I like the way you're pro-RT stance highlights the negatives.
To me, the results look great and the performance runs fine on existing GPUs. That's a significant win, a great piece of tech, and a great early adoption of SDF which is far newer tech than raytracing (only 20 years old?).
ahhh, lol, not my intention, it was a lazy post so understandably people will assume things about my intentions here.
I'm not necessarily pro-RT because I think it's better. I just can't help but shake that feeling that we've been here before. Where the cost of quality per pixel is too high a price to pay, so instead we increase the resolution, texture detail etc. Every generation of next generation power, has been largely used towards moving the resolution up, or frame rate, or colour (those 16, 24, 32 bit shoot out back in the day).
HRT is an interesting topic of discussion because of precisely what it does, it amps up the load tremendously without burdening the developers in a restrictive way. It removes the concept of hacks, it removes all sorts of restrictions that hacks come with, and ultimately you're relying on the power of the hardware to crunch it through.
We talked a lot earlier in this thread about quality per pixel. A lot of people floated how great graphics would look if you could imagine 12TF of power put into a 1080p title. Well, i'm looking at it. It's Hybrid Ray Tracing.
The trouble I've had with this debate is that there is this assumption that non-RT methods could approximately generate the same results for significantly less performance hit. And that's where I wanted to shed the light onto the subject. That there are issues aside from performance that would limit whether or not a title could use a specific feature, or if it was necessary, the game would be designed around those limitations.
we often talk about why exclusives are generally 'better' looking games than AAA titles. That's because they only have 1 platform, they're fully funded, they can design the game however they want, around any limitations they want, and they won't be penalized for it. The idea that all these other non 1P companies could operate in a similar manner is unrealistic. 3P companies don't have that flexibility, if they want the game to do certain things, then you either don't have that feature, or you brute force it. Which, with the introduction of DXR, and DirectML it seems like the most direct way to get those high end graphics, on any platform, without impacting your game design, without the development baggage that comes with trying to hack your way through optimization.
But the stress of it goes back onto the hardware.
I dunno, we've been here before, like when the 4K consoles got announced. But no one bats an eye at the 4K topic anymore, it's pretty clear you shouldn't be going into next gen supporting only 1080p. But boy, did we have a large topic on 4Pro and Scorpio. We had all sorts of images and graphs saying if you don't have a certain screen size and sitting at a certain distance, you couldn't see the difference. We had people just straight up say they couldn't see the difference.
To them I say, make sure you're seeing 20/20 before you make that claim.
But with the HRT demos, we get similar response: "I'm not seeing a big difference"
But i'm sure, once you started playing HRT games all the time, you'd see a big difference jumping back. And this is like all things, people going down in resolution, people going down in frame rate, people going down in graphical quality.
I'm not entirely sure 'how' RT will be implemented. I just know that next gen can't be 4K and VR. We did that already. You can't sell CPU - look at how PS3 turned out.
