CGI's Party Of Graphics & Tech (9th Generation)

[DonFerrari]

SvennoJ said:

DonFerrari said:

Seems like it matches what I expected, the sacrifices for RTX on the current build wouldn`t be worth it even if on resolution mode.

Ray traced illumination wouldn't be able to match the pre-baked light maps with that level of detail. The day night transition would be a little bit less jarring (although you only notice it in timelapse mode) and it would be a big sacrifice just to get some more natural looking shadows. Like in the last picture the shadow should be getting less strong with less sharply defined edges as the shadow stretches across the rock wall.

We'll see with GT7 how the lighting changes with real time lighting vs baked in lighting. Since not all tracks will have dynamic lighting, some with still have the ray traced light maps from GT Sport. GT7 only does some ray tracing in replay mode though, during races it's all old techniques.

RT is simply too expensive for the level of detail AAA games want to achieve on console. Maybe some smaller more stylistic games will start making full use of RT. However in AAA games it will remain a gimmick, an little enhancement here and there. The thought that RT would make it easier on developers (not having to pre-bake light / shadow / reflection maps anymore) is only true while making the game on powerful hardware. Instant preview when editing the world. It's going to take at least another gen before RT can become the standard way to render games.

For now we're stuck with screen space reflections and all the side effects that brings. Horizon FW does a decent job with reflections in water yet you always see it 'missing' / changing along the edges where the data isn't there. Shadows getting softer the further they extend can be faked without RT, yet pre-baking all reflections for dynamic day/night cycles would be far too much data.

Miles Morales and Ratchet made great use of RT on PS5, but yes it could have been prebaked and with the extra power put it into something else imho.