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Comment by kjkjadksj | Hacker News Reader

Do gamers actually want ray tracing? Or is this something like bloom/post effects/motion blur where is computationally expensive and gamers who care about their k/d shut it off anyway to see the other team easier?

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Do I want global illumination? Yes, absolutely. Will it make games substantially better? Only marginally. The core experience will still be the gameplay.

Still, the visual spectacle of what some of these products can create is a fantastic experience in itself. It can enhance immersion in a drastic way, and especially for story heavy games, that can act as a direct multiplier on an already good story and structure. Bad games will still never go past being just a tech demo.

I feel like graphics are chasing a dragon so to speak. I remember games of my childhood looking great, now they look like n64 games. I still had plenty of fun though.

From my experience it's the thing gamers enable after getting 120fps "ultra" in rasterization already. Rasterization-based estimations of many of the visual features are very good now, and most people I know tend to have a better end experience with higher frame rate than fixing some of the less-noticeable issues with them.

So it's probably useful if you've got a 4090, but beyond that more try it once, go "Huh, that's neat", and then disable it.

But there's always a chicken and egg problem for every new feature - it may make sense to push support even if it's not particularly useful right now, as once it's ubiquitous there may be more use cases for lower total performance cards - "light" ray tracing may be a better solution than some rasterization tricks for things like GI, or even things like AI line of sight or other non-specifically-graphics tasks.

But as gamedevs have to support the non-RT path anyway, it probably doesn't make sense to develop two separate paths. So it's relegated to "optional" visual features only.

I played Control on a 2080 Ti and for me the difference with RTX on was worth the compromise of lower frame rate. Mind you, it’s a relatively slow-paced game, not a competitive shooter.

The better question is if developers want ray tracing; for them, it can represent a massive time and cost savings in terms of lighting games.

Raytracing is currently not universally supported and slow, so it's used to supplement existing pipelines. It's more work, not less.

That's the story with all new tech. Difficult transition to a better tomorrow. Rinse and repeat.

Totally agree! We're currently quite early in the transition, and the tech is not ready to stand on it's own, but the future is bright!

Not every game (or gamer) is of the competitive type.

RT is pretty nice and more and more games are featuring it, problem is at least on consoles they cannot go crazy with it so some games only do reflections for example or just shadows or just global illumination.

Sony is supposedly releasing their Pro model of the PS5 later this year with improved support for RT.

I think people who kneecap their graphics settings to eek out the last few millis of latency are the vast minority.

Really? I feel like most gamers set their graphics to whatever will get them around 60fps. People buying high refresh rate monitors are also going to want to take advantage of that with a high framerate or even vsync.

With desktop GPUs I certainly thing there's room to improve framerate and image clarity before considering ray tracing. Maybe if you have a high end GPU and an an otherwise lightweight game it's worth it.

For a mobile GPU, like Meteor Lake? I wouldn't even bother.

For single player games it's probably still desireable. Cyberpunk 2077 with Ray Tracing looks amazing and enhances the gaming experience. Other than framerate issues, there's no drawback to having it on. For single player games, immersion is important.

Immersion is good but I think noticeable frame drops are more immersion breaking than not seeing a sunbeam

For someone who played outside growing up, ray tracing is a nice addition, the baked lighting always drove me crazy in my games. I put it up there when I noticed Physics engines stopped feeling like I was floating through a game.

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