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What do gamers actually think about Ray-Tracing?

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Soldato
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Posted as a separate post so not to mess up other useful threads regarding ray tracing.


Worth completing this HUB survey too if you have a minute, it's part of the above video and link is also in the description area too and below here.

SURVEY: https://forms.gle/u43Pa7wEt63nZwSH7
 
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Haven't seen raytracing yet. I do have cyberpunk and need to play it at some point. But I think that with seeing video reviews for my 7900xtx I still probably won't get to see it either, it sounds like a Nvidia 4090 feature.
 
Personally my take is, there is nothing wrong with the RT tech itself but as they somewhat touched upon the issue is the price point to get a decent experience, you basically need a 7900xt or 3080+ to really enjoy it and appreciate it and going forward when as shown, games start to use heavier RT, you ideally need a 4070ti super/4080+ so sadly, lots just won't use it, which is a valid view point of course, for me, as long as I can maintain ideally 70/80 fps, I'm good, although ideally do want to get 100+ fps, which is somewhat possible tbf with upscaling and frame gen, even on the 3+ year old 3080 with the exception of AW 2 and cp 2077 PT.

Not to be that guy..... but the biggest issue is there is a massive lack of knowledge and awareness on what RT actually is and what it sets out to achieve as well as who really benefits from it as well as just being outright oblivious to the advantages it offers over dated methods. The other problem is people who just look at something like BF 5, tomb raider and go "rt sucks!!!" and ignore every other game.

RT is primarily a way to benefit developers first and foremost, games are incredibly hard to make and in a world where cost cutting is more important than ever (particularly in the development/tech world), this is to aid them in being able to deliver quicker, remember that scene showing 4a enhanced workflow, 1 scene/frame for lighting, shadows etc. where it took them 30-50 minutes to get somewhat ok looking compared to the instantaneous setup of RT? That's an incredible amount of time and money saved there but obviously to get the most from this, developers will have to stop supporting raster methods too otherwise it is a duplicate effort in some ways (but alas with any new tech, there is also a learning curve). This will naturally happen over time where RT will be always on to some form and you won't even have a choice to disable it entirely as we are starting to see now, ps 5 being the main platform to showcase this (avatar is on all platforms and of course metro ee [although was more of a tech demo really]), this is also showing in the raster vs rt scenes where devs are basically putting no effort into raster to get it looking great and it is starting to become more evident.

The 2 main hurdles for RT advancement is the weak console hardware and devs still supporting raster, I think the biggest step in RT progress will come with the next gen consoles where next gen consoles will have better RT hardware support and probably use hardware mode for RT and the current gen consoles will fall back to more software based RT. IIRC, on steam, isn't it something like 70/80% of hardware has support for RT now?

I also think a large part of the hate/anti RT is also because nvidia have done a rather clever game with all their RTX marketing to make people think RT is a nvidia thing and naturally, when nvidia are first to something or leading the way, it gets hated on or rather it's not an important feature/advantage to have but then when/if amd catch up or overtake, it's the next best thing and vice versa to when amd are first and nvidia are catching up e.g. just look at the upscaling and frame gen situation.

Ultimately I think people just need to accept that raster is on its way out, majority of games coming out (since RT became a thing in the gaming scene) is only growing and growing, most game engines have RT built in now, UE 5 (which a lot of games are using going forward) uses software RT with support for hardware RT, console games are using RT and some are providing no option to disable it, amd, intel are all onboard with it too not to mention, chipset makers too.
 
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I don't use it, the huge performance hit isn't worth it for better reflections and lighting. I'd rather render at native and not use upscaling.

The main purpose of it was to create a reason for people to upgrade imo. Raster performance got so good needed something else. Then you also need uoscaling as the performance hit is so huge. Creates angles to sell new products.
 
mattyfc said:
I don't use it, the huge performance hit isn't worth it for better reflections and lighting. I'd rather render at native and not use upscaling.

The main purpose of it was to create a reason for people to upgrade imo. Raster performance got so good needed something else. Then you also need uoscaling as the performance hit is so huge. Creates angles to sell new products.
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Everything ever done by any company is to make money but usually when new solutions are created, it's to solve issues or/and improve the experience for the end user, in development, this is called user stories so a team, usually product owners/sales people will converse with their end users to identify what they would like to be improved or ways to address certain issues i.e. to keep it pretty low level, in the case of raster cons:

- requires an incredible amount of time to get it looking good, development costs a silly amount of money, the people said companies are paying for is not cheap, in fact, it's probably the biggest outgoing for a company and with the game development industry, it is absolutely vital that publishers meet deadlines here, not every company can spend several years to make a game that looks as good as RDR 2 for example
- raster held/holds back advancement in advancing other areas of visuals e.g. destruction, well in the sense, if you want your lighting to look correct and not have to put in a lot of effort, raster is a no go since most of the time, everything is pre-baked, you just have to look at how static/flat games with good destruction looked after buildings came down and so on e.g. BF and red faction guerilla, have a look at the finals as an example of how much this is improved now (also, actually runs very well with RT)
- wanted to solve the issues with raster drawbacks e.g. light sources leaking through solid objects/rooms, reflections disappearing when moving your camera angle ever so slightly, reflections not showing everything in the gameworld around you, shadows missing or not being produced correctly in terms of hard and soft shadows depending on the source, distance and type of light etc.

To get to the next level of visuals where raster has/had basically peaked, the next step is ray tracing to allow devs to go even further now.

The issue with RT performance is largely down to the hybrid method we most commonly see too, path tracing is very intensive but look at metro ee, it runs better than the hybrid metro rt version.

RBImGuy said:
Nvidia simply slapped a feature and raised prices sold at twice the price and people thought it got better.
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What's your take on the chipset makers, intel and amd supporting RT and working towards improving their versions? Thoughts on spiderman 2 and avatar (nvidia not involved at all) not providing any option to disable RT?
 
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It's... fine? I understand that it's objectively a better way to do things, but it's yet to enhance my gaming experience in any meaningful way. A game can't be doing much to hold my attention if I have time to stop and admire the shadows or ponder whether the lighting is perfectly accurate to real life or not. I've always forgotten it was even off within five minutes of disabling it.
 
Aretak said:
It's... fine? I understand that it's objectively a better way to do things, but it's yet to enhance my gaming experience in any meaningful way. A game can't be doing much to hold my attention if I have time to stop and admire the shadows or ponder whether the lighting is perfectly accurate to real life or not. I've always forgotten it was even off within five minutes of disabling it.
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That's like saying we're happy to stick with GTA SA/vice city level of visuals since you don't stop to think if graphics look good or realistic.... Like any advancement in graphics regardless of RT, it's all about providing extra immersion or improving the overall visuals to enjoy as you "play" the game when you're in the moment e.g.

- driving down night city when it's raining is quite an awesome immersive experience regardless of RT being on but with it being on, it's taken to a whole new level that simply wouldn't be possible even with the very best raster implementation (and cp 2077 raster methods are actually very well done too)

For me, one of the main perks of RT is just simply not having the immersion breaking artifacts of raster where reflections disappear, weird halo'ing around objects in front of water surfaces etc. I somewhat compare it to 144hz vs 60hz, in some cases, it's not immediately noticeable but it's when you have become used to it and you go back to the old way, that's when you notice something doesn't look/feel right:

Having become so accustomed to RT/PT now, it's actually incredibly jarring when going back to older full raster based games, even the best looking ones like batman AK, RDR 2, GTA 5 etc. and the downsides with raster are immediately obvious now and actually somewhat ruin the immersion I find with things like the reflections disappearing just because you change your angle ever so slightly, rooms/areas of the gameworld, which has this illuminating glow despite there being no light to provide this anywhere, light leaking in from other closed of rooms, lack of shadows on some objects, AO being poor which all adds to that flat popup book look. Nothing looks/feels right in these games when compared to AW 2, CP 2077, DL 2, metro ee etc. It really is astonishing just how "fake" raster is.
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For me, the performance hit is such that raytracing is unsuitable for fast-paced games. But for more sedate games - Portal RTX, for instance - it makes a huge difference in visual quality.

When RT first came in with the 20 series I remember opining that it would take at least 3 generations to hit the mainstream. That would be the 40 series, but with the price hikes and numbering shenanigans we've seen, I'm putting it back a generation or two.
 
I only just said this last night:

tommybhoy said:
Vrams been holding game textures back and fluidity for years now.
It needs to be implemented better into games, I've got zero interest in unrealistic one to one puddle/mirror reflections with an absolutely insane performance hit regardless whether I'm running on Nv/AMD.
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I'm going with the majority so far, too costly a performance hit and I've been RT capable since it started with my 20/30/4070's bought at launch each gen.

It's coming but until the performance hit is negligible, I'll take high FPS over RT'ING every single time.
 
Nvidia pushes a very intensive graphics feature,then implements one of the worse upsells in the last decade(if not the worst) with the RTX4000 series. Then AMD joins in for good measure. At least with Fermi,Nvidia pushed tessellation but the GTX460/GTX560 series were decent mainstream cards.

Trash like the RTX4060TI is not a good way to bring RT to the masses. It's not even a good way to bring extra rasterised performance to the masses.

If it was the Nvidia of over a decade ago,we would have had the RTX4070 as an RTX4060TI or even an RTX4060. Not anymore,so most of us plebs are stuck with a rubbish experience unless we throw money at it. I don't care enough to throw more money at RT currently.

It might change when we get decent cards at the mainstream level at an actual maintream price. Not the fantasy mainstream prices their accountants thing they are at.
 
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Ray tracing will be good, provided that developers use it correctly and the hardware required to run it well isn't prohibitively expensive. At this stage, neither of these things are true. If it's an option to turn on, I will turn it on, but if it is impacting performance as much as it currently does, it's the first thing I turn off.

I said a couple of years ago that for me, it's a few generations away, and I still think that it is the case. Diminishing returns on GPUs are also extending that time frame.
tommybhoy said:
It's coming but until the performance hit is negligible, I'll take high FPS over RT'ING every single time.
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This is basically it for me.
 
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Quite an anti DLSS sentiment here… even if you think DLSS makes it look worse, the image quality issues seem quite minor to the improvements RT brings to the tables.

So, yes I always turn it on, and always turn on DLSS.
 
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