Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2025]

[pcchen]

I'm not sure I fully agree with John's argument about UC4 and static environments, especially as they are inserting clips of a jeep plowing through dozens of movable physics objects while he's explaining it. Dynamic environments and objects don't need RT. RT just allows you to have movable objects with closer to baked lighting quality.

There are games today and in the past that have quite a bit of interactivity without RT. Astro Bot and TOTK are two modern examples. TOTK even has a crude system for dynamic diffuse GI and reflections on very low-end hardware. Fortnite is maybe the best example of what he's saying, and it's dynamicism is likely why Epic moved in the direction of Luman. But games like Fortnite are the exception.

Imo, I think the reason people are unimpressed is because realtime RT lighting brings with it heavy processing requirements, noise, and low resolutions on common hardware, all for marginal visual gains if you already had good baked lighting. Plus, many games have no real increase in interactivity. (Silent Hill 2 Remake comes to mind) Basically, many games are filled with new artifacts that weren't there before, and many people often couldn't see the artifacts in the old rasterized way in the first place; especially if they are comparing the best rasterized examples from the past.

Of course RT is the future, and has been the future since programmable shading came out in 2000, but perhaps it's been pushed too hard when most people really don't have the raw GPU power to make it look good yet. Moore's Law slowing to a crawl just makes that worse.

Isn't that his point entirely? When you have some restrictions, it's possible to make some impressive visual effects. The point of RT is to remove more of these restrictions, however it'd cost more.
For example, I still remember seeing the first Little Big Planet game. It's lighting is so good it almost feels pre-render quality. However, the restriction is that it's a semi-2D game (the camera can't move much more the fixed angle). Many tricks were applied to make it looks very good, with the condition that the camera can't move much.

Saying that RT has been "pushed too hard" is a bit like saying "3D gaming was pushed too hard" in the era of Virtual Fighter. RT hardware was out for 6 years. It's about time people should do something with it.

 

[trinibwoy]

Imo, I think the reason people are unimpressed is because realtime RT lighting brings with it heavy processing requirements, noise, and low resolutions on common hardware, all for marginal visual gains if you already had good baked lighting. Plus, many games have no real increase in interactivity.

Good baked lighting requires you to design your game around static environments so it’s a self fulfilling prophecy. Real time lighting opens up more possibilities in game design. Sure games that are inherently static don’t benefit from RT but that’s not really the point.