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Comment by metalliqaz | Hacker News Reader

That's largely Nvidia marketing spin. RT in games during RDNA2's lifetime, and even today, is little more than a gimmick that causes huge performance impact for fidelity that is barely noticeable while actually playing. It isn't even real ray tracing.

And even further, even on the RTX parts, using RT usually requires rendering at a much lower resolution and then upscaling. With DLSS3, they just go ahead and start inserting extrapolated frames to get the FPS numbers up. It's hard to believe gamers are willing to make that trade to be honest. If it was pitched together as all one package many years ago, they'd have been laughed out of the room.

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I could be wrong, but I always saw Nvidia's pitch about ray-tracing to be a publisher-targeted message. "You can fire all your lighting artists with RTX."

still, with 99% of the available hardware without RT capabilities, someone has to handle it somehow, so the pitch in any way was pure marketing gymnastics at best

>That's largely Nvidia marketing spin.

Hardly, every game I play now has RT and RDNA2 is crap at it. It was their first go at it sure, but RDNA2 is also what the consoles have to put up with so the subpar raytracing performance had an outsized effect on the industry.

>RT in games during RDNA2's lifetime, and even today, is little more than a gimmick

Absolutely, categorically false.

>that is barely noticeable while actually playing.

This is not true in the slightest.

>It isn't even real ray tracing.

It's true that raytraced effects is not _full path tracing_. It still makes an enormous visual difference via things like RTGI.

>And even further, even on the RTX parts, using RT usually requires rendering at a much lower resolution and then upscaling.

Yes, this is another area AMD was way behind and recently almost caught up. DLSS2.x is amazing, letting me render at 1440p scaled to 4K with an output that _exceeeds_ 4K native quality in many games/contexts (thanks to 4K native also running TAA, which has other issues).

>With DLSS3, they just go ahead and start inserting extrapolated frames to get the FPS numbers up

You're using outdated terms. DLSS3.x includes _both_ the 2.x image upscaling tech and DLFG (deep learning frame generation) that was previously called "DLSS3". DLFG is an optional feature of the 3.x SDK that's only supported on 4000 series GPUs. DLFG also works very well, and both initial reviews and user feedback on reddit has been overwhelmingly positive.

>It's hard to believe gamers are willing to make that trade to be honest.

What trade?

>If it was pitched together as all one package many years ago, they'd have been laughed out of the room.

This entire post just seems like AMD cope, rather than a fair evaluation of the current state of RT. RDNA3 upped RT performance significantly but it's still not enough.

> What trade?

More input latency plus whatever quality loss is incurred to pull frames out of thin air.

The latency is a big trade off for competitive reaction-time-based games.

It's often true that people can't easily feel the difference of a few extra ms or tens of ms in input latency. It is nonetheless a statistical disadvantage, as a players reaction times will be too slow in a higher percentage of cases since they've had a bit of their reaction window robbed by input latency.

Given that DLSS frame multiplication requires Reflex, the latency trade off is minimal/non-existent

I don't see the relevance of Reflex here, the latency is not non-existent, and I just explained why even small amounts of input latency can matter.

DLSS, when used with reflex, has a latency that is comparable with native frames with no frame generation. I guess you could get a lower latency with Reflex alone, and DLSS turned off, but imo the fact that it is still as good as "normal" makes the latency argument moot.

Have you actually tried DLSS3? That's absolutely not true.

Have you? Not OP and I have not tried it personally, but the people I know who have it say it's virtually imperceptible overall and that the whole issue is vastly overblown by people who mostly haven't used it themselves.

Remember that framegen's latency is inversely proportional to framerate in general... if you're starting from a (DLSS-assisted) 70fps framerate in a cinematic single-player game, that's probably fine. If you're playing a twitch shooter where the framerate is 200fps, your framerate is already high enough that the extra 0.5ms latency is probably fine.

People have been consistently negative about these new technologies from NVIDIA ever conceivably working or improving in the future, while absolutely fellating anything AMD comes out with. Framegen really is a solid option even right now and it's only going to get better over the next 2 years. The obvious trajectory here is that NVIDIA will continue to get better and people will still pooh-pooh it up until AMD releases FSR3 and suddenly wow, it's great, even though it is worse than NVIDIA's initial offering was. Remember they don’t have the optical flow engine and even nvidias first-gen engine is significantly worse quality.

It's so predictable at this point, I want AMD to do well but the social media story hasn't changed in 10 years to be honest, everything AMD does is amazing and benevolently pro-consumer and is gonna be great in a couple more iterations, and everything NVIDIA does is awful and malicious/avaricious and could never possibly work.

Just wait for FSR3 (with FluidFrames TM!) and RDNA4. Yup, that cycle is starting now too.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-fsr-3-announced

https://hothardware.com/news/amd-promises-rdna-4-near-future

Like I guess framegen is so awful that AMD is gonna spend like ten million bucks of dev time making their own. That kinda says it all.

I don't care about AMD vs Nvidia, I only care about reality. You seem to be overcompensating for some imagined bias. In the Witcher 3 the input lag increase is huge. The game is playable, but the difference between 90 fps with or without DLSS3 is very noticeable.

If you see a big benefit from Reflex, then the game was doing things wrong to start with, and you should demand those fixes as part of your baseline.

Many games do just fine on latency without Reflex.

The input latency of 60 fps with DLSS 3 is about the same as 30fps with no DLSS 3

Can you show me an example where RTGI is making an enormous difference?

Metro Exodus PC enhanced edition. See digital foundry’s coverage.

> This is not true in the slightest.

Clearly a post made in bad faith. You seem to think I don't have a lot of experience playing these games, if you are going to assert that RT makes so much difference to the player experience (other than reducing performance).

I am certain that the majority of gamers could not effectively discern what "RTX On" actually means without being trained to know what to look for. You hear things like "it's shinier" from people. This is often true even when they are looking at clips or screenshots, let alone while they are concentrating on actually playing. What percentage of players even understand that a game advertising RT may only be using it for shadows, for example?

As we have this discussion, the biggest release is Hogwarts Legacy, for which there are support forums full of people complaining about performance issues so they can see a stained glass window reflected (on a stone floor!?) like its a mirror.

I hope you understand that the marketing spin to which I was referring is the very idea that RT is needed to make a modern game look good in the first place. You seem to really care about it. To me it's just another thing to put on the box like 4k, 8k, HDR, etc. Things that do look good, especially in awe-inspiring screenshots, but have essentially no impact on my actual enjoyment of the game.

Basically everything in this post is wrong, from calling hogwarts legacy “the biggest release” with respect to RT (it’s actually terrible) to pretending most gamers couldn’t tell the difference between fake and RT lighting.

You are woefully uneducated on the subject at best, and at worst you’re downplaying the importance of accurate lighting to cover for AMD’s pitiful first attempt.

I’m sure this will all go away when RDNA4 has acceptable RT performance and suddenly it’s the best thing ever.

While it might not be fully-ready for games yet, you can see from the Blender GPU rendering benchmarks (https://www.phoronix.com/review/blender-33-nvidia-amd) that compare nvidia CUDA (no ray tracing hardware acceleration support, just done in software) vs OptiX the advantage hardware raytracing provides, and how AMD are at least one generation behind performance-wise.

Sometimes I go to 30fps so I can have some nice bells and whistles on my older, weaker card. FPS isn’t really that big a deal outside of the competitive scene I think.

Yeah it will at the minimum take another 5-6 years before raytracing of current gen highend cards reaches med teir cards and maybe consoles as well. Then only will we get games made for and properly use ray tracing. Today it is great for the wow factor but most people disable it to get better fps while playing.

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