Greentext

Ray tracing isn’t supposed to make things look better, it’s supposed to save development time

If you spend enough time on lighting you can make static lights look better but that’s just it, it takes longer so it costs more

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.

I think RayTracing is pushed so hard by the industry because it gives manufacturers an excuse to force consumers to buy better cards to get "the very best". I have a 4070 and I never use RT.

I don't know but Path Tracing makes CBP2077 and Alan Wake 2 looks like a real next gen game.

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!

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!

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

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.

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.

I'm running a 4070s

CP2077 with RT is around 50fps with dips. Without RT I sit at 90fps with max settings and 144p

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

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.

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.

Maximise your RTX performance with this one crazy hack!

Ray traced reflections: on
Ray traced everything else: off

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.