4 ms·

Hmm I watched the video [1] and in the games where it had an unambiguous improvement, the improvement in reflection quality is extremely stark and noticeable. A

Hmm I watched the video [1] and in the games where it had an unambiguous improvement, the improvement in reflection quality is extremely stark and noticeable. Anecdotally, when I was playing Black Myth Wukong recently, there were some shiny environments where full path tracing really made a huge difference. So I guess it's just a "gimmick" in that relatively few games properly take advantage of this currently, rather than the effect not being good enough. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBNH0NyN8K8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBNH0NyN8K8

adastra22 2y ago
Using raytracing on a very recent, high end game that has been designed for raytracing has an extremely noticeable positive improvement on visual quality. Wukong is a perfect example. Unfortunately most people’s experience with raytracing is turning it on for a game that was not designed for it, but it was added through a patch, which results in worse lighting. Why? Because the rasterized image includes baked-in global illumination using more light sources than whatever was hastily put together for the raytracing patch.
- IntelMiner 2y ago
  The first game I encountered with RayTracing support was World of Warcraft "Classic"'s Burning Crusade launch a couple years back. WoW Burning Crusade launched in *2006* originally. The "Classic" re-release of the game uses the modern engine but with the original game art assets and content. Does it do anything in the 'modern' WoW game? Probably! In Classic though all it did was tank my framerate. Since then I also played the unimaginable disaster that was Cyberpunk 2077. For as "pretty" as I suppose the game looked I can't exactly say if the ray tracing improved anything
  - adastra22 2y ago
    What's perhaps not obvious is that if you take a 2006 game and "add" raytracing, there's no relevant information available for the raytracer. Whatever original light sources were used to bake in global illumination does not exist in the game assets used for rasterization. In the best case the original art assets can be used to create raytracing scenes, but it's not as straightforward as it might seem, and most conversions are pretty sloppy. If you want to see what raytracing can do, I'd only look at very, very recent UE5 titles that are designed for raytracing from the ground-up.

adastra22 2y ago

Using raytracing on a very recent, high end game that has been designed for raytracing has an extremely noticeable positive improvement on visual quality. Wukong is a perfect example. Unfortunately most people’s experience with raytracing is turning it on for a game that was not designed for it, but it was added through a patch, which results in worse lighting. Why? Because the rasterized image includes baked-in global illumination using more light sources than whatever was hastily put together for the raytracing patch.

IntelMiner 2y ago
The first game I encountered with RayTracing support was World of Warcraft "Classic"'s Burning Crusade launch a couple years back. WoW Burning Crusade launched in *2006* originally. The "Classic" re-release of the game uses the modern engine but with the original game art assets and content. Does it do anything in the 'modern' WoW game? Probably! In Classic though all it did was tank my framerate. Since then I also played the unimaginable disaster that was Cyberpunk 2077. For as "pretty" as I suppose the game looked I can't exactly say if the ray tracing improved anything
- adastra22 2y ago
  What's perhaps not obvious is that if you take a 2006 game and "add" raytracing, there's no relevant information available for the raytracer. Whatever original light sources were used to bake in global illumination does not exist in the game assets used for rasterization. In the best case the original art assets can be used to create raytracing scenes, but it's not as straightforward as it might seem, and most conversions are pretty sloppy. If you want to see what raytracing can do, I'd only look at very, very recent UE5 titles that are designed for raytracing from the ground-up.