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Spindel on 21 May 2021
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Pemalite said:
Peh said:

Every word in this sentence is wrong except "to" and "the". 

He's not wrong.

It -is- an industry buzzword to hype new hardware (not just consoles).

Ray Tracing has been around for decades, Generation 6 consoles had games that used Ray Tracing.

It's not new. It's not novel.

Spindel said:

While RT could be used as an gameplay element just as physics can I see less of an use for it that couldn't be done with "cheating" meaning no need to have actual real time RT. 

From a game play perspective I see more to gain from real time CFD than real time RT to be honest. 

But I might just lack imagination. 

At the moment developers are using " Dedicated Hardware" Ray Tracing to "Bolt on" effects to current games (I.E. Shadows and Reflections) rather than using it to hardware accelerate operations... Once developers start using it to hardware accelerate say... Global illumination for example we can then spend more shader processing to bolster visual fidelity elsewhere.

At the moment, the few games that tend to use Ray Tracing don't necessarily look significantly/generational better, but rather simply look different... Until you start nit-picking finer details like screen-space reflections and its inherent visual artifacts... But let's be honest, in a fast-paced first person shooter, you aren't going to notice the visual flaws in screen spaced reflections vs ray tracing if screen-spaced reflections are of acceptable quality.

Reminds me of Motorhead (an old arcade racer made by Digital Illusions about 20 years ago) that was so stunning with the reflections in the cars. 

Well it was all cheating since it was the same track specific dynamic texture just being repeated over and over again. But when you actually played that game (I loved it BTW) you really didn't noticed that detail you just noted that there where reflections and it looked cool. 

And that is my main problem when, in my opinion, to much resources are wasted on graphical "lul" in games, t h e y  d o  n o t  m a t t e r if the game is good and immersing because of gameplay. 

EDIT:// here is a video of Motorhead gameplay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlXnI2R4gAE you might laugh but at the time of its release it was visually really stunning. 

Last edited by Spindel - on 21 May 2021