Still, doesn't look anywhere as good as the top tier titles of this gen.
Likely a matter of personal preference and artstyle. I have seen scenes that look pretty close to regular games.
I think the main limitation they have is missing cube maps so no PBR. But this is no tech limitation. Users generating the content probably have no fun placing probes manually.
But it has some interesting features neither rasterization nor current RT can offer:
High frequency diffuse geometry
'Proper' DOF and motion blur (although i have not seen how the noise looks on the real game not YT)
It also supports huge worlds and rapid content generation (but the latter could be used for polys too).
I should have mentioned it earlier - it's really the thing i talk about: No fixed function but same performance than rasterization although more flexibility, and the creative development process going beyond restrictions. According to the paper a trail of failures - that's the spirit!
I'm not sure if I'm remembering correctly, but I'm pretty sure claybook performance is not affected by the number of edits made to the world sdf. I don't know the correct term. I'm assuming Dreams would be the same, if theys hat's true, then is it likely we'll see a larger ray-marched sdf game, something like a liner third-person title? Is the issue mainly conetent creatiin like modelling and animation? Or are there missing pieces, like high-frequency texturing and materials?
Dreams uses SDF only as a intermediate data structure for editing. The result is converted to point clouds before rendering, it is a splatting approach.
On PC still not possible efficiently because 64 bit atomics to framebuffer are not exposed. (UE4 dev has requested for this recently - maybe things have changed.) Would be super interesting for foliage but also distant landscape.
Both SDF (sphere tracing) and splatting performance is affected by scene complexity. SDF (like RT) suffers from diffuse geometry, and splatting has the overdraw problem (like rasterization).
high-frequency texturing and materials?
In Dreams they solve the grainy output with regular TAA. According to the (outdated) paper it's not perfect and requires more work.
This depends a lot on what you prefer. There are two kinds of people:
Those that want smooth images and dislike high frequencies (like me - i reduce game resolution to 1080p because the image quality becomes better due to smoothing, and nowadays TAA is so good it causes no downscale artifacts)
Those that want crispy and sharp images, 4K screens and textures. (they never agree that CG is usually much too sharp)
I assume the first kind likes splatting more than the latter maybe.
With RTX point clouds maybe become very inefficient because of the 'custom mini acceleration structure embedded in BVH boxes' problem. Would be interesting to know... Maybe they add a point primitive?