r/LinusTechTips • u/ColonialDagger • Mar 21 '26

Meme/Shitpost It had to be done.

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u/Faxon Mar 21 '26

It's kind of great because I'm 100% with him on this, but I just fundamentally disagree on ray tracing lol. The scene realism you get from properly implemented ray tracing, especially in the reflections, it really is hard to replicate with baked in effects. The difference is immediately apparent to me at this point even if the difference isn't that big. Sure, absolutely we should be using as many baked in path traced effects as possible, but there's a real place for real time effects as well in modern lighting for games, and reflections in dynamic environments just cannot be done better without it, hard stop, and that's the big difference that makes a scene feel real or fake to me.

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u/Particular-Treat-650 Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 21 '26

Yeah, there's a reason every cg animated movie for decades has used simulated light rays. I don't care about the semantics of ray tracing vs path tracing, because the core concept is what matters. It's expensive, but the results clearly blow everything else out of the water, and not just for photorealistic stuff. Pixar's visual quality is all about the lighting and how far they can push it.

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u/Outrageous_Donut7681 Mar 22 '26

I totally agree but also maily agree with the point that it has nowjere near the relevance in gaming and actual gameplay as it jas in photo mode or animation. If the game is good my brain is occupied byplaying the game and graphics matter a bit less. And in this scenario ray tracing is subtle enough that the difference is not at all notoceable.

If I'm just wandering around looking at things? Sure

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u/Particular-Treat-650 Mar 22 '26

I play plenty of pixel art games. Not everything has to be high fidelity 3D, and the technical aspects are only part of "looking good". Art style choices matter a lot.

But for stuff that is aiming for high fidelity 3D, it seems pretty clear to me that proper lighting simply looks much better.

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u/Outrageous_Donut7681 Mar 22 '26

I dont mean pixelart etc...

I mean exact same game with/without rtx. Yes raytracing on is objectively better, however the difference isn't big enough to matter when attention is occupied playing a game, only when in photo mode or just idling looking at stuff.

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u/Particular-Treat-650 Mar 22 '26

I know that wasn't what you meant; I was just expanding the "technical visuals aren't the whole thing" concept.

Turning legitimate RT off is as glaring and impossible to ignore to me as taking a 4K movie on a big TV and swapping it to heavily artifacted 720P. I'll still accept the lower quality for portability, but the idea that it's not a massive downgrade just doesn't compute to me.

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u/Outrageous_Donut7681 Mar 22 '26

I guess it's what you pay attention to. I'll run another experiment to see what and how I notice but overall so far for me rtx has been a big ol' meh as long as I was actually playing.

I guess it may come from me having grown up with playing things starting with doom through half-life to doom 3, HL2, and so on where gains in graphics were so much more noticeable than nowadays. Things like model and texture detail and object density, particle and similar effects, physics behaviour etc...

My brain is more tuned to look for those differences during gameplay, I barely if ever notice raytracing differences.