Ray tracing isn’t supposed to make things look better, it’s supposed to save development time
If you spend enough time on lighting you can make static lights look better but that’s just it, it takes longer so it costs more
When I had a PS5 and Cyberpunk, I would sometimes switch ray tracing on and off to see if it made a huge difference. Well, the frame rate would be capped at 30 with it on...and I suppose if I stopped and looked around for a bit, it was noticeable, but honestly, I preferred the higher framerate. I've yet to see a game that really benefits from RT.
It's mostly developers that benefit from RT long-term. Not now while it's optional, but once it becomes a requirement, they can cut a couple of time-intensive steps from the development pipeline.
Can't wait until my GPU needs 1000W to run :'(
I think RayTracing is pushed so hard by the industry because it gives manufacturers an excuse to force consumers to buy better cards to get "the very best". I have a 4070 and I never use RT.
i wish they would just make more gpu so they aren't so supply limited geez
Why would they want to do what's bad for them and good for us? They're a corporation:)
I don't know but Path Tracing makes CBP2077 and Alan Wake 2 looks like a real next gen game.
Cy Ber Punk? interesting
There is a real reason to not use the "C + P" initialism in online chat these days... on some platforms it's likely to be flagged & reported by automods/bots/Eye of Sauron.
But I love CP!! It’s so next gen!
That's him, officer, right there ☝️🤓
rt is a marketing trick very few games are made in a way that makes it look better
I am waiting for the GPU's to use the rotating kinetic power of the fans to feed back into the GPU to give them ERS boost like in formula 1, when scenes become to graphically demanding. If you steal my idea that is intellectual theft and I will be sad!
as someone who has worked in visual fx for 20 years now, including on over 15 films and 8 games, raytracing is most definitely not simply a marketing tool.
Ray tracing is just a way for nvidia to proprietize a technology then force the industry to use it all to keep Jensen in leather jackets. Don't buy his cards; he has too many leather jackets!
We’ve gotten so good at faking most lighting effects that honestly RTX isn’t a huge win except in certain types of scenes.
The difference is pretty big when there are lots of reflective surfaces, and especially when light sources move (prebaked shadows rarely do, and even when, it's hardly realistic).
A big thing is that developers use less effort and the end result looks better. That's progress. You could argue it's kind of like when web developers finally were able to stop supporting IE9 - it wasn't big for end users, but holy hell did the job get more enjoyable, faster and also cheaper.
Soooo, there's a missing part here. The point (and drive) behind raytracing isn't making games beautiful, it's making them cheaper and less man-hour intensive to make/maintain.
The engine guys spend manyears every year working on that non-raytraced engine so it can do 150. They've done every cheat, every side step, and spent every minute possible making it look like they haven't done anything at all.
The idea is that they stop making/updating/supporting non-raytracing engines and let the GPU's pick up the slack. Then using AI to artificially 'upgrade' the frame rate with interpolation.
Don't forget that temporal smear. I like to apply vaseline directly onto my monitor instead.
It's not just a time limitation either tho, it also opens up a lot of room for artistic direction and game design
I don't think you could possibly make something like Control's shiny black blocks world look decent without raytraced reflections.
Also anything with significantly large dynamic geometry usually either needs like half of the level file size to be duplicated for every possible state, or some form of raytracing, to work at all. (There's also things like voxel cone tracing that do their own optimized tracing but they also don't really work in 100% of situations and come with their own visual downsides)
“I have a shitty computer and can’t play my single player game at imperceptibly fast frame rates boo boo boo.”
I think raytracing is fine for games that want a lot of realism. But I'm playing games with monsters and fantasy. My suspension of disbelief isn't going to break because reflections aren't quite right.
But I'm pretty much in the camp of, I want my games to look and feel like games. I like visual cues like highlighting items I can interact with or pick up. So lighting is always non-realistic.
Baked lighting looks almost as good as ray tracing because, for games that use baked lighting, devs intentionally avoid scenes where it would look bad.
Half the stuff in this trailer (the dynamically lit animated hands, the beautiful lighting on the moving enemies) would be impossible without ray tracing. Or at the least it would look way way worse:
I never turn it on, the visual difference is too unimportant to warrant such a huge cost in hardware resources (and temperature). It looks different if you have side-by-side screenshots, or if you turn it off and on in-game, but if the difference is several orders of magnitude too slight to be worth it. Higher frames-per-second is more important than realistically-simulated light beams. You can't really have both in large AAA games.
Raytracing is cool, personaly I feel like the state that consumers first got it in was atrocious, but it is cool. What I worry about is the ai upscale, fake frame bullshit. While it's cool that the technology exists; like sweet, my GPU can render this game at a lower resolution, then upscale it back at a far better frame rate than without upscaling, ideally stretching out my GPU purchase. But I feel like games (in the AAA scene at least) are so unoptimized now, you NEED all of these upscaling, fake frame tricks. I'm not a Dev, I don't know shit about making games, just my 2 cents.
Skyrim has "ray traced" shadows in certain places and works great. I was in a cave once and hiding behind a cliff. An enemy was wandering around the next room and I was able to use the shadow cast on him by a torch to observe his movements without having his actual body in my field of view.
All this modern RT nonsense does is make things look slightly better than screen space reflections and tank performance.
That's actually one specific torch!
It is unknown why it has this function, or why Bethesda left it in
Just Bethesda things
I would expect that to be a normal rasterized shadow map unless you can find any sources explicitly saying otherwise. Because even 1 ray per pixel in complex triangulated geometry wasn't really practical in real time until probably at least 2018
Maximise your RTX performance with this one crazy hack!
Ray traced reflections: on
Ray traced everything else: off
Also caustics and volumetrics, if your game has those.
It's not a trick, it's just lighting done the way it should be done without all the tricks we need now like Subsurface scattering or Screen space reflections.
The added benefit is that materials reflect more of their natural reflection making all the materials look more true to life.
Its main drawback is that it's GPU costly, but more and more AAA games are now moving toward RT as standard by being more clever in how it handles its calculations.
Yes, I'm sure every player spends the majority of their game time admiring the realistic material properties of Spider-Man's suit. So far I've never seen a game that was made better by forcing RT into it. A little prettier if you really focus on the details where it works, but overall it's a costly (in terms of power, computation, and price) gimmick.
I'm running a 4070s
CP2077 with RT is around 50fps with dips. Without RT I sit at 90fps with max settings and 144p
Early 3D graphic rendering was all ray-tracing, but when video games started doing textured surfaces the developers quickly realised they could just fake it with alpha as long as the light sources were static.
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