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).
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.
Sorry but I just don’t care. Sometimes we need to just leave some people behind in order to move forward. Devs having to cater to people with 10 year old potato hardware is holding the industry back.
Yea that is kind of not ok.
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.