Can someone explain to me the appeal of ray tracing? It seems like a waste of time

[Vini 430]

Instead of obsessing about light particles wouldn't it make more sense to invest the better hardware into higher quality textures? 

 

Red Dead 2 is the perfect example of this. Still the best looking game ever made and not because of it's reflections, because every little thing you look at in that world has detail and texture to it. 

 

Ray Tracing seems like a lazy dev's way of polishing a turd. Cyberpunk trees and bushes still look like shit no matter how much light is bouncing off them

[lostfool 680]

I totally agree.  I think it can be used to great effect but so far it just looks like devs are overusing it like light blooms when that first was a thing.  Ray-tracing is too much of a hardware hit right now.  Focuse on material quality and if there is still room left yeah toss in ray-tracing.  However right now it seems like the focus is to ray-trace and work the way down.  It's stupid.  

 

[DynamiteCop 2,085]

You can do both, also accuracy in lighting, reflections and shadows goes a very long way to providing a much more convincing and realistic interpretation of what's being rendered.

 

It's demanding for sure, but everything you're seeing is behaving in the way it would in the real world.

[Playstation Tablet 1,723]

When you have a choice between 60fps on consoles or 144hz on PC, its fairly useless feature because framerate is king.

[kokujin 558]

particle effects are huge man. you don't kno what chu talking about. 

[kaz 2,439]

1 hour ago, kokujin said:

particle effects are huge man. you don't kno what chu talking about. 

 

more like you don't know what you are talking about.   

 

also yea I agree, gay tracing is just in the early stages I think. but it can look pretty cool.

[Mr. Impossible 407]

Buzz words sell GPUs. 

[The Mother Fucker 26]

It was introduced hard as part of NVIDIA's campaign to sell a very weak GPU generation jump from Pascal to Turing, and to price the RTX 2080 Ti at a grand compared to the GTX 1080Ti.

Even going far as renaming the Geforce cards from GTX to RTX.

Techtubers help push the promotion of this as NVIDIA gave them free RTX cards to review

It was gaining enough attention that AMD felt it had to compete and start offering ray-tracing support it in it's graphic cards which meant consoles were going to get ray-tracing as well. 

 

[Voidler 1,675]

Ray tracing is amazing

 

But its biggest issue is that devs have already replicated most of what it can do with trickery and you can get most of the value of volumetric lighting with cheaper methods

 

That doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. It will make the actual development more efficient, especially as it gets better. And when that happens devs can put more time into other parts of the graphics without having to make different time of day assets or different textures for different lighting conditions

 

Also, smaller devs that don't have the budget to do those methods of trickery will benefit greatly from having lighting solutions that pretty much work at a click of a button

 

Edited February 8, 2021 by Voidler

[jehurey 3,227]

They're already putting alot of work pre-baking reflections on every object in regular games.

 

So think of a game like spiderman or Watch Dogs where they have to go and put in a cube-map for every window textures on every building and every reflective surface.

 

ray-tracing just does the calculation and creates the reflection automatically on whatever thing they designate as a reflective surface. The downisde is that its a shitload of calculations that is has to be doing.

 

They pre-bake lighting and shadowing in areas as well. ray-traced lighting would do that automatically.

 

I think thats part of the reason AssCreed Unity was like 50GB for a game that was released back in 2014. It had assloads of pre-baked lighting because they didn't have a day-night cycle. So whenever it changed to a different time of the day, they switched out all the textures in the worlds with different pre-baked lighting. Textures for the bright day, textures for the late afternoon, textures for the evening, textures for the middle of the night.

 

The artists designed these rooms so that the blue room that has wood trim has lighting that is more blue-ish, but when he walks into a yellowish room with gold trim, the lighting is a warmer yellow. Ray-tracing would do that automatically because the light would bounce off the gold-trim and make the room yellower.

 

 

[Vini 430]

17 hours ago, jehurey said:

They're already putting alot of work pre-baking reflections on every object in regular games.

 

So think of a game like spiderman or Watch Dogs where they have to go and put in a cube-map for every window textures on every building and every reflective surface.

 

ray-tracing just does the calculation and creates the reflection automatically on whatever thing they designate as a reflective surface. The downisde is that its a shitload of calculations that is has to be doing.

 

They pre-bake lighting and shadowing in areas as well. ray-traced lighting would do that automatically.

 

I think thats part of the reason AssCreed Unity was like 50GB for a game that was released back in 2014. It had assloads of pre-baked lighting because they didn't have a day-night cycle. So whenever it changed to a different time of the day, they switched out all the textures in the worlds with different pre-baked lighting. Textures for the bright day, textures for the late afternoon, textures for the evening, textures for the middle of the night.

 

The artists designed these rooms so that the blue room that has wood trim has lighting that is more blue-ish, but when he walks into a yellowish room with gold trim, the lighting is a warmer yellow. Ray-tracing would do that automatically because the light would bounce off the gold-trim and make the room yellower.

 

 

 

Yeah look at that game imagine a modern version of that in 4k/HDR. Why would you waste the calculations on Ray Tracing