Digital Foundry: Why don't people care about, or even reject Ray Tracing?
Also Digital Foundry: Enabling full RT cuts the frame rate by more than 12×, to single digits. Even we couldn't tell the difference most of the time.
I kid, but here's the thing which really stands out to me:
Half-measures with RT really aren't doing a whole lot for the image.
Sure, you have some more accurate shadows like the air conditioner, and some nice soft shadows on the ground, but to most people that is an extremely minor difference which is not worth a performance hit.
The roughness cut-off is doing significant harm to the effectiveness of RT.
As soon as you remove the roughness cut-off, now the image starts to look "correct" - and then adding GI completes it.
But the roughness cut-off exists because it has the biggest effect on performance.
People will say "now the image looks flat and gray" however that is only because the scene clearly wasn't lit using a fully ray-traced pipeline.
Minecraft impresses because it cannot have baked lighting, and using full path-tracing dramatically changes the image.
Most games don't need fully-dynamic lighting, and the baked solution is absolutely fine. Far from being perfect, but
fine when the alternative is cutting the frame rate by 1/2 or 2/3 - and those are the performance-optimized solutions.
The 'problem' is that RT is going to happen whether people like it or not.
Developers will move to an RT-first pipeline. That makes a lot of sense, because it should dramatically improve the process of lighting an environment if it can be done in real-time without having to bake to see your results.
But there will be a point where they stop baking in the lighting after the fact. You won't have the option to disable RT unless you want a completely flat, unlit world - even if the game is not using things like a dynamic time of day.
And on top of the performance cost of RT, it still hurts image quality a lot right now. Ghosting and image noise are a real problem for current RT implementations.
I'm hopeful that a lot of this is because we're still on the first generation of RTX hardware, and RDNA2/Ampere will fix that.
There's been rumors that RT performance will increase 4× on Ampere, which should enable RT in games with only a minimal performance hit. Though I'm highly skeptical of those claims (4× RT cores ≠ 4× RT performance) that's what really needed to happen first.
My other concern is that games built to run at 30 FPS with RT on console hardware are not going to easily scale to higher frame rates on PC.
We already saw that problem this generation, where certain games that were only built for 30 FPS really struggled to even hit 60 FPS on most PC hardware despite a far greater than 2× difference in hardware capabilities.
Here's the thing: no-one else notices this. They aren't doing A/B comparisons while looking at garbage bags.
For most people, I would say that the effects of RT -unless they are dramatic- only serve to make the image subtly more natural in a way they are not actively aware of.
Honestly, the thing that excites me the most about this is being able to fix the FOV on ultra-wide monitors, and hopefully disable mouse acceleration. So many games built on UE4 seem to get those two things wrong - likely due to "bad defaults" for the engine. I know that it uses horizontal FOV by default, rather than vertical, for some stupid reason.
It wasn't until
Dictator's video about DOOM that I realized I was able to fix the viewmodel FOV in
DOOM (and later
DOOM Eternal) since it does not scale with FOV by default, and doesn't scale properly on ultrawide monitors.
It's so disappointing to me that TV manufacturers rushed in on 3D and put out sub-par products that poisoned the well.
4K TVs with passive 3D is where things should have
started. Not 1080p TVs which either had migraine-inducing shutter glasses, or passive TVs which had a 540p resolution per-eye. It's so disappointing to me that LG dropped 3D support on their OLEDs to increase brightness by a few percent.
Same thing with the 3DS. 3D was a novelty at best on the original models, since the viewing angle was so narrow. The super-stable 3D on the n3DS models was a game-changer and made it comfortable to be enabled at all times. But people were already scared-off after years of bad implementations.