this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2025
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You clearly don't know what you're talking about here. Ray tracing has nothing to do with textures and very few games force you to use RT. What is "allowing" devs to skimp on optimization (which is also questionable, older games weren't perfect either) is DLSS and other dynamic resolution + upscaling tech
I meant they also just don't bother to optimize texture sizes, didn't mean to imply they are directly related to ray tracing issues.
Also... more and more games are clearly being designed, and marketed, with ray tracing in mind.
Sure, its not absolutely forced on in too many games... but TAA often is forced on, because no one can run raytracing without temporal intelligent upscsling and frame gen...
...and a lot of games just feed the pixel motion vectors from their older TAA implementations into the DLSS / FSR implementations, and don't bother to recode the TAA into just giving the motion vectors as an optional API that doesn't actually do AA...
... and they often don't do that because they designed their entire render pipeline to only work with TAA on, and half the games post procrssing effects would have to be recoded to work without TAA.
So if you summarize all that: the 'design for raytracing support' standard is why many games do not let you turn off TAA.
...
That being said: Ray tracing absolutely does only really make a significant visual difference in many (not all, but many) situations... if you have very high res textures.
If you don't, older light rendering methods work almost as well, and run much, much faster.
Ray tracing involves... you know, light rays, bouncing off of models, with textures on them.
Like... if you have a car with a glossy finish, that is reflecting in its paint the entire scene around it... well, if that reflect map that is being added to the base car texture... if that reflect map is very low res, if it is generating it from a world of low res textures... you might as well just use the old cube map method, or other methods, and not bother turning every reflective surface into a ray traced mirror.
Or, if you're doing accumulated lighting in a scene with different colors of lights... that effect is going to be more dramatic, more detailed, more noticable in a scene with higher res textures on everything being lit.
...
I could write a 60 page report on this topic, but no one is paying me to, so I'm not going to bother.
Doom the Dark Ages is possibly what they're referring to. ID skipped lighting in favour of Ray tracing doing it.
Bethesda Studios also has a tendency to use hd textures on features like grass and terrain which can safely be low res.
There is a fair bit of inefficient code floating around because optimisation is considered more expensive than throwing more hardware at a problem, and not just in games. (Bonus points if you outsource the optimisation to some else's hardware or the modding community)
That is a prominent example of forced RT... basically, as I described with the TAA example in my other reply...
idTech 8 seems to be the first engine that just literally requires RT for its entire render pipeline to work.
They could theoretically build another version of it off of vulkan-base, to enable you to be able to turn RT off... but that would likely be a massive amount of work.
On the bright side... at least the idTech engines are actually well coded, and they put a lot of time into making the engine actually very good.
I didn't follow the marketing ecosystem for Doom Dark Ages, but it would have been really shitty if they did not include 'you need a GPU with RT cores'.
...
On the other end of the engine spectrum:
Bethesda... yeah, they have entirely lost control of their engine, it is mangled mess of nonsense, the latest Oblivion remaster just uses UE to render things slapped on top of Gamebryo, because no one at Bethesda can actually code worth a damn.
Compare that to oh I dunno, the Source engine.
Go play TitanFall 2. 10 year old game now, built on a modified version of the Portal 2 Source engine.
Still looks great, runs very efficiently, can scale down to older hardware.
Ok, now go play HL Alyx. If you don't have VR, there are mods that do a decent job of converting it into M+K.
Looks great, runs efficiently.
None of them use RT.
Because you don't need to, if you take the time to actually optimize both your engine and game design.