Why is garbage like ray tracing needed again?

Why is garbage like ray tracing needed again?
Pic related is lightning from 20 years ago, looks perfect and it costs nothing to run

looks perfect

lol

it looks like shit, gramps

they added ray tracing shadows to wow
i turned it on and dont see any difference

Why is garbage like ray tracing needed again?

In theory, dynamic lighting, global illumination, better reflections, perhaps even sound propagation - it could enhance a game's visuals significantly and not require levels and mapping to be built with pre-designated lights and shadows, while also allowing for dynamics so that if things get destroyed, the lighting just handles the change appropriately on the fly, viola.

In practice, it's basically engine cocksucking for minimal payoff on the player's end of things because 98% of players won't fucking care or notice, or if it's on a PvP competitive game, they'll turn that shit off to get maximum frame rates anyway. There's no "need" for Ray Tracing, but it's the big gimmick thing to push, and no one's actually using it worth a damn. The biggest extent of it, path tracing, requires top of the line rigs virtually only handfuls of individuals can even afford to begin with, and you're using so much DLSS and frame gen to handle it that it's worthless to those that simply want to play the fucking game.

I prefer left

looks perfect

nostalgia really is something

I'll say it once, I'll say it a thousand times.

RAYTRACING? MORE LIKE GAYTRACING.

Real reason: RTX is SO much easier to develop because you do not have to do much, the engine does it. Performance is shit, but that is just rolled over to the consumers. So they made up a huge campaign to push RTX as the best thing ever, but it is only better for devs.

What you are missing is that devs are lazy as fuck now and will not put in the time to try to make things look polished. Hell most devs don't even attempt to optimize games anymore. They make things good enough and ship it and leave the performance heavy lifting up to your cpu/gpu. If it's cross platform it only has to work on console well enough to not upset normies. If they get 30 fps they are over the moon.

Why is garbage like ray tracing needed again?

Baked lightmaps took too much space and don't work for time of day cycle

foliage all the way to the horizon in 2006

No.

This is the same braindead argument we had when pixel shaders became the norm.

noo I don't need normal and bump maps

noo I don't need dynamic lights

And then when shader model 2 dropped the same poojets cried about it too. WoW launched without shader requirements but what OP posted is the updated shader reliant renderer. You fags are pathetic.

do you think artists are paid royalties or something? xD

Now this is more like the vanilla look.

RT means you're not doing handplaced light for each specific scene/location anymore

You think movies are shot with the real life light as-is?

RT means you're not doing handplaced light for each specific scene/location anymore

What are you talking about?

RT is literally just doing in real time what used to have to be pre-rendered because hardware wasn't powerful enough to do it in realtime. That's it. Both involve you having to place light sources into the scene.

RT means you're not doing handplaced light for each specific scene/location anymore

Why? Every interior in Cyberpunk is full of hand placed lights. Every cutscene uses hand placed lights. You seem to have a strange grasp on what RT light is. Unlike baked light you can control bounce and material properties in real time with RT. It gives even more control over lights than static baked lightmaps.

normal maps didn't regress graphics.
Now it's like:

Wow hair look worse than 20 years ago, My game is an incoherent grainy mess of smeared vomit that can't even render transparent objects.

my games runs at 10 fps on the most powerful hardware thanks to forced ray tracing and needs AI upscaling and frame gen just to run as shitty as it does..

but I sure am glad those reflections and ambient lighting that I will never notice are "accurate"

clearly reflections need to be top priority over the basics like visual clarity and being able to render transparent objects.

glad modern devs have their priorities straight.

because you need a reason to buy new graphic cards

I'm actually remembering RT Overdrive's launch with pathtracing, and how fucked up it was because yeah, everything is 100% real time lighting in that mode - but not every single scene actually had properly placed lights, leading to some interiors accidentally becoming pitch black. Then people discovered that a flashlight mod would be a pathtraced light, so it basically became a recommendation to light up these spaces.

that HUGE 5% visual difference. all for the low price of a $2500 graphics card going full pelt and using up 1kw of power.
And also making the game run like shit even when rtx is off.
Totes worth

RT is literally just doing in real time what used to have to be pre-rendered because hardware wasn't powerful enough to do it in realtime. That's it.

It's not, it's automating what used to be hand designed

The lights are handplaced, the actual light, not so much

For example in an old game where shadows and light were part of the texture, you could ensure certain features of the face were always in focus despite any other light systems you had going on, with RT you have the base unlit face model with an unlit skin texture, and what's lit/in shadow is going to entirely depend on the lights you placed in the scene

The vast majority of games don't think about this the way movies do and just let the engine take the wheel and consider realistic=good, which is why new games often look like shit despite all the technology

That's without going into the fact even old JRPGs with fully pre-rendered backgrounds made with pre-baked RT still had artists go in and touch up the light to make the final scene look good

Ray tracing is pushed because game developers can cut corners by offsetting it to consumers who GPU manufacturers can milk for their money and media (organised and solo) don't push against it because of both inside journalism and ray traced screenshots, thumbnails and videos get more views.

At the end of the day it's just about money. We have to buy more hardware, developers can cut costs and anyone who posts about gaming knows that ray traced produces more money for them.

When ray tracing is "fix" and stable, new "technology" will come in and the cycle begins.

It's easier to just have the computer calculate the shadows with raytracing than to actually put any effort into baking shadows yourself. Who cares if the game runs like shit? Zoomers will call you their little brother and insinuate that you are poor because you aren't using the latest bleeding edge card (that often cannot run the game well either).
Modern game "devs" are both lazy and incompetent with no passion nor vision.

the og artstyle and biomes are some of the best that were ever created

First of all E33 dosen't used RT. Second AA is fucked because that's the drawback of deferred rendering. Which is the fastest way to render complex scenes and effects and has been a standard since 2009.

easier to have the computer calculate

It's not, it's just cheaper for the developers. They don't need to have their computers running while they bake the lighting using their unnecessary 4k textures and normal maps for a fruit basket.

what makes you think you need to buy new hardware for raytracing?

I wish the 2004 WoW team somehow had access to RT GI, it would look gorgeous. Blizzard used to have great artists.

It does, it uses software lumen for it's lighting. It has a lot of ghosting (especially later on) due to SW lumen being "optimized" to run on Consoles.

First of all E33 dosen't used RT

but it is perfect for showing off how bad deffered rendering looks.

Which is the fastest way to render complex scenes and effects

that's a malicious lie.
it's the laziest way to get out of managing and optimizing your lighting properly while creating an unacceptable loss in visual quality and polluting your screen with glitchy artifacts.

because you need to consoom shit nu-tech

In layman terms, newer hardware is better suited for raytracing and the upscaling needed for any frame rate not retarded.
Real time raytracing and upscaling is handled on the GPU silicone. The only way to get the stable performance with frame generation, is through new hardware.

Ray tracing was meant to be the new advancement in reflections, don't know why so many devs decided they needed it for lighting

but I sure am glad those reflections and ambient lighting that I will never notice are "accurate"

The sad part is reflections are way worse than planar reflections and aren't suitable for mirrors

Raytracing saves devs time. They don't care if it costs you.

RT is cool because it allows for much more natural lighting. More than that it's cool because it allows for more dynamic lighting, at least if the game is dynamic enough to benefit from it. There are plenty of bad implementations though, that's certainly a problem.

I want to go back

All of that is available on pre rt cards

You don't understand, it's not about being available, it's about mechanically optimising the silicone itself.
Think of HDD to SSD. Both can read and store data but to get the SSD speeds and reliability, you need the SSD. The GPU difference is just smaller than anything we can imagine, but it's still there.

Your attempts at dismissing this both shows your ignorance around computer science and common sense in reading metric data presented by youtubers using graphs.

Cause your shit rig can run it

Youtubers are shills. None of them have made a video showing rt on Vega and Polaris cards.

Why do you broke bums want 10 year old hardware to be the baseline for developers forever? I‘ll never take any of you crying about “consoles holding back gaming“ serious again

You're brown.

They used dynamic lighting back in the day, they don’t anymore which is what ray tracing is for

What does my skin tone have to do with anything? It's a cool technological achievement, you'd think hardware enthusiast channels would jump at the opportunity to show it off.

It has to do with your reading comprehensive skills.
You've read something you didn't understand and started replying to it with something not relevant and then shilling some more non topical stuff.

Just post your shilling about the advancement, don't pretend it had any relevancy to what I was discussing.

there is something however that I dont understand, because unless the lights or objects will be moving I dont see how it couldnt be possible to bake those lumen results. The light on the left is also baked but why arent the bounce values of that bake at the level of the one on the right? Since its baked they could make the bounce values even higher than the realtime lumen solution. That is what I dont understand.
Mirrors Edge did the right result baked years ago, so did Sonic Unleashed. It had less detail and resolution since it was more limited but the light and color bounce was there.

We've achieved peak graphical fidelity around 2016-2017 and didn't need to go further since.

i believe the light on the left isn't baked, just AO + dynamic

That's from Chapter 4 before the art style change in Chapter 5.

Right looks technically better but also kind of ridiculous - the shadows look way too crisp. In the bottom pic, ice is never that shiny and photorealistic IRL - it tends to look more muddled and broken up

Looks like runescape though???

GOD, WoW is fucking ugly on purpose
Not so much the areas (usually) just every character, NPC, monster design is ugly as fuck, even the night elves are garish on purpose with the retarded huge ears and eyebrows

I mean I am struggling to run Fortnite on my 3080 since Chapter 6.

Raytracing works better for day-night cycles and it saves a lot of time and storage space compared to baked lighting and how complex games are nowadays. With hardware getting good enough to run RT, it's better to be proactive and start using RT so that in the near future, the games will look even better and run better with RT on compared to baked lighting as it's very forward compatible.

saves a lot of time and storage space compared to baked lighting

So it saves storage space, which is cheap as hell, at the expense of graphical processors, which are expensive as hell and only get more exorbitant in pricing each year, good tradeoff

how complex games are nowadays

Raytracing works better for day-night cycles

no it doesn't and why the fuck do I want that shit in a game anyway?

the games will look even better

devs relying on automated lighting instead of proper art direction has only made games look worse and worse.
and they run like trash too.