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What do gamers actually think about Ray-Tracing?

mrk said:
Incase this was missed from DF recently, id software bring receipts as to why RT is pinnacle, unless everyone wants to go out and buy new SSDs just to store new games on going forwards.... 110GB of just lighting data alone is needed if using baked lighting, and that's at half the size, not even full size data!

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You'd remain with the limits of the medium and don't really do advanced lighting.

Even if the game doesn't ship with Path Tracing, I'd expect each studio will end up using it internally, even if it's slower and perhaps noisier, due to its obvious advantages.
 
My gut instinct says that devs have been holding tight for a while waiting for the new gen of consoles to come out then they can essentially forget about non RT paths entirely. Games running engines like idtech 7 have proven that an optimised approach can result in excellent RT cross-platform without much compromise in current gen hardware, and next gen consoles are said to be much more hardware RT focused, and Unreal Engine 5.5+ is also geared this way with at least 30% efficiency gains compared to previous versions.

We already have games that cannot run on GPUs that do not support hardware RT, this is going to becom more common as devs speak out more often on how much easier it has made their lives.
 
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Cronos has one easily visible difference when toggling hardware Lumen RT vs software Lumen RT. It's most noticeable on OLED due to the infinite contrast ratio they afford, but on a decent IPS it will still be there too. I am talking about the UE5 boiling effect and ever-present artefacting that happens when the RTGI has to be calculated behind a transparency object, in this instance our traveller.

The issue completely goes away when enabling HW RT mode, but at the cost of a massive framerate drop in this game. It will be interesting to see what Stalker 2 sees when GSC update the game to UE 5.5.4 as Cronos is still running an old UE5 version, the efficiency and performance boosts in later versions will no doubt help, assuming GSC also enables the HW RT option (they should).


Another plus for raytracing.... if you can spare the framerates.
 
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Remember you can't turn RT off in UE5 games as it is what Lumen is, you either choose hardware mode or software with visual trade-offs.

Other non UE games have only RT as well and require a GPU with hardware RT support to run.
 
mrk said:
Gamespot has some thoughts.

www.gamespot.com

Ray Tracing Hasn't Yet Lived Up To Its Potential

Budgets, game design, and timing haven't quite lined up yet to make ray tracing a primary feature in games.
www.gamespot.com www.gamespot.com
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Couple things, RT was always over hyped. It should now be looked at as a single graphics technique in a toolkit, not something that will drastically alter the way games look. It was the same thing with Tessellation back in 2011, I remember - we had these demos coming out showing the use of the tool in curated scenarios to make it look good and everyone thought this would change everything, but it turned out to be just one small tool in a bag of graphics tools.

Despite what the Marketing, especially from Nvidia, has claimed, neither Tessellation or RT is as transformative as when we went from 2d to 3d games, but Nvidia just wants you to think it is.

What does actually drastically alter the look of games is HDR, but unfortunately the HDR rollout and implementation has been even worse than RT. And I don't know if it's going to change anytime soon either, we still have a major problem of fake HDR screens being used and an entire media and content global industry that for the most part is still setup to fully cater to SDR content production.
 
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Grim5 said:
What does actually drastically alter the look of games is HDR, but unfortunately the HDR rollout and implementation has been even worse than RT. And I don't know if it's going to change anytime soon either, we still have a major problem of fake HDR screens being used and an entire media and content global industry that for the most part is still setup to fully cater to SDR content production.
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HDR doesn't tank the framerate either and improves image quality way better than RT/PT imo. A lot of people still use older or cheaper displays and have never seen HDR in person so they think its some marketing gimmick, its sad! :mad:
 
Grim5 said:
Despite what the Marketing, especially from Nvidia, has claimed, neither Tessellation or RT is as transformative as when we went from 2d to 3d games, but Nvidia just wants you to think it is.
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RT if used properly is transformative, unfortunately most devs just use it to paper over the cracks of traditional techniques rather than leverage its potential, even RTX Remix plays quite safe with it with a fairly constrained lighting model. Doesn't help so many "ray tracing" projects use Unreal Engine 5 which has a fairly mediocre implementation as well (even hardware Lumen is pretty crap compared to what ray tracing can do).
 
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Grim5 said:
Couple things, RT was always over hyped. It should now be looked at as a single graphics technique in a toolkit.
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This. My issue has never been with RT, just the nearly 10yrs of hype "I cant play games without RT" etc. No other tool has received such relentless non stop hype. To be fair, its usually the same group always posting. I agree HDR has a much bigger pq impact, but if you visited OC forums you'd think RT was much better.
 
Latest game I see is Avatar getting some updates (third person view, improved performance for 50 series cards, ray reconstruction). I don't have this game but maybe someone does for the visual showcase.
 
Ironically the only game where I kinda enjoy it is Diablo 2 Resurrected and that one was playable with RT even with my old RX590.
 
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