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We’ve gotten so good at faking most lighting effects that honestly RTX isn’t a huge win except in certain types of scenes.

Maximise your RTX performance with this one crazy hack!

Ray traced reflections: on
Ray traced everything else: off

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d99E01tgOGw

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.

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.

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.

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.

The first F.E.A.R. had excellent dynamic lighting, I'd argue it had the epitome of relevant dynamic lighting. It didn't need to set your GPU on fire for it, it didn't have to sacrifice two thirds of its framerate for it, it had it all figured out. It did need work on textures, but even those looked at least believable due to the lighting system. We really didn't need more than that.

RT is nothing but eye candy and a pointless resource hog meant to sell us GPUs with redundant compute capacities, which don't even guarantee that the game'll run any better! And it's not just RT, it's 4k textures, it's upscaling, it's Ambient Occlusion, all of these things hog resources without any major visual improvement.

Upgraded from a 3060 to a 4080 Super to play STALKER 2 at more than 25 frames per second. Got the GPU, same basic settings, increased the resolution a bit, +10 FPS... Totes worth the money...

Edit: not blaming GSC for it, they're just victims of the AAA disease.

Edit 2: to be clear, my CPU's an i7, so I doubt it had much to do with the STALKER bottleneck, considering it barely reached 60% usage, while my GPU was panting...

Edit 3: while re-reading this, it hit me that I sound like the Luddite Boss, so I need to clarify this for myself more than anyone else: I am not against technological advancement, I want tech in my eyeballs (literally), I am against "advancements" which exist solely as marketing accolades.

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.

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.

I have seen FEW games that really benefit from RT. RT is a subtle effect because we'we got pretty good at baking and faking how light should look.

But even if its just a subtle effect, it adds so much, the feeling of the lighting is (for me) better wit RT, light properly propagates, bounces, dynamic geometry is properly lit. It's just so much of these, on the bigger scale, tiny upgrades that make the lighting look a lot better.

It just sucks that the performance is utter shit right now. I hope in few years this will be optimised and we won't need to sacrifice 1\2 of the framerate just to get lighting that feels right.

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.

The best examples of raytracing are in applying it to old games, like Quake II or Portal or Minecraft.

Newer games were already hitting diminishing returns on photo realism. Adding ray tracing takes them from 95% photo realistic to 96%.

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!

But maybe finally games will get working mirrors again.

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.

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.

rt is a marketing trick very few games are made in a way that makes it look better

Raytracing is being pushed so hard by the industry because it makes things easier for devs as opposed to making the games look better for the customer.