this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2025
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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.