... The new Doom only works with RT, you could run Eternal on max settings with 200 frames, now you run it on medium 60 frames with the same gpu. What a joke...
Doom Eternal had offline baked lighting that then incorporated ray traced reflections. It also used to smaller environments, smaller enemy counts, and less geometric complexity across the board. What you're seeing with Doom The Dark Ages is the performance difference between offline lighting, held together with smoke and mirrors created by the best in the business, versus fully real-time lighting based on full-blown photonic simulation. The key benefit isn't to you - the gamer - getting a more total lighting solution, it's actually to the developer, because they don't need to use offline techniques which require nightly builds, delaying QA on scenes by literally days. This allows them to move quickly because in their editing tools, what they see is what you get. This is quite a lot faster, which in turn means cuts costs. That's important because big AAA games are climbing north of USD$300 million on a regular basis.
... What do you think about it? I wish it would just die already.
Ray tracing isn't going to die because your old hardware can't handle Doom The Dark Ages any more than polygons are going to die because your 386 couldn't handle Quake. This is the future.
Real talk - developers used tricks and fakery for so long to give the illusion of better real-time rendering that they utterly eclipsed what the hardware was actually capable of. This created a gulf - the difference between what can done in real time, and what can only be done when you spend millions on elaborate tricks to fake it. This bubble was always going to burst. Instead of intelligent trade offs, like what we saw in games like Doom 3, the industry employed entire armies of people to create masses of bespoke assets to give the illusion they'd pulled off the impossible. What they couldn't achieve with talent they faked with money. Everything from one dimensional background billboards to hardcoded per-camera angle pixel shaders for cut-scenes. And now we're seeing that come to a head. No one can afford to keep doing this. Not at this level of complexity, this level of fidelity. Outside of Rockstar, there's literally no one left who can actually sell enough games to justify these expenses. Developers are falling back to real-time because it's literally the only way they can stay in business. Fortunately, graphics hardware is still actually super powerful - as long as you know how to use it. Doom The Dark Ages is the real deal - it's 60 FPS fully real-time on consoles with great animations, texture work, models, scale, scene complexity, and ray traced lighting. id don't fuck around. Anyone else still delivering pre-baked non-sense is spending
dramatically more - and if they're not delivering native 4K 60FPS across the board with all that extra headroom, why even bother? So their screenshots can look 6.7% better? Pfft.
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