Poll: Ray Tracing - Do we care?

[StarShock]

Hello, with the impending release of these new fangled "RTX" cards, do any of us actually care about ray tracing?
For me I don't think it will add very much, like its a cool new way of doing stuff, and at a professional level will likely save Disney a bunch of time and money on their next block buster, but from a gaming point of view, even if there were games that use it, it seems like it wouldn't add very much to the end result.

I mean I'm sure developers will be happy to be able to just flip a switch in the game engine instead of having to go through the game and manually add texture and lighting maps to a scene, but by the sounds of it there will be a big old performance hit, and I'm not sold that it will actually improve the end result.

Add to that, if only a hand full of top end cards will even be able to pull it off, just means that if a game dev wants to actually sell a lot of games, they will need to do it the old way as well for at least a few more generations.

I feel like this is just going to be another PhysX or hair works, NVidia will pay a few devs to add it to their games, but no one will actually use it or care.

What do you guys think? Next big thing or not?

 

[StarShock]

Just thinking, and I could be very, very wrong about this. But, Are we sure that the resolution will have an effect on the ray tracing, what I mean is as the ray tracing is offloaded onto a separate RT core thing, and it may be running with a set number of rays based on how its set up in the engine, it may be that the resolution won't have much effect on the speed of the ray tracing stuff. So like it can only run the ray tracing stuff at ~40 FPS regardless of the resolution, so might run 4K just as well/badly as it runs 1080p.

As I said though this is a pure guess on my part based on a whole lot of nothing. But its a half way interesting thought.

 

[StarShock]

More pixels = more rays required, if I'm understanding it correctly, so will be slower the higher resolution you go

Fair enough

 

[StarShock]

Will it be an on or off switch or will it be a slider that can give us control over how much performance we lose.

Yes I know realistically it is either ray traced or not, but the same could be said for tessellation or anti aliasing and we get a range of options for those. Bad example I know but you get what I'm trying to say hopefully.

I imagine at the very least there will be a low, medium and high setting. Just based on the fact that the 3 RTX cards have different numbers of RT cores. Otherwise the RTX 2070 is going to be seriously gimped if anyone wants to use it for ray tracing