Much as I love the look of Quake RTX, it feels like it’s a barely there performance hog in modern games. You look at the benchmarks on the newer cards and so much is focused on ray tracing performance but I just don’t see that big a difference in Cyberpunk on an 3080 Ti unless I look really hard for it.
Am I alone in this? I’d much rather have 100+ non generated FPS at 4k over what raytracing is delivering in major titles. And by 4k I really mean my super modded Skyrim VR :)
It really is a matter of personal preference. You don’t need RT to have great lighting but it certainly can help if implemented correctly. I think old games like Silent Hill 2 have great lighting without RT. I think Cyberpunk 2077 looks gourgeous with path tracing. It really does depend.
You are not alone in feeling it’s overblown.
Well-done ray tracing can be beautiful, but realistically, it doesn’t matter to me. I’m not Narcissus; I don’t play games to stare at my reflection in a puddle. My time and attention are almost entirely devoted to things that move too fast for ray tracing to matter, or reading text, or the geometry of a scene as I plan my approach to whatever I’m about to do.
If all other things were equal, I would gladly take the extra eye candy. But to me, it’s not worth paying significantly more money for real-time ray tracing hardware and higher electricity bills.
Please wake me up in ten years or so, when every GPU does it well without measurably increasing power draw.
I can see the difference I just tend to hate RTX making a lot of places way too dark. I don’t want realism, I want to see where the fuck I’m going. Maybe that issue will go away when RTX is the default but that isn’t the case yet.
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You likely have a wildly uncalibrated monitor. I’ve never once played a game with RT and thought “this is too dark.” I’m also on OLED which has fantastic near black visibility so it might be an issue with LCD monitors. Or your in game/gpu driver settings are wrong.
It’s a gimmick to sell GPUs. Once we increase ray throughput by two orders of magnitude it will become standard because developers won’t need to bake gi, etc, saving dev time. For now, I truly can’t believe people don’t find the dynamic lighting update lag jarring. It breaks immersion much more than less accurate but real time lighting. (at least on a 4090, maybe the 5090 can do it faster)
It is nice doing pathtracing on older games, but it’s pretty clear we’re no where near the computation required for path tracing anything newer than HL1/Q2. Even Portal RTX and HL2 RTX require copious amounts of Upscaling and framegen with the highest end available hardware (that draws 600watts…)
