I agree I think ray tracing is here to stay because it can look much better when enabled. The only issue is it tanks performance. If GPU's could run it without taking too much of a hit (and costing too much), I cant see anyone disabling it, but as it stands now the performance hit (and cost) is too much.
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What do gamers actually think about Ray-Tracing?
- Thread starter Purgatory
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I think it will be stopped talking about & just accepted once hardware is sufficiently powerful that the performance budget of its implementation is negligible. This could even be with the next gen? I think as a game engine design product it is very exciting to see what visions devs create in the future - imagine Kingdom Come: Deliverance with RT instead of GI?
In it's current iteration I have very little interest in it, I haven't seen enough of it in the games I play and it doesn't affect my purchase decisions. It's currently a marketing tool that favours one company more than another.
In it's current iteration I have very little interest in it, I haven't seen enough of it in the games I play and it doesn't affect my purchase decisions. It's currently a marketing tool that favours one company more than another.
In my opinion, RT/PT is overrated. For me, it adds almost nothing to the experience ; realistic lighting isn't always more aesthetically pleasing. For visuals I much prefer a strong art direction over "realism". Those that praise RT/PT usually hold the opposite view/preference. Then there is the performance hit to consider, which is considerable unless you own a RTX 4080/4090. However, I agree that at some point, RT/PT will become more commonplace, and I take Noxia's point on board that it may help reduce development costs etc.
It's not overrated, it's overpriced. I don't think there's much doubt that it can make scenes look more natural, however to get that you're looking at having to spend £1k+ (let's no kid ourselves and pretend a 4060/70 can do RT without making compromises).
If people can't use RT without compromises for less than $500 (probably even less) then it will forever remain a niche within a niche.
One thing I find very interesting here is the amount of people saying they value performance above all else, don't see a difference or don't care for slight increase in visuals and want more fps yet in the native/upscaling threads, people then say they don't want to use upscaling and rather use native and yet as shown, the decrease in IQ from this is little to nothing or in some cases, better... 
At the Eurogamer expo last November I had the opportunity to very briefly tryout CP2077 with RT on an all singing all dancing PC.
The thing that left the strongest impression on me, was how much noise RT introduced to the scene when not using DLSS. I do remember flicking between RT on and RT off but I don't remember it blowing me away. However it was a brief spin on a showroom floor.
I played though Ratchet and Clank rift apart and noticed the exact same noise issue as I saw in CP2077. I gave RT a good go and kept it on for a good chunk of my playthrough, I put up with the 60fps. I disabled RT on a certain level because the framerate nose dived but I didn't feel like I was missing out buy not having RT enabled.
Its a nice to have but when push comes to shove I disable it.
I pretty certain that no coverage of RT in video games, that I have seen, has ever touched on this noise issue. It seems like the devs do not bother to denoise the output. I'm guessing it is because they simply do not have a performance budget to do that. I do not fault people who think that DLSS/FSR looks better than native since those technology do seem to work as a denoise step. I wonder if those people are noticing the noise and its clean up when enabling DLSS/FSR but don't understand that, that is what is happening.
For anyone who is wondering what I mean when I say noise. In the link below there is an image at the top of the page that shows a noisy image and a denoised version. There are different levels of noise introduced to an image that image does show a particularly harsh example.
The thing that left the strongest impression on me, was how much noise RT introduced to the scene when not using DLSS. I do remember flicking between RT on and RT off but I don't remember it blowing me away. However it was a brief spin on a showroom floor.
I played though Ratchet and Clank rift apart and noticed the exact same noise issue as I saw in CP2077. I gave RT a good go and kept it on for a good chunk of my playthrough, I put up with the 60fps. I disabled RT on a certain level because the framerate nose dived but I didn't feel like I was missing out buy not having RT enabled.
Its a nice to have but when push comes to shove I disable it.
I pretty certain that no coverage of RT in video games, that I have seen, has ever touched on this noise issue. It seems like the devs do not bother to denoise the output. I'm guessing it is because they simply do not have a performance budget to do that. I do not fault people who think that DLSS/FSR looks better than native since those technology do seem to work as a denoise step. I wonder if those people are noticing the noise and its clean up when enabling DLSS/FSR but don't understand that, that is what is happening.
For anyone who is wondering what I mean when I say noise. In the link below there is an image at the top of the page that shows a noisy image and a denoised version. There are different levels of noise introduced to an image that image does show a particularly harsh example.
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Don't think I have ever seen noise issues in any RT games (well maybe in some of AMDs sponsored titles like FC 6 and RE where I don't use FSR and DLSS isn't present but it wasn't bad, certainly nothing like the image in that intel comparison) although I always enable DLSS but noise handling is a seperate step, perhaps because of upscaing tech rendering at a lower res. it somewhat reduces this. There is ray reconstruction now which uses AI to denoise and arguably produces better results but it's only in AW 2 and CP 2077 atm.
Digital foundry have covered the noise in a few of their game videos but main one being the video on ray reconstruction:
Caporegime
One thing I find very interesting here is the amount of people saying they value performance above all else, don't see a difference or don't care for slight increase in visuals and want more fps yet in the native/upscaling threads, people then say they don't want to use upscaling and rather use native and yet as shown, the decrease in IQ from this is little to nothing or in some cases, better...
People don't like to admit things that go against the narrative and the persona that they like to maintain in this section.
Soldato
Persona is ********, more like people can't accept differing choice.
If we want to turn on RT/PT/Upscaling we can, if we want to turn it all off we can-exactly why we game on PC.
If we want to turn on RT/PT/Upscaling we can, if we want to turn it all off we can-exactly why we game on PC.
Soldato
If you have a rubbish base game like cyberpunk, atleast you can make it look nice?
Caporegime
That's not what we're talking about, accepting people's choices, I honestly don't care what options people want to use when they play.
It's more the fact that you can open a new thread and look at the username on the left and immediately know what some people's reaction to the topic will be, and it will contradict something they've said in another thread.
I know we're all walking contradictions to a certain extent, but it's getting a bit tiresome on here. You can't honestly tell me that some of the posters on here aren't vehemently one-sided and will stick to their guns as long as that opinion aligns with their "side".
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Associate
RT does look good but as with all graphical features only when it's implemented well. I tend to find that once I'm over the initial phase of looking for it specifically I forget it's even on, and sometimes turn it off for the added performance.
If I had a card that could run it better then I'd use it more, but I'm not paying the significant sums currently being asked for the hardware capable of that. But again, that's also the case with intensive graphics options overall. I'm increasingly happy to turn down settings and just enjoy the gameplay itself.
HDR/OLED has had a much bigger impact on IQ in my opinion, that was a real game changer and the most significant visual upgrade I've experienced in a decade. Cyberpunk and Doom Eternal in particular looked so much better than they did before. Yes, there's a cost associated, but in my case as it was a TV it sees utilisation for a wide range of entertainment and not just games, hence it was much easier to justify the price.
If I had a card that could run it better then I'd use it more, but I'm not paying the significant sums currently being asked for the hardware capable of that. But again, that's also the case with intensive graphics options overall. I'm increasingly happy to turn down settings and just enjoy the gameplay itself.
HDR/OLED has had a much bigger impact on IQ in my opinion, that was a real game changer and the most significant visual upgrade I've experienced in a decade. Cyberpunk and Doom Eternal in particular looked so much better than they did before. Yes, there's a cost associated, but in my case as it was a TV it sees utilisation for a wide range of entertainment and not just games, hence it was much easier to justify the price.
There's a big difference, a lot of people have had experiences with upscaling that was implemented badly or in old games and made everything blurry or artefacts were horrible. For example Warthunder's implementation of DLSS still makes everything look very blurry which directly makes your performance way worse as it's a PvP game. In one of the previous modern warfare games (starts in the forest in the evening) it caused all tree branches to horribly flicker against the sky etc. Seeing few of such examples I was very much against DLSS too. But then they fixed most (not all!) Issues and in many games it's good enough. There are still few examples where it looks bad (as in, visually disturbing with horrible ghosting etc.) but not that many anymore. Comparing big visual artefacts to relatively small visual improvements in many games with RT is not sensible at all.One thing I find very interesting here is the amount of people saying they value performance above all else, don't see a difference or don't care for slight increase in visuals and want more fps yet in the native/upscaling threads, people then say they don't want to use upscaling and rather use native and yet as shown, the decrease in IQ from this is little to nothing or in some cases, better...
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That's a very good point and it goes back to what I also mentioned earlier about RT working relatively well on top hardware today only because of many many shortcuts and simplifications - here it being very low number of calculated rays which generates huge amount of noise. The problem is that it also produces low amount of details, which then denoising makes even worse. That was very visible in cp2077 with PT enabled before NVIDIA introduced the newest AI denoiser. But even with that it's still easy to see noise in darker areas and it's still far from perfect. This will improve greatly when hardware gets much much more powerful in RT, but again - we are most likely many generations away from that. Till then AI seems to be the only way forward to fix as many issues as we can with such small number of rays being calculated.
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As you basically said in your last couple of lines there. How often is that the case now though? Especially for DLSS. The native/upscaling thread was only created a couple months back so we're not talking about DLSS 1 levels of ****. I do agree though when artifacting is bad, it's noticeable hence why I will never use FSR as in motion, the shimmering, aliasing etc. is immersion breaking for me.
Also, I don't recall likes of war thunder really needing upscaling either but maybe it's been upgraded in graphics department? I'm mainly referring to these fancier looking games which do need the extra performance from upscaling tech, even on newer/beefier gpus and even more so at 4k/if pushing high refresh rate screens i.e. to go from likes of 50/60 to 90+ fps or say 30/40 to 70 fps
Absolutely my experience as well. And HDR cost no FPS at all, though there's cost barrier with proper monitor - but that is getting cheaper now.
To clarify - a lot of people got burned on earlier cases and they simply don't really want to try again, still holding old opinions. That's most likely what you see as effect.
WT has also horrible TAA implementation and hope was for DLSS to fix it but it's oddly even worse. The only true solution turned out to be DLDSR instead - image looks way way better then.
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