Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2022]
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Flappy Pannus
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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.
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The cost is so highly variable as well, both literally in terms of $, and in frame rate. A simple question of 'Is it noticeable' really doesn't fully address the core arguments as to why more people are not full-on advocates for RT at this point, as it doesn't really address these drawbacks. If the 4090 was a mainstream card this perspective would be hard to argue against, everyone would just turn it on. But that's an extremely small niche.
This performance cost determines this significant variability in perceived impact, as developers have to factor what hardware most people can actually afford when architecting their game and the fidelity of whatever level of RT they include, if they do. As @Nesh said, it's impact can vary wildly even within a single game on a scene-by-scene basis. Reconstruction tech, while certainly being a boon in many ways with balancing image quality/performance, can also impact this disproportionally compared to other elements in a scene by further reducing the resolution of RT effects (something which I hoped was going to be addressed with DLSS3 before it was announced).
I think everyone here agrees that the development cost of handcrafting prebaked lighting and laying on raster effect after raster effect is prohibitive, and getting worse. So much better use of time and budget could be spent focusing on animation, AI and level design. A fully ray traced development environment is obviously ideal. But reading threads like these on here, I get the impression some here feel that this future is being 'held back' by those who are just not enthusiastic about RT enough, like they're just ignorant and need to be educated, rather than consumers who are just making rational choices based on what they can see with every frame vs. what they can see in some. If only they would open their eyes, we would all have fully ray-traced lighting and reflections in every game now.
The reason RT is not more widely regarded as essential is due to one thing - the cost of slowing process node improvements. It's a highly variable choice in most games because its inclusion has a significant performance penalty, not just because Joe Q Public just doesn't appreciate the 'realness' of a proper roughness reflection cutoff. This was my concern when I saw the arguments being made when it was first announced, "Only matter of time, just like hardware T&L" - but we're in a very different time right now vs the breakneck pace of years past when we would get +50% performance uplift every gen at the same price.
I can't recall the particular Arc interview where he said this, but when doing his promotional tour, even Intel's Tom Peterson said that we may be stuck with hybrid rendering for 'quite a long time' (paraphrased) due to the cost of RT. Intel has certainly invested a good deal of expertise in this area and even their spokeperson is skeptical that we'll be moving to a full-RT world in the foreseeable future. As such, we're going to be having these arguments for a long time I suspect.
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this is an example of a game changer, Raytracing -path traced- on Quake 2 RTX. It looks like a totally different game, I couldn't believe my eyes. The light lits the scene how it should in real life. Very taxing, 4K 60fps with path tracing is not doable on my GPU, but stable 60fps is achievable with upscaling. The game is a raytracing showcase, it's crazy how simple lighting details we miss in videogames until you play this game.
Flappy Pannus
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It's not the best RT ever sure so that's fair, but it definitely is one of the worst screen space reflection implementations. RT is working wonders here in large part simply because it gets that shit off the screen. When it first came out most people assumed there was something inherently broken about the implementation.
You would of course not have that usual problem of reflections disappearing when not in screen space with RT, that effects every game with SSR. But the particularly bizarre level of noise and breakup with RE2's SSR is unique to that game.
It of course looks substantially better than the original, no question - huge impact in that regard.
Does it look comparable to modern games because of it? I'd argue...no. It looks like what it is - a very, very old game with excellent reflections and lighting.
I just can't classify this as 'game changing' personally. I played these games at 320x200 on launch on my PC at the time, and through updates including a Rendition Verite, Voodoo, AMD, Nvidia, so I definitely get the nostalgia aspect and I can certainly appreciate the massive leap in tech, I have the memory of what they used to look like vs now. When I'm playing them though, it's very clear what's occurring - a new lighting engine, but that's it - everything else about the game reminds me exactly of the era it came from. I have a significantly more heightened sense of wonder when running around modern, purely rasterized open worlds at high resolutions and framerates as opposed to this accurately lit, but very poorly animated, blocky world.
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now an example of exaggerated Screen Space Reflections, where people goes "ooooh this is what Raytracing does to videogames". Meh. I am not inventing this, that's what some colleagues of mine said when they saw the scene. 
Irony is that CoD Modern Warfare 2 doesn't have RT, and that's how much damage SSR does to videogames because when many gamers see exaggerated reflections they go "Raytracing!". Sigh.
Irony is that CoD Modern Warfare 2 doesn't have RT, and that's how much damage SSR does to videogames because when many gamers see exaggerated reflections they go "Raytracing!". Sigh.Flappy Pannus
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now an example of exaggerated Screen Space Reflections, where people goes "ooooh this is what Raytracing does to videogames". Meh. I am not inventing this, that's what some colleagues of mine said when they saw the scene.
Wait, you think people mistaking SSR for raytracing is indicative of the damage SSR has caused?
If anything that's indicative of how most people experience RT's inclusion due to performance budgets, but also what effect artistry has on popular perception of graphics quality. SSR isn't 'damaging' anything here, it's helping to present a highly imperfect effect at an excellent framerate on currently affordable hardware.
It's bizarre to me to actually lament a twitter thread extolling wonder about a game's presentation simply because these poor fools can't appreciate proper RT reflections. Like, what?
davis.anthony
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You should try the Quake 1 RT mod...looks even better imo.
Raytracing reflections work on every surface. In Wolfenstein you have metal door knobs and the character gets reflected. There is no limitations with raytracing in regards of reflections.
One of the best examples is "Deliver us the Moon". A three year old game and Raytracing is transforming the whole experience. Always seeing the character in windows gives the illusion to actually play a person and not some kind of ghost or vampire. Just two examples from the game:
Imgsli
imgsli.com
Imgsli
imgsli.com
Playing god of war -- really great looking game, but two things about the visual presentation really bother me:
1- Really obvious ssr issues. There are tons of reflectives (big lakes, puddles, polished floors) and all have the "white at the edges of the screen" artifact when you turn the camera. This normally isn't a huge issue in games but here its extremely eye catching and happens like, 80% of the runtime in effected areas.
2- Pet peeve of mine -- games where a large portion of the gameplay is climbing over ledges with temporal/checkerboard image reconstruction. You're constantly climbing up and over ledges in this game, and it's constantly causing a smeary wipe as it reveals low res un-reconstructed pixels.
I wish these could be addressed with in the quality mode on ps5, rather than just unnecessarily higher resolution -- the performance mode is already so crisp!
1- Really obvious ssr issues. There are tons of reflectives (big lakes, puddles, polished floors) and all have the "white at the edges of the screen" artifact when you turn the camera. This normally isn't a huge issue in games but here its extremely eye catching and happens like, 80% of the runtime in effected areas.
2- Pet peeve of mine -- games where a large portion of the gameplay is climbing over ledges with temporal/checkerboard image reconstruction. You're constantly climbing up and over ledges in this game, and it's constantly causing a smeary wipe as it reveals low res un-reconstructed pixels.
I wish these could be addressed with in the quality mode on ps5, rather than just unnecessarily higher resolution -- the performance mode is already so crisp!
I think what we need to put an end to these "RT is barely noticeable" arguments is just a dedicated thread with nothing but comparison screenshots and videos of quality RT implementations (on vs off) where the difference is obvious - we have (or had?) one for performance so why not one for visual impact?
I'll happily admit that it's not always obvious but there are plenty of instances where the difference is very obvious - much more so than what many games offer between low and ultra settings for example. It's time we gathered those examples in a single place as a quick and easy response to these comments rather than the constant back and forth which happens every time someone says something like RT barely makes a difference.
Note this would be different from whether it's worth it from a performance perspective. That's a different argument.
Here's a few shots I came across from a user in this Reddit thread:
https://imgsli.com/MTI2ODQ5/0/1
https://imgsli.com/MTI2ODQ5/2/3
https://imgsli.com/MTI2ODQ5/4/5
https://imgsli.com/MTI2ODQ5/6/7
https://imgsli.com/MTI2ODQ5/8/9
https://imgsli.com/MTI2ODQ5/10/11
https://imgsli.com/MTI2ODQ5/12/13
https://imgsli.com/MTI2ODQ5/14/15
https://imgsli.com/MTI2ODQ5/16/17
https://imgsli.com/MTI2ODQ5/18/19
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Particularly videos. A big source of these arguments is the sub-argument: "sure it's different, but is it better?" This is hard to prove with screenshots and even kinda hard to prove with short videos. Actually playing games with RT on makes the stability, correctness, and completeness of the effects very obvious. I don't think "is rt noticable" arguments should even be taken seriously, people just need to go out and play some games to get their answer.
Edit: Really, what we need is a generation of consoles that can comfortably run medium-quality raytracing, so we can start getting games that always have the feature on as a core part of their functionality. Metro is a good (but limited) example of this. Once it sets in as normal people will stop toggling it on for 5 minutes, deciding it doesnt matter, and going back to running their two gen old graphics at 120fps 8k.
Come on man. Look at those first 6 screenshots and then tell me that again with a straight face. I'll grant the last 4 are more subtle but still show a significant difference in overall visual quality.
I think one issue with RT is that developers are creating scenes with natural lighting. When I say "natural" I mean how lighting looks in reality. Like I said before there is a reason why films do not make a lot of use of natural lighting in scenes. Because natural lighting tends to be mundane while cinematic lighting can enhance, add depth and create mood. Staging lights in scenes is going to have to be more than setting at night or in the rain.
it doesn't have to be necessarily, but how they design lighting will need to change significantly more than just dropping lighting wherever they want.
I think this is partly true but partly a misdiagnosis -- rt lighting needs to be staged differently, yes, and is rarely perfectly staged, but that's because the games also support non-rt modes and the content has to work for both. As more RT only games come out this will become a non issue.
I agree with you.
Currently, I think in game development, non-RT scenes use RT scenes for reference so you will never see anything beyond subtle differences.
In a sense the utility of RT and what it adds to gaming isn't really felt by gamers because the benefits it provides is felt even when the feature is turned off. I'd bet the difference would be really noticeable if non-RT lightning was just devs eyeballing it.
What is sad is that when we get wide use of better staged scenes in a game where RT can really shine but prebaking falls apart due development costs, gamers won't really know because non-RT will be missing or only available on portable wears. Where the blame will be placed on the overall performance deficiency of the mobile hardware.
here you can see how Screen Space Reflections are more exaggerated and pronounced than actual RT reflections.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider only features RT shadows, for instance, and reflections are handled by SSR. It's the only weak point of the game, which imho is a master piece otherwise. RT shadows are costly in the game, although they aren't only more accurate, it's just that even regular shadows on Ultra can't compare quality wise with raytraced ones.
Quake 2 RTX does deserve a try even if just for the lighting. Still, now with technologies such as DLSS and XeSS where some games look virtually jaggy-less like animated movies, it's tough to look at certain older games even if you are a nostalgic person. Games look better nowadays, and are arguably better nowadays, maybe with the exception of those where gameplay is everything and technical details are not as important -Heroes of Might & Magic II and 3 and Age of Empires, and the likes-.
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