What Control did you play? Without Raytracing there is a ton of graphical effects missing - beginning of reflections everywhere, to transparent reflections, much better AO, contact shadows for everything and indirect diffuse lighting. These are all "new" features. Otherwise what "new" features is UE5 bringing to the market? More geometry and better GI is not really new, too...
Seems very subjective then.
To me, the RT extras of Control are nice but still subtle. No reason to upgrade, speaking as a gamer. (This applies to all RT games. Exudus cinvinces me the very most.)
But the UE5 demo blew me away. The most impressive upgrade i have seen since Doom 3. It is something new, and i would not have expected this is possible. Speaking of detail, not lighting.
But tbh, i have serious concerns about UE5 being practical too, after running the Matrix demo on my PC.
I'm just the extreme opposite from many of you here: I expect that parctical HW power might even go down, because people get tired about high costs and huge boxes. Switch, Steam Box, Series-S. This represents current gaming interests much better than bleeding edge GPUs which require a 1200W PSU and a bigger case as well, i assume.
Currently, Arc feels liek a saviour, keeping our PC platform afloat as is for some time. But i still think it will change towards APU over dGPU. I think ithis progress is unavoidable, and it was not easy for me to accept this. I'm an gfx enthusiast too.
When Absolute Biginner told us first about Series-S here, my first thought was: Meh - another weak console to hold us back. Please don't build this.
But i quickly realized it is a good idea within few days. Affordable, good enough, easy entry, sustained business.
So i befriended the idea that scaling down is more important than scaling up.
And it turned out right, because Series-S was always available at good price, even at peak of covid and mining crisis, afaict.
Once you arrive at this mindset, latest NV presentation of 4090 feels like a treat, putting this reasonable low power future in danger. Unaffordable bleeding edge tech is sold in the same segment as mainstream, lifting peoples expectations to unreachable levels, which will result in increasing dissatisfaction and envy across gaming. In a time of recession and growing critique / disrespect about games, that's the last thing we need. GPU makers NV - and probably AMD as well - lost their mind and work against us. That's my impression, and it won't change until they get down to our power limited planet earth again.
Maybe they offer a reasonable midrange or even entry level next year, now after Intel proofing that's still possible. Late if so, and i doubt it, but still.
Maybe my worries are exaggerated, it wont be as bad as i think, and so i should lower my temper.
But maybe you should lower your expectations on offline CGI at realtime as well.
To settle the issue, i would propose some things:
HW vendors should differentiate mainstream and enthusiast products. Differnt names, and making clear the latter is more reasonable for content reotars than gamers. Launching mainstream first would be nice.
Journalists should do the same. A 2000$ GPU is not gaming HW, and this should be made clear very frequently. Don't present this as 'must have' or 'best in gaming class'. Associate to your audience, not to those sending you review samples.
In an ideal world, we would not need such borders, but our world isn't ideal. And confusion, distraction and misinformation is an increasing issue.
It's a meme to normal people. RT may be the future, but this is not.
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