That is one thing that is enjoyable in Portal RTX from my perspective: things in reflections have visually the similar quality as things in primary view. GI, material responses, reflections in their own right... I cannot wait to see more games getting to that level.
Yes, we want it. But maybe it's too expensive to be worth it. Depends, ofc.
But to me this uber shader goal is not specific to RT, it's the final goal of material shading research in general. Disney tries to come up with some generalized material model, NV also has related research, everybody wants it.
But besides the complexity of the physics problem, technically we also need the transition to bindless rendering, so we no longer have old school 'one shader per texture per model', but a more efficient and flexible 'one general shader can access any texture it needs' approach. That's pretty common nowadays already. For ray tracing it seems the only way at all, if you care about performance.
Notice there is no visual compromise to expect, because the rasterizer would use the same system as well ideally. If we use a visibility buffer, we have the same problem here, because a tile of threads no longer will process the same materials either.
The legacy pipeline of many materials and shaders seems a bit outdated to me, or at least inefficient.
In case we really need many different materials (which sure is the norm, but we could easily reduce it to something like 10), we can still bin pixels to materials to get coherent shading. Iirc, UE5 does it, for example.
So i ask: Why isn't this the norm fro RT as well? We could bin reflection hitpoints to materials just the same way. And if we have so many hitpoints that this isn't practical (e.g. GI), then we could easily use a simplified and uniform material for everything without any visual compromise for those blurry cases, because material details do not show.
If nothing like this is implemented for Portal RTX, then questioning poor optimization, intended or not, is justified.
But i'm just
speculating here that this
eventually might be the reason profiler outputs look so bad.
I don't know, and i see no point in discussing 'Portal RTX was made to only barely run on new 40 series high end', etc.
The interesting question is: Could it run better, well enough also on less powerful HW?
This material shading issue really makes it hard to get an objective impression on RT performance, to me at least. But maybe i'm too naive assuming this should be no big problem at all.
