Ray Tracing.

PostRay Tracing. by **Peter Crisp** » Fri May 06, 2022 3:17 pm

Has ray tracing been the upgrade we were told it would be?

I've been playing a fair bit of Watch Dogs Legion and I turn the RT off as I think the 60fps version without it still looks bloody amazing. I honestly can't say I've felt shortchanged in the graphics department because of the lack of RT and I have a feeling this gen of consoles is going to struggle to have games with it enabled at 60fps.
So far for me, it's a nice feature to have and just have a gander at for a while before turning it off and playing the game properly which seems like a real shame.

Maybe it's different on high powered PCs where you can have all the bells and whistles and 60fps but maybe that will only appear on this gen near the end when developers really get to squeeze every ounce of horsepower from them?

PostRe: Ray Tracing. by **OrangeRKN** » Fri May 06, 2022 3:18 pm

Never heard of him

PostRe: Ray Tracing. by **Peter Crisp** » Fri May 06, 2022 3:23 pm

OrangeRKN wrote:Never heard of him

But, he's the saviour of video games!!!!!

He's a slightly less famous version of Peter Molyneux :capnscotty:

.

PostRe: Ray Tracing. by **Cumberdanes** » Fri May 06, 2022 3:24 pm

OrangeRKN wrote:Never heard of him

Beat me to it :lol:

PostRe: Ray Tracing. by **Peter Crisp** » Fri May 06, 2022 3:28 pm

Cumberdanes wrote:
OrangeRKN wrote:Never heard of him

Beat me to it

It seems Ray needs a new PR agent.
The poor guy :cry:

.

PostRe: Ray Tracing. by **Peter Crisp** » Fri May 06, 2022 3:29 pm

Bloody hell, this topic isn't going how I hoped it would :shifty:

.

I blame Brexit.

PostRe: Ray Tracing. by **Hound** » Fri May 06, 2022 3:30 pm

I nearly always bin it off in favour of a performance mode.

PostRe: Ray Tracing. by **Jam-Master Jay** » Fri May 06, 2022 3:33 pm

Ray tracing is impressive but even with a 3090 it often isn't worth the performance hit. DLSS and other similar techniques have been the truly great additions of the past couple of GPU generations.

PostRe: Ray Tracing. by **Knoyleo** » Fri May 06, 2022 3:34 pm

Don't have hardware capable of supporting it, so no idea. Sorry Pete.

PostRe: Ray Tracing. by **Cumberdanes** » Fri May 06, 2022 3:44 pm

Peter Crisp wrote:
Cumberdanes wrote:
OrangeRKN wrote:Never heard of him

Beat me to it

It seems Ray needs a new PR agent.
The poor guy .

Joking aside I'm still not entirely sure what ray tracing is. I hear the term quite often but not really know what it is.

PostRe: Ray Tracing. by **jiggles** » Fri May 06, 2022 3:44 pm

It’s not worth the performance hit, because the lightning that it corrects the accuracy of vs what is normally faked isn’t especially noticeable. It does look much better, it does look immensely more accurate, but you don’t really notice what’s wrong with games that don’t use it.

Couple it with AI upscaling though? Hell yeah.

The comparison of Minecraft is probably the best in terms of what it does, because Minecraft doesn’t use any of the tricks devs use to achieve “realistic” lighting in their games, so when you have raytracing on, you get the idea of what you get for free that you never had before.

PostRe: Ray Tracing. by **Godzilla** » Fri May 06, 2022 4:12 pm

It's a waste of time. Would be nice if it just added something to a game but it always comes at the expenses of frame rate.

PostRe: Ray Tracing. by **OrangeRKN** » Fri May 06, 2022 4:12 pm

Minecraft makes a great comparison vid. It's also interesting because every objective improvement to the lighting in Minecraft I'm of the opinion makes the game look worse - it's a game of blocky voxels, it should have blocky lightining!

PostRe: Ray Tracing. by **Zilnad** » Fri May 06, 2022 5:32 pm

It looks good when it doesn't impact performance but I don't think it's that amazing. Not worth the performance dip in my opinion.

YouTube · PostRe: Ray Tracing. by **Stugene** » Fri May 06, 2022 5:44 pm

Raymond Tracing's work in video games is under-rated, but history will remember him fondly - like Tony Pail, the inventor of the Pony Tail.

PostRe: Ray Tracing. by **Bertie** » Fri May 06, 2022 6:18 pm

I’m a big fan of ray tracing where implemented properly rather than just ‘look at these fancy reflections’ often using puddles. I think the best use of ray tracing is when proper ‘global illumination’ (GI) is used. See metro exodus enhanced.

This is where Nvidia have played a blinder and got ahead. Ray tracing is never worth it on AMD based systems as the performance or image quality hit is too big. On 30 series cards where DLSS (software with some additional hardware ray tracing) is used, then the hit is far far less, especially when you get to 3070 and above.

I’ve just picked up a PS5 and I found 30FPS unplayable. So 60FPS consistently is absolutely the priority. If you can do 60 and some RT then great. I’m not convinced consoles will get there with them being RDNA based.

PostRe: Ray Tracing. by **Ironhide** » Fri May 06, 2022 6:20 pm

I think its currently a bit of a gimmick but its probably here to stay and will become increasingly common in AAA games as the technology improves (and becomes even more ridiculously expensive).

I have a graphics card that does RT but nothing I play utilizes it.

PostRe: Ray Tracing. by **Qikz** » Sat May 07, 2022 10:55 am

Quake 2 with Ray Tracing is amazing.

PostRe: Ray Tracing. by **aayl1** » Sun May 08, 2022 8:40 am

Peter Crisp wrote:
OrangeRKN wrote:Never heard of him

But, he's the saviour of video games!!!!!

Arrived to fight his arch enemy, Mike Rotransactions.

PostRe: Ray Tracing. by **Herdanos** » Sun May 08, 2022 8:45 am

I heard that Mike teamed up with Moe Netisationofvideogamesandisitaproblemathreadbyjawa

Ray Tracing.

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