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.

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 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%.

But you NEED the green and expensive GPU, otherwise you are missing out!!!!

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.

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.

But maybe finally games will get working mirrors again.

Maximise your RTX performance with this one crazy hack!

Ray traced reflections: on
Ray traced everything else: off

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.

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.