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.
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!
I'm running a 4070s
CP2077 with RT is around 50fps with dips. Without RT I sit at 90fps with max settings and 144p
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!
Ray tracing is cool, problem is, it is still in beta basically. Once hardware catches up and you can still get good FPS then it won't be an annoyance
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.
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.
It's like when the unity game engine came out, somehow IMO, instead of having to program the whole thing up to your specific game, now everyone could make a 3D platformer.
It does, again IMO, take the soul out of games.
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)
To see how far rasterization has been stretched, and how that holds back development - Path of Exile 2 has a tech talk about their bare minimum settings. Artists weren't allowed to rely on anything that could be turned off. They begged the programmers for specific gimmicks, and turned that cheap nonsense into a million blades of grass, raymarched cracks in translucent ice, and soft shadows with no Peter Panning.
Or, picking one specific trick: ambient occlusion was half of why Crysis humbled $5,000 PCs. There's a slide deck for how a superior version of the same effect was achieved in Toy Story 3 on the Wii.
Real-time raytracing was unobtanium for decades because we kept moving the goalposts. The entire 3D games industry is built on cheating around simple parallel techniques being too expensive. By the time hardware catches up to where doing something the simple way is feasible, complex software has faked a wild variety of other effects. Meanwhile: games are designed to rely on what's available. All of the tells for proper path-traced lighting have either been faked or avoided. Games don't even do mirrors, anymore.
There's a reason RTX shows off games from the late 1900s.
Don't forget that temporal smear. I like to apply vaseline directly onto my monitor instead.
Don't forget the 10 shadow copies of my car/weapon following me around. It's like someone really liked having a trailing mouse cursor and thought everything should have it
Meme creator is clearly blind.
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.
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
That's actually one specific torch!
It is unknown why it has this function, or why Bethesda left it in
Just Bethesda things
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.
Look at Tiny Glade, it's a great example of what raytracing can bring to a stylized game. (They did use their own raytracing pipeline different from the usual - in their own words, re-stir was overkill for what their game needed). Or like 95% of animated films. Including Arcane but excluding Stray.
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:
Practically impossible for this developer? Maybe. Technically impossible? No.
We do have realtime GI solutions which don't require raytracing (voxel cone tracing, sdfgi, screenspace, etc). None of which require any 'special' hardware.
Raytracing is just simpler and doesn't need as much manual work to handle cases where traditional rasterisation might fail (eg; light leaking). But there's not many things it can do which we can't already achieve with rasterisation tricks.
Raytracing is mostly useful for developers who don't have the time/budget/skillset to get the same visual quality with traditional rasterisation.
However, in an industry which seems to prioritise getting things released as cheaply and quickly as possible, we're starting to see developers rely heavily on raytracing, and not allocating many resources into making their non-rt pipeline look nice.
Some are even starting to release games which require raytracing to work at all, because they completely cut the non-rt pipeline out of their budget.
So I'd argue that you're incorrect in theory, but very correct in practise (and getting even more correct with time).
That's kinda the thing with ray tracing. You can save a lot of work but since you want your game available for gamers that don't have the hardware you still have to do that work...
I'm expecting the next PlayStation to focus on ray tracing to set it apart in the market. They have the volume and it would be good for their exclusive titles.
Edit: Okey, maybe I'm just hoping, rather than expecting. Sony can absolutely screw this up.
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