So am I the only one here who
looks at this video and thinks that, on about 75% of the examples
@Dictator shows to highlight the benefits of RT-ON, the emperor is kind of missing his pants and using polkadot underwear?
Granted, there are scenes where the visual impact is very large, like the water reflecting the city and that car interior with the black guy with a gold metal arm. But a handful of scenes like those don't turn the game into
OMG next-genz material.
Plus, in some cases I wonder if we can really say for sure that it's the RT version that is very good or that specific implementation in normal rasterization just came out poorly. I've seen more than one report claiming that asset and scene quality is rather inconsistent throughout the game, which seems to be a byproduct of having different teams producing different sections of the game.
Within the majority of the scenes
@Dictator shows there is indeed a discernible difference in lighting and/or shadow fidelity, but to me it seems to be more of an academic exercise than an obvious difference in immersion.
And I think this is especially obvious in CP77 where the general NPC quality seems to be pretty mediocre.
Unnamed NPC skin and clothes textures/shaders/geometry seem to be super bland throughout the game, so I wonder if spending more GPU resources on those would have been a better option for immersion than enabling RT.
To make an example of my point, in this scene
@Dictator is commenting on the fidelity of the reflection in the ceiling:
But then I wonder if anyone will think "
wow, this makes it so much more immersive" when the NPCs look like.. well, this:
And it's not just the NPCs' visual fidelity that seem lacking in this game. Watching the game in motion shows how NPCs always seem to move in straight lines, and they seemingly just change gait direction by completely and perfectly rotating their body which is really immersion breaking IMO (and physically impossible).
In this PoV, I get why some people claim that RDR2 looks better at times. The NPCs not only look much better (they look dirty, sweaty, hairy, there's a higher range of skin tones, etc.) but their movement seems to be a lot more organic than the NPCs in CP77. They either did more / better mocap work for NPCs or their animators did a better job. I think the same goes for NPC movement in Ubisoft games like the latest Watchdogs and Assassin's Creed.
Another thing I wonder about CP77 is how many resources they dedicated to enabling RT (or rather
nvidia-only RTX because it's on a whitelist so far) on the PC on day one, and whether these should have been dedicated to the consoles instead.
On one side we have the PC version with all these bells and whistles that serve a small fraction of their PC market (which by itself is a smaller fraction of the total sales compared to consoles). On the other side we have the game running on the consoles so badly that it's being pulled from digital and physical stores, mass refunds everywhere and the publisher on the verge of getting a class-action suit from their investors for deceptive communication.
Nvidia had better been responsible for pushing 99.9% of the engineering efforts to implement RTX in this game, or making this available on release day instead of focusing on the consoles would just be another sign of terrible management.
Cyberpunk 2077 does everything, GI, shadows and reflections. MM is weaksauce RT compared to it.
Perhaps Miles Morales' implementation was just properly studied for maximizing performance-cost / visual-benefit on a platform that is probably around 5 million large already, whereas CP77 may be kind of brute-forcing RT with minimal visual impact after a certain threshold, which then doubles as a marketing campaign for only the higher-end range of the graphics cards from one specific IHV.
In that logic, MM's RT may be
weaksauce in terms of computational demands, but CP77's is
weaksauce in terms of resource optimization.
On the other hand, I really like that
@Dictator made this video where he identifies which RT effects in CP77 are the most effective in the visual upgrades they provide. To me, it's the most useful RT-related CP77 video I've seen so far.
Thank Alex!