this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2025
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Ray tracing is a money grab.
Ray tracing is pretty nice. You get real, sharp reflections and can see around the corners, giving a minor gameplay benefit that could be utilized. I'm rather of opinion that 4k is a money crab. All it does is give you no tangible benefits and makes you upgrade your gpu while everything runs like you have a 970 on 1080p. More hz is better than more res.
Totally agree about 4k, it useful for work (its like 4x 1080 screens!) but for gaming it's so much overkill.
Lol wut? No it's not. That's a ridiculous thing to say. Properly implemented RT is gorgeous and worlds ahead of rasterized lighting. Sure, some games have shit RT, but RT in general is not a money grab. That's a dumb thing to say
While RT made my 2070s cry in cyberpunk, the difference was way less noticeable than the difference in FPS. I dunno, IMO when you watch some slowed down video or take your time inspecting things, you can tell a bit. But when you're driving a car and shooting foes you can't even tell. IMO, not worth $2,000 to improve my ray tracing to not even 144 FPS.
Cyberpunk is night and day with and without ray tracing. And in motion is the best way to see a lot of the effects. I'm not sure what to say. The difference is so obvious to me, especially after the path tracing updates.
Well 24fps sure as shit didn't help me.
Game engines don’t have to simulate sound pressure bouncing off surfaces to get good audio. They don’t have to simulate all the atoms in objects to get good physics. There’s no reason to have to simulate photons to get good lighting. This is a way to lower engine dev costs and push that cost onto the consumer.
I do wish siege audio became standard tho.
You're either not arguing in good faith or grossly misunderstanding why RT results in more realistic lighting. I suggest you read up on RT, how it works, and what it is supposed to be simulating.
I can see your point to an extent. Good style is more important than hyper realism. But that doesn't mean hyper realistic with good style can't be good.
Sure, but imitating good audio takes a lot of work. Just look at Escape From Tarkov that has replaced its audio component twice? in 5 years and the output is only getting worse. I imagine if they could have an audio component that simulates audio in a more realistic way with miminal performance hit compared to the current solutions I think they'd absolutely use it instead of having to go over thousands of occlusion zones just to get a "good enough".
If it meant it solves all physics interactions I imagine developers would love it. During Totk development Nintendo spent over a year only on physics. Imagine if all their could be solved simply by putting in some physics rules. It would be a huge save on development time.
I might be misremembering but I'm pretty sure raytracing can't reenact the double slit experiment because it's not actually simulating photons. It is simulating light in a more realistic way and it's going to make lighting the scenes much easier.
The only downside of raytracing is the performance cost. But that argument we could've used in the early 90s against 3d engines as well. Eventually the tech will mature and raytracing will become the norm. If you argued they Raytracing is a money grab at this very moment I'd agree. The tech isn't quite there yet, but I imagine within the next decade it will be. However you're presenting raytracing as something useless and that's just disingenuous.
Ray tracing is a conceptually lazy and computationally expensive. Fire off as many rays as you can in every direction from every light source, when the ray hits something it gets lit up and fires off more rays of lower intensity and maybe a different colour.
Sure you can optimize things by having a maximum number of bounces or a maximum distance each ray can travel but all that does is decrease the quality of your lighting. An abstracted model can be optimized like crazy BUT it take a lot of man power (paid hours) and doesn't directly translate to revenue for the publisher.
The downside is the wallet cost. Spreading the development cost of making a better conventional lighting system over thousands of copies of a game is negligible, requiring ray tracing hardware is an extra 500-1000 bucks that could otherwise be spent on games.
Ray tracing is so old I got my first ray tracing card for like 100 extra after selling my 970.
You can get a ray tracing capable card for $150. Modern iGPUs also support ray tracing. And while hardware rt is not always better than software rt, I would like to see you try to find a non-rt ighting system that can represent small scale global illumination in a large open world with sharp off screen reflections.
The wallet cost is tied to the performance cost. Once the tech matures companies will start competing over pricing and "the wallet cost" comes down. The rest of what you're saying is just you repeating yourself. And now I also have to repeat myself.
There's no reason to argue over the now, I agree that right now raytracing really isn't worth it. But if you're going to continue arguing that raytracing will never be worth it you better come up with better arguments.
You're forgetting about the #1 reason why Ray Tracing is so good: it saves hard drive space because you don't need to pre-bake lighting, when it's rendered in realtime. You should be a fan for that reason alone. Games have gotten too large.
Lighting bakes are done on a very small texture and only one texture sheet per asset. For a single 4k PBR texture with alpha (and more mask maps in case you want moss or snow or whatever) you could have around 8x4(plus any extra masks) for 512 or 4x4(plus any extra maps) 1k lightmaps. Not to mention lightmaps are simple 0 to 255 channel rather than 3x255 for rgb. Besides dynamic lights are used whenever performance allows making the savings smaller.
I looks pretty when enabled, can you get Cyberpunks level of ray tracing visuals without it? Honest question, I thought that's what made the game gorgeous, but if it's possible without it why don't know why some teams haven't shown those results without it? And again I may have missed some games that do near equivalent without that feature.
With some games, pre baking lighting just isn't possible, or will clearly show when some large objects start moving.
Ray tracing opens up whole new options for visual style that wouldn't really be possible (aka would probably look like those low effort unity games you see) without it. So far this hasn't really been taken advantage of since level designers are used to being limited by the problems that come with rasterization, and we're just starting to see games come out that only support rt (and therefore don't need to worry about looking good without it)
See the tiny glade graphics talk as an example, it shows both what can be done with rt and the advantages/disadvantages of taking a hardware vs software rt approach.
Cyberpunk with RT off still looks damn good.
Personally, if it's between RT off and giving my money to a company normalizing lying to me, I'll stick with RT off.
The b580 is pretty fast with RT, it beats the price comparable Nvidia gpus
Yeah I considered one. Wish it had 16GB VRAM.