Ray Tracing Simps - WHY?

[Stone Masonry]

okay, so i remember when ray tracing (i am told that the correct term is something else, i mean the technologies like rtx reflections, rt global illumination, etc. that require rtx or similar cards for instance*) first came out in 2018 or 19 or whatever on PC with battlefield, a lot of people were talking about how great of an evolution it will be for PC gaming (insert soyjack face).

Fast forward 4 years, and its still a bit divisive i would say, but mostly due to its performance/looks ratio. What I dont see discussed a lot is, is ray tracing holding back imporvements in terms of graphics? When i watch videos like digital foundry or most comment sections for graphics videos on youtube, everyone seems to mostly love and appreciate ray tracing.

I dont play a lot of games or understand technology, so thats why im making this thread, if someone could please explain to me, how is ray tracing making games look better? Here's my experience based on the games I played:

1. Fast forward from 2018, and I feel like still, many of the best looking games I played over the past few years use traditional lighting and reflections - the pc port of God of War, Red Dead 2, AC Odyssey, even Arkham Knight all hold up amazingly well (I feel in 2022). When I play games with ray tracing features/patches (like Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, the RE games, Control), I feel like the developers often sacrifice quality of textures/draw distances/facial animations to make some stupid light bounce around the room for a barely visible result.

2. The only ray tracing effect I see making a geniune difference is RT reflections - screen space reflections are pretty distracting/ugly at times, and with games like Spider-Man Remastered or Doom Eternal, they do make a pretty noticeable improvement in quality/realism. Although even in spiderman there are times when the highest resolution ray tracing looks worse in terms of clarity than the cube maps or whatever they used in the old version.

3. However, for me, ray traced global illumination or whatever its called just doesnt make that big a difference. I feel like you can pick out screenshots in games like Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, Metro where it does show a difference, but I feel like developers often sacrifice other things. For instance like with the new ray tracing patch in the witcher (i havent tested it out a lot), but for me the biggest differences seemed to be from the ultra+ quality settings - i feel like improved draw distances, physics, textures, etc. universally benefit a game. I looked at like the Metro Enhanced Edition (which was released earlier this year i think), and compared some of my screenshots with those from last light and 2033, and I honestly would struggle to tell the difference in most indoor scenes, even with all the emissive surfaces and stuff they added in exodus.

so what is going on with ray tracing? i feel like its 4 years past the technology's inception, and people are still getting excited about some stupid 90 year old game like quake getting rtx, when its not being implemented well into most games.

When i look at games released pre 2014 vs 2016-2018, I see a big difference - that was like a year after gta came out vs the year rdr2 (with much more physics, better volumetrics, better textures/foliage/water) came out, dark souls 2 vs 3 feel different because better textures, ac unity vs ac odyssey have comparable graphical quality i feel (but one is dynamic and on a much larger scale), watch dogs 1 vs 2 feel much more realistic. now compare pre 2018 to 2020-2022: metro exodus barely looks different from metro last light, hitman 3 with rtx barely looks different from hitman 2 i would say, and even traditional titles feel stagnant (ac odyssey looks comparable to ac valhalla while actually being larger, elden ring feels in some ways like a step down from ds3, etc.).

okay i forgot what i wrote about at the start but i was wondering if someone could offer their thoughts

[Komarimaru]

Stone Masonry původně napsal:

Komarimaru původně napsal:

I can tell right away.
https://i.imgur.com/sRjnfPP.gif
Look at his left hand as the gif plays, the building and background. Look at the foliage right of his head.

That's very interesting, thanks for making this gif im learning a lot!!! Also, wouldn't it be lower than 57% or whatever because the reflections arent native resolution anyways, so they'd be a fraction of the dlss fraction?

also i checked out taa/dlss quality sharpening 10/dlss quality, and it seems that dlss quality and sharpening both make the reflections look worse! for me personally i hate the taa blurriness of like the trees in there, so i still prefer the dlss look overall i think especially since the performance is better, but its interesting how it does hurt reflection quality!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2901846071
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2901846129
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2901846153

Ya, reflections are already lowered, thus getting lowered more. I edited my post but will say it here as well.

Ray Tracing cannot make a game look magically better. There's many mods out there that add it to games, making it so ugly, over reflective surfaces and poor bounce light, or stuff like Quake 2 RTX I think is done poorly.

All comes down to textures, model detail and of course properly done ray tracing.

Also, if you must use upscaling, it's something we have to deal with. Performance > Features imho. Why I try and run native 4k whenever I can.

[GunsForBucks]

Screenshots get auto compressed .


If you want to show visual differences you are better off doing a screen cap and pasting it in a png and upload it as artwork for better detail.

Just FYI

[Haruspex]

I think part of the "problem" (I wouldn't actually say it's a problem.) is that the techniques used to mimic what ray tracing does naturally have gotten really, really good over the years. Things like ambient occlusion and screen space reflections, while yes, you could pick it apart and objectively say ray tracing is better, is it so much better that it's worth the massive performance hit and steep hardware requirements?

I would argue that it's really not.

Even in the comparison video for Witcher 3 posted above, while RT looks nice there, it's not so much nicer that I feel like I'm missing out on something by not having RT. In fact the general effect can largely be achieved with a simple reshade[reshade.me]. Yes, I know reshade is not ray tracing, but to most gamers it really doesn't matter in the slightest.

I like to cite this LTT video, in which half the crew really can't tell the difference between RTX on or off, and for the half that can they really have to squint to figure it out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VGwHoSrIEU

I think RT is the future, but in the present I don't think it matters nearly as much as Nvidia wants us to think it does.

[Qbert ⭐]

They got me when Quake 2 with ray tracing was out... and now portals (Yes, i am a simple man)

[Washell]

Raytracing is computationally intensive. Nvidia's RTX implementation was the first mass market commercially available edition for realtime rendering.

Current rasterizing engines are computationally cheap, but every shader and effect you add on top, ups the amount of computation that needs to be done.

A lot, if not most, of those shaders and effects come for "free" with a full raytracing engine. We're currently moving towards a point where both engines will provide roughly equal results, both with their strengths and weaknesses, after which the balance will tip to raytracing for best graphical fidelity.

[Stone Masonry]

Washell původně napsal:

Raytracing is computationally intensive. Nvidia's RTX implementation was the first mass market commercially available edition for realtime rendering.

Current rasterizing engines are computationally cheap, but every shader and effect you add on top, ups the amount of computation that needs to be done.

A lot, if not most, of those shaders and effects come for "free" with a full raytracing engine. We're currently moving towards a point where both engines will provide roughly equal results, both with their strengths and weaknesses, after which the balance will tip to raytracing for best graphical fidelity.

that's interesting thank you!!! i have heard that it makes developing games "easier" with rtx stuff, so i guess maybe thats kind of like what you are talking about (like having to place artificial lights, etc)

8bitbeard původně napsal:

I think part of the "problem" (I wouldn't actually say it's a problem.) is that the techniques used to mimic what ray tracing does naturally have gotten really, really good over the years. Things like ambient occlusion and screen space reflections, while yes, you could pick it apart and objectively say ray tracing is better, is it so much better that it's worth the massive performance hit and steep hardware requirements?

I would argue that it's really not.

Even in the comparison video for Witcher 3 posted above, while RT looks nice there, it's not so much nicer that I feel like I'm missing out on something by not having RT. In fact the general effect can largely be achieved with a simple reshade[reshade.me]. Yes, I know reshade is not ray tracing, but to most gamers it really doesn't matter in the slightest.

I like to cite this LTT video, in which half the crew really can't tell the difference between RTX on or off, and for the half that can they really have to squint to figure it out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VGwHoSrIEU

I think RT is the future, but in the present I don't think it matters nearly as much as Nvidia wants us to think it does.

thats kind of what i was getting at, like you look at plague tale innocence vs requiem (which doesnt have ray tracing yet i think), i would say the difference is even bigger than in terms of witcher 3 2014 vs 2022 (admittedly that video shows witcher 3 2022 ray tracing vs not). so for me, like i went back to hitman 2 recently, and sure the lighting and stuff is a bit weird at times, but i was very impressed by the asset variety, how theres like beer cans where you can actually sorta see whats written on it, etc. By contrast, when I go back to like control or exodus, sure seeing red light of a flag bounce off is nice, but do i really need to have green light from mushrooms bounce off the environment when that just casts more green light?

So i feel like maybe this is part on me for mislabeling the discussion, i guess what i meant to ask is "why would a developer prioritize having rtx features over good asset variety/facial animations/etc." so for me in games like witcher or portal like someone mentioned, would portal really benefit from more detailed textures? but the lighting does make a nice difference in some scenes imo. but for games like dl or control or exodus, i dont really get why they would focus on lighting over textures so much!

[Haruspex]

Stone Masonry původně napsal:

"why would a developer prioritize having rtx features over good asset variety/facial animations/etc."

"Raytracing" is the new big shiny marketing buzzword that's supposed to get us all excited, only in this age of diminishing returns with graphics it's not as big a difference as in the past.

In the early 90s it was "VGA Graphics! 256 colors!"
In the mid 90s it was "3d acceleration! Colored lighting! Real time shadows!"
In the early 00s it was "Pixel shaders! Bump mapping!"

Things got kinda blurry for me after that. But now in the 20s it's "Raytracing! RTX on!" It's also really starting to be all about AI, with AI upscaling and frame insertion.

[Stone Masonry]

nullable původně napsal:

Well presumably the textures are already decent in games like Control or Metro Exodus. I mean maybe you feel differently, or have opinions the textures should be better, different, higher resolution. But your opinion may not be objective reality.

So the developers may feel the textures are fine, and improvements would suffer from diminishing returns. So upgrading the lighting may provide a greater benefit in their opinion.

Also framing it as having to choose one or the other may not be accurate. A lot of teams have enough developers are artists where they can do more than one thing at a time. So again, your feelings and opinions about how resources and effort ought to be spent may not project on the whole profession evenly.

Ultimately when you make your own games you can make those decisions. People already making games make their own decisions about what's best at any given point.

But maybe end of the day Ray Tracing is pretty cool. And double resolution textures aren't and don't provide twice the benefit.

That is interesting, thank you for sharing, but I don't really agree with Control or Metro Exodus having "decent" textures. So like it's hard to pick out comparable places between different games, but compare the detail in this control bathroom to the details in this hitman 2 bathroom (the two control screenshots are in taa/dlss quality in case you wanna see differences since this came up in this thread):
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2902581668
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2902581719
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2902578543
By the way, yes, steam does compress screenshots, but i find if you click on them to get them at "full res" or whatever, it does a decent job showing the differences. Compare how much better the lines between the tiles are in Hitman, how much more realistic it looks, how much more variety there is. For the record, I understand there are confounding factors in favor of control (new technology, virtually everything is destructible), but there are confounding factors in favor of hitman 2 as well (they didnt even have the budget for proper cutscenes in this game because of being dropped by their publisher or something, lol)

Now here are some comparisions between like Hitman 2 and Metro:

compare like the details on each of these buckets compared with random crates from metro:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2902578777
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2902579332


Compare this random door and crate from Metro with something like Doom (I dont have it installed, but like the sticker type objects are so much more clear there)
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2902576511
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2902576584
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2902579178

To like a random door and crate in Hitman:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2902590337
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2902590232

[Stone Masonry]

nullable původně napsal:

Well presumably the textures are already decent in games like Control or Metro Exodus. I mean maybe you feel differently, or have opinions the textures should be better, different, higher resolution. But your opinion may not be objective reality.

So the developers may feel the textures are fine, and improvements would suffer from diminishing returns. So upgrading the lighting may provide a greater benefit in their opinion.

Also framing it as having to choose one or the other may not be accurate. A lot of teams have enough developers are artists where they can do more than one thing at a time. So again, your feelings and opinions about how resources and effort ought to be spent may not project on the whole profession evenly.

Ultimately when you make your own games you can make those decisions. People already making games make their own decisions about what's best at any given point.

But maybe end of the day Ray Tracing is pretty cool. And double resolution textures aren't and don't provide twice the benefit.

Again, who would think this is "passable" texturing?
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2902579251
(i think the reflection on the left is messed up from me switching between dlss and taa or something for some reason lol)
Compare the detail on the cloths there, how Hitman has an actual clearly legible product while Metro has some generic blurry "Metro 2033" repeating book textures, the clarity of the wall textures, etc.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2902579037
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2902578835
And so for instance in the two screenshots above, I feel like Metro has better wood assets, and so it's not a universal improvement with Hitman, but I feel like on the whole it is. And maybe you don't and that's fine, my examples aren't great or anything, I just ran around random maps in Hitman and the Volga map to find stuff to compare, but to me it seems like the asset quality advantage is clear.

Compare like the asset variety here with anything in Metro:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2902590252

And for the record, I don't think Metro or Control look bad at all, I just think they went with this expensive technology, which they went with even more in Metro Enhanced Edition for instance, when they could have kept most of the same lighting from the original Exodus and improved the textures or something. And again for the record, maybe the Metro textures just aren't loading for me properly, but there's other forum threads that are dedicated to this, videos from like Digital Foundry etc. seem to point to the same issue (they even mentioned it in their video on Metro), and so maybe it's some weird texture loading glitch, but I really am not sure what else it could be except poor texture work. I tried dlss vs no dlss, everything else, and nothing really worked to make them better, so I think it might just be the way they are. And there's some great textures in Metro too, but just the overall quality I would consider not good.

[Stone Masonry]

nullable původně napsal:

Well presumably the textures are already decent in games like Control or Metro Exodus. I mean maybe you feel differently, or have opinions the textures should be better, different, higher resolution. But your opinion may not be objective reality.

So the developers may feel the textures are fine, and improvements would suffer from diminishing returns. So upgrading the lighting may provide a greater benefit in their opinion.

Also framing it as having to choose one or the other may not be accurate. A lot of teams have enough developers are artists where they can do more than one thing at a time. So again, your feelings and opinions about how resources and effort ought to be spent may not project on the whole profession evenly.

Ultimately when you make your own games you can make those decisions. People already making games make their own decisions about what's best at any given point.

But maybe end of the day Ray Tracing is pretty cool. And double resolution textures aren't and don't provide twice the benefit.

And by the way (sorry I posted like thirty paragraphs now) as a last post, I absolutely recognize my preferences are subjective, and so this thread isn’t really to say ray tracing sucks or oh it’s expensive so it sucks, it is more so to ask like in what instances does sacrificing texture and asset variety for this technology worth it, like maybe you were in the caspian level and saw the sand reflect the sun into a bright building or something in metro, etc. so I do understand your point, I’m just trying to figure out what people feel is cool about ray tracing, like you said!

[Lystent]

I only have two games that have used PhysX. Borderlands 2, and Borderlands The Pre-Sequel. Even with hardware that was made years later, PhysX effects would tank their performance.

I think stuff like that painted a picture on what to expect from Nvidia's Ray Tracing. That, and maybe the part where it only catered to those with certain Nvidia cards.

[Epicurus]

Komarimaru původně napsal:

...
This is why people like ray tracing. Yes a game can look good without it, but when done right Ray Tracing looks infinitesimally better. The downside is, if you've poor hardware, then you'll be using lower ray tracing settings, so things will look odd.

I'm betting you don't really mean "infinitesimally". ;)

[Chelle]

You're missing the boat that's sailed my friend.
Many ( myself included) bought the best bang for buck card they could.
Now I use a GPU for some image producing and it matters re photographic manipulation using certain apps.

Yet to conclude the RTX in many cases is simply a byproduct of a good graphics card.

Whilst in say Pinball FX the new version the tables look so much more realistic it is the horsepower of the card I know I looked for.
That being the RTX 3080 12gb version after my 2080 TI died.

The card was bought in my case for the power of the card. The rendering ray tracing was simply candy floss.
And yet in some games it truly makes them look far better whilst in others not so.

Either way I got the card for horsepower vs cost.

[lailaamell]

Never use raytracing since i use a 3060ti

[Komarimaru]

Epicurus původně napsal:

Komarimaru původně napsal:

...
This is why people like ray tracing. Yes a game can look good without it, but when done right Ray Tracing looks infinitesimally better. The downside is, if you've poor hardware, then you'll be using lower ray tracing settings, so things will look odd.

I'm betting you don't really mean "infinitesimally". ;)

You necro'd a year old thread, to think I didn't use a word properly? I did indeed use it properly, since the smaller details is what ray tracing adds.