• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Raytracing - Would you buy in to it now?

Soldato
Joined
17 Jun 2004
Posts
7,587
Location
Eastbourne , East Sussex.
No.

Even with a 3080 I don't think it's worth the performance penalty and I don't like the compromises DLSS brings in order to get the frame rate up (I can really notice the resulting noisy textures etc).

Maybe next gen.


This ^^. Its what i noticed with DLSS, the textures dont seem ` right` and at a lot of points you can tell its upscaled. Better than DLSS 1 , but its still a huge fudge.
 
Caporegime
Joined
4 Jun 2009
Posts
30,927
Nope.

- performance killer, maybe after another couple of gens
- doesn't make enough of a difference, cyberpunk without it still has outstanding reflections etc. and in some cases even looks better than ray tracing imo, then just have to look at the likes of batman arkham knight and shadow of the tomb raider, even without ray tracing there, their reflections are stunning

One game where RTX has definitely wowed me more than anything else though, is spiderman miles morale on the ps 5. Kind of makes me laugh that it does the job better than anything on PC :D
 
Pet Northerner
Don
Joined
29 Jul 2006
Posts
8,025
Location
Newcastle, UK
Nope.

- performance killer, maybe after another couple of gens
- doesn't make enough of a difference, cyberpunk without it still has outstanding reflections etc. and in some cases even looks better than ray tracing imo, then just have to look at the likes of batman arkham knight and shadow of the tomb raider, even without ray tracing there, their reflections are stunning

One game where RTX has definitely wowed me more than anything else though, is spiderman miles morale on the ps 5. Kind of makes me laugh that it does the job better than anything on PC :D

I really liked spiderman too! But don;t tell Grim or he'll poo poo it because the reflections are not perfectly crisp and 4k
 
Man of Honour
Joined
21 Nov 2004
Posts
44,881
The problem at the moment is that every game with RT is built on the premise of ‘look, we have RT, everywhere’, hoping people are so blinded with RT they miss the lack of an actual game.
 
Soldato
Joined
30 Jul 2005
Posts
19,361
Location
Midlands
In youtube vids i see some differences but thats me sitting back and watching for them. When involved in the game i tend to see less details in general and focus mainly on the action and targets.
 
Soldato
Joined
24 Jul 2003
Posts
3,285
Location
South East Coast
If I had the opportunity to buy a card now I would go 3080/90 simply because in basic rasterisation they trade blows with their AMD equivalents but it's nice to have the option of ray tracing and DLSS to get it to playable levels. For games like Cyberpunk that are slower paced I would like the option to play it at decent settings with some/all RT enabled.

RT isn't the be all end all of graphics options, but I would like the option.
 
Associate
Joined
23 Aug 2005
Posts
1,273
After Cyberpunk news of bugs (expected) and the world not being all that immersive (oh dear) I think I'll get a 3070 rather than all out 3080. I think RT is great and DLSS magic to help it also great, but the game also has to have depth and be fun and not just window dressing. Control is the main RTX game for me, Metro Exodus sure, plus I just want to experience real-time ray tracing, maybe mess around in Quake II RTX.
 
Associate
Joined
14 Jul 2005
Posts
568
I agree with the OP. Cyberpunk 2077 is my first RT game and it does enhance the experience to the point where I would hope all big AAA games will offer RT going forwards.

I wasn't really sold on the half-baked implementations I saw in BFV and even Control but Cyberpunk is the first game where it genuinely enhances the immersion.
 
Man of Honour
Joined
13 Oct 2006
Posts
90,821
Would you notice RT in a fast paced shooter or car game compared to a slow walk down night city in cyberpunk?

With a proper implementation yes - when you have a full range of features like bounced light, proper glossy surfaces and specular reflections, caustics, etc. there is an effect on the overall presentation of the graphics. Current games just using token features don't really show what it can bring and can easily be lost within a set of high end rasterisation features.

In a proper implementation light can do interesting things throughout the scene in a way current techniques can't as well as the little touches like scattered light from chrome surfaces, etc.

EDIT: While they may seem like little things look how the light is bounced back off the chair legs into the scene where they are in sun light and the pillar top middle of the screen is being indirectly lit by light bouncing off the wooden counter etc. in this screenshot - when the whole scene has those little details everywhere it all adds up to a much bigger impression even in fast paced game. This is just from me experimenting in Quake 2 RTX - my artistic abilities and even understanding of the tech are somewhat limited - so it is possible for someone who actually knows what they are doing to do much better.

 
Last edited:
Soldato
Joined
8 Jun 2018
Posts
2,827
From a technical perspective, Cyberpunk is just as impressive as long as you have the hardware for it. CD Project RED revamped their RedEngine, which powered The Witcher 3 back in the day. It's now running on DirectX 12 with support for Global Illumination and raytracing. No support for variable rate shading, mesh shaders, or sample feedback by the way, so it's not a full "DirectX 12 Ultimate" title. The Global Illumination system works great without raytracing and is capable of handing the full day/night cycle while keeping everything lit (mostly) properly.
..
The artists did fantastic work and achieved great things when it comes to lighting. While playing the game, I often thought "wow, how does this look with RT off?" and vice versa. In several cases, I found the non-RT lighting better even though I realized it wasn't as physically accurate as the raytraced version. During normal gaming, you'd never realize that; you'd have to look for it. Digging deeper into the RT effects, I'm also slightly surprised that many corners have been cut to help with performance. Theoretically, the promise of raytracing is "physically accurate," but in Cyberpunk, I can't even see myself in RT reflections? Only light from the sun and moon is used for raytraced shadows, and reflections are limited in how often they can bounce. Now, this kind of a compromise of course makes sense to achieve better performance, but it's still an important argument to understand the technology.
...
Given the massive raytracing performance hit of around 50%, we definitely need to focus on getting raytracing performance to usable levels first before dialing up the RT details even further. NVIDIA's DLSS technology can help with that as it renders the game at lower resolution and then uses an advanced upscaling algorithm to get you a high-quality anti-aliased output that looks nearly identical to the default TAA anti-aliasing filter at native resolution. At this time, Cyberpunk 2077 supports raytracing only on NVIDIA's RTX platform. AMD Radeon users will have to wait a bit longer, support is coming in a future patch. By the way, we did test the final public release version of Cyberpunk with the latest 1.03 patch and the game-ready drivers from AMD and NVIDIA.
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/cyberpunk-2077-benchmark-test-performance/6.html

How is it that the most anticipated game of 2020 isn't fully DX12 Ultimate compliant? So that explains the performance penalty problems. I still can't see using RT but at least games using RT should be fully DX12 Ultimate compliant.
Shssh talk about pulling the wool over people's eyes...
 
Associate
Joined
20 Jun 2013
Posts
1,831
I like the effects it brings, but I own exactly 2 games with ray tracing, one came with my 3090 and the other is a game I was waiting years for to release.
I can't see Ray Tracing become mainstream until more games support it, and more importantly, it stops battering the crap out of performance. It's a growing technology, but still has a ways to go
 
Man of Honour
Joined
13 Oct 2006
Posts
90,821
Problem with a game like CP2077 you have a massive performance hit from advanced use of traditional techniques then having to try and cram some ray traced features in there in a manner that doesn't upset things when they aren't enabled by people who don't have hardware support and/or performance to run them and even token use of RT features still requires an implementation that has a large slice of the performance impact of a full RT solution (on top of your already non-RT performance requirements) despite only using limited RT features.
 
Associate
Joined
29 Aug 2013
Posts
1,175
Honestly I can't see a massive difference with on vs off but the performance hit is quite big, so off for me. Rather have 80+FPS with RT off than 50 with it on.
 
Back
Top Bottom