Quake 2 (last update) actually scares me how far it has come - even though it is missing some effects i.e. light scattering off a transparent surface (i.e. water) doesn't happen (though I think that is more something the developer never got around to implementing - so I had to fake it in some test scenes using underwater lights purporting to be reflected light) while they do have fast approximation of caustics through a transparent surface. Only the sun light has proper simulation of bounced light and even then the number of bounces is heavily constrained with other emissive sources even more constrained in terms of how many additional rays after the first hit will be generated and very limited transport of the colour of previous bounces.
But just seeing the play of light throughout the scene in a way that older techniques can't even come close to is quite something - I've spent a lot of time building test scenes in Quake 2 RTX but it is let down a bit by the older geometry engine in the game which lacks support for things like static meshes and minimum brush resolution is like 1 inch hah.
It does look beautiful in a way which you just can't achieve with rasterization, and it's just the tip of the iceberg, in 10-20 years time we'd ideally like modern games mostly using ray tracing as the primary source and aiming for the kind of lighting and shadow quality we have in modern renders. As long as the hardware continues to scale we move closer to that dream, it's just the roadmap is going to have a gradual shift, it's baby steps right now to get the tech in, get standards established and get it into general circulation, and the refinement will come later. It's the story with almost all new tech adoption.
Thanks for providing the detail necessary to prove the point that is just a second option. As you demonstrated it doesn't change the fact of what you see in global illumination. It doesn't change the fact of how you see Shadows, etc. These options aren't new when rt is used. The end results are the same. How rt is used now only compliments rasterized games.
We are aware of how Ray tracing actually works and how it works differently from rasterized games. However that is not the point, and far from it. It is the end result and its implementation in current games which is the focal point not the techniques used. Which becomes irrelevant and lost in the details as the end result is always the same.
It just compliments rasterized games using only a few features of rt. Even now when some of those features are used the game still needs to be downsample as the average midrange hardware isn't capable.
Now if the day comes in which a game is truly, completely Ray traced that brings a higher level of realism to the seems that it presents then we can talk. And, no cb2077 doesnt count. But I seriously doubt it would be on this generation of Hardware LOL.
But it does matter because with rasterization it's just an approximation and when you compare scenes you can tell one is faked because it has all sorts of telltale signs, we know that reflections for example can only be screen space when rasterized, which has all sorts of problems and limitations. But also it matters for developers, if they have to manually add in these effects or tailor them to the map, or worse the map to the effects losing more creative control, then that's less time they can spend doing other things. Where as it's a meme with ray tracing but it just works, very little artistic input is needed once it's implemented in the engine, you can just turn it on and away you go.
It's not "lost in the details" because the details are the entire point, people care about graphics and they want improvement in the fidelity of the graphics and so simply by definition the details matter. If what you mean is you couldn't give a toss about the details, then fine. But a lot of us do which is why we spend the better part of a grand on video card hardware.
If i told you this scene contains both Ray Traced Reflections and Screen Space Reflections, now that you know this can you tell me which is which in this scene?
Normally with reflections the tell is if the items exist in the screen space or not. In this example the lights reflecting in the puddle do not, nor does that air compressor looking thing in the reflection to the right of the puddle, suggesting it might be ray traced. But who knows with enough manual fakery you could reproduce those effects other ways like with cubemaps or whatever.
