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Comment by outworlder | Hacker News Reader

> My guess is the performance improvements are the biggest for raytracing, which I personally don't care for.

I still don't understand the raytracing craze when it comes to games. Years ago when I wrote my first raytracer I might have got excited about it. But we have advanced so much with rasterization that I don't really understand why this is something we need.

Raytracing complexity is tricky and it is likely to prove challenging to do in a game with consistent frame rates. Soft shadows are expensive even for hardware.

I would be more excited about some other global illumination improvements, like photon mapping.

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> other global illumination improvements

RTX cards don't render everything with ray tracing. They use it for light calculations, for example it can be used exactly for global illumination.

> why this is something we need.

The answer is simple. Because there is a limit to how realistic we can make the lighting and shadowing using the old models. We are almost at that limit. Using ray tracing removes that limit.

> challenging to do in a game with consistent frame rates

Try Quake II RTX. It is very consistent right off the bat, and if you turn on the resolution scaling, you can get completely consistent framerates (within 2-3 fps continuously). While it might not be a game with the most advanced graphics, it does have variety of scenes, and there is no issue with the framerates being "inconsistent".

Many newer games are designed to show off raytracing effects. Cyberpunk 2077 has lots of neon lights, shiny things, rain puddles, etc for light to bounce around, and raytracing makes it look a lot nicer than when the shadows are approximated in traditional ways. Minecraft ... ye gods. The videos I've seen look amazing. The other nice thing these cards have is the DLSS 2.0 tech, which is supposed to let it render at higher resolutions by _making things up_ (?) based on ... something buzzword-laden. The effect, though, is that you get similar or better quality at much higher framerates, because lossy techniques are still nice to look at.

"Need" is a strong word, but I'm sure someone will make a game where the shadows _matter_ for telling the story, or solving puzzles, or even just making the game world look more realistic and believable.

DLSS renders the game at a lower resolution then upscales it to a higher resolution using AI to modify the final image. The models are trained from super-resolution renders and used to be trained per-game but are now generalized. They're designed to upscale textures, denoise, fix aliasing and overall increase quality based on that high-end source data so you get the same output without having to actually run at those settings.

> "Need" is a strong word, but I'm sure someone will make a game where the shadows _matter_ for telling the story, or solving puzzles, or even just making the game world look more realistic and believable.

Or selling GFX cards..

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