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The thing I hear a lot from people who skew towards AMD is that raytracing and DLSS and all the software solutions that nvidia has are gimmicks, or somehow actu

The thing I hear a lot from people who skew towards AMD is that raytracing and DLSS and all the software solutions that nvidia has are gimmicks, or somehow actually not a big deal. They’re stuck on the concept of rasterized graphics being the ground truth in gpu value. Then they’re shocked when the wider consumer market doesn’t hold their perspective. AMD hasn’t had the big picture vision that nvidia has had. For example, with Vega AMD had a gpu architecture with exceptional async compute performance a generation before nvidia was competitive. AMD then abandoned Vega, switched to a leaner and less compute friendly rDNA architecture while nvidia went in the opposite direction, pushed compute heavy features like raytracing and dlss and AMD hasn’t had an exceptional response since then.

Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
Raytracing being a gimmick is highly subjective. Creating reflections using rasterization requires shortcuts and sacrifices. And once you see them, you can't unsee them, and then you find them visually distracting. There are basically 3 ways to create reflections without ray-tracing: 1. Double the geometry and render it in the reflection. This is rarely the approach taken because it's incredibly resource intensive. Oddly, Duke Nukem 3D back in what, 1996? did this, but that had pretty simple graphics. Genuinely not feasible for any sort of reflect surface that is curved. 2. Screen-space reflection: Just take the rendered image, invert it, and overlay it onto the reflective surface. This is probably the most common way to do it. It's fast and looks decent. The problem is that it requires the reflected image to be visible on the screen. When it's not, there's no reflection. It creates a bizarre effect when, for example, you're looking over a body of water at something in the distance, and you see the reflection in the water, but as you move the camera down, the reflection gets cut off and eventually disappears entirely. 3. Using a static image as an environment mapped texture. Apex Legends does this for shiny surfaces. It creates a great illusion of a reflection, but taking even a second to actually look at it, you'll notice that the reflection doesn't actually show what it should unless you're standing in the exact right place. I will concede that gamers typically don't notice the issues created using methods 2 and 3, especially in a game like Apex Legends where you're moving around too much to notice. But me? I dunno. I notice and get distracted. EDIT: DLSS, on the other hand, is basically a crutch. It's not surprise that DLSS became a big thing at the same time RTX did. RTX requires more juice to run at full resolution than the GPU has, so they introduced DLSS to render at a low resolution and upscale it.

Sohcahtoa82 3y ago

Raytracing being a gimmick is highly subjective. Creating reflections using rasterization requires shortcuts and sacrifices. And once you see them, you can't unsee them, and then you find them visually distracting. There are basically 3 ways to create reflections without ray-tracing: 1. Double the geometry and render it in the reflection. This is rarely the approach taken because it's incredibly resource intensive. Oddly, Duke Nukem 3D back in what, 1996? did this, but that had pretty simple graphics. Genuinely not feasible for any sort of reflect surface that is curved. 2. Screen-space reflection: Just take the rendered image, invert it, and overlay it onto the reflective surface. This is probably the most common way to do it. It's fast and looks decent. The problem is that it requires the reflected image to be visible on the screen. When it's not, there's no reflection. It creates a bizarre effect when, for example, you're looking over a body of water at something in the distance, and you see the reflection in the water, but as you move the camera down, the reflection gets cut off and eventually disappears entirely. 3. Using a static image as an environment mapped texture. Apex Legends does this for shiny surfaces. It creates a great illusion of a reflection, but taking even a second to actually look at it, you'll notice that the reflection doesn't actually show what it should unless you're standing in the exact right place. I will concede that gamers typically don't notice the issues created using methods 2 and 3, especially in a game like Apex Legends where you're moving around too much to notice. But me? I dunno. I notice and get distracted. EDIT: DLSS, on the other hand, is basically a crutch. It's not surprise that DLSS became a big thing at the same time RTX did. RTX requires more juice to run at full resolution than the GPU has, so they introduced DLSS to render at a low resolution and upscale it.