No, they are almost certainly not just clicking 'enable raytracing' and poof, good to go. Nothing in game development is ever that simple.
Value of Hardware Unboxed benchmarking *spawn
- Thread starter Phantom88
- Start date
Well, porting a game leads directly to sales opportunities. Not easy but there's an obvious revenue stream. Changing a lighting model which could require manual pass of all level/world lighting and art assets from the art team is a whole other can of warms with maybe less concrete sales benefits. You can add ultra settings that increase shadow resolution, texture filtering, draw distance etc that should present all of the assets int he game in the same fundamental way.
Flappy Pannus
Veteran
Considering the performance of the GR2 demo right now, I'd say 'just activating' something in UE4 is part of the problem with PC releases on that engine. It apparently requires more work.
D
Deleted member 2197
Guest
Will be interesting to see their FRS 3 review once now that they have access.
They sounded like they were all-in, so I wouldn't expect any fallbacks at all, at least for lighting. They will likely just have to sacrifice resolution.
4A Games on next-gen: "We are fully into ray tracing"
It's official. 4A Games are fully committed to ray tracing technology for its next big game and the implications are ex…
www.eurogamer.net
They test at 3 settings:
- Ultra RT (apparently the best Ray Traced experience in the game??)
- Ultra no RT
- Medium no RT
- He doesn't think frame generation is worth it (FSR3 reviews are going to be interesting)
- Because FG isn't worth it he concludes the only GPU's truly capable of running with RT enabled are the 4090, 4080 and maybe the 4070Ti.... yes this includes when using DLSS apparently as well
- We shouldn't care about RT anyway because in his opinion, high frame rate is more important than RT and 60fps isn't enough.
Flappy Pannus
Veteran
He said (I think it was a GPU review?) he basically only plays competitive online shooters and since frame generation wasn't applicable there and thus, no interest to him.
Circling back to me "why don't other outlets actually review the tech and report on issues like stuttering as DF does" and welp, there you go
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Not a bad take, I'm glad all review sites aren't just copy pasting each other. For some of us, framerate is definitely more important than RT when playing the game. Although I'd argue that only a 4090 is maybe worth it for RT (for me). DLSS/FSR/XeSS still aren't good enough. Frame gen is even worse.
Which does not mean that RT, frame gen or DLSS/FSR/XeSS isn't extremely beneficial for some or even most people. You know the world is large enough to support a variety of opinions on the worth or not worth of something.
Some people are perfectly fine with gaming at 30 FPS or 60 FPS. Some people are perfectly fine with additional artifacting in their game (either unnoticeable to them or the additional performance is worth it).
Regards,
SB
Which does not mean that RT, frame gen or DLSS/FSR/XeSS isn't extremely beneficial for some or even most people. You know the world is large enough to support a variety of opinions on the worth or not worth of something.
Some people are perfectly fine with gaming at 30 FPS or 60 FPS. Some people are perfectly fine with additional artifacting in their game (either unnoticeable to them or the additional performance is worth it).Regards,
SB
DegustatoR
Legend
Which should be a stance of a GPU reviewer, not his own personal preferences. Someone of our age may play I dunno Master of Orion 1 exclusively - does that make all new GPUs completely pointless and should this be a conclusion of every review such person would make?
Silent_Buddha
Legend
I have no problem with it, the vast majority of review sites already cater to opinions that have absolutely zero bearing on what I and some of my friends value in a video card. Hence they are almost worthless to us in the majority of cases. While Hardware Unboxed certainly isn't perfect (hint: no review site is), it serves us better than most other review sites as it more closes matches how we actually use our cards (both AMD and NV with most of us using NV cards).
I find it ludicrous that people can't seem to grasp that there are multiple ways to approach how a GPU is used and how and what features are valued.
Rather than me complaining that other sites offer useless benchmarks on DLSS and RT, I instead look at their non-DLSS and non-RT benchmarks (if they have any, some don't) as well as going to review sites that don't spend overly much time on them.
If people don't like Hardware Unboxed's reviews and opinions, then they obviously don't have to read or watch them. Easy peasy. Noone is forcing them to read or watch them.
It's like this indignation that how dare someone value something differently. It's honestly very strange that someone would feel that way rather than acknowledging that not everyone values the same things in the same way.
Regards,
SB
DegustatoR
Legend
I find it ludicrous that a reviewer can't grasp that the point of a review is to present an objective view on something - or be as close to it as possible.
People can have different views and opinions but a reviewer should look at a product from all sides at once to make a proper conclusion, not from his personal preferences.
Because in that case as I've said someone who exclusively play Doom from 1993 would just call all new PC h/w useless trash - if that's what you want to see in a review then you don't really get what a review should be.
SB has a valid point. People have the right to evaluate products using whatever criteria they consider to be important. But they need to be crystal clear on what those criteria are. HWUB isn't very good at doing that aside from some passing comments on Steve's personal preferences. Their written reviews for example don't state what type of gamer or what types of games their recommendations are targeting.
It's not an easy problem to solve because to give a truly objective opinion you would need to give a separate opinion for each game, sort of what [H]ardOCP tried to do back in the day. That's a ton of work though and doesn't scale to the number of games that HWUB tests with.
It's not an easy problem to solve because to give a truly objective opinion you would need to give a separate opinion for each game, sort of what [H]ardOCP tried to do back in the day. That's a ton of work though and doesn't scale to the number of games that HWUB tests with.
Svensk Viking
Regular
A review, whether it is for a graphics card, book or a film, always boil down to subjectivity. It's the reviewers take of the product they have gotten. A review can be very specific too, if someone says he's going to run 50 DX9 era games just to see if they all work as expected, and does exactly that, there's nothing wrong with the review itself, even if you as a reader wants to see only this year's Vulkan and DX12 releases.
If you want objective reviews, you should demand every outlet to present the relevant figures/graphs and nothing else.
That still leaves room for being subjective however, since the selection of games to the selection of settings also boil down to subjectivity.
This expectation that GPU reviews should be written as if they were litterature review articles will leave you disappointed in the majority of cases. The majority of GPU reviews posted on this site are targeted towards gamers, not professionals in the field, who typically also would be more interested in their specific use case rather than wasting time on tests not relevant to them.
Not really. All reviews are limited to some extent. Some might test Overdrive only or Steam deck only and their tests could very well still be enough to make a proper conclusion about performance (in those limited sets of scenarios).
HUB’s foundational criteria for judgement is frames per dollar. Features are a case by case situation.
You're obviously correct that there can be multiple preferences for graphics settings/framerate mix, and preferring high frame rate over core graphics is absolutely as valid as the opposite. I guess where your position confuses me a bit is that it seems internally inconsistent. i.e. you've stated your preference for high frame rate and image stability, and yet you eschew DLSS which in arguably the majority of cases actually improves image stability in it's quality mode while at the same time increasing frame rate!
You've also mentioned recently that you're very sensitive to rendering errors, particularly in shadows and lighting - to the point you have turned shadows off entirely in games until only a few years ago. Yet these are the very problems that Ray Tracing resolves, or at least significantly improves. And if you use the RT in combination with DLSS then you are potentially going to get an image with:
- More accurate lighting
- More accurate shadows
- Greater image stability (in many cases)
But which frames? They certainly have drawn lines in the sand with respect to IQ. If frames per dollar was the main thing they wouldn’t be benching at ultra settings. They would be criticizing ultra as wasteful the same way they criticized RT as wasteful. They would be pumped about upscaling since the vast majority of people would not see a difference. Their lines seem arbitrary.
They don’t support ultra settings and often make optimized settings videos for big titles. Ultra settings are just so ubiquitous throughout benchmarking it’s easy to settle on that as a standard approach. Every game has an ultra preset for consistency. They do support DLSS but you don't want to benchmark competing GPUs when one is outputting a completely inferior image. It has also been long established what uplift you can typically expect. Benchmarks are meant to show comparative performance. Outside of RT, graphic settings and upscaling don’t typically change that.
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