What do gamers actually think about Ray-Tracing?

[Calin Banc]

The Wukong devs call it Nvidia Raytracing IIRC in the Chinese version,so it has no optimisations for AMD or Intel cards. But we could go through other way with COD,which is one of the most played games and also has more optimisations for AMD.

But why bother with a £380 to £400 RTX5060TI 16GB for those games when you can get an RTX5070 from £460 to £490?

The reality is the RTX5060TI 16GB is poorly priced as the RX9060XT 16GB has been £300 to £320 frequently in the last few weeks.

For a person on a budget, building a new system that extra saving should be used for a better CPU,more RAM,storage,etc.

The RX9070XT 8GB is £230 to £240,has a full speed 16X PCI-E connection and is cheaper than most RTX5060 cards. In most games it will beat an RTX5060 whilst being to maintain more of its performance on older systems due to a full speed PCI-E connection.

The B580 12GB is £240 and B570 10GB is below £200.The RTX5050 is below £220 if you want something more compact or lower power.

Yeah, a 5070 would be better. I was just looking at something I'd say was the bare minimum.

Path tracing with Nvidia also has SER for instance and perhaps other tech AMD doesn't have,it will be in next iterations of DirectX, making current AMD a bit obsolete I'm that sense.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Yeah, a 5070 would be better. I was just looking at something I'd say was the bare minimum.

Path tracing with Nvidia also has SER for instance and perhaps other tech AMD doesn't have,it will be in next iterations of DirectX, making current AMD a bit obsolete I'm that sense.

Personally I think AMD will be fine for bog standard RT as the PS5 Pro will be the basis of many multi-platform titles which push RT on consoles for the first time. RDNA5 in the PS6 and the next Xbox in 2027 is an evolution and will have to be somewhat backward compatible. PT is a different animal and I think people expecting longevity unless you spend over £600 to £700 on a card are in for a shock.

But again is PT going to be run by millions of users of the RTX3060/RTX4060(including the laptop models) - games devs will have to also make their games run OKish on them too. Mandatory RT is barely a requirement now for games 7 years after the RTX2000 series launched.19000 games were launched in 2024 - how many need mandatory RT or PT? Most don't(you can switch it on or off) and 769 games since 2018 support DLSS. 94000 games have been launched on Steam alone since 2018.Remember most reviews are testing these mainstream cards on high end systems,so real world performance will be worse.All the Nvidia cards under an RTX5070TI are somewhat of a compromise IMHO in one way or another when it comes to RT/PT. The AMD cards are also compromises too,why they need to hit their RRPs. The RX9070 needs to be under £500 now.

Microsoft has for a long time consulted with Nvidia and ATI/AMD with every DX update. SER is on Nvidia/Intel cards so they brought out an update to support it,but after the fact. But AMD RT works in a different way to Nvidia/Intel so the bottlenecks will be different.DX10.1 for example supported certain ATI specific features,which overcome some AA bottlenecks the ATI cards had,but Nvidia did AA differently. So there might be another DX update which supports other forms of tech,which AMD does support and Nvidia or Intel does not.

People on here saying Nvidia had matched Infinity Cache,with their own large caches in Ada Lovelace and RDNA3 seemingly having gone backwards in bandwidth usage.But GDDR7 seems to do very little for Blackwell. Then AMD with lowly GDDR6 being able to do significantlly more with less and nobody believing this outcome. Microsoft pushes a schedular update which will help Intel one day,but AMD CPUs work differently so there needs to be another update to support AMD later.

We all know that once Nvidia starts pushing more PT,they will introduce some new features with the RTX6000/RTX7000 which will make it run much better and the older generations will not work as well.An example is how RTX4000 framegen couldn't work on older cards,but AMD got it to work on them. People were saying frame generation could ONLY work that ONE way. AMD doing it in a totally different way,that nobody here predicted. Then Nvidia moved to an implementation closer to what AMD does,but apparently it now can't work on older cards due to some other tech which is needed. So apparently now three ways to get it to work.

I pretty much expect AMD to do the same,so for pathtracing 2027 games,when the new consoles are released,you might as well get one of the newer generation cards.Why? They want you to buy new cards. Since RT is getting easier to run,they now push PT so you will have to buy another new card.I also expect a lot of the PT interested folks will have changed over to the next generation of cards once PT becomes enough of a thing.

 

[humbug]

Ultra RT with Frame Gen and AFMF 2.1, so 4X frame Gen, frame rates in the top right.

I have to use FSR to get the Radeon RT Refined mod to work so i used Native AA.

FPS about 110 average.

You can run FSR 4 in Cyberpunk with Optiscaler.

 

[mrk]

Anyone catch the Black mesa RTX Remix coverage? Forgot to try the mod so will do that later, but DF did coverage this week:

Try that in raster

 

[Firegod]

Anyone catch the Black mesa RTX Remix coverage? Forgot to try the mod so will do that later, but DF did coverage this week:

Try that in raster

Looks great. I recently played through the black mesa remake and loved it.

 

[mrk]

Very good, very very good, but also work in progress.

Now imagine what the full HL2 RTX release is going to look like!

 

[Calin Banc]

Personally I think AMD will be fine for bog standard RT as the PS5 Pro will be the basis of many multi-platform titles which push RT on consoles for the first time. RDNA5 in the PS6 and the next Xbox in 2027 is an evolution and will have to be somewhat backward compatible. PT is a different animal and I think people expecting longevity unless you spend over £600 to £700 on a card are in for a shock.

But again is PT going to be run by millions of users of the RTX3060/RTX4060(including the laptop models) - games devs will have to also make their games run OKish on them too. Mandatory RT is barely a requirement now for games 7 years after the RTX2000 series launched.19000 games were launched in 2024 - how many need mandatory RT or PT? Most don't(you can switch it on or off) and 769 games since 2018 support DLSS. 94000 games have been launched on Steam alone since 2018.Remember most reviews are testing these mainstream cards on high end systems,so real world performance will be worse.All the Nvidia cards under an RTX5070TI are somewhat of a compromise IMHO in one way or another when it comes to RT/PT. The AMD cards are also compromises too,why they need to hit their RRPs. The RX9070 needs to be under £500 now.

Microsoft has for a long time consulted with Nvidia and ATI/AMD with every DX update. SER is on Nvidia/Intel cards so they brought out an update to support it,but after the fact. But AMD RT works in a different way to Nvidia/Intel so the bottlenecks will be different.DX10.1 for example supported certain ATI specific features,which overcome some AA bottlenecks the ATI cards had,but Nvidia did AA differently. So there might be another DX update which supports other forms of tech,which AMD does support and Nvidia or Intel does not.

People on here saying Nvidia had matched Infinity Cache,with their own large caches in Ada Lovelace and RDNA3 seemingly having gone backwards in bandwidth usage.But GDDR7 seems to do very little for Blackwell. Then AMD with lowly GDDR6 being able to do significantlly more with less and nobody believing this outcome. Microsoft pushes a schedular update which will help Intel one day,but AMD CPUs work differently so there needs to be another update to support AMD later.

We all know that once Nvidia starts pushing more PT,they will introduce some new features with the RTX6000/RTX7000 which will make it run much better and the older generations will not work as well.An example is how RTX4000 framegen couldn't work on older cards,but AMD got it to work on them. People were saying frame generation could ONLY work that ONE way. AMD doing it in a totally different way,that nobody here predicted. Then Nvidia moved to an implementation closer to what AMD does,but apparently it now can't work on older cards due to some other tech which is needed. So apparently now three ways to get it to work.

I pretty much expect AMD to do the same,so for pathtracing 2027 games,when the new consoles are released,you might as well get one of the newer generation cards.Why? They want you to buy new cards. Since RT is getting easier to run,they now push PT so you will have to buy another new card.I also expect a lot of the PT interested folks will have changed over to the next generation of cards once PT becomes enough of a thing.

Doing a bit of couch math with my rtx4080, I'd say there is a strong possibility that the next gen consoles could do path tracing at least 30fps if AMD implements properly the new dx features and has an upscaling method at least as good as DLSS is now. With a good FG method, it could be even 60fps. Normal RT? No doubt, I think solutions like the GTA5, Metro Exodus EE, etc. have will become the norm.

I've tried FG from FSR 3.1 (v3.1.4 if it updates along with the upscaler version) and while it works and looks decent, moving around feels like it has a lot more motion blur than FG from nVIDIA and also it feels a bit sluggish / perhaps a bit more errors, too. Could be the reason why nVIDIA said older hardware is not as good. But, yeah, at least it could leave up to the user to make its mind.

Playing a bit more Alan Wake 2... man, that's probably the most imersive game I've ever played in terms of atmosphere!

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Try that in raster

Yeah,blood.

Now imagine what the full HL2 RTX release is going to look like!

Imagine if Valve actually completed the story?

Doing a bit of couch math with my rtx4080, I'd say there is a strong possibility that the next gen consoles could do path tracing at least 30fps if AMD implements properly the new dx features and has an upscaling method at least as good as DLSS is now. With a good FG method, it could be even 60fps. Normal RT? No doubt, I think solutions like the GTA5, Metro Exodus EE, etc. have will become the norm.

I've tried FG from FSR 3.1 (v3.1.4 if it updates along with the upscaler version) and while it works and looks decent, moving around feels like it has a lot more motion blur than FG from nVIDIA and also it feels a bit sluggish / perhaps a bit more errors, too. Could be the reason why nVIDIA said older hardware is not as good. But, yeah, at least it could leave up to the user to make its mind.

TBH,the version for Nvidia hardware is probably not as optimised - I still found it weird an RTX3090TI couldn't do it but a laptop RTX4050 6GB could. Apparently XeSS 2 frame generation also has been opened up to AMD and Nvidia dGPUs too.

I think the one thing I heard is the new generation consoles will have much better CPUs, The consoles have CPUs around the performance of Zen+ so I could imagine RT scenarios where the CPU would be an issue. Moving over to Zen6 might actually help quite a bit.

 

[mrk]

HL3 is coming this year though

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

HL3 is coming this year though

I will believe it when Valve actually announces it. But it might be a Half Life:Alyx sequel too.

 

[mrk]

None of the data mined details say anything about VR so it won't be an Alyx game that's for sure unless Valve has ditched VR

 

[melmac]

None of the data mined details say anything about VR so it won't be an Alyx game that's for sure unless Valve has ditched VR

There is more concrete info out there about Valve's next VR headset coming than there is about Half Life 3.

The last Half Life game was released shortly after the Valve Index released. And it was a showcase for the Valve Index.

Which do you think is more likely? That the next game that Valve releases will a VR game to be a showcase for their new VR headset. Or that the game coming is Half Life 3?

 

[mrk]

The dataminers would have found VR references if this new HLX title was a VR one, there is none.

 

[Raelgun]

There is more concrete info out there about Valve's next VR headset coming than there is about Half Life 3.

The last Half Life game was released shortly after the Valve Index released. And it was a showcase for the Valve Index.

Which do you think is more likely? That the next game that Valve releases will a VR game to be a showcase for their new VR headset. Or that the game coming is Half Life 3?

I'm pretty sure valve said they only release games where it makes a industry changing perspective and game design.

Which both portal and HL did, it's likely the next title will use vr in a major way.

 

[melmac]

The dataminers would have found VR references if this new HLX title was a VR one, there is none.

Dataminers have been consistently wrong about HL3. But, even if the datamined info so far is accurate, then it's still doesn't mean that HLX is not a VR game or at least one that can also be played in VR, because VR can be added later in the development. It's the same engine that Half Life Alyx uses.

I'm pretty sure valve said they only release games where it makes a industry changing perspective and game design.

Which both portal and HL did, it's likely the next title will use vr in a major way.

Well, can you show a link where Valve said that? Because before the release of the Index and Half Life ALyx, what Valve actually said was that they are committed to making 3 VR titles.

With the release of a new Standalone VR headset next year that is rumoured to work with the Steam deck. That would be a perfect time to launch their second VR game.

It's all just leaks, rumours and conjecture about both the Headset and HL3 at the moment. But if the headset does look like it's going to become a reality, then I would be fairly certain that the next game Valve releases will be a VR game.

 

[Calin Banc]

I think the one thing I heard is the new generation consoles will have much better CPUs, The consoles have CPUs around the performance of Zen+ so I could imagine RT scenarios where the CPU would be an issue. Moving over to Zen6 might actually help quite a bit.

New DX features should help keeping the BVH structure clean, too. All it takes is devs to jump ship

 

[SuperElectric]

Very good, very very good, but also work in progress.

Now imagine what the full HL2 RTX release is going to look like!

It's looking really good, although there does seem to be way too much light overall in some of these environments.

 

[mrk]

It's looking really good, although there does seem to be way too much light overall in some of these environments.

It's work in progress, just like the HL2 RTX demo which the devs re-adjusted.

DF gets asked the question, DF answers: