If the game really ships without HDR then that is truly sick. No amount of RT can compensate for that.
Unfortunately I have a mixed impression of RT here. I think the problem for them is similar to what Metro Exodus had with the initial RT, except there it worked in their favour and suited the atmosphere, but here the low amount of ray bounces is very evident with an over-darkening of AO in many instances. You simply cannot have such low lighting amount in an outdoor open world game with so much vegetation. The GI part seems as weak as it did for Cyberpunk (RTL Psycho), probably only used as an enhancement for the existing GI, except in CP their base GI was much stronger so it was an acceptable compromise. Reflections also don't get to play much of a role here either. It is the sun shadows that do the heavy lifting in most situations in this game, so I'd say that's a must to turn on.
But as much as I am slagging their RT if we look at how the rasterised-only image looks it makes a very bad impression. Sometimes it works in its favour when you get the golden hour effect (whereas with RT near buildings you sometimes get a much colder image if you're opposite the sun; more accurate, yes, but less aesthetically pleasing), but a lot of the times it just puts even more emphasis on the low quality of textures & pure geometric detail it ships with (also similar to Metro Exodus) and is a complete mess. One reviewer said it best, in many ways this is like an Xbox 360 title taken to the extreme and brought into 2022. On the one hand you have advanced RT techniques necessitating obscene amounts of computing power, on the other you have tufts of grass in the urban environment which are literally just 2D cards plopped down and randomised, looking like placeholders more than a finished product. The studio simply doesn't have the technology base required for dealing with so much vegetation and it shows. They are in way over their heads. One of the guys on gamegpu showed it compared to The Division 2 and the difference was immediate and staggering, no doubt that game is in a class of its own and shows how far you can push traditional raster techniques at the end of its cycle. Different worlds entirely, and we know they did a LOT of work for RT + vegetation for Avatar, so that'll be raising the bar yet again. Amateur devs (Techland) vs Pros (Massive), it's a embarassing to even make the comparison but here's them juxtaposed anyway.
You can find some more tests & performance here:
https://gamegpu.com/action-/-fps-/-...obzor-i-sravnenie-graficheskikh-nastroek-igry
https://gamegpu.com/action-/-fps-/-tps/dying-light-2-stay-human-test-gpu-cpu
As for RT vs Vram
If you're on Nvidia then the RT grunt will do you no good, because you will be choked by the lack of memory. If you're with AMD then the grunt is not there, but out of the two if it goes to raster vs raster then AMD wins. So unless you have a 3080 (and even that's an edge case) or better then it should give you no comfort that you have dedicated RT cores in this case (3070 & lower).
Oops, guess it ended up a rant.
