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[SnapShot]

Idk man it still looks better than without Raytracing, this whole baseless "Raytracing is pointless, inferior...etc...etc" is getting tiresome.

 

[Wildebeest]

It was dropped in Id Tech 7. Only Doom Eternal don't use megatexture. It's not even bandwidth problem but game size one. With megatexture you literally can't use texture in more than one place and that limits how big they actually can be before games is so big that it cant't be fitted into hard drives of players. It also is in opposition to PBR and raytacing so with that technologies being pushed forward it stops being asset and starts to be liability.

The problems with original console versions of Rage were pinned on i/o bandwidth, but if you solve that problem, you do shift the bottleneck to other points like storage space.

 

[MiguelItUp]

Yeah, the baked lighting looks really good here, and the RTX is, well, not good enough for what it is. I feel like you see what it's doing most on the ground and in reflections and other minor effects. But it's pretty subtle here nonetheless.

It honestly all depends on how it's implemented, and how well it functions, on both sides. There have been plenty of situations where baked lighting looks better than RTX, and situations where RTX looks better than baked lighting. It just all depends. But I don't think it's a fault on either, more so the developer for how well or poorly it was implemented.

 

[mrMUR_96]

Is it official implementation or some injected one through mod?

It's enabled via a hidden option in the game files, so it's probably in testing of some side or perhaps abandoned. Either way, it's clearly not a finished or optimised implementation.

 

[lughnasadh123]

RT will just be one of those things I don't care about when performance is still an issue. For now, "good enough" is good enough.

 

[Moochi]

I have a 3090 and there's not a single game that's better with ray tracing on. It's a complete novelty, and an unimpressive one, for the moment.

 

[mrMUR_96]

I have a 3090 and there's not a single game that's better with ray tracing on. It's a complete novelty, and an unimpressive one, for the moment.

Performance impact is still high with current hardware, but dismissing it as a novelty is naive. Many games already look far better with RT, for example the next gen version of spiderman, dying light 2 on pc, the metro last light RT update, cyberpunk 2077 on pc and others. Yes, it's definitely early days, but it's the future of rendering in games without a doubt.

 

[Moochi]

I have Spiderman. It's crap with raytracing. When you're actually playing, the only perceptible difference is a cratering frame rate. You can stop and admire Spiderman reflection on the side of a building. Cool. That was fun for about 3 seconds.

Haven't tried the others. Ray tracing might be the future, but it's just a sales gimmick and a niche feature at the moment.

 

[mrMUR_96]

I have Spiderman. It's crap with raytracing. When you're actually playing, the only perceptible difference is a catered frame rate. You can stop and admire Spiderman reflection on the side of a building. Cool. That was fun for about 3 seconds.

Haven't tried the others. Ray tracing might be the future, but it's just a sales gimmick and a niche feature at the moment.

Maybe on the PC where it's still got RT stability/flickering issues, but it's a big noticeable difference for me on the ps5 where it tops out at 60fps anyways. But yeah, early days either way.

 

[TIGERCOOL]

30-40 fps gained on quality mode? With what game?? And on what resolution?

Sometimes you don't get even close to gain 40 fps on performance mode ffs

the cycle frontier at 1440p, anr also used it dowscaled from 4k and it had a similar impact. This was definitely an extreme case... I usually get 10-20 fps more in dlss quality. It's f2p on steam if you wanna try for yourself

 

[Lethal01]

Too bad these hardware are not nearly as powerful to guarantee both things, so why wasting time when you have a way lighter solution that looks almost as good and use the hardware for something that doesn't have any alternatives like i don't know, some fucking physics or that nanite shit to improve lod and details?!

Nanite has an alternative, it's premade Lod's, it looks worse and has obvious drawbacks. Baked lighting is no more a solution than just using the same Lod systems we have for the last decades

Just like using baked lighting looks much worse than raytracing. Imo Baked lighting has looked terrible in every game and I can not wait longer for raytracing to become more prominent. I laugh when people say it looks almost as good when there isn't a single game I can play where I'm not distracted by how fake all the lighting looks every second.

 

[Lethal01]

Raytraced lighting can be baked and doesn't have to be real-time. this is what they did in Returnal, they recorded the light setting but also touched them up. the cost is shifted to the bandwidth in light files that were 300mb in size.

The before picture is what you get when you bake realtime lighting. as we have done for decades.

 

[Lethal01]

Can't you only do that if the game is a pc exclusive? like how do you make work a game with ONLY rtx on console?

The matrix awakens demo was exclusively using raytraced lights, and that them demo is already very outdated with newer engine versions being more performant while having higher quality.

 

[poppabk]

Well yes, raytracing baked into lightmaps is an age old technique used across generations. UE itself has full support for it and always had.

Real time raytracing is useless if most of your environment and lighting aren't gonna move/change around.

But that also means you are restricted to having most of your environment and lighting not changing or moving around. The question is which is the driving force - do most games have mainly static environments and therefore pre-baked lighting or do most games have pre-baked lighting and therefore static environments. Destructible environments are something I would love to see more of and RT may be what we need to make it possible.

 

[I_D]

Adding ray-tracing into games frequently looks bad because those games weren't made with such a thing in mind.
Developers also don't have much practice with it, yet.
And the hardware still kinda sucks for ray-tracing. Give it a few more generations.


But it's still a bit deeper than that.
Ray-tracing and baked lighting aren't really a 1-1 comparison.
All kinds of 2D games wouldn't even notice a difference by switching to ray-tracing, for example. Or, even worse, real-time lighting might break the game.
Lots of games are trying to convey a specific cinematic look, which would be too difficult to do with realistic lighting.
Lots of games deliberately use unrealistic lighting, specifically to achieve an over-the-top feel, or mystery, or whatever else.


However...
If you want your game to look like the real world, and you want it to react realistically, then ray-tracing is superior 100% of the time.
The only limiting factors, if realism is your goal, are hardware-limitations, money, time, and developer-skill. Luckily, all of those things will improve in a relatively short amount of time.

 

[SportsFan581]

The raytraced setting just removes what makes the game attractive.


Returnal also simulated raytracing well.

Can't help but feel raytracing has become a technical obsession rather than an important benchmark for games. games don't need it and it only wastes most of the resource budget.

There are many times where I think the non-RT lighting in a game has a better artistic look than the RT. RT will be more realistic, but not necessarily more pleasing to the eye. Not to say that you don't see videos where the RT is a vast improvement.

 

[GymWolf]

Nanite has an alternative, it's premade Lod's, it looks worse and has obvious drawbacks. Baked lighting is no more a solution than just using the same Lod systems we have for the last decades

Just like using baked lighting looks much worse than raytracing. Imo Baked lighting has looked terrible in every game and I can not wait longer for raytracing to become more prominent. I laugh when people say it looks almost as good when there isn't a single game I can play where I'm not distracted by how fake all the lighting looks every second.

Nah dude, many people just don't notice bad lights\shadows or don't care, i don't know if it is a brain thing, a perception thing, a sight thing (don't think so since i have 13\10), i can swear on my life that i really don't notice much difference in most games with rtx except some cherry picked moments in some locations.

For me is absurd that people are not bothered by the absence of ragdoll or having precanned repeated-at-infinitum death animations in games where you kill stuff or people not bothered by generally shit animations or lack of weight in the movements because for me they are fundamental to add realism, but here we are...

Let me put it this way, in real life, i would probably notice people moving in a wrong way before noticing a non detailed shadow or wrong illumination in a room, if you get what i mean.

 

[Lethal01]

Lots of games are trying to convey a specific cinematic look, which would be too difficult to do with realistic lighting.

Cinema is literally made with real lights, or in the case of CGI, it's made with raytracing

Lots of games deliberately use unrealistic lighting, specifically to achieve an over-the-top feel, or mystery, or whatever else.

Raytracing can be customized and used to create fake unrealistic lighting as much as raterized techniques can. There is nothing about raytracing that forces you to be 100% realistic. You could literally use the technique to totally mimic rasterized light.

 

[zcaa0g]

Ray tracing isn't the issue. Current hardware limitations and it still being new to developers as far as implementing in games is. It is vastly superior to other solutions from what it can produce standpoint.

I'm not even sure the Nvidia 4xxx series is going to be adequate. Probably 2 or 3 more generations before it can actually not be such a negative hit on performance.

 

[I_D]

Cinema is literally made with real lights, or in the case of CGI, it's made with raytracing


Raytracing can be customized and used to create fake unrealistic lighting as much as raterized techniques can. There is nothing about raytracing that forces you to be 100% realistic. You could literally use the technique to totally mimic rasterized light.

You certainly could. But why change what already works? "Cinematic" wasn't the right word. Maybe "artistic" is better?

I agree that ray-tracing is better damn near every time.
There are some exceptions, though. I don't see where Ori, for example, would benefit from real ray-tracing.

 

[PSYGN]

60FPS > today's standard for ray-tracing

 

[Come On Tars]

Nothing beats Ass Creed Unity's baked lighting.

 

[Amiga]

Yeah, Rage used their megatexture tech that allowed them to burn a lot of detail into map textures. I think they dropped it afterwards due to problems such as detail popping in when turning due to lack of i/o bandwidth and the pure complexity of their solution.

Interesting, but was the process automatized? (Yes it was). If so it may be very well worth revisiting

EDIT: as a matter of fact, seems i'm not the only one speculating on a possible comeback for this.

current gen I/O is built for that tech. it was ahead of it's time.

 

[Guilty_AI]

current gen I/O is built for that tech. it was ahead of it's time.

There still problems in terms of storage space and excessive VRAM usage, it might not be as efficient as using ray tracing, though i suppose its circunstancial.

 

[Amiga]

There still problems in terms of storage space and excessive VRAM usage, it might not be as efficient as using ray tracing, though i suppose its circunstancial.

This why new consoles have 16gb of GDDR6. Matrix Awakens streams missive textures. On PC, AMD smart access storage streams the assets direct from storage to GPU.

 

[Guilty_AI]

This why new consoles have 16gb of GDDR6. Matrix Awakens streams missive textures. On PC, AMD smart access storage streams the assets direct from storage to GPU.

Still doesn't seem like a very efficient use (though again, circunstancial). You're basically wasting hardware budget that could be used for real time lightining tech instead of a static one, or massive textures through Nanite + Lumen.

 

[Lethal01]

You certainly could. But why change what already works? "Cinematic" wasn't the right word. Maybe "artistic" is better?

It's not just that using raytracing does not force you to be realistic, it just takes as much work to achieve whatever style you can imagine with rasterization as it does with raytracing.

 

[I_D]

It's not just that using raytracing does not force you to be realistic, it just takes as much work to achieve whatever style you can imagine with rasterization as it does with raytracing.

I'm not going to claim to be an expert on it, so I'll take your word for it.
I'm curious about rendering-budget, though. Surely baked lighting is cheaper than ray-traced?
Or 'less-hardware-intensive,' or however it's phrased...


If I'm wrong about that, then I take back what I said. In that case, ray-tracing is even better than I originally thought.

AMID EVIL, which definitely isn't going for realistic looks, has ray tracing, and at least i think it helped with the general look of the game

While I do think that looks really good, I also think it looks hyper-realistic (in terms of lightning, but nothing else).
Just by definition, I can't really imagine what non-realistic ray-tracing even looks like.
Are there any super-out-there examples which really show it off?

 

[Guilty_AI]

Adding ray-tracing into games frequently looks bad because those games weren't made with such a thing in mind.
Developers also don't have much practice with it, yet.
And the hardware still kinda sucks for ray-tracing. Give it a few more generations.


But it's still a bit deeper than that.
Ray-tracing and baked lighting aren't really a 1-1 comparison.
All kinds of 2D games wouldn't even notice a difference by switching to ray-tracing, for example. Or, even worse, real-time lighting might break the game.
Lots of games are trying to convey a specific cinematic look, which would be too difficult to do with realistic lighting.
Lots of games deliberately use unrealistic lighting, specifically to achieve an over-the-top feel, or mystery, or whatever else.


However...
If you want your game to look like the real world, and you want it to react realistically, then ray-tracing is superior 100% of the time.
The only limiting factors, if realism is your goal, are hardware-limitations, money, time, and developer-skill. Luckily, all of those things will improve in a relatively short amount of time.

AMID EVIL, which definitely isn't going for realistic looks, has ray tracing, and at least i think it helped with the general look of the game

 

[RadioactiveLobster]

What a lot of people in this thread don't seem to realize that in a lot of cases (not all of them though), baked lighting IS ray traced lighting, it's just done offline in very high resolution during during development and the static baked lighting you see in the final game is the result of it.

Ray Tracing done in real time is always going to be at lower ray counts and quality than an offline render. Maybe not forever as tech and hardware improves but that's the reason a lot of baked static lighting looks so realistic. It's because it is, they offline ray traced it.

 

[Piggoro]

Ray-tracing is more realistic (often looks bland, as real life does) vs more expressive and artistic baked lighting (has a lot of edge cases when the illusion of real lighting falls apart). I'm personally for more realism with RT.

 

[Pimpbaa]

60FPS > today's standard for ray-tracing

I'll take both at the same time. Like in Doom Eternal, Spider-Man, Rachet and Clank Rift Apart, oh and Metro Exodus' RT bounce lighting look really amazing for 60fps and I really wish more devs would do it.

 

[sachos]

What a shit video, why make a comparisson video and not show the same scene??? Just the cat running around in two totally different scenes... Baked lighting is pre calculated ray tracing and it forces you to have static elements on scene. Real time raytracing allows you to develop fully dynamic worlds, if we want games to become more dynamic then we need raytracing. And RT does look better in this video, i dont know what you are talking about OP, look at scene in 7:22 for example, how every object is much more grounded in the scene with RT On, no weird glow in plants for example, or the cats self shadow and the robot self shadow.

 

[Crayon]

I think a lot of rt implementations look notably better. It's just too slow right now. Currently, on rx 6000 it's ridiculous and rtx3000 it's borderline. We're going to see how the relative performance hit imroves in a few months here. Hopefully green will improve alot and more hopefully red will be right there.

 

[peronmls]

I sometime prefer baked effects like AO and shadows. Texture fog as well. When that happens you don't have jaggies on shadows and AO has no performance hit while being baked in.