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Will Raytracing become a huge leap forward for gaming visuals or will be discarded as a performance hog?

ItWasMeantToBe19

ItWasMeantToBe19

Banned
Oct 26, 2017
20,440
Here are some examples of ray-tracing in PC games.

Wolfenstein Youngblood's implementation (reduces framerate by 50%)




Control (reduces framerate by >50%)



Metro Exodus (reduces framerate by 20-30%)



Battlefield 5 (reduces framerate by over 50%)


Shadow of the Tomb Raider (reduces framerate by >40%):



Now, visual effects can obviously improve over time (DLSS went from a joke to being cutting-edge and probably the main standard for next-gen in like 9 months) and games built around ray-tracing may show the effect better than games that add it on as a lowest priority thing, but ray-tracing has just looked pretty meh so far to me and these performance hits have been massive.
 
DarthBuzzard

DarthBuzzard

Banned
Jul 17, 2018
5,122
It's the inexorable, irrefutable future of video game graphics. There is no debate against this. Rasterization may still be used to some degree in the future, but a majority of the rendering will be raytraced or pathtraced as optimization gets better and hardware can catch up.
 
Mifec

Mifec

Member
Oct 25, 2017
17,749
Should have looked more into raytracing in general, it's what we want everything to come down to in the future, there isn't any debate about this.
 
Kudo

Kudo

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,881
No debate to be had here.
Just hope smaller (and Japanese) studios embrace it soon too. Elden Ring with RT, man can dream.
 

Deleted member 11276

Account closed at user request
Banned
Oct 27, 2017
3,223
It will be, and in the future, devs will learn to optimize RT. Currently it's just tacked on as the games were not programmed with RT in mind, I think that's the main reason why the performance cost is so huge.

Control and Metro are the best uses of RT currently, by far.
 
Jroc

Jroc

Banned
Jun 9, 2018
6,145
I think it depends whether there are other, more noticable effects that the power can go towards instead. A dev like Naughty Dog might prefer traditional effects that look 80% as good if it means they can put the extra power towards fully simulated snow or something like that.

I'm hesitant to pay out the ass for a current RTX card given the performance hit. Second generation RT stuff will probably be a big improvement.
 
collige

collige

Member
Oct 31, 2017
12,772
Screen space reflections and cubemaps are garbage, so it'll be the future just on improving reflections alone.
 
Yogi

Yogi

Banned
Nov 10, 2019
1,806
With what we've gotten so far, I'm not seeing the benefits being worth 50% performance, at all. People will flip the switch to turn it off, and there goes next-gen till we drop cross-gen support. Even with a 2080Ti people are treating it like a preview, because the performance is so bad.

I'm curious about Dying Light 2, and maybe(?) Godfall, because those look really good, but who knows how they actually turn out.

I'm not sure why people are so quick to throw away 50% performance. That's basically the difference between current gen and next-gen gpus. It needs to be actually worth it.

Fully raytraced natural lighting would be, but that's not what we're getting and won't be for many decades. We get a very limited raytracing, which sometimes shows minimal benefit, no benefit or worse IQ. It needs to be amazing to claim 50% performance.

It has to make current gen games look next-gen but I'm not seeing it in most examples so far.
 
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Lant_War

Lant_War

Classic Anus Game
The Fallen
Jul 14, 2018
23,579
Even on these limited implementations I think it looks amazing and it's well worth the performance hit.
 
catswaller

catswaller

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
1,797
RT performance is already absurdly good vs where we expected to be by now just a few years ago. It will keep getting better. Theres absolutely no question it's worth the ms.
 
Doskoi Panda

Doskoi Panda

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 27, 2017
14,960
I don't understand how raytracing being the future of video game rendering is even in question.
 
Orioto

Orioto

Member
Oct 26, 2017
4,716
Paris
My worry is that i think if you really want the benefit of RT you need to be pretty smart in your art direction, and it's going to be difficult to convince people the cost is worth it when you need a digital foundry vid to explain you that this corner in the room looks better cause there is indirect light bounce from the reflection of your flashlight in the ceiling.

I mean, 'faked" lights can be amazing and RT doesn't automatically means amazing lights. They are just done in a more natural and complete way (but we'll never have complete RT anyway on consoles i guess..). Some games have amazing fake lights, and when you do the same with Rt, people will be like "yes and ?" if you don't create situations in your game where you can see something that was clearly not possible before.
 
Delusibeta

Delusibeta

Prophet of Truth
Banned
Oct 26, 2017
5,648
Ultimately, it's simultaneously the future of videogame lighting, and the primary reason next gen games will once again be mostly 30FPS. With that said, I also do think we're at least another console generation away from hardware being powerful enough to enable fully raytraced games. (see also: Quake 2 RTX)
 
Lump

Lump

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 25, 2017
16,027
The real question is when games will start requiring it, as devs letting raytracing do all the work in lighting will mean that they don't have to divert time and resources to faking it anymore. This isn't Tesselation or Hairworks or PhysX where it's all nice but optional - this is an actual game changer.
 

Deleted member 8468

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 26, 2017
9,109
It's inevitable. Also a big reason why CG looks so much better than games (obviously more going on, but it's a chunk of the reason).
 
Dylan

Dylan

Member
Oct 28, 2017
3,260
The tech has proven itself but the "when will consumers benefit" is still very much a question mark. The new consoles will likely dictate how central to development raytracing will be for the next decade.
 
orava

orava

Alt Account
Banned
Jun 10, 2019
1,316
I'm worried that the progress will stall a bit when the next gen consoles arrive. The performance can't be very good on those and we will again be stuck with them for years.
 
Dio

Dio

Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,097
Lump said:
The real question is when games will start requiring it, as devs letting raytracing do all the work in lighting will mean that they don't have to divert time and resources to faking it anymore. This isn't Tesselation or Hairworks or PhysX where it's all nice but optional - this is an actual game changer.
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which is something AMD argued. it needs to be ubiquitous, where even the low end can use it.
 
Semfry

Semfry

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,956
Xando said:
It's the first generation of new tech. I expect this years nvidia cards to be a lot better.
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Not to mention before RTX came along I remember people saying that real-time raytracing on consumer hardware was at least 10+ years away, so it even being playable (even if it's generally more like "playable") in any capacity today is a huge leap beyond what most people predicted.
 
White Glint

White Glint

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
3,617
Realtime raytracing has always been the goal to reach for. It finally being viable in realtime is far more important than a performance hit that's gonna be negligible in a few years.
 
Uncle Squingis

Uncle Squingis

Member
Jan 3, 2018
3,405
Lump said:
The real question is when games will start requiring it, as devs letting raytracing do all the work in lighting will mean that they don't have to divert time and resources to faking it anymore. This isn't Tesselation or Hairworks or PhysX where it's all nice but optional - this is an actual game changer.
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Sorry for being ignorant, but what kind of work do devs do now that they won't have to do with RTX?
 
Anth0ny

Anth0ny

Member
Oct 25, 2017
47,005
lowhighkang_LHK said:
Is there any realistic hope that games targeting 60 fps could utilize RTX on next-gen consoles or is that unlikely?
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I haven't been following all the tech stuff super closely, but I'd imagine it would be possible with optimization and some sacrifices elsewhere (overall fidelity, resolution).

Mid cycle refresh consoles will probably be powerful enough to run them at 4K/60.
 
Dictator

Dictator

Digital Foundry
Verified
Oct 26, 2017
4,931
Berlin, 'SCHLAND
Yogi said:
With what we've gotten so far, I'm not seeing the benefits being worth 50% performance, at all.
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You watch my videos per chance?
Yogi said:
Even with a 2080Ti people are treating it like a preview, because the performance is so bad.
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PC players, are not a monolith of single desires. We all want different things.
Uncle Squingis said:
Sorry for being ignorant, but what kind of work do devs do now that they won't have to do with RTX?
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Depends on the RT implementation type.
 
imapioneer

imapioneer

Member
Oct 27, 2017
1,057
This gen we had Enlighten for Dynamic Global illumination? Or maybe it was static. As long as we have Dynamic global illumination like VXGI for +90% of next gen games I'll be happy. Tomorrow children had the best lighting this gen for consoles and I want more of that for next gen.
 
TheYanger

TheYanger

Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
10,153
Mercador said:
I see it as I see shadows. It helps but it's not mandatory.
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It's literally a game changer. Right now they're also implementing non-ray traced solutions to problems that they simply won't have to once it's just the standard.

Also, Control on PC really opened my eyes, that's the absolute most gorgeous game I've ever played with Ray Tracing. It runs at over 60 fps on my 2080 still too, so I'm not too miffed about any performance hit there might be.
 
StudioTan

StudioTan

Member
Oct 27, 2017
5,836
DarthBuzzard said:
It's the inexorable, irrefutable future of video game graphics. There is no debate against this. Rasterization may still be used to some degree in the future, but a majority of the rendering will be raytraced or pathtraced as optimization gets better and hardware can catch up.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Yup, this. It's like the move to 3D graphics in games, it'll become standard despite performance differences. It'll make development much easier in many respects as well. Having to "fake" real lighting is such a huge time sink.
 
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