Is Ray-Tracing the biggest scam in gaming?

Nowa said:
This technology has like what, 7 years in mainstream gaming? And it is still dogshit. I have a decent Nvidia GPU, and why in god's name would I ever turn it on when I can run games much more smoothly without it?

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.

What do you think about it? I wish it would just die already.
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Can only speak about the gamer side, since I know fuck all about programming, I think its the shittier graphics gimmick ever invented, it consumes huge resources for minimal improvement, after all this years I haven't seen anything that made me go "holy fuck this is incredible and totally worth it" ... its the ultimate diminish return gimmick in the age of diminishing graphics return.

Look at that puddle reflexes and shining lights! Awwwsome!

Im sure that in ideal situations, super powerful systems and tech demos it may look otherworldly... but in real time applications it just isn't ready and its being pushed nonetheless

They had to invent/push something to justify charging 2.000 dollars for a GPU. And people have to justify spending 5k on a pc. RT it is.
 
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The problem is that turning on RT drops performance to half. Of less.
And with Path Tracing, it's much worse. As it drops to one third, or a quarter.
To make things much worse, GPUs are now a lot more expensive.
And to make it even worse, there are only a handful of games where there is a notable difference in image quality.
In most games, you can only tell RT is on, because of the huge drop in performance.
 
ZehDon said:
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.

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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Exactly, and even Rockstar are moving to RT which just proves your point further.
 
ZehDon said:
Doom Eternal re-used significant engine work and assets from Doom 2016. Doom 2016 took approximately eight years, including a reboot. The Dark Ages has a brand new version of the engine, and every single thing was built entirely brand new. Without Ray Traced lighting, id estimates an extra year or two of development time would've been needed due to the efforts of baking their assets. So, it shaved approximately 25-30% of the development off, dropping the budget accordingly.

If you're going to post garbage on the internet, might I suggest not posting gaming related garbage on one of the most hardcore gaming forums on the web? You're less likely to be called out on your bullshit.

... wait, are you trolling, and I'm too old and grumpy to pick up on the nuance?
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Nothing you said was true. AI will most likely reduce development time. Raytracing didnt, wont. I fucking laughed out loud at the hardcore gaming forum.

Actually I habe doubts about AI as well. So far nothing has reduced development times. There is no proof to state that raytracing is in fact cost and time effective. If there is, go ahead, prove it.
 
Killjoy-NL said:
Isn't the purpose of RT to provide realistic lighting and reflections?

That can never be scam. I'd argue that baked lighting is the actual scam, just like all those color-enhancers and whatnot on your tv that you should be turning off straight-away.
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People are taking "scam" too literally. What people mean by that is an overhyped marketing ploy that hasn't really provided meaningful benefits. There is a small degree of truth to that despite the underlying technology being good.
 
The Cockatrice said:
Nothing you said was true. AI will most likely reduce development time. Raytracing didnt, wont. I fucking laughed out loud at the hardcore gaming forum.

Actually I habe doubts about AI as well. So far nothing has reduced development times. There is no proof to state that raytracing is in fact cost and time effective. If there is, go ahead, prove it.
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By using simple logic lmao. Baking takes a lot of time and you need to re-bake when you move around assets and want to preview the lighting, which will be very often during development, levels get tweaked all the time. RT massively speeds up iteration time, how is that even debatable.
 
Three said:
People are taking "scam" too literally. What people mean by that is an overhyped marketing ploy that hasn't really provided meaningful benefits. There is a small degree of truth to that despite the underlying technology being good.
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I get that, but even in that sense.

Similar statements have been made about HDR, yet HDR adds much more realism to visuals, like providing more "depth" to volumetric effects like fog.
 
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RTGI is transformational
RT Reflections finally give us realistic looking worlds

so no, its the future but when theres only 1 player in the RT market it will take a very long time to progress.
 
Nowa said:
This technology has like what, 7 years in mainstream gaming? And it is still dogshit. I have a decent Nvidia GPU, and why in god's name would I ever turn it on when I can run games much more smoothly without it?

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.

What do you think about it? I wish it would just die already.
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Doom Eternal ran on a Switch 1, you can't compare it to literally one of the best looking and most cutting edge games (Doom TDA). RT is God send unlike Ultra settings which look almost exactly the same but cost a metric ton of fps, at least RT GI and Path Tracing do something. Play cyberpunk at ultra with 0 RT and then play it with Overdrive (Path Tracing) it's night and day.

Guess what the PS6s marquee feature is? Path Tracing and AI, same shit your "decent" (I expect at least 5060ti 16GB level power for "decent") Nvidia card can do now.
 
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Killjoy-NL said:
I get that, but even in that sense.

Similar statements have been made about HDR, yet HDR adds much more realism to visuals, like providing more "depth" to volumetric effects like fog.
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Yeah, your mileage will vary. HDR doesn't really come with a performance cost so it's a little more difficult to come to a subjective conclusion that it is 'a scam'. For RT though you can often see performance halve for 'realistic lighting' and people have differing opinions about it.
 
mrMUR_96 said:
By using simple logic lmao. Baking takes a lot of time and you need to re-bake when you move around assets and want to preview the lighting, which will be very often during development, levels get tweaked all the time. RT massively speeds up iteration time, how is that even debatable.
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"simple logic" does not apply to real word development and management of games. Again, unless you prove otherwise, the claim is bs.
 
ByWatterson said:
AI will light games before ray-tracing becomes cost-effective.
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This is effectively what happens anyway. Real time ray tracing will create a scene at low resolution with lots of ugly visual artefacts because it is optimized for speed. Then it is up to AI to upscale it and make it look presentable.
 
I dont think it's scam, but highlighting RT is like too much focusing on graphic, and forgot if it's a gameplay they should address as well.

And since years ago, people always highlight somethign that not too much important, such as metaverse, nft, and now we got AI as well. 90-99% are craps, when people discover the truth or darkside of the feature highlighted above, people will start bashing. But flocking with some new buzzwords all again soon.
 
I think it is, yeah. Good for devs I guess but we as players are constantly being gaslighted how good it is for us. Games that use it barely look better if even or they sometimes look worse like the new Doom that has worse graphics than previous ones despite being current gen only.
 
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The_Observer said:
I think it is, yeah. Good for devs I guess but we as players are constantly being gaslighted how good it is for us. Games that use it barely look better if even or they sometimes look worse like the new Doom that has worse graphics than previous ones despite being current gen only.
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How do you explain cyberpunk, for example?
 
RT will stay and will get more adoption as it simplify game development and allow more features like dynamic environment (and AI will not replace it)
There will be optimizations and shortcuts that will deal with performamce issues
Like KCD2 use voxel cone tracing that is simplified ray tracing technique. It has roughened quality but has better performance
 
Nowa said:
This technology has like what, 7 years in mainstream gaming? And it is still dogshit. I have a decent Nvidia GPU, and why in god's name would I ever turn it on when I can run games much more smoothly without it?

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.

What do you think about it? I wish it would just die already.
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RDNA 5 will flip the table like

it's the lack of competition.
 
IAmRei said:
I dont think it's scam, but highlighting RT is like too much focusing on graphic, and forgot if it's a gameplay they should address as well.

And since years ago, people always highlight somethign that not too much important, such as metaverse, nft, and now we got AI as well. 90-99% are craps, when people discover the truth or darkside of the feature highlighted above, people will start bashing. But flocking with some new buzzwords all again soon.
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RTGI being the baseline makes implementing things like more dynamic level design and destruction easier. Being able to skip baking means faster iteration too so this can indirectly lead to more focus on gameplay.
 
A lot of the best looking games at the moment are using ray tracing to achieve their visual quality so it's not a scam, but whether it's worth the performance cost will be up to each person. In some games like Assassin's Creed Shadows is with it for me.
 
The Cockatrice said:
"simple logic" does not apply to real word development and management of games. Again, unless you prove otherwise, the claim is bs.
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https://gdcvault.com/play/1035526/Rendering-Assassin-s-Creed-Shadows

Here is just one example, taken from Ubisoft talking about developing AC Shadows.
This is literal proof of how RT streamlines development and how complicated it was for them to have to support baked lighting and that they want to move to RT only streamline development.
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ZehDon said:
Everything I said was objective fact, including Doom The Dark Ages development saving thanks to Ray Tracing. Since you clearly have no clue about what you're talking about - up to and including disagreeing with easily verifiable facts - we're done. Go be wrong somewhere else.
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Link doesnt work but Im guessing its the same as this? https://www.thegamer.com/doom-the-dark-ages-would-have-been-delayed-if-not-for-ray-tracing/

"Without ray tracing and with the same design goals, we would have had to elongate the [development] time by a magnitude of years, because we wouldn't have the ability to create the same type of content."
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Cmon. We both know that is not entirely true and its marketing bs "magnitude of years" lmao. 4 decades of gaming prove otherwise. We've seen games being done in less time than that. Obviously Im not one to dismiss claims, even tho exaggerated so sure, down the pipeline and for minor things such as light bounces, it's easier with pathtracing instead of manually placing light emitters. Still, I highly doubt we'll see games releasing in 2-3 years in the future, even with AI and PathTracing. Theres always going to be something that will prolong game development.
 
Not the biggest scam but the hardwares are clearly not ready for the whole rtx suite, and without the whole suite, results can vary...wildly.

Even the most advanced form on pc is still far from perfect, some scene in cyberpunk straight up look better without path-tracing.
 
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I remember when people got upset by GPU demanding shaders, why not use a regular old texture?
RT & FG have such detractors now, but it's going to become normal, eventually.
 
The Cockatrice said:
Nothing you said was true. Raytracing didnt, wont. I fucking laughed out loud at the hardcore gaming forum.

Actually I have doubts about AI as well. So far nothing has reduced development times. There is no proof to state that raytracing is in fact cost and time effective. If there is, go ahead, prove it.
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You cannot be any more wrong if you even tried.
 
Senua said:
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Some people brains are not wired to recognise rtx, without rtx they just see the scene being lit differently, not incorrectly.

I guess it's like people not noticing meh texture and calling stuff like ds2 the best graphic out there or considering yotei a nextgen jump compared to sushi1, i'm more surprised by these people than people who can't notice rtx tbh.

But in that case, sony tribalism\kojima dick dicksucking is probably a big part of that.
 
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I'm a sucker of good RT implementations, both in modern (Cyberpunk, AW2, DL2, Indy) and old games (Quake II, Portal, HL2, TW3), and playing with fram gen doesn't bother me.

Sorry.
 
PleaseDoNotQuoteMe said:
Devs can use ray tracing hardware to calculate baked lighting or light probes, no? There's nothing to stop them from buying RTX 5090 to do that.
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It wouldn't surprise me if some do, the only one I know of for definite is Fatshark with Darktide (they talk about using RTXGI probes for the baked GI in their developer blog) The baked lighting on Darktide does look really good as a result and was probably faster to complete & cheaper to do using the RTX hardware they had, but it is still lacking compared to the higher presets of RTGI as its just not as dynamic.
 
RetroGamingUK said:
Ray tracing will be essential to driving down dev costs and time as it eliminates the need for baked lighting.

Current hardware isn't up to it though.
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Ray tracing is hardly a new concept. It was first conceived back in the 1970's or even earlier in the 1960's. The first CG movie to use raytacing to any degree was Dreamworks Monster House in 2006. Pixar would use it to some degree in their movies up to Toy Story 3, where they started using it more extensively in various scenes. Monsters University fro 2013 uses ray tracing for almost every scene, it has a path tracing and global illumination, material renderes, light bouncing and all that. I remember being really impressed by the lighting in Monsters University.

In video games, it is still in the lower resolution rasterization phase. Raytracing still requires a lot of rendering cycles. It certainly is not a passing fad and will become more predominate with better hardware. AI will be able to take advantage of ray tracing/ path tracing. The first few generation of RTX cards were over hyping the feature. Long term, it's here to stay.
 
5090 owner: no it is not a scam.

Would it still be considered a scam if it weren't such a huge performance hog on GPU's?
I think raytracing brings such a remarkable sense of realism that I would never want to go back to games without it.
It's still a fairly new technology and it will improve and mature over time. GPU's will become more capable of running it, with the help of technologies like fake frames, which do not bother me.
I prioritize fluidity over minor graphical imperfections.
 
You are partially right but we've reached a point where there's a big diminishing return on almost every other aspect of a game's visuals and lightning is what's gamechanging nowadays, which explains why pretty much all the best looking games are using advanced RT tech or HW lumen.

Sony's latest games are a good example, they aren't up there with other best looking games anymore simply because the lightning on them looks flat compared to AC: Shadows with RTGI, Cyberpunk, Crimson Desert, SH2 blabla
 
The only scam part is that it's not workable enough for mid-tier and lower GPUs now, and ends up costing too much vs a baked solution + every other effect getting turned up.

For the next generation of consoles/lower-end GPUs, when the hardware is either more powerful or some other AI solution replicating the same effect happens...it will just become the default. Devs like it because baking sucks ass, and you can't tell me when you have good performance that all lighting being dynamic with better accuracy is somehow bad.

One thing is certain to me though....console warriors (not talking about OP) who I see shit on ray-tracing now will bend over backwards next-gen to say it's great because it will run well, and probably dunk on Nintendo fans because their handheld won't do it.
 
Senua said:
Best to specify you're only talking about consoles then.
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The Cockatrice said:
Link doesnt work but Im guessing its the same as this? https://www.thegamer.com/doom-the-dark-ages-would-have-been-delayed-if-not-for-ray-tracing/



Cmon. We both know that is not entirely true and its marketing bs "magnitude of years" lmao. 4 decades of gaming prove otherwise. We've seen games being done in less time than that. Obviously Im not one to dismiss claims, even tho exaggerated so sure, down the pipeline and for minor things such as light bounces, it's easier with pathtracing instead of manually placing light emitters. Still, I highly doubt we'll see games releasing in 2-3 years in the future, even with AI and PathTracing. Theres always going to be something that will prolong game development.
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Strange, might be able to use the link here ree summarised - https://www.resetera.com/threads/as...performance-developer-pains-and-more.1186575/

Why are you still so dismissive, you literally asked for proof and I linked Ubisoft's own presentation with the developer literally explaining how RT streamlines their development by saving time.

Games are becoming larger and more complex, it's just becoming unsustainable to be able to bake it, RT is path forward here. Yeah games will still take a long time to build, but your original argument was that RT doesn't help with development times and complexities which is just completely false.
 
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