I love ray tracing and path tracing when they’re done right. Ik fully ray traced scenes are hardly playable even on high end cards without upscaling but like if one has a powerful enough card, why not utilize its potential? Yet most people don’t seem to care about RT.
When it comes to upscaling though, I hate it, and I’m not even talking about frame gen. It makes things look blurry and causes annoying artifacts. I think playing on lowest settings with clear textures is more enjoyable long term than maxed out in 4k with a consistently blurry image. Also this new technology makes devs care less about optimization (which will backfire btw as we’re approaching the physical limit of transistor size).
Efficient ambient-light ray tracing (like Lumen) is amazing. It contributes massively to making environments feel believable and immersive.
Path traced reflections and shadows are a indefensible waste of processing power (for now).
Upscaling and frame generation are crutches that are actively harming gaming right now. From disocclusion artifacts to unsightly “sharpening” distortions to developers/publishers skipping optimization because they expect DLSS/FSR will pick up the slack, it’s a cool thing that has unfortunately resulted in games being worse all around.
I wouldn’t have finished The Last Of Us Part 1 without FSR, which I desperately wanted to play again for the nostalgia. That game is so fucking horribly optimized.
I barely know and don’t have a strong opinion about it.
I like raytracing in that it actually makes the job easier for artists in many cases.
I think it’s incredibly overrated. Modern games already look incredible without it, so I really don’t think it’s worth the cut in performance.
Raytracing and path tracing can look pretty nice and raytracing especially is worth turning on when it’s a game where it’s properly optimized. Unfortunately in many games, it really isn’t, which means the performance impact is too large compared to the visual benefits. So in many games, I don’t turn it on as I prefer the much higher framerate.
Upscaling technologies are pretty great. Especially in their current iterations, the image quality they can achieve from low resolutions is impressive. That said, they should be used as a way to get graphically advanced games working on low to mid-spec GPUs. Using them as a crutch to get unoptimized games working on high-end cards is not acceptable. Neither is pretending that upscaled and frame-generated performance is directly equivalent to native-res performance (looking at you, nVidia).
I personally don’t see much of a difference between RT and the established lighting algorithms, so that’s that.
Super resolution / upscaling is something I love, given that I play on a 4k TV. DLSS is black magic wizardry.
It’s not for me I don’t want be spending a thousand on a GPU and a hundred on a game that takes my whole SSD and refuses to run off a spinner
in some situations it’s allowing me to put off buying a video card for a while which I appreciate
I like upscaling when it’s done well (some older iterations of dlss and fsr were not great compared to the current versions). If I have to lower my resolution to get a good frame rate then the image will already look blurry. Using upscaling to hit my monitors native resolution will generally look better. I could care less about raytracing because I don’t have a GPU strong enough to handle it.
It’s OK.
DLSS is amazing, if it’s available in a game I’m playing I use it.
Ray tracing and path tracing are incredible and the industry needs to quickly cut ties with all hardware that can’t do it. It makes game development significantly quicker, it looks better, and it has genuine gameplay advancements by the very nature of it (like being able to see reflections/shadows of off-screen enemies).
Hmm I decided not to interact with the answers a lot as they are personal opinions but yours is very radical so I decided to step in. Please keep in mind that not all people have an ability to buy any kind of expensive setup. Ray tracing is great but it indeed has a severe performance impact and not all manufacturers have efficient hardware for it yet so an ethical and nondiscriminatory way of implementing forced ray tracing will not be possible any time soon. Just something to keep in mind when forming a strong opinion.
Graphics are, like it or not, the main thing the majority of people look for first when they go to buy a game, and raytracing is a ridiculously easy way to achieve that in comparison to the time and skill required to elevate traditional lighting to that same level of beauty. PS5 and XSX both support raytracing, and PC graphics cards that don’t are coming up on 10 years old at this point.
Any AAA developer is going to see those two facts, that it’s way cheaper and runs on most of the market’s hardware, and abandon development work on traditional lighting. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is RT-only, and it was a huge success.
DLSS is in a similar boat - it reduces the need to spend time and money on optimization.
Now, let me be clear, I lament both of these facts. I think raytracing looks gorgeous, and DLSS is usually a nice performance boost for minimal tradeoff, but I don’t think every game should look photorealistic, and some games just don’t look good with DLSS on. What I’m saying is they both make game development cheaper and faster for very little relative downside, so I wouldnt be surprised if all AAA games required raytracing within the next few years.
I do like upscaling, it lets me my poor 6650xt reach 75fps (my monitor refresh rate) on games where it can only get 60fps on native 1080p.
I don’t play those games that need upscaling to barely run ok. They aren’t getting my money, at least until they fix their shit.
It has it’s place but if a choice between that and raw raster within the same power envelope give me the latter every time
