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I think ray tracing in games looks pretty good, but it never justifies the performance hit. Ever. Not one game so far justifies it. Agree/disagree?
- Thread starter nogoodnamesleft
- Start date
It's been worth it for me on PC, but that's because of DLSS.
I don't have to make that choice like I would on consoles.
Playing Spider-man on PC right now with ray tracing and at over 60 FPS on a 3060ti.
I don't have to make that choice like I would on consoles.
Playing Spider-man on PC right now with ray tracing and at over 60 FPS on a 3060ti.
The three advantages that stand out the most are more accurate reflections, more accurate lighting and more accurate shadows. Ray tracing calculates and display these things in a more realistic way because it calculates how a ray of light hits an object or surface. The more rays, the more bounces, the more accurate it will look. It's essentially replicating how light works in real life in video games in real time. Without ray tracing in video games, things are approximated, baked, or faked.
If you're going to do ray tracing, do it completely.
There are games that half ass it and say they have ray tracing but it doesn't apply to certain effects like fire, so you can have a puddle or shiny floor and the fire isn't part of the reflection. Lame.
There are games that half ass it and say they have ray tracing but it doesn't apply to certain effects like fire, so you can have a puddle or shiny floor and the fire isn't part of the reflection. Lame.
Yeah this is where I'm at. Maybe if RT gets pushed more it'll get designated to the 40FPS in 120Hz container modes but if they can keep up the "Performance RT" 60FPS modes I'm cool with that as an option.
Watch the DF videos on Minecraft or Quake 2 RTX.
They're the most incredible use of raytracing I've played. Far more impressive than most modern games that use raytraced reflections or shadows. It's impossible not to see the difference/upgrade with those.
The performance hit with raytracing is significant depending on the implementation, but I find it's usually OK on PC since it tends to be coupled with DLSS. While you definitely lose frames, DLSS can keep it out of distractingly low framerates.
Yeah, I'm not sure how to describe it but Metro Exodus: EE looks different from every game I've ever played because of this. It just has a totally different feel because of the RTGI
On consoles I never go with the Ray tracing because I can't stand 30FPS. But on PC, its usually worth it for me with 1440 monitor+3080Ti since I csn get at least 60FPS w RT especially if DLSS is available.
For instance, I recently played RE3 on PC which takes a massive hit from RT... but even with that big hit my game still managed 80+ FPS all the time. And I was happier with the RT than an extra 20 or so frames.
For instance, I recently played RE3 on PC which takes a massive hit from RT... but even with that big hit my game still managed 80+ FPS all the time. And I was happier with the RT than an extra 20 or so frames.
First generation RT on consoles was always going to be limited. It's a start though and will only improve in future generations. The RT performance mode for Miles Morales was pretty great, I thought. As long as it's 60fps, I'm happy.
PC of course is well ahead as it always is. If you're able to afford it, you'll get the best there.
PC of course is well ahead as it always is. If you're able to afford it, you'll get the best there.
I think it obviously depends on how much horsepower you have. If you can hit high fps comfortably then for a lot of games, like Spiderman, then I think it's very much worthwhile for what it does to the games visuals if you can keep 60 fps.
If you're pushing into low framerates for rt then obviously it's not worthwhile.
If you're pushing into low framerates for rt then obviously it's not worthwhile.
Imagine you have a light in an environment.
99.9% of the time all the light it's casting on local objects is drawn-in. Hence why 99.9% of lights etc are static and un-interactable and cast fake shadows or none at all.
Ray tracing can make it so that light casts actual light and actually casts realistic shadows, and reflections.
If you want to tell the difference in reflections, look at "Control". you can have reflections in transparent objects and you can reflect dynamic objects from off-screen.
Our two main solutions for reflections right now are screenspace, where objects disappear if not being rendered on-screen which causes lots of artifacts and obvious issues like halos around characters since they're occluding objects. Or cubemaps which vary highly and are static since they're decided during rendering (if i remember correctly). So sometimes you have moments where cubemaps load in over-top of screenspace to "cover" for the lack of vision of the dynamic objects from screenspace. So sometimes you can see exactly where a cubemap starts taking over for screenspace reflections.
Here is a video that gives an example of this kind of occluded screenspace artifacting at the extreme. Battlefield 5. Notice how everyone occluded by the gun or objects just disappears. Because there isn't a good solution for having some kind of static fall-back like a cubemap take over or soften the visuals. once it's not on-screen, it falls apart. Dynamic objects usually only render when on-screen and we've just layered tacked-on solutions to solve this kind of problem where RTX just handles that because it's a true-to-life dynamic system
View: https://youtu.be/cld6c1ALw80?t=35
If you want an example of where raytracing can take us that current tech cannot. Imagine playing a scene in a subway tunnel that has one of those corner mirrors that show you who/what is coming around the corner. in an RTX world we could accurately see through the mirror who and what is coming down that hall. currently, there is no way to do that... MAYBE with the fake-room rendering technique from generations past, but that's a lot of extra overhead on its own and isn't a true 1-1 reflection. we can trust lights to do what they're supposed to do, and artists don't have to do another pass to fake all the lighting everytime the assets change or the design of something changes. They can just change whatever and the lighting physics works as its supposed to. No more artifacts from all the many different technologies we use to create a fully lit scene.
Every effect of light and shadow from Ambient occlusion, shadows, bounce and global illumination, reflections. All of it can be replaced by RTX and lighting artists will go from "faking it" to more like how a movie lighting person would. Place the lights you want and trust the physics rather than just painting it in and finding clever ways to fake stuff.
I understand people's complaint about "sacrificing performance", but to throw the baby out with the bathwater is stupid. The power will catch up as the tech itself gets more efficient and our hardware becomes more efficient. It will become the de-facto way EVERYTHING to do with light and shadow is handled by games in short order. This argument is especially annoying right now because spending a bit of time watching a comparison video or understanding what RTX actually does should demonstrate its value on its own. You get true, dynamic lighting and shadow and reflection even if objects are occluded as long as they're rendered in the scene without painting in fake lighting or trying to calculate object creases and such. It's even resolution and object scalable for performance (as seen in a lot of console rtx games).
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The only time I turned raytracing off on PC was in The DioField Chronicle demo as I barely saw the point of it there.
What games have you tried so far? Different games use different RT implementations so, again, generalizing all of them together doesn't mean anything. There's different kinds of RT in games be it RT reflections, RT lighting, RT shadows etc.
Metro Exodus: EE has to be one of the best visual examples of what RTGI can do to completely change the lighting and feel of a game. I'd put Minecraft and the LEGO game up there as well.
I thought Control looked just okay without RT, so it felt like a game that was designed with RT in mind.
RT is totally worth it if the developers behind it make the right sacrifices to get it running at 60fps. Insomniac is the gold standard.
People who are not convinced yet should look forward to next decade or so when most games are built from ground up with RT for all things lighting instead of using it for addon "enhancements" like they do now.
Hopefully largest portion of GPU dies are dedicated to RT and ML acceleration as well.
Hopefully largest portion of GPU dies are dedicated to RT and ML acceleration as well.
Not worth the hit to framerate to me.
However it is worth the hit in resolution in games like Spider-Man and Ratchet with the RT 60fps mode.
However it is worth the hit in resolution in games like Spider-Man and Ratchet with the RT 60fps mode.
Agreed. It looks great, but non-raytraced lighting looks nice too.
I'll tell you where it IS worth the performance hit, and also where it really showcases what a dramatic improvement it is, is old games where they stick in ray-tracing.
I'll tell you where it IS worth the performance hit, and also where it really showcases what a dramatic improvement it is, is old games where they stick in ray-tracing.
Yeah, while it's nice to have, I find I stop paying attention to graphical effects after a while of playing any game. It doesn't make it more fun to play, so if you're forced to pick 1 out of RT or performance, I'll always pick performance.
Always turn RT off, because the extremely tiny difference I do manage to notice is not worth 20-30 fps loss. Playing on PC with a 3080. Also, 60fps is not enough for me, especially with a mouse and keyboard. But I do think RT has a future, but that future is not here yet.
It's one of those things I don't even notice until it's taken away, or I see a comparison video.
Depends on the game, the ones with good implementation are amazing.
Dying Light 2 is one of them.
Dying Light 2 is one of them.
I played the PS4 and PS5 versions of Elden Ring and I did notice that the lighting was nebulously "better" on PS5, and I played Miles Morales on PS5. Otherwise I've played...Stranger of Paradise, some Yakuza games, The Quarry and GG Strive. Not a lot of PS5 showpiece games.
Out of those only Miles Morales has ray tracing. None of the others have any ray tracing at all so no wonder you haven't noticed it!
the only one of those games with RTX is like Miles Morales, iirc
like take 27 minutes out of your day and watch this video, i timestamped it at a relevant quote
"it does not make the surfaces in actuality shinier. Not at all. ... rather it makes them have the reflections the other techniques fail to represent"
That's just reflections...
View: https://youtu.be/blbu0g9DAGA?t=572
Go to Times Square in Miles Morales. That's a good spot to see the difference in the ray traced reflections.
Nah, I love the extra bells and whistles. If I can get the game to stay at 60fps, I'll happily turn them on, and depending on the genre, 30fps doesn't offend me as it does some.
It's still one of those things that you kind of forget about most of the time while playing. Though you do get those moments where you get pulled out of the game and are stunned. But I have an AMD card on Linux and haven't witnessed RT in real time yet. I'm not a graphics first kind of person. I'm more about playing with systems and all I really look for is artistic cohesion when it comes to graphics. Edit: My first sentence is referencing just graphical prowess in general and not RT since I've just seen it in videos, but it's still one of the graphical boosts that fade away when I'm into a games systems.
Yeah, it doesn't really feel like there are many big games coming out these days that really push the hardware. Miles just looks gorgeous in general, even though to my eye it didn't seem THAT different between the PS4 and PS5 versions, since I got my PS5 partway through the game and then continued my save on the PS5 version, like I did with Guardians of the Galaxy. Insomniac just makes absurdly pretty games in general.
