When you say noticeable do you define it as "I can notice this is an RT reflection" or as in "makes the visuals noticeably or significantly better?"
In my experience the impact is limited and even the implementation is quite limited in many games.
Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2022]
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In my experience the impact is limited and even the implementation is quite limited in many games.
davis.anthony
Veteran
It's when people on Twitter say the RT reflections in Spiderman aren't noticeable over the SSR and cube maps and I'm like.....
Do you notice yourself in a mirror?
From the video's I've seen (many of which are the DF one's) I'd say absolutely the second one.
For comparisons sake I'd say the difference between RT on and off on PC is generally bigger than the difference between current and last gen versions of cross gen console games excluding resolution/framerate (and in some cases including those too).
Depends. Are we a vampire?
davis.anthony
Veteran
Depends. Are we a vampire who's been bitten by a zombie?
The difference RT makes is very variable, I think that is why some people think it makes a huge difference and some people have an entirely different opinion.
Even in a strong showcasing for RT like Cyberpunk. Some parts of the map demonstrate a very slight difference, while in some parts the difference is more noticeable. And in some specific indoor scenes, there's a generational leap.
But as most people will just drive around in Night City and play the game without actually noticing SSR and SSAO artifacts, they will not find much differences. What they are more likely to notice is the huge frame drop from enabling RT.
RT is great for enthusiasts like us but for the vast majority of gamers, I don't think its important right now. That will change when engines like Snowdrop use HW-RT as a standard though.
Even in a strong showcasing for RT like Cyberpunk. Some parts of the map demonstrate a very slight difference, while in some parts the difference is more noticeable. And in some specific indoor scenes, there's a generational leap.
But as most people will just drive around in Night City and play the game without actually noticing SSR and SSAO artifacts, they will not find much differences. What they are more likely to notice is the huge frame drop from enabling RT.
RT is great for enthusiasts like us but for the vast majority of gamers, I don't think its important right now. That will change when engines like Snowdrop use HW-RT as a standard though.
Evolutionary changes. It takes time. Hard to appreciate what good food is if all you’ve been eating is fast food.
But if you’re used to good food, you’d be grossed out by fast food. We come from a place of fake setup lighting.
We are used to the game to cue to us what to look at through the lens of fake lighting.
There are barely reflections in games, we haven’t be trained to look for them in games, but they are everywhere in real life. Over time as games get more thorough with RT based lighting solutions, you won’t want to go back, you’ll realize how fake everything was.
I am a vampire. My RT reflections are off.
humbertklyka
Newcomer
The main issue I see with regards to the reflections is that they look very artificial. Real glass panes are warped and dirty, so the reflections are quite uneven, but from screenshots and videos, the reflections seems to be very idealized in the implementation. Hence feeling a bit like the lens flares or vaseline glow of yore.
I am sure it will get better in time, but like all those newfangled concept it will take years before a balanced implementation is realised.
I am sure it will get better in time, but like all those newfangled concept it will take years before a balanced implementation is realised.
Yeah I am gaming on console. To be honest there are some parts that look amazing. But its not like they are in your face all the time, or in a lot of places. Most of the time they are limited to some spots.
Sometimes those RT reflections might be very low resolution too.
For example I was playing Doom Eternal with RT on PS5 and I wasnt sure what I was looking at. The game had a huge amount of reflections but most surfaces didnt use RT.
My character had a reflection only in some surfaces (which btw was quite funny too because my first person hands didnt correspond with my reflection's pose) and those surfaces were giving me a weird uncanny valley feel. I was seeing something that was better and something that wasn't. One part of my brain said it looks more natural but at the same time those reflections were lower resolution compared to the other non RT reflections.
I tested my gun's reflections (which btw were awesome) against environment elements that were animated but didnt show up in my gun. So I suppose they were high quality cube maps. But the impression they gave was just as good as an RT solution.
I am not sure if the PC version applies RT globally in every material in high quality. But the console version had it applied in limited places. One reflective surface showed my avatar, another didnt. Comparing the non RT and the RT modes just didnt give that much punch in the visuals.
Rachet and Clank had some really brilliant RT reflections in some places, but most areas were comprised mostly out of high roughness materials.
R&C was in many ways impressive from a technical stand point where it was applied, but I am not 100% about the overall impression. For example, RT reflections in Rachet's eyes is not something I can experience. But I must say I loved those reflections on his ship's cockpit glass.
Unless a surface has very low roughness the difference between cube maps and RT isnt much pronounced. Surfaces that combine cube maps and SSRs give a similar illusion on a horizontal plane (such as a floor). RT is more noticeable in vertically placed objects. And it is usually reserved for windows and mirrors. Which are not always high resolution. Surfaces that have middle roughness might just as well look great with high quality cube maps.
I ve seen GT7's RT and non-RT modes in replays and car demos compared to their cube map counterparts and it just doesnt do much of a difference.
Overall my experience with RT its as if it takes a lot more out of performance and image quality than the benefits it can provide because it is selectively applied which gives an uncanny valley feel.
Because if we think what RT really is, it is not just a reflection. In real life everything emits light and shadow on every object. When one aspect uses RT and another uses another solution, they dont fully match and it creates confusion. When RT is sometimes running at a lower resolution than a previous solution it also produces a mixed feeling. You are not sure if you like it or not. It ticks a box of existing, but not of impressing.
For me RT will be ready when everything in an environment will be globally affected and the hardware has the juice to run it at good speeds and good resolution.
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I think some response to Nesh are unfair. In side-by-side comparison RT on/off, the difference is generally subtle in a lot of cases. So there's definitely a point to saying the impact is 'limited'. Contrast screen space reflections to no reflections whatsoever - the level of difference substantial. Likewise, SSAO versus none whatsoever - the difference is night and day. As tech improves, the level of gain diminishes to a degree where until you have a massive leap, the delta is hard to distinguish. Depending on what one's own experience of RT is (have you a monster GPU or not), the amount of impact will vary.
I agreed with Iroboto that eventually we might grow accustomed to high quality such that going back is impossible. If you play with screen space reflections and aren't noticing them in game, it won't be until you've experienced real reflections that the glitches will become more apparent.
Also, I always think of good audio in these cases. Good audio is good when you don't notice it. Smeary lensflare sucks. It's when it's subtle and you don't notice it that it becomes good and contributes in a sibconscious way. Eventually amazing RT will make things look super real and we'll just love the visuals. At the present it's not there and we just have side-by-side comparisons of similar looking (same sort of information, varying degrees of accuracy) approximations, the impact of which varies from titles to title. But there aren't (m)any games at the moment where 'RT on' makes a night-and-day difference in console-land to the general aesthetic.
I agreed with Iroboto that eventually we might grow accustomed to high quality such that going back is impossible. If you play with screen space reflections and aren't noticing them in game, it won't be until you've experienced real reflections that the glitches will become more apparent.
Also, I always think of good audio in these cases. Good audio is good when you don't notice it. Smeary lensflare sucks. It's when it's subtle and you don't notice it that it becomes good and contributes in a sibconscious way. Eventually amazing RT will make things look super real and we'll just love the visuals. At the present it's not there and we just have side-by-side comparisons of similar looking (same sort of information, varying degrees of accuracy) approximations, the impact of which varies from titles to title. But there aren't (m)any games at the moment where 'RT on' makes a night-and-day difference in console-land to the general aesthetic.
It’s a testament to how effective developers have been in drawing players eyes away from what’s weak in an image onto what is strong.
Most games purposefully try to put your attention anywhere but the lighting, and the only time people like lighting is when it’s cinematic lighting, which is fake because it’s meant to be artistic, they want you to see something from certain angles that technically light cannot get to. This is what people enjoy today.
Playing the game however is different, players have full agency over the camera, and suddenly lighting falls apart, it’s just that most people won’t notice it because they’ve been trained to look elsewhere.
There was an interesting article I once read that gamers turned out to be terrible IED detectors and that soldiers who spent more time playing cod etc were More likely to step on a IED in Afghanistan than those that didn’t play at all. That video game training, is quite subconscious.
Most games purposefully try to put your attention anywhere but the lighting, and the only time people like lighting is when it’s cinematic lighting, which is fake because it’s meant to be artistic, they want you to see something from certain angles that technically light cannot get to. This is what people enjoy today.
Playing the game however is different, players have full agency over the camera, and suddenly lighting falls apart, it’s just that most people won’t notice it because they’ve been trained to look elsewhere.
There was an interesting article I once read that gamers turned out to be terrible IED detectors and that soldiers who spent more time playing cod etc were More likely to step on a IED in Afghanistan than those that didn’t play at all. That video game training, is quite subconscious.
imho, reflections are just a very small part of what raytracing can do. Heck, you can even have more exaggerated reflections using SSR than with raytracing. Look at the famous Amsterdam scene in CoD Modern Warfare 2, which has radioactive reflections. 
-most people dislike exaggerated SSR reflections, and blame them on being raytraced, which they aren't-.
Where raytracing excels is in the entire lighting of the scene. That's where the difference is night and day. With good RT the lighting looks logical. You watch a scene and in your brain it seems to look like it would look in real life to you. When I first saw RT in motion, that was the difference I found, and had never seen something similar in a game.
-most people dislike exaggerated SSR reflections, and blame them on being raytraced, which they aren't-.Where raytracing excels is in the entire lighting of the scene. That's where the difference is night and day. With good RT the lighting looks logical. You watch a scene and in your brain it seems to look like it would look in real life to you. When I first saw RT in motion, that was the difference I found, and had never seen something similar in a game.
The most noticeable RT effect is global illumination. It makes everything look better. However the subtle and accurate lighting that GI brings is wasted on low quality models and textures.
I don’t understand why assets in games are still so shitty given DX12, mainstream 16 thread CPUs and the ridiculous triangle processing capabilities of modern GPUs.
I don’t understand why assets in games are still so shitty given DX12, mainstream 16 thread CPUs and the ridiculous triangle processing capabilities of modern GPUs.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
People should also keep in mind that different things are more or less noticeable to different people. For example, for me, the change from 30 FPS to 60 FPS or 60 FPS to 120 FPS is a far and away significantly more visible and affects the IQ of a game more-so than the vast majority of RT implementations in games.
That said, to say RT isn't noticeable to me would be an untruth. But if the cost of enabling RT in game is that the game in motion becomes worse due to the impact on framerate then it becomes a situation where I can enable one thing to make the game look better but at the same time it's also making the game look worse.
And then there's the various temporal upsampling techniques which can help with the performance issue but then introduce (to me) extremely annoying rendering artifacts that my visual system just cannot ignore. So again, it's adding one thing to address something but in the process introduces other less desirable things.
For others, motion resolution and clarity are far less important compared to static resolution or additional effects. In such cases those people see perceive the game in a different way from how I perceive it.
It helps if people can just accept that everyone (or at least most people) eventually wants RT, everyone eventually wants high framerates that are consistent (or at least most people), everyone eventually wants HDR ... etc. etc. But each individual person has to justify how valuable each individual thing is when balanced against another individual thing.
And thus we end up with people saying 30 FPS is good enough or 30 FPS is horse dookey or current implementations of RT is incredibly impactful or current implementations of RT is minimally impactful ... etc. etc.
No-one is wrong, but I think people fail to understand that not everyone perceives games the same way and thus everyone has a different opinion on just about everything.
Regards,
SB
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When I say noticeable, I mean an implementation that really makes a big difference. It is a mixed back currently, with some reflections making more impact than others, with limited or mixed implementations and mixed results.People should also keep in mind that different things are more or less noticeable to different people. For example the change from 30 FPS to 60 FPS or 60 FPS to 120 FPS is a far and away significantly more visible and affects the IQ of a game more-so than the vast majority of RT implementations in games.
That said, to say RT isn't noticeable to me would be an untruth. But if the cost of enabling RT in game is that the game in motion becomes worse due to the impact on framerate then it becomes a situation where I can enable one thing to make the game look better but at the same time it's also making the game look worse.
And then there's the various temporal upsampling techniques which can help with the performance issue but then introduce (to me) extremely annoying rendering artifacts that my visual system just cannot ignore. So again, it's adding one thing to address something but in the process introduces other less desirable things.
For others, motion resolution and clarity are far less important compared to static resolution or additional effects. In such cases those people see perceive the game in a different way from how I perceive it.
It helps if people can just accept that everyone (or at least most people) eventually wants RT, everyone eventually wants high framerates that are consistent (or at least most people), everyone eventually wants HDR ... etc. etc. But each individual person has to justify how valuable each individual thing is when balanced against another individual thing.
And thus we end up with people saying 30 FPS is good enough or 30 FPS is horse dookey or current implementations of RT is incredibly impactful or current implementations of RT is minimally impactful ... etc. etc.
No-one is wrong, but I think people fail to understand that not everyone perceives games the same way and thus everyone has a different opinion on just about everything.
Regards,
SB
Some games do it better than others and with most games having just ok results.
I m with @trinibwoy and @Cyan on this. The implementation most of the time is not taking into account the entirety of lighting. It is selective.
Sometimes an artistic placement of some lighting effects might give a more powerful impact than having RT applied because there might be some lighting set ups that need more careful tweeking
@Dampf reminded me of some Cyberpunk 2077 image comparisons I ve seen in open spaces. Some worked in favor or RT, some I wasnt sure if I prefered the RT version or the other.
I think people forget graphics is an equilibrium between asset quality(number of polygon, texture quality), lighting quality(GI, shadows, reflections) and material shading quality(PBR). Like @JoeJ told in another thread, raytracing is a visibility algorithm to determine the path of light nothing more.
People forget that PBR and raytracing arrive at the same time in most movie in offline rendering. On Videogames PBR and RT arrive at different moment.
www.pbr-book.org
A good example is FF7 remake cutscene using PBR against FF7 Advent children with micropolygon and raytracing but very poor material shading quality.
FF7 Advent children off screen reflection in the metal ball and the eye of the character
poor shading material and off screen reflection in the glasses
FF7 remake
I think FF7 remake looks better because it have enough polygons and good normal map quality and a much better materials even if the lighting is fake and some hack. And micro polygons and RT can't save poor materials for FF7 Advent Children. For sure if you take the PS1 version and add PBR and RT it will not looks good at all.
People forget that PBR and raytracing arrive at the same time in most movie in offline rendering. On Videogames PBR and RT arrive at different moment.
A Brief History of Physically Based Rendering
www.pbr-book.org
A good example is FF7 remake cutscene using PBR against FF7 Advent children with micropolygon and raytracing but very poor material shading quality.
FF7 Advent children off screen reflection in the metal ball and the eye of the character
poor shading material and off screen reflection in the glasses
FF7 remake
I think FF7 remake looks better because it have enough polygons and good normal map quality and a much better materials even if the lighting is fake and some hack. And micro polygons and RT can't save poor materials for FF7 Advent Children. For sure if you take the PS1 version and add PBR and RT it will not looks good at all.
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