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makedesign t1_izxu24n wrote

Reply to comment by TheDankerGod in AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT / XTX review: 4K performance for less | AMD’s top RDNA 3 GPU manages to beat the RTX 4080 in many games at a $200 lower price. But ray-tracing performance is far behind Nvidia. by chrisdh79

Layman here - what am I giving up with Ray tracing?

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Neoptolemus85 t1_izym4g4 wrote

Ray tracing is used to give physically-accurate real-time lighting and reflections by simulating the bouncing of light through an environment. Without ray tracing, games have to fake things like sunlight illuminating a room through a window, or mirrors, puddles and other reflective surfaces.

The thing is, games have become really good at faking those things, so for a lot of people the difference is only noticeable when viewing side-by-side comparisons, and not really when actually playing in-game.

Ray tracing could be much more than just better lighting and reflections, but it's still a niche capability for enthusiasts with high-end gear. We won't really see the full potential of ray tracing until it becomes standard for the majority of gamers which is years away.

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BIGSTANKDICKDADDY t1_izzeqhm wrote

>The thing is, games have become really good at faking those things, so for a lot of people the difference is only noticeable when viewing side-by-side comparisons, and not really when actually playing in-game.

In some side by side comparisons you may not notice any difference or even an advantage to the "non-RT" image. Offline baking allows us to perform extremely high quality path traced lighting and shadowing, taking hours and hours to illuminate a scene, then store that result on disk and load it back in when the game is played. The downside is that all of the geometry we use to perform those calculations must remain static! Because you aren't able to perform those calculations at runtime you can't allow the player to modify the scene and break the lighting/shadowing you baked into it. Modern processors have made complex physical interaction very achievable but utilizing offline lighting techniques means you can't make wide-scale use of them for interactivity.

Real-time ray tracing is a massive boon, not just to visual fidelity, but to interactivity in game environments going forward. It also alleviate a lot of manual effort we spend faking the lighting in environments to look as if we did have RT available. It will be interesting when we see the first game that doesn't offer a "non-RT" version because it was built from the ground up using RT and didn't incorporate any older workflows and techniques.

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HugeHans t1_j01ma66 wrote

I think ray tracing is fantastic but I also think that realistic doesnt always mean better in this context. Like if I was trying to sell my home and took pictures for the ad with a really good camera the pictures would be very realistic but someone could make my home look much better in photoshop by tweaking the colors and contrast. One is realistic, one is what people like.

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BIGSTANKDICKDADDY t1_j01nrnh wrote

Ray tracing isn't necessarily about creating "realistic" scenes. It's about creating a realistic model for the behavior of light. It doesn't preclude color grading or any other stylistic flair you want to inject into a final render. Fortnite is a cartoony game that looks pretty great with raytracing. Epic's Matrix demo adopts the same "cold blue" aesthetic from the films. Disney/Pixar use path tracing in their 3D works but nobody would say "Up" or "Frozen" look "realistic", you know?

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werfenaway t1_izzqiww wrote

Ray tracing saves game development time by sparing developers having to do all the tricks to get it looking comparably good.

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alc4pwned t1_j02eady wrote

Idk, Cyberpunk with raytracing on vs off is a big difference.

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panzerfan t1_izxudzz wrote

About 1/3 less frames, increased overhead. Pretty stiff penalty even now.

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jordoneus121 t1_izy478n wrote

Maybe on an amd gpu. It's typically around a 40% loss on an nvidia card. Ray tracing done well is gorgeous and absolutely worth the cost imo.

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CazRaX t1_izy6tu2 wrote

Most people play at 1080p or 1440p, ray tracing is nice but most won't see the difference or care.

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BarackaFlockaFlame t1_izy92od wrote

i 100% see the difference of ray tracing at 1080p. Spider-man is incredible looking with raytracing on, seeing the real-time reflection on glass windows as you swing by and then distorting the way they would on a glass material. the lighting is also so much more realistic in how it effects things around it. it was nice for a bit, but then i want higher frames for the combat so I turn it off. Would love to have it always on but my PC can't reliably do over 60fps with raytracing at the quality settings I'd want.

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coworker t1_izyefjv wrote

I agree with the other guy. I have a 3080 and play 1440p on a G9. I couldn't tell a sizable difference in CyberPunk with RT on or off.

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BarackaFlockaFlame t1_izyfwvu wrote

cyberpunk has dog shit ray tracing to be fair. that game looked the same to me as well, except with ray tracing off it performed much better. i'm not arguing that not having raytracing is dumb, im just saying that on games that utilize ray tracing well, you definitely can notice in 1080p, there just aren't many games that use it effectively. try out quake 2 rtx on steam. it is free and shows you what ray tracing should look like. they also just released a free update to portal that gave it a graphical overhaul to also use ray tracing. id recommend giving them a go if you want to actually see some good uses of it, and even at 1080p its crystal clear that there is a difference in how light interacts with the game world.

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panzerfan t1_izy4txr wrote

I am somewhat on the fence when it comes to this. If people have OLED or QLED, then yeah, go for the raytracing eye candy. The problem to me is that it is a tiny minority.

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KeyWerewolf5 t1_izye8la wrote

What do oled or qled have to do with raytracing?

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panzerfan t1_izyegub wrote

I don't see why you would really embrace raytracing if your monitor can't handle the dynamic contrast.

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durielvs t1_izyh5xu wrote

Ray tracing is not the same as hdr. Rt is used to be able to see reflections in real time on water, for example, and much more complex lighting in general, even though it does not have a great dynamic range.It has much more to do with the physics of light than with pretty colors.

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KeyWerewolf5 t1_izyoynu wrote

But raytracing isn't about that. Its about more accurate reflections of light which lead to more realistic mirrors/bounce lighting/etc. Your resolution or hdr/dynamic contrast/whatever will certainly help a bit, but no, the benefits of raytracing are apparent across all screens. Watch every toy story on the same screen and tell me the lighting doesn't look better each sequel. Same thing.

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BobisaMiner t1_j0h9m3d wrote

This is not even remotely true. Sure they'll look much better on an oled (qled is not in the same league.. and it's mostly made up by samsung) but raytracing looks good on all panel types.

It's cutting edge tech for pc gaming, of course it's going to be for a small group.

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