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[belteshazzar]

It's really cool and looks amazing when comparing side by side. However, I think traditional lighting looks really good already and most of the time you don't even notice RT unless you stop to smell the roses. The majority of the time the performance hit is not worth it, and most people don't have the hardware to make it worthwhile. So for me, it's usually turned off.

 

[Ev1L AuRoN]

Techniques like ray tracing and path tracing are necessary to bring down the cost of developing great presentations. It is expensive on the hardware, yes, but that will lessen with time. The most important aspect is that the tech allows games to look better with less time and cost.

 

[UnrealEck]

Try this poll in a few years (surely) when a Playstation comes out that is as capable of doing RT in games like a mid+ range nVidia GPU can.
I bet the results will change.

 

[nkarafo]

Unfortunately some games needs it. Talos 2 is one of them. Without RT it looks very flat, the developers probably didn't care spending time to make it look good otherwise.

The game also has areas filled with lakes and water, having anything less than "Ultra" reflections makes these areas distractingly bad.

 

[StereoVsn]

Hopefully RT can save dev times in the long run so we can see games finished quicker as in theory this can save a lot of time vs manually placing raster lighting sources.

And Pathtracing truly looks remarkable when properly implemented in a handful of games that support it properly, with Cyberpunk being best example.

That said, it’s not needed per se and the hit to performance is not worth it in most games.

 

[poodaddy]

Thinking it's a necessity is patently insane, literally tens of thousands of great games have been made without it.

Sho is purdy though.

 

[nemiroff]

It has been important to get it rolling to make it an up to date standard asap. Just like all the other tools which now are default but people didn't think was necessary in the past,

 

[Bojji]

I like the combination ND is using in their games.
@Vick You got them uncharted 4 and tlou2 gifs. It's time.

Combination of what? All ND games have baked in lighting. Sometimes it looks good and sometimes it looks not correct at all (with characters on screen). Uncharted 4 epilogue house is gold standard for baked lighting.

Ray Tracing is absolutely needed, real time global illumination is a game changer, reflections are nice too.

 

[Lethal01]

As a guy who vastly prefers sylized or simple graphics like breath of the wild I suppose some game could be fine without it.

But for anyone or any game that claims to care about realism it is 100% needed

 

[rofif]

Combination of what? All ND games have baked in lighting. Sometimes it looks good and sometimes it looks not correct at all (with characters on screen). Uncharted 4 epilogue house is gold standard for baked lighting.

Ray Tracing is absolutely needed, real time global illumination is a game changer, reflections are nice too.

Flashlight in uncharted 4 and tlou2 does it's own Gi and shadows. You even see it accumulating from grain like rt. it's their software technique.
There is bounce dynamic lighting in these scenarios.
That combination

 

[Merkades]

I don't think it is needed, but I absolutely hate screen space based effects. It is so annoying to look near the edge of you screen (an inch or two) and see no reflections or what not (this was nasty in FFXV PC). Or in Days Gone PC (haven't play PS5 one in ages), climb one of those towers and watch the land in the background and watch shadows pop in and out. Screen space reflections and shadows were good for their time, but they need to die .

 

[bitbydeath]

And the fact that you used this image shows you don't really understand what RT does at all. This isn't even lighting, it's a visual effect, and Second Sons actual lighting is sub par compared to RTGI.

If RT isn’t to do with lighting and shadows I would be interested to hear your take on what RT does.

 

[Bojji]

Flashlight in uncharted 4 and tlou2 does it's own Gi and shadows. You even see it accumulating from grain like rt. it's their software technique.
There is bounce dynamic lighting in these scenarios.
That combination

Yeah I have seen that in many gifs right now....

I's a clever trick but limited to some scenarios.

 

[rofif]

Yeah I have seen that in many gifs right now....

I's a clever trick but limited to some scenarios.

But it makes perfect sense.
In outside daylight scenarios, the time of day never advances. Only some cloud shadows do. It makes perfect sense to do high quality bake.
And in indoor scenarios with forced flashlight, the "trick" as you call it, works just as good as any modern rt does. you get shadows and color transfer. what else would you need?
I wonder if it works the same in tlou2 because you can use flashlight any time in that game

 

[Bojji]

But it makes perfect sense.
In outside daylight scenarios, the time of day never advances. Only some cloud shadows do. It makes perfect sense to do high quality bake.
And in indoor scenarios with forced flashlight, the "trick" as you call it, works just as good as any modern rt does. you get shadows and color transfer. what else would you need?
I wonder if it works the same in tlou2 because you can use flashlight any time in that game

I mean lighting in UC/TLoU is not on par with Metro or other games with RTGI/Lumen (or even SVOGI). It's better than in most raster games but that's as far as it can go without real time global illumination.

 

[CompleteGlobalSaturation]

Depends on the game.

Whilst RT does look better, it incurs such a heavy performance penalty that it's not worth it in most cases.

Perhaps in 5 years we can have GPUs powerful enough for RT, 4K, 120fps.

 

[Crayon]

There are some games that manage to do it fast and get good results. The games requiring it tend to do that. That finally shows some progress.

 

[Corporal.Hicks]

People will always enjoy playing old games, because graphics isn't the most important factor, but at the same time modern games with good graphics offer a more immersive experience. I remember how big a difference shaders and bump mapping made in early 2000s to the game lighting and graphics. RT can make equally big difference, if not bigger. Not all games look drastically different with RT, as raster techniques used to fake lighting can be quite convincing, but I think even games with limited RT looks noticeably better, especially if we look at reflections. I never liked screen space reflections, because these reflections would fade in and out as I moved the camera, and that was very distracting.

People often say that GPU's still arnt ready for RT, but hybrid RT is very scalable. For example, maxed RT reflections in Spider-Man 2 can be quite expensive. I was getting 35-45fps at 4K DLSSQ with ultimate RT and I thought the game was very demanding, but with high RT settings I was able to run the game at over 60fps in native 4K. With DLSSQ + FG well over 120fps.

Resident Evil 3 Remake runs 130-190fps at 4K native on my PC. The RT reflections in this game are simple and low res, but they still made a noticeable difference IMO, especially in the last level where many walls were mirror like. The same level with SSR instead of RT was just ugly. Anyone who thinks that RT has nothing useful to offer on modern GPUs is lying himself.

Jill Valentine reflections in small CRT. It might be a small detail for some people, but I noticed it and thought it looked cool.

Doom Eternal also run extremely well at 4K native with RT and I think it's one of the most optimized games on PC. I cant wait to play Doom dark ages, because the game will support path tracing, so the lighting quality will be even better compared to Doom Eternal.

Cyberpunk is still considered one of the most demanding games, but RT in this game is also very scalable. I get the same performance on my PC with raster and RT reflections.

1440p DLSS Quality +FGx2, Raster Ultra settings

1440p DLSS Quality +FGx2, RT reflections

Doom eternal and RE3 remake runs at well over 100fps at 4K, but these games are using just RT reflections. GTA 5 Enanced Edition has however RT reflections, shadows, GI, and yet the game runs amazing at 4K native with maxed out settings (55-75 in the grassy areas, 75-90 fps in the city). With very high RT instead of ultra the game runs at 90-120fps. I wish every RT game would run like that.

RT GI make a big difference in GTA5. It grounds objects into the scene.

RT GI is too expensive for current gen consoles, but even software based RT (like SVOGI) can make a huge difference without affecting performance that much. Even PS4 console could run SVOGI (Crysis remastered). Kingdom Come Deliverence 2 on the PS5 / XSX also use SVOGI.

Developers can prebake GI for the scenery, but in raster games moving objects and characters will always stand out. For example this screenshot. Samuel Drake is standing in the shadows, yet he's still well lit. Dynamic GI (either software RT or HW) would solve this problem.

When people say that hardware isnt ready for RT, they probably think about PT games, because these games are brutally demanding, twice as demanding as the most demanding hybrid RT games. At 1440p my RTX4080S can run older PT games quite well (Quake 2 RTX 120-130fps, or Half Life 1), but modern games like Cyberpunk or black myth wukong runs around 30-40fps. DLSS technology makes however possible to run even these extremely demanding PT games at high refreshrate, so even these extremely demanding PT gamers are playable on modern PC's if you are only willing to use DLSS features.


Alan Wake 2 1440p DLSSQ + FG2, PT

Cyberpunk - Raster Ultra settings, 1440p DLSSQ + FGx2

Ultra Raytracing decreased my performance from 205fps to 160fps, that's only 22% relative difference. Even SSR can have a more noticeable impact on performance in some games while looking like crap.

Path Tracing decreased my performance by 46% compared to raster. That's a lot bigger performance hit compared to hybrid RT at Ultra settings.

If I had to play PT games at native 1440p, I would not be happy with the performance. Thanks to DLSS however framerate and smoothness improves a lot, to the point where I'm very happy with performance even in one od the most demanding PT games. There are however some problems in Cyberpunk. DLSS Quality looks amazing without RR, but with RR I can start seeing a little bit of softness and with DLSS performance the image starts to look like a paint (becasuse the image looks too filtered). DLAA + RR looks perfectly sharp and PT noise is very minimal, but the only card capable of running cyberpunk at 1440p with DLAA at 60fps is the RTX5090, and this GPU cost insane $2000-3000. DLSS Quality looks good enough even with RR, so I cant complain, but I can definitely complain about strange shadows glitch in this game when you turn RT. All palm trees in Cyberpunk have dark shadows when they start moving with the wind (wind mod can fix this problem). People talked about this glitch one year ago and CDPR still havent fixed it .




And for comparison, here's how AMD GPUs are running PT in Cyberpunk.

1440p, FSR4 mod in performance mode

RTX4080S results with similar settings, but with DLSS performance instead of FSR performance. 52fps vs 92fps is 77% relative difference.

DLSSQuality instead of performance and I still get higher framerate.

AMD improved performance of hybrid RT performance on the 9070XT, but they are still one generation behind Nvidia in PT performance. Given how noisy PT can look with Performance FSR / DLSS it's much better idea to play this game with "just" RT ultra. The RX 9070XT can run RT ultra in cyberpunk quite well and RT even without ray reconstruction looks quite clean.

FSR quality with ultra RT, 83fps average on the 9070XT and 72fps in the most demanding location in entire game.

 

[Bernardougf]

This useless graphics gimmick is like 10 or 15 years too early and fucked up the whole chance of a stable framerate gen ... for what ? 10% more pretty lights and some puddle reflexes ?? ... peak graphic whoring retardation

 

[DeltaPolarBear]

By some metrics, PS2 was 200 times more powerful than PS1. That kind of power boost every generation was what allowed massive improvements. That sort of is gone now. In theory ray tracing would have been default for every game made, if we are still getting powerful hardware for cheap. But that is not happening so it stalled.

 

[Loomy]

The only problem with ray tracing today is the resource cost and resulting performance dip. That will be fixed over time.

This is like back in the day when the question was "is 4K necessary?"

 

[TehGoomba7s]

It's a great tech and a huge step forward visually but in practice I'd never sacrifice framerate for it. I find 30fps to be physically nauseating so anything limited to that is off limits. Hopefully there is breakthroughs in computing costs and techniques to make it more readily available and achievable at good framerates.

 

[Fortuneelsewhere]

Absolutely yes! The holly grail I’ve heard about all my life now is coming to real time graphics.. its so exciting to see the tech being push forward as the GPUs get more powerful and better techniques are used in the implementation.. I just hope when next gen arrives Sony and AMD already have a strong tech in place to allow path tracing in several games.. (I know is wishful thinking but a man can dream).

 

[rm082e]

I prefer not to run DLSS if I don't have to, and I have no interest in frame gen. As such, RT comes with a serious performance hit. I've yet to find a game where that trade off is worth it tp me given my hardware.

 

[SportsFan581]

Can it look better? Sure. Can baked lighting look better? Sure, since sometimes reality can be a little bland and the fakery can be more artistic.

Is it a necessity? Absolutely, not.

 

[KuraiShidosha]

Either we recognize that graphics matter in which case ray tracing is quite literally the only way forward, or we decide graphics don't matter and in that case we don't need it. I spend much of my time today running around in games with good ray tracing implementations just enjoying how not hacky the graphics are compared to raster. It's a pastime of mine now.

 

[zeroluck]

Definitely a necessity for Keanu lol

 

[Jigsaah]

a necessity? For Indiana Jones it is, apparently.

No it's not. Performance drop in most cases is not worth the increased visuals. There are even sometimes where RT can look worse than baked lightning due to artifacts. It's all about how the devs implement it.

Best Raytracing I've seen in a game so far has been Metro: Exodus. If you got the headroom, Cyberpunk is very good too but Cyberpunk has other lightning and LUT issues that are really weird.

 

[Allandor]

Switched from an rtx 3070 to Rx 7900xt because I really don't see a benefit in RT so far.
It is far to expensive and introduced new artifacts and even visible time dilation for spreading light. Also not a fan of dlss because of new artifacts and fluctuating quality.
And even a 4090/5090 are not really enough to get high framerates and super quality without additional tricks (introducing artifacts).
I really don't think that rt/PT will ever reach reasonable GPU products with good quality and performance. The <$200 market is also no longer existing for that stuff. And the manufacturing steps won't get that much better in future, so only bigger and more expensive chips could be a solution.

Also the "cost-reduction" using RT is more or less not there, as more work in other stuff to let rt work good makes it more expensive.


And my last point. Games won't get better because of rt.

 

[RafterXL]

If RT isn’t to do with lighting and shadows I would be interested to hear your take on what RT does.

You showed a close up gif of a spell effect and were all like "ray tracing can't do this!". What part of shadows and lighting was that spell effect, btw? If you wanted to prove that the shadows and lighting of Second Son were superior to RT, you'd show actual images of the world lighting and shadows, not some close up flash bang image.

I agree. That's where it is all going and I'm all for it. Not everyone has access to high end hardware though and that's the hurdle that RT has to get over.

This ain't helping...

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/asus-implements-another-price-hike-for-geforce-rtx-5090-cards-25-increase-rx-9070-xt-now-stars-at-720.1681799/#post-270211417

True. The cost of hardware since Covid and that fact that it's probably never coming down again, is going to make the goal take even longer. And it's why I'm glad some developers are using alternatives in the interim. KCD2 uses Voxel Cone Tracing, which is less precise than RT, but still significantly better than traditional lighting and is far less intensive.

 

[Doctor Hades]

I think ray-tracing can be transformative for certain types of immersive games such as horror and open-world games but it isn't required for every game, only those that push more realistic kinds of rendering such as photorealistic environments and characters. RT can minimise lighting issues and shadow/reflection pop in which can be jarring and take me out of the experience. There's nothing I despise more than the flawed screen space techniques used for ambient occlusion and reflections in games where they are occluded or disappear noticeably at the edges of the screen when you pan the camera, e.g. Hogwart's Legacy on consoles.

 

[b0uncyfr0]

Absolutely not.

Traditional lighting can be just as good in some situations. Plus its still too demanding.

 

[Jakk]

It obviously isn't a necessity. For the current-gen base consoles, it's mostly a marketing gimmick, but that's expected as it's the first generation of consoles that use it and it's not like devs are forced into it.

That doesn't change the fact it can be impactful when implemented right, and it's going to be utilized more and more in the future.

 

[AMC124c41]

To chime in again, I think another massive point that is being ignored and why devs are moving over to RT solutions is that the classic solutions used until now have hit a wall. Having a probe-based GI system and cascade shadows has gone as far as it can and its reached a point where trying to make those solutions look better is as computationally expensive as RT. I don't think people realise how much of a performance hog cascade shadows are and they tend to look like ass as well. Then there's the GI which requires more and more probes to be put into the game world which makes it hit performance more and more. Finally, having really good looking lighting bakes takes absolute ages and requires a PC farm to render out and every time a single thing is changed in a game level you need to re-bake the lighting.

So, the question becomes why bother with all of the above when for RT you create a BVH structure that can be used to calculate light, reflections, shadows, audio, etc all in one go rather than using all those separate techniques that require massive amounts of time and have reached the peak of what they can offer quality-wise?!?
Trying to push the classic techniques further in order to keep up with gamer's demands would have the same performance cost as RT and require more work and more money so, why would devs pursue that?!?

 

[bitbydeath]

You showed a close up gif of a spell effect and were all like "ray tracing can't do this!". What part of shadows and lighting was that spell effect, btw? If you wanted to prove that the shadows and lighting of Second Son were superior to RT, you'd show actual images of the world lighting and shadows, not some close up flash bang image.

I’m sure RT can do it at a cost but it really shows how unnecessary that cost is.

 

[HeWhoWalks]

Again, cost is a relative term. We're also leaving out just how much of an impact stuff like DLSS 4 has made. With stuff like it, I just couldn't imagine scenes like this without ray/pathtracing anymore. And I easily get north of 30fps thanks to DLSS 4...

Now, again, if we're talking a console other than the PS5 Pro, yes, I'd agree that the cost is not worth it. But on it and a decent rig, we can have nice things like the scenes above with framerates higher than 30fps and the visual medium can keep moving forward.

 

[Bojji]

Absolutely not.

Traditional lighting can be just as good in some situations. Plus its still too demanding.

It can't. Look at this:

This game is one of the best looking pure raster games. Lighting is completely incorrect in many places.

Left image looks good to you? This game runs SVOGI even on switch...

Raster can't do this shit...

It creates real time shadowed areas.

People talk about how good raster can look but I didn't see any examples. Raster without software RT or voxels (SVOGI) is shit at realistic lighting.

I used DF video and Corporal.Hicks pictures.

 

[HeWhoWalks]

Excellent examples of what I mean. The non-raytraced stuff looks far worse! Unless your framerate goes from 150fps or so down to 10fps (highly unlikely with stuff like DLSS and the like), then I think we're finally at a point where raytracing can flourish.

 

[Bojji]

Excellent examples of what I mean. The non-raytraced stuff looks far worse! Unless your framerate goes from 150fps or so down to 10fps (highly unlikely with stuff like DLSS and the like), then I think we're finally at a point where raytracing can flourish.

Performance looks like this, native 4k with RT to high on everything:

100-120fps (recording does some hit to framerate):

Once consoles have competent RT hardware (Pro already has in theory) people will say different things about RT...

 

[Bond007]

No.

 

[RafterXL]

This is a half-assed, unimplemented developer tool that modders enabled in Dragon's Dogma 2. Just look at the massive difference even an unfinished, broken implementation of path tracing makes to how a game looks. People can complain about the performance all they want, but there is no denying the graphical impact. And, yes, on consoles and lower end PCs this stuff is far from viable, which is why we've literally never seen proper RT on console, but it's coming, like it or not.

 

[Xdrive05]

Good ray tracing, especially RTGI, creates immersion that you simply cannot get with raster. Full stop.

Immersion doesn't necessarily make a game more fun, but if immersion is what you enjoy in games - then it's damn near necessary.

 

[HeWhoWalks]

Traditional lighting can be just as good in some situations.

I'd need to see the best raster examples next to top pathtraced games if this is accurate.

 

[dgrdsv]

If your game is 3D and it want to have good lighting then RT is unavoidable.
If a game is 2D retro pixel art then no, RT is not a necessity.

 

[Roman Empire]

It is clear the expertise and tech for mass adoption of Ray-tracing isn't there yet. So no, we don't need it. We lived well enough all these years without so we don't need it haphazardly implemented. Don't mistake my statement as not liking RT at all, I love it but there is no denying it is a tech in its infancy that is being pushed like it should be industry standard, which leads us to the situation we are in right now where most games are all bad optimized slops to fit a tech that is too demanding for current hardware. Give another 10 years to give RT a go.

 

[yamaci17]

Again, cost is a relative term. We're also leaving out just how much of an impact stuff like DLSS 4 has made. With stuff like it, I just couldn't imagine scenes like this without ray/pathtracing anymore. And I easily get north of 30fps thanks to DLSS 4...

Now, again, if we're talking a console other than the PS5 Pro, yes, I'd agree that the cost is not worth it. But on it and a decent rig, we can have nice things like the scenes above with framerates higher than 30fps and the visual medium can keep moving forward.

path tracing is possible even on 3070 tier ray tracing performance. it looks quite nice at 1440p dlss performance while giving 30-45 FPS

1440p dlss 3 performance looks much better than native 1080p taa
1440p dlss 4 performance literally looks better than native 1440p taa

so you get great visual clarity and quality despite the internal resolution. and it is on an ancient GPU that is not designed with path tracing in mind... I played alan wake 2 and cyberpunk this way and NO OTHER GAME come close to their visual level. I played a lot of raster games at 4K/dlss quality and yet alan wake 2 and cyberpunk with path tracing at 1440p/dlss performance is at the top of my graphics tier list

but if you do that on ps5 pro (3060ti-3070 tier of ray tracing performance) people will complain it is 720p 30 FPS. so I don't think they will do it with ps5 pro

 

[Corporal.Hicks]

not a fan of dlss because of new artifacts and fluctuating quality.

The DLSS transformer has completely eliminated the sharpness fluctuation. You will however still see this imperfection on your current 7900XT when you play TAA / FSR3 games.

And even a 4090/5090 are not really enough to get high framerates and super quality without additional tricks

I see no reason to play modern games without these "additional tricks", because they improve framerate (and therefore gaming experience) noticeably, but with the right settings (sometimes decreasing RT settings from ultra to high doubles the framerate) you dont even need DLSS on GPUs like 4090 / 5090 in the vast majority of RT games. Even my 4080S can get over 100fps in some RT games at 4K native, not to mention at 1440p.

(introducing artifacts).

With the latest Ray Reconstruction artefacts are minimal even in PT games, especially with DLAA. Alan Wake 2 with PT was quite noisy, but now it's almost noise free. At this point raster artefacts are more noticeable to me than RT / PT. Screen space reflections fade in and out as you move the camera and there are also occlusion artefacts. Cascaded shadows are also distracting, because they draw right in front of the character. These problems are way more noticeable than RT/PT noise with the latest ray reconstruction.

And my last point. Games won't get better because of rt.

You can make a good game with simple graphics, but at the same time better graphics increase the impression.

 

[Buggy Loop]

It has been important to get it rolling to make it an up to date standard asap. Just like all the other tools which now are default but people didn't think was necessary in the past,

I think also software RT should have been way more prevalent than it did.

Crytek's SVOGI should have been implemented in nearly all engines, way ahead of its time. Look at KCD 2 performance. It's not the most accurate form of ray tracing but who cares, it's still better than raster solution for open world.

Sucks that Crytek kind of had a hard time. UE5 Lumen will also become more performant in ~5.5 I think because of megalights. To be seen.

Teardown which is software RT also runs 1620p 60 fps and even a 120 fps mode on PS5 and has massive destruction physics (kind of make the claim Astrobot pushed PS5 to its limit an hilarious joke).

Bad implementations poisoned the well. But there's also many cases where RTGI is present and performs good.

I'm also in the camp that games like Silent Hill 2 does not need ray tracing as it is 98% static. It simply saved the dev time to place lights which is also fine. But that game could have been done raster for sure.

But open world? Raster feels very old for those type of games. I spot the difference almost immediatly.

 

[Corporal.Hicks]

Depends on the game.

Whilst RT does look better, it incurs such a heavy performance penalty that it's not worth it in most cases.

RT on my old GTX1080 was heavy. My framerate in the witcher 3 decreased from around 70fps to 7fps (90% performance drop). That was certainly unplayable. On my 4080S not even PT tanks performance that much and there are also games where RT is literally free on this GPU.

Perhaps in 5 years we can have GPUs powerful enough for RT, 4K, 120fps.

You have the RTX4080, so you can play the vast majority of RT games right now with 4K like image quality and 120fps thanks to DLSS, unless you want to live in the past and continue playing with TAA native.

 

[PaintTinJr]

For an advertising bullet point for a AAA game wanting massive sales? absolutely, yes.
it is commercially risky to not offer the feature, now even if the implementation results in a lower resolution noisy image that looks barely improved, and still needs 90% of people to be told it is ray tracing because of how minimal the feature delivers.

For a blind test on what gamers actually think looks better to them? No, not at this stage.
Compromised resolution to allow for RT, lighting noise and a comparisons with existing baked HQ lightmapping - where the scenery is static - and the lack of average gamer appreciable of the advantage for RT/PT over raster GI techniques.
Outside of tech demos like Lumen in the Land of Nanite - where the complexity of nanite meshes really sell the lighting difference, compared to the flattish surfaces like puddle, lakes, windows, mirrors and metallic car surfaces with caveat restricted RT/PT in stuff like Alan Wake 2 aren't delivered at superior resolution to GI raster techniques or planar reflections to look (far) superior when observed casually as gamers typically do while preoccupied playing(gameplay) the game.

The major area where RT/PT would show a huge difference in real-time volumetric lighting, even without higher resolution is god rays in fog, etc, but as the performance just isn't there yet for that number of ray, visually differentiating between raster gi and RT/PT just isn't possible for most gamers, which tells its own story IMO.