Value of Hardware Unboxed benchmarking

[DegustatoR]

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora? Star Wars Outlaws? Black Myth Wukong?

These are mentioned at least as those which aren't looking much different w/o the use of RT h/w and are skipped because of this. Which sounded a bit odd as well to me because the first is consciously using RT h/w to speed up RT calculations (so in its case it is performance which should be compared), the second has RTDI implementation which does provide a visual difference in the presence of RT h/w and the last one has a "full RT" mode which is also different from what you get with either s/w or h/w Lumen.

 

[Cappuccino]

I don't think devs care about that all that much. if it makes development easier and with more consistent results, it's going to be used to their benefit.

And if devs want to make UE5 slop because it’s easier then I won’t be buying them lol, and considering the response to Outlaws I think a lot of people agree.

I like RT when it’s impactful but in very few titles is it really impactful.

I've played most of the games in this video and in basically all of them RT was a clear gain in visual fidelity. Takes like on RE Village are just buffling to me as they essentially boil down to "I like bad graphics more than good graphics".

Then you disagree with their take, but when most people look at these light RT games they are probably closer aligned with HUB than your take here

 

[DavidGraham]

the second has RTDI implementation which does provide a visual difference in the presence of RT h/w and the last one has a "full RT" mode which is also different from what you get with either s/w or h/w Lumen.

They examined Fortnite but omitted Black Myth?! Really? As I mentioned, completely arbitrary set of standards in an effort to come up with a certain "conclusion".

They are still trying to clean up their major mistake of picking up the 5700XT over the RTX 2070.

 

[Seanspeed]

A bunch of cringe worthy takes on RT from everyone's favorite channel.

It's a good, reasonable video that is saying things you dont want to hear, that's all.

I'll just copy/paste my comment about this video from another topic, makes more sense here, I guess:

"It's where I'd say that most implementations add little to nothing, and of the situations where it really offers significant visual improvements, the demands for getting those improvements are typically quite steep.

I know they'll do another video talking about the performance costs, but that's really where most people's issues are. It's obvious ray tracing can offer some nice enhancements visually and I think it's reasonable to expect we'll get more games using it better going forward, and more games using it by default(as we'll have with most UE5 games, for instance), but I think the opinion of ray tracing among gamers is not going to drastically change til either the demands of having ray tracing go down significantly, or the price of good hardware that can run it without heavy compromises goes down significantly. Neither of which I'm sure are all that likely going forward.

I dont want to turn this into a topic about whether we can get notable increases in performance per dollar in the future, but at the same time, I dont think we can really discuss the future of ray tracing and how people will perceive it without addressing this question. I really do think it's the most critical part of the situation. Even today, I think people would think better about ray tracing were something like the 4070Ti called a 4060Ti instead for $400. Suddenly, ray tracing with good resolution, overall settings and performance doesn't seem so out of reach, does it? But this isn't reality. And I'm not sure when that kind of performance will be available for $400."

 

[DegustatoR]

They examined Fortnite but omitted Black Myth?! Really?

It's there in the summary but not examined in detail in the video. Which is funny considering that Fortnite warranted a detailed look.

 

[Seanspeed]

Then you disagree with their take, but when most people look at these light RT games they are probably closer aligned with HUB than your take here

Most PC gamers will absolutely agree with HUB's conclusions here, and for entirely obvious and justified reasons. This forum just has a small following of people with a vendetta against HUB because they don't like Nvidia like they want them to. This forum is not remotely representative of the PC enthusiast space, let alone the PC gaming community as a whole.

 

[DavidGraham]

Most PC gamers will absolutely agree with HUB's conclusions here

The use of the most gamers argument doesn't really hold, nor is HUB representative of all gamers. Most gamers don't really care about graphics technologies, fps, DirectX version or any of these things.

Sales wise, the most widely used hardware is RTX hardware and by a very wide margin, now whether that is due to it's superior ray tracing or superior upscaling, or NVIDIA's brand is anyone's guess, but it's probably a combination of all of these factors, which ultimately means that yes gamers do care about ray tracing.

 

[troyan]

So, i guess this guy has played every game and finished them. What is the average game time - 15h? So that makes 555h or 70 days (8h per day). Otherwise what is the point of a few scenes from games? Here is an example from Metro Exodus (old version): https://imgsli.com/MzExMjg4

Metro has a full day night cycle. So putting the old version in the "Different image, unclear if better" categorie shows the knowledge of this guy and what game developer want to archive with Raytracing.

 

[Cappuccino]

The use of the most gamers argument doesn't really hold, nor is HUB representative of all gamers. Most gamers don't really care about graphics technologies, fps, DirectX version or any of these things.

Sales wise, the most widely used hardware is RTX hardware and by a very wide margin, now whether that is due to it's superior ray tracing or superior upscaling, or NVIDIA's brand is anyone's guess, but it's probably a combination of all of these factors, which ultimately means that yes gamers do care about ray tracing.

This analysis ignores that most PC gamers buy prebuilts which almost exclusively use Nvidia hardware. Finding an RDNA prebuilt is like finding a needle in a haystack.

If Nvidia released a version of the 5080 without RT but with DLSS I bet it would sell incredibly well if it came with a decent discount, and would probably be one of their most popular cards if they put it into prebuilts.

They have completely arbitrary standards to judge ray tracing, like how fast the game is moving, or whether you have to pixel peep or not. These standards apply to raster effects as well, you won't notice ultra shadows, ultra hair or ultra shading when you move fast, you will have to pixel peep, yet we still have these things and more.

In most of the games they examined, they only examined stationary scenes, and ignored motion comparisons, which will expose screen space shadows and reflections as being unstable, lacking and buggy, while ray traced shadows and reflections are stable. They also picked up many titles with very weak ray tracing implementations like ray traced ambient occlusion, I mean really?

Where is Chernobylite? Control? Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War? Wolfenstein Youngblood? Warhammer 40K: Darktide? Lego Builder's Journey? Bright Memory Infinite? Dying Light 2? Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora? Star Wars Outlaws? Black Myth Wukong? Desordre? Minecraft RTX? Quake 2 RTX? Portal RTX? There are many many more examples they could have used instead of picking up titles with RTAO and expecting them to offer tangible image quality benefits, It's just AO, what did you expect?

Mentioning COD CW is funny because every subsequent release of COD has omitted any RT, despite CW having pretty nice RT. Even Blops 6, Treyarchs newest title, doesn’t seem to include it (it wasn’t in the beta and they are using the MW engine which hasn’t featured it to date).

All of this to say, I still don’t think many new RT games surpass BF1, BFV (in raster mode, RT didn’t do much in that game) and most of all RDR2 in lighting (or really anything beyond maybe models) and have taken a clear step back in image quality with how blurry modern reconstruction looks, particularly most TAA implementations. DLSS looks better but that’s ultimately a hardware locked feature.

 

[DegustatoR]

If Nvidia released a version of the 5080 without RT but with DLSS I bet it would sell incredibly well if it came with a decent discount, and would probably be one of their most popular cards if they put it into prebuilts.

Why would it come with a decent discount? Would you wager that it would still sell incredibly well if it would be priced similarly to the RT-enabled alternative? Because technically that's what we've had between Nvidia and AMD, now turned into "slow" vs "fast" RT - and people seem to generally be buying into RT or "faster" RT now way more than you suggest they would be.

 

[DavidGraham]

Mentioning COD CW is funny because every subsequent release of COD has omitted any RT

Nope. Post launch, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 and Call of Duty Warzone 2 added path tracing with ray reconstruction in the lobby and firing range areas.

 

[Cappuccino]

Why would it come with a decent discount? Would you wager that it would still sell incredibly well if it would be priced similarly to the RT-enabled alternative? Because technically that's what we've had between Nvidia and AMD, now turned into "slow" vs "fast" RT - and people seem to generally be buying into RT or "faster" RT now way more than you suggest they would be.

Consumers aren’t going to pay the same for an inferior product regardless of if they turn on RT, so no it would need to be cheaper obviously.

Again you guys are using evidence of Nvidia marketshare as evidence people are using RT or think the effects are worth it. Nvidia has had dominant marketshare pretty much since AMD bought ATI, and they’ve dominated more as AMD has failed to get their cards into prebuilts. The last successful AMD card was probably the 480/580/590, which was in prebuilts.

There’s also drivers, most people I talk to buy Nvidia because AMD cards have a reputation of being janky and poorly supported. In some ways I agree and don’t blame them.

Nope. Post launch, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 and Call of Duty Warzone 2 added path tracing with ray reconstruction in the lobby and firing range areas.

Do you think this disproves what I said?? RT in the menu is completely inconsequential to the game lol.

 

[Seanspeed]

The use of the most gamers argument doesn't really hold, nor is HUB representative of all gamers. Most gamers don't really care about graphics technologies, fps, DirectX version or any of these things.

Sales wise, the most widely used hardware is RTX hardware and by a very wide margin, now whether that is due to it's superior ray tracing or superior upscaling, or NVIDIA's brand is anyone's guess, but it's probably a combination of all of these factors, which ultimately means that yes gamers do care about ray tracing.

I'm talking about people who DO care about this stuff, enthusiasts who talk about this stuff online. If this is the only place you talk about games and graphics and hardware and all that, you're vastly, vastly out of touch with what the rest of the community actually thinks about these things. I'm not out of touch with such folks and it's entirely clear that most absolutely agree with HUB. This forum is not just unrepresentative, it's straight up in a different world entirely when it comes to opinions about this stuff. A bizarro world in many cases, in my opinion.

Nvidia hardware being dominant is not because everybody is just so enamored with ray tracing. lol And we should be clear here, HUB's stance, and that of people who agree with them, is NOT anti-ray tracing(or anti-Nvidia) as people here dishonestly misconstrue it. People can like and appreciate ray tracing in some situations, as HUB does, while also feeling it's still not yet been this transformative technology overall, and feel it's entirely justified to criticize the cost to benefit ratio of most implementations, and the high end hardware often required to have good ray tracing without heavy sacrifices on resolution and whatnot.

It's a 100% reasonable stance overall, and it's why most people agree with it.

 

[Cappuccino]

It’s conversations like this that make me realize how important HUB and their reporting is right now. It’s not useless to discuss if these fairly marginal graphics improvements are even worth it to the average PC gamer who is more likely to be using an xx60 vs an xx90.

 

[DegustatoR]

Again you guys are using evidence of Nvidia marketshare as evidence people are using RT or think the effects are worth it. Nvidia has had dominant marketshare pretty much since AMD bought ATI, and they’ve dominated more as AMD has failed to get their cards into prebuilts. The last successful AMD card was probably the 480/580/590, which was in prebuilts.

That's fair but we don't have any other evidence to suggest otherwise so I'm not sure what you base your view that a non-RT GPU would sell better upon - or even if you have such a view at all. It's obvious that if you're selling a product at a different price then it will sell differently than it would on a price which would be similar to another product. Does this tell us much about people's interest in RT though? Or is it just a result of selling something cheaper? And if such products would be priced similarly then people would obviously be buying the one with an additional "feature" - which to me says that they would be interested in having it at least if not using it in every game which would support it.

The latter is in fact a completely different topic here. The fact that your h/w supports something doesn't mean that you are forced to use it so saying that people who don't enable RT in every game which is using it for whatever reason would just go and buy the h/w which wouldn't support RT at all seems all kinds of dubious to me.

 

[Cappuccino]

That's fair but we don't have any other evidence to suggest otherwise so I'm not sure what you base your view that a non-RT GPU would sell better upon - or even if you have such a view at all. It's obvious that if you're selling a product at a different price then it will sell differently than it would on a price which would be similar to another product. Does this tells us much about people's interest in RT though? Or is it just a result of selling something cheaper? And if such products would be priced similarly then people would obviously be buying the one with an additional "feature" - which to me says that they would be interested in having it at least if not using it in every game which would support it.

The latter is in fact a completely different topic here. The fact that your h/w supports something doesn't mean that you are forced to use it so saying that people who don't enable RT in every game with is using it for whatever reason would just go and buy the h/w which wouldn't support RT at all seems all kinds of dubious to me.

What I’m saying is that if Nvidia offered non-RT hardware for a discount then people would buy it, meaning they value RT less than a few hundred buck discount. You could reword this as ‘if AMD cards were in prebuilts more and had better upscaling, but still bad RT, they would sell way more’.

The reason I say this is people are pointing to RTX sales as evidence that RT is popular, but all that proves is Nvidia is popular. If Nvidia offered non-RT modern cards (like the 16 series) we could compare sales and see how much consumers actually value RT.

If you sell an RT card and a non-RT card for the same price nobody is going to buy the non-RT card unless there is some other benefit or trade off.

 

[DavidGraham]

Do you think this disproves what I said?? RT in the menu is completely inconsequential to the game lol.

Yes, you said they omitted ray tracing, when they straight up implemented the biggest forms of ray tracing, it's a stepping stone of what's to come. They clearly value it and want it.

enthusiasts who talk about this stuff online

The majority of enthusiasts do care about latest graphics technologies, because they are enthusiasts they like to run their games at max settings, hence why they do care about ray tracing, it's the ultimate form of max settings.

Enthusiasts care about ray tracing as evident by the huge number of mods enabling ray and path tracing in new and old games, whether through RTX Remix or through post process shaders.

Enthusiasts care about ray tracing, which is why developers are catering for them by releasing remastered games with integrated ray tracing like the Witcher 3, World of Warcraft, Crysis 1, Crysis 2, Crysis 3, Dark Picture Anthology: Man Of Medan .. etc.

Everywhere I go in enthusiasts circles I see people demanding more powerful ray tracing in this game or that game, I even see people demanding path tracing, heck, people still bitch and moan about the delay of ray tracing for the PC version of GTA V to this day.

people are pointing to RTX sales as evidence that RT is popular, but all that proves is Nvidia is popular.

RT is popular because of the reasons I listed above.

while also feeling it's still not yet been this transformative technology overall

Guess what? This has been the case for most recent graphics upgrades, DX9 to DX10 transition, DX10 to DX11, DX11 to DX12. Nothing is particularly new in this regard with DX12 to DXR transition, it takes time until every implementation is stellar.

These last few years witnessed the whole gaming industry grinds to a halt progress wise, with most releases being based on last gen hardware, with dozens of remasters and superficial upgrades and very slow progress towards true next gen graphics, not to mention the devastating effect of COVID, but we are getting there, most new AAA releases are using ray tracing and even path tracing. Most of the new trailers for upcoming 2025/2026 games and beyond feature good use of ray tracing.

 

[DegustatoR]

What I’m saying is that if Nvidia offered non-RT hardware for a discount then people would buy it, meaning they value RT less than a few hundred buck discount.

Where's the "few hundred bucks" come from? 4060 and 4060Ti are a hundred buck apart - what makes you think that a 4060Ti-no-RT would cost less than 4060?
And I'm not even going into the whole "die size have zero relation to market price of a product" here.

You could reword this as ‘if AMD cards were in prebuilts more and had better upscaling, but still bad RT, they would sell way more’.

The choice of h/w for prebuilds is made by assessing the demand on the market for some h/w so if you're saying that Nv's market share comes from people who buy all these prebuidts then Nv's h/w in these prebuilds comes from the same demand as on non-prebuild markets.

 

[DavidGraham]

and feel it's entirely justified to criticize the cost to benefit ratio of most implementations

Enthusiasts rarely care about such ratio, they run their games at max settings even without ray tracing. Max settings always has the worst performance to visuals ratio, it's why we have things such as optimized settings to begin with.

 

[Kaotik]

RT is popular because of the reasons I listed above.

Enthusiasts aren't more than a drop in an ocean. Some enthusiasts liking something doesn't make it popular.