welcome to the death of game optimization.
it especially sucks for Doom: The Dark Ages since both Doom 2016 and Eternal were considered very optimized for their times of release.
I especially fail to see the value to drive up obsolescence. Look how the Final Fantasy XIV art team, or the Tyranny RPG expressed so much through comparatively ancient engines of the PS3 era. And for shooters we have so much visual polished fidelity, with physics, high resolution textures and dynamic lighting to create anything you want. From "Prey" (2016) to Prey (2005) I think both look amazing.
I especially fail to see the value to drive up obsolescence.
"Can't afford an upgrade to a high-end PC? Buy one of our Xboxes." --Microsoft
My GPU can do ray-tracing and that's usually the first thing I turn off because it absolutely destroys performance for minimal effect. I think ray-tracing is cool and all, but I don't really care when it makes most games run like shit. I thought Elden Ring was poorly optimized until I turned it off and than BAM 120fps no problem.
Honestly if it has to be enabled, as much as I love the Doom games, this'll be a pass for me. Smooth combat doesn't mean shit when it stutters every 2 seconds.
Tbf, elden ring is still poorly optimized. It's been 3 years since it released and I still get cutscene stutters and no ultrawide
ray tracing is the AI of pc gaming. A bunch of hardware made "obsolete" just so a few nerds can get marginally "better" lighting.
I would say AI is the AI of PC gamimg.
Fake frames and upscaling everywhere.
Yup, the whole bullshit with Nvidia touting the 5070 performing better* than a 4090.
It's to make development easier.
With ray-tracing it becomes much easier to light environments in game. You don't have to have devs adding artificial light sources or painting environments as of they're lit.
unfortunately most developers can't make a game with raytraced lighting
I wouldn’t say better lighting, just easier
I once watched a 20 minute video on how in order to compute trajectories for the rocket launcher in the original doom, they did some of the most advanced math I have seen in any context to avoid doing any division which is computationally expensive. How the mightly have fallen.
Yep the original Doom was something else and the way John Carmack built his engines was something to be in awe of.
Game development is about maximizing revenue while minimizing development costs. There won't be many more Mysts, Dooms, Quakes or Half Life 2s in the gaming future. Get ready for "Generative AI" stories/levels and ever increasing hardware feature set requirements.
You really need to stop playing AAA crap.
sounds like I'll have a great time with this in 10 years when I do my next upgrade.
When was your last upgrade? Curious for context.
Mine was jan 2020. 2070 super will not cut it for this game, likely, since cyberpunk2077 with ray tracing makes my 3880x1440 monitor cry ~14-24 FPS.
I did an upgrade last year. Not really sure what I upgraded to because it doesn't matter.
I would still be using an fx9590 with a gtx970 if stability issues weren't driving me up the wall, because it otherwise ran everything I cared about just fine.
I don't care much about RT but the reason they've decided to do RT implementation mandatory is quite good and revolutionary and I can't wait to see it in action. Using RT for pixel perfect hitboxes? Sign me in!
"And now, it has been revealed that the game will use ray tracing (RT) not only to enhance visuals but also to offer key gameplay improvements, such as better hit detection and the ability to distinguish materials in a bid to make the game more immersive."
Ray tracing really is the future. Instead of doing a bunch of tricks to make things look good all lightning is just simulated using ray tracing.
I remember when metro exodus enhanced edition came out and they explained that when they remade the game for RTX only, they could remove a lot of workarounds like invisible lights. And actually just light the scenes with actual light from bulbs or the sun and it just looked great.
IMO we have to move someday to the newer technology. Whenever that's today or not, I don't know. But it really is the future. Historically it also isn't unusual at all that someone had to get new hardware to play new games. It's just that it was stagnated for a while.
Edit: pretty sure it was this video from digital foundry: https://youtu.be/NbpZCSf4_Yk?t=1376
I disagree. The future is not AAA.
I agree with you. But if AAA develops it so it's easier to implement across the board, im all for it.
Game engines don't have to simulate sound pressure waves bouncing off surfaces to get good audio. They don't have to simulate all the atoms in objects to get good physics. There's no reason to have to simulate photons to get good lighting. This is a way to lower dev costs and increase spending on the consumer side, I would not be surprised if Nvidia was incentivizing publishers to use ray tracing.
Maybe the future but I still content that ray tracing is not the present.
Ray tracing as it currently stands tanks frame rates into sub par gaming experience s unless your on a more expensive card and so many implementations of ray tracing adds so much more noise and artifacts that I just don't think that ray tracing isn't there just yet to make it mandatory.
I mean I recently just bought a 4070 super to finally see what ray tracing is all about and finally have a 'mid range' card that could actually do it right and I'll be honest, I find ray tracing pretty underwhelming. I turned ray tracing off when playing ratchet and clank just recently because there was so much noise and artifacts that the visual quality was just too bad for me and wasn't worth the big hit to frame rates and many other games suffer the same things I found.
Plus so many lower end graphics cards are still shipping with 8 GB of vram, which the 5060 will still be at, which has been proven that it's not sufficient for Ray tracing without dropping visual quality was down.
So again, I simply don't think that ray tracing is ready for being required in games yet.
Good thing that ray tracing is very rarely required.
Of course some games are gonna be ahead of others on dropping conventional lightning. That's just life sometimes.
id software moving PC specs forward? You're KIDDING. Outrage, I tell you!
Wait, didn't Quake require a math coprocessor enabled CPU?
Hang on, Quake 3 required a 3D accelerator... Outrageous!
Raytracing hardware has been around for the better part of a decade now. It's time.
The same id managed to keep the hardware requirements for Eternal amazingly low. I have a pretty beefy PC, yet I'd prefer to play without Ray Tracing, as that usually keeps the framerate from reaching a stable 120. It sucks they are taking away that option.
However, the reality is that most gamers are now using gear that has some ray-tracing capability.
Sure, plenty, and I'm still going to hard-pass any idiot game that forces raytracing or upscaling. Find something actually useful to do with the power available, instead of something that worthless and computationally wasteful, or don't and run at lower power. That's more valuable than raytracing.
Doom eternal was fun up until you had to jump around like a drunken spiderman. Turned that shit off so fast, never buying a doom game again.
The constant required acrobatics turned me off as well. I loved Doom 2016, but Eternal wasn’t nearly as good IMO. I also didn’t care for the low max ammo / punching dudes for ammo or weak spots. Eternal is the first Doom I haven’t finished.
I think a lot is being made of this headline, honestly. Indiana Jones did the same thing using the same engine... and runs well on a broad variety of hardware, including AMD cards with no dedicated RT accelerators. And that's not an experience designed with high framerate competitive action in mind.
I also literally booted Doom Eternal for the first time in a while today, enabled raytracing, and played at 120FPS with 4K native on a 7900XTX, all settings on High. Id knows how to frigging optimize a title, and you can bet their raytracing implementation will be substantially better optimized than the RT we're used to seeing. So long as you don't run it with Path Tracing (a future forward feature, like Crysis back in the day), I fully expect you'll still be able to get high framerates and incredible visuals.
Wait for the Digital Foundry tests before buying if you're uncertain, absolutely, but I really don't see any reason to be concerned with the way idTech 8 has been shaping up.
I didn't plan on buying this, but now I extra don't.
So couple things:
The first RTX cards were the 20 series, which came out in 2018
There was a time when volumetric lighting was also optional
There was a time when GRAPHICS CARDS were optional.
The first game to require RTX was the Indiana Jones game, as did the Avatar game.
Shit moves on. Did you expect your 1060 card from 2016 to last indefinitely? How long did you expect developers to support 2 different lighting systems?
There is so much to be angry about these days, but not this. This was inevitable. If you MUST be angry about it, at least be angry at the right devs
Shit moves on. Did you expect your 1060 card from 2016 to last indefinitely? How long did you expect developers to support 2 different lighting systems?
This as well as Indiana Jones are both 1st party games Microsoft which are also being released onto Xbox Series S. They are already supporting two different lighting systems because of that.
It's not unreasonable to for paying customers to expect Microsoft to just ship the same performance profiles on their PC games.
What Microsoft is doing is not a technological move. It's a desperate move to sell more Xboxes.
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