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Comment by noir_lord | Hacker News Reader

> But how about a practical argument instead. Enabling raytracing in games tends to suck. The graphical improvements on offer are simply not worth the performance cost.

Pretty much this - even in games that have good ray tracing, I can't tell when it's off or on (except for the FPS hit) - I cared so little I bought a card not known to be good at it (7900XTX) because the two games I play the most don't support it anyway.

They oversold the technology/benefits and I wasn't buying it.

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There were and always are people who swear to not see the difference with anything above 25hz, 30hz, 60hz, 120hz, HD, Full HD, 2K, 4K. Now it's ray-tracing, right.

Glad you intimately know how my perception of lighting in games works better than I do - though I'm curious how you do.

I can see the difference in all of those. I can even see the difference between 120hz and 240hz, and now I play on 240hz.

Ray tracing looks almost indistinguishable from really good rasterized lighting in MOST conditions. In scenes with high amounts of gloss and reflections, it's a little more pronounced. A little.

From my perspective, you're getting, like, a 5% improvement in only one specific aspect of graphics in exchange for a 200% cost.

It's just not worth it.

Doesn't gel with my experience.

CP2077 rasterization vs ray tracing vs path tracing is like night and day. Rasterization looks "gamey". Path tracing makes it look pre-rendered. Huge difference.

CP2077 purposefully has as many glossy surfaces as humanly possible just for this affect. It somewhat makes sense with the context. Everything is chrome in the future, I guess.

As soon as you remove the ridiculous amounts of gloss, the difference is almost imperceptible.

There’s an important distinction between being able to see the difference and caring about it. I can tell the difference between 30Hz and 60Hz but it makes no difference to my enjoyment of the game. (What can I say - I’m a 90s kid and 30fps was a luxury when I was growing up.) Similarly, I can tell the difference between ray traced reflections and screen space reflections because I know what to look for. But if I’m looking, that can only be because the game itself isn’t very engaging.

I think one of the challenges is that game designers have trained up so well at working within the non-RT constraints (and pushing back those constraints) that it's a tall order to make paying the performance cost (and new quirks of rendering) be paid back by RT improvements. There's also how a huge majority of companies wouldn't want to cut off potential customers in terms of whether their hardware can do RT at all or performance while doing so. The other big one is whether they're trying to recreate a similar environment with RT, or if they're taking advantage of what is only possible on the new technique, such as dynamic lighting and whether that's important to the game they want to make.

To me, the appeal is that game environments that can now be way more dynamic because we're not being limited by prebaked lighting. The Finals does this, but doesn't require ray tracing and it's pretty easy to tell when ray tracing is enabled: https://youtu.be/MxkRJ_7sg8Y

But that's a game design change that takes longer

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