Is ray-tracing still a meme?

Is ray-tracing still a meme?

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it works for richfags

But even richfags could use more frames using 4k resolution.

why are you being disingenuous, here is an actual comparison from the same game

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Why is it all pixelated/fuzzy?

and even with the good titles you kinda want something in the range of 4080 to play them at 1440p with balanced dlss and have a good framerate

I really hope 50xx or whatever amd shits out will have decent 4080 tier rt perf around 600€

So not worth it for the vast majority of games.

I don't like the right. The clothes on the right look better because they're brighter which a texture change can port to the left but the armour is too shiny, it's a completely different aesthetic.

The left looks like armour that needs to be cleaned, it's seen some damage. On the right it's new, it's polished and it's armour that has just been brought out, it hasn't had any mud from the wind kicked on it.

Also the left is missing ambient lighting from the sky. There's no blue to light up the inside of the building, the front of the armour to showcase details or to tint the clothes brighter.

meanwhile 15 years ago on a PS3...

The whole RTX thing is one huge crutch and a scam. Crutch for lazy hacks, that enable predatory hardware manufacturer's jewy business practices.

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cp looks almost real with it
now if you buy a <4070 tier gpu with RT chances are most of that hardware is going to waste and you dont have to care about the tech
but a fully path traced title where the lighting team put in the effort to make it look good is transformative

the only two games where I saw raytracing as somewhat decent was in Control and Cyberpunk 2077 , too bad the game runs like shit when is on

Fun fact #1. Did you know, that devs can generate light with the help of rt, bake it into the game and then allow everyone to use baked in lightning based on rt, without additional fps cost over hand made lightning?
Fun fact #2. We will never see this, because a) It takes time to do it and devs are too lazy b) It won't help sell new gpu, and you might upset gpu mafia

on a PS3

It isn't. The PS3 version was sub 700p, and so was the original PC port.

Literally every game with global illumination does that.

can put wow in the same tier as diablo 4 lmao

Yeah bro the resolution of the image was his point

PC port wasn't 700p. It supported normal res.

which one is supposed to be better?

metro exodus runs great and looks great

I'm talking specifically about rt. There is no need for real time rt involvement anywhere, except reflections.

Nope. It rendered at 700p no matter the resolution settings. You're thinking of the fan mod/fix.

PC launched locked at 1024 x 720
Are you blind?

Is ray-tracing still a meme?

For the most part yes.

First you need to find a game in which raytracing actually changes the image at a noticeable level, this already removes like 30% of the games. No Far Cry, no Diablo 4, etc.
Then you need to find a game in which raytracing objectively improves the image instead of just sidegrading it - that's another 30% gone. No Jedi Survivor, no Deathloop, etc.
Then you need to find a game in which the raytracing isn't stupidly hard to run - that removes another 30%. So no Hitman, no Atomic Heart, etc.

So if you want games with RT that isn't stupidly hard to run while actually being a noticeable visual upgrade over the non-RT version, you're left with very few games. Off the top of my head that's Metro Exodus: Enhanced Version, Control, Alan Wake 2, Cyberpunk, the Witcher 3. I haven't played any other games with good and performant RT implementations.

Wasn't that how lightmaps worked before the craze of dynamic lighting hit the shelves?

it's been 5 years and there's been maybe 3 games where i've thought yeah that could be worth it if you have the hardware. not beating the meme allegations

always has been

Is this some type of gaslighting? I 100% the game on PC and finished it before using any fixes.

It's a meme because of consoles. Notice how AMD sponsored games with most sales expected on consoles have superficial or awful RT implementations, because console hardware can't handle RT right now.
Meanwhile games primarily made for PC or Jewvidia sponsored games actually have impressive RT. It's not a concidence, Hardware Unboxed says so in the bideo.

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what about remake 2/3 and resident evil 7?

Maybe you played the so-called remaster. That one had actually functional graphics settings. The original PC port's graphics settings were just fake sliders.

bottom one is clearly better

but u cant see shit

this is the truth for the vast majority of games, theyll use it as a crutch to work less, same thing happened with AI upscaling

Dark Souls Remastered vs OG

iirc there wasn't a denoiser implemented into the engine since this was never supposed to be officially released by Capcom
Digital Foundry did a little piece on it that explains

I find it most preferable as a mod in older games like Sultim's releases of Doom, Quake and Half-Life.
With how old each of those is, you still get solid performance.

cuts you fps in half

you see less detail

what a weird technology

that's how light behaves inside a car with no windows

I't a meme because companies usually add it by flipping a switch and doing 0 optimization to it, which means you get slightly better lgihtning in some situations for 3 times the resource demand.

Photorealism just isn't worth it.

You mean cyberpunk, right?

30 years ago the arguments about MSAA and performance were

just make the pixel art and textures better

why should I need a card capable of 4x4 box AA when I can just go from 600x480 to 1024x800 resolution?

You're all, these people all over again.
RT is a thing, it's going to keep being a thing, and eventually it will be so ubiquitous that you have no choice.
And only you will stil lbe saying RT is worse than no RT.

I do miss MSAA, by the way. Vastly superior to postprocess effects.

Why can't more studios do what Metro Enhanced did? It both looks and performs so much better than many other rt games. Yes it costs something to redo the lighting but 4A games probably doesn't have 1/10th the budget of the American AAA juggernauts. If they can somehow manage it others should be able to

Then only I will continue to be right and actually able to play games above 100fps because I won't be playing modern games with RTrash.

Read John Carmack's message on his departure from Facebook. I see no reason to not generalize their inefficiency to all of silicon valley.

The reflections in DS1 PTDE are pure sex.

Maybe you played the so-called remaster.

I am not.

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Path traced Cyberpunk and Control are the only two games where Ray Tracing made a big difference, for me.
everything else was a case of having to squint to see it.

Then you just have a bad memory. It was 720p 30fps until later that day someone fixed it.

No

Yes.
It's a very minor visual upgrade in exchange of performance

here is an actual comparison

posts screenshot of mod that looks like shit in motion and tanks performance

Why are you so indigenous.

What kind of ray tracing you retard? Most of the current implementations are a combination of GI, SSR and RT. Only a few games have actual full path traced renders.

Realtime GI is the future.
But raytracing is a very expensive way to do it and has lots of drawbacks (i.e. low resolution, noisy).
I want devs to abandon the current solutions and just go back to a voxel based one.
Hunt Showdown looks and runs better than 95% of UE5 titles.

I miss realtime stencil shadows. Drop the polycounts and bring those back. Modern AAA games make Doom 3 look good.

Yes, and?

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you are so retarded dude
literally too retarded to have a conversation with since you'll veer off to some retarded shit like this within 2 sentences

And go ahead and post the games you've been playing that actually benefit from that power and aren't complete trash filled with gay shit for retards.

MW19 had ray traced lighting

never returns again

they add path tracing in MW3 but only in the menu and firing range

next game is pajeetMD sponsored so it has no ray tracing features whatsoever

I'm so tired

But raytracing is a very expensive way to do it and has lots of drawbacks (i.e. low resolution, noisy).

RT and 4K need too many cheats. Fake frames, fake resolution, and because of these fakes Nvidia made that Reflex stuff. But one day RT will work easy as tesselation.

my PS2 catalog upscaled 8x doesn't even need 60 watts. Can your 3060 do that?

Completely unnecessary and detrimental to the lifespans of our hardware. Every game that comes out edges more and mor people out of the minimum spec range because of this trash.

AMD is really crap for RT, but in the hands of talented devs it can work.

Seems to be the same kind of half-assed dogshit that was present in Elden Ring

I believe even at its highest settings, Unreal is only using 1 ray per 4 pixels. For comparison, a movie render might use 100s of rays per pixel. So there is always going to be some level of temporal accumulation going on and with that comes issues like ghosting, the need for TAA, etc.

When they first added Lumen to fortnite it blew me away I still play with it to this day but the game just doesn't look anywhere near as good anymore as it did during those first few seasons after the update to UE5 and Lumen. It's a shame.

We are at the limits of hardware based gains. Unless the programming for raytracing computation can become 10x or 100x more efficient it's just never happening.

I highly doubt any big breakthroughs are gonna happen anymore for a while, nvidia was very preoccupied with developing RTX and improving it as much as possible but then AI became an actual big thing and now they're 12% of the US's entire GDP now because of it so clearly that's where they're gonna be spending all their money now.

A lot of that came down to really good art direction. They knew what they were doing with the fall colors and medieval villages.
The worst case scenario for GI is genuinely a grass field with a blue sky. Blue + green create an ugly gray for the color bounce.

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Two more years for graphene and fusion revolutions, trust the plan.

Yes and no. 'No' that it can produce really excellent lighting in the right hands, but 'yes' that most methods of doing it are inefficient and not even sufficiently optimized, and require too much computational power for the majority of users to benefit from it consistently. Arguably much more concerning is the over-reliance on things like TAA and frame generation to compensate for the computational load and generally appalling lack of optimization. If ray-tracing was done in a more efficient manner with games that were properly optimized, this would be less of a big debate.

Always was and always will be

To play PS2 games that don't even patch above 60 fps. Great. Awesome technology we have here.

It doesn't HAVE to be a meme but in 99% cases unfortunately it is, for the following reasons:

games with visuals that would significantly benefit from RT aren't actually that common, sometimes it's really not needed

games that are primarily built on rasterized lighting look like shit when you just half-heartedly slap RT on top after you already built the game around raster

most developers are shit at implementing RT because they've been trained on raster all their lives, only a select few developers are good at implementing it

higher budget games are made with consoles in mind - console hardware is bad at RT - so it is in the best interest of developers to hold back with RT

most PC users' current hardware is actually weaker than current consoles so building a game around raytracing is targeting a tiny portion of the audience, the majority will call it a gimmick

The only developers who actually know how to work with RT are 4A games with Metro Exodus. First they built a normal version of the game, then later they dismantled the rasterized lighting system and reconstructed the game's visuals from the ground up entirely around raytracing. The end result (Enhanced Edition) was a game that looks vastly better than the normal edition while barely having any performance hit compared to the non-RT version. So far this is the only game in which RT is done right.

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I think this is FEAR.

player shadow still visible on top of the stencil shadow

garbage

the biggest yes its a meme is because of the demands for actual RT were realized in 4090 which costs a bit more than is reasonable for mainstream
then the development resources put into RT go entirely to waste because 1% of the playerbase enables full path tracing, like all studios are doing game modes that are intended to be played on hardware of the future

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this single object in a small room 6-sided cubemap example

Great now apply that to every object in every frame in a large open space.
Oh wait that would take 10x the GPU power as just using RT to begin with.

Shocking!

funnily enough this game absolutely obliterated hardware back in the day, people with two year old cards were lucky if they could run this 1280x1024 at 20fps
nowadays people with 8 year old cards bitch and moan about games not being optimized and begging for upscalers and framgen to save them

Wow a single dynamic light (with no GI) and a single planar reflective surface.
Now try that with dozens of lights and curved surfaces.

Yeah almost like devs shouldn't deliberately design games that will run like shit for most users. You could have said that about FEAR at release, but it's a lot easier to sell when there are actually substantial and noticeable improvements in 3D graphics year after year, unlike in the 2020s.

I remember trying this on my newer 7900XT/7900X machine. Was unbelievable at 2160p with Nanite+RT. The contrast of lighting felt very atmospheric, especially considering I just moved from an old 1440p display to a 2160p one. That said, seeing as I want to maintain 144 fps to match my monitor's display rate so the game feels good to play, I had to turn off all those features. The recent seasons just lack a lot of that ambience whether you use RT or not. If I had a beefier GPU, maybe I could manage to play with them on at higher frame rates, but alas.

Mfw those numbers aren't even at 2160p

I agree that it's simply not tenable in its current form of implementation in games. I do think it's good that it is explored since hardware whales can help indirectly fund the development of that kind of tech. Eventually, maybe forms of it that will work broadly will come to fruition. The new console gens aren't far aware either, so they'll have to learn to optimize shit for them at least.

One thing that is objectively better with RT is reflections. Devs should just forget all the RT memes and add RT reflections only

Could have fooled me

>meanwhile 15 years ago on a PS3...

Isn't raytracing, like reflections, something that's gotten harder instead of easier because of how much shit game engines have to keep track of now?

No, engines were never capable of real-time ray tracing until fairly recently.

Frankly I'm just used to how rasterized lighting looks. It's a strong contrast, it's dramatic, it's used by developers to visually point things out in the environment.

I recognize that RT often looks better but it feels unnatural to me and often clashes against the contrast and intent of game lighting.

It's hard to explain but think of Skyrim dungeons. You can stumble into a cave that should by all accounts be dark and gloomy, but it's lit up because there's inscriptions on the walls you're supposed to notice and points of interests to interact with, and there's a beam of light coming from a hole in the ceiling to point out an artifact even though the beam should realistically be 95% weaker. This isn't "realistic" lighting but it works.

A lot of mods try to "fix" Skyrim's lighting by making it look more realistic and all it would do in this caveis make it fucking dark and you're barely able to see anything. Not the inscriptions in the wall, not the artifact. Which DOES make more sense but it doesn't work for the game. Developers love to put fake lights everywhere for artistic purposes so when you turn on RT in those same scenes, it can ruin the scene's intended strong contrasts and presentation.

Metro Exodus is the only game I thought RT was really good and didn't ruin the visual presentation. Cheap and looks nice.

Ray tracing yes.
Path tracing no.

But it doesn't need to be done in real time. Reflections don't matter.

How show the frame rate for both

decent 4080 tier rt perf around 600€

the copium is strong with this one

Always has been

The problem with most RT implementations is that they're just added on top of the traditional rendering techniques, thus the heavy cost because the GPU is doing both. With full path tracing you have an extremely high base cost but in turn you can have a nearly unlimited amount of reflective surfaces, shadows, and lights. The downside is that it becomes completely resolution based since it's rays per pixel, making true 4k a long way off.

true 4k is a waste

Not in the current gaming landscape of dithering and temporal smearing for 90% of effects.

DLAA doesn't count. Do better.

The technique itself was never a meme, it's been tried, tested and used in several animations and still pictures in this past half century.
Now real time ray tracing sure is

Its really only nice to have for some shaders and reflections, using it for shadows is a fucking meme when you can achieve the same with pre baked lighting or is downright unnecessary unless your game has a day/night cycle