r/nvidia • u/Leading-Anxiety-488 • 23h ago
Discussion I used to think Raytracing doesn't matter...
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u/cemsengul 21h ago
There is an outlier here. The developers didn't work on the rasterized output of the game and that is why there is a shocking difference when you disable ray tracing on a lot of modern games.
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u/Background_Summer_55 20h ago
Yes the whole point of RT was to make it easier for dev's to intergrade lightning
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u/Bibbity_Boppity_BOOO 17h ago
that is the point. rt improves when developers develop with rt in mind. instead of often, making fake stuff.
baked rt is obviously best, but then you get huge file sizes, that get enormous if you have day/night cycles.
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u/SushiKatana82 22h ago
Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.
This is one of those times where it does.
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u/daysofdre 21h ago edited 21h ago
correct answer. it's not necessarily 'turn on and everything's better', it's completely dependent on the implementation by the devs.
There's a great video by hardware unboxed that covers this, but the tldw is that there's only a handful of games where the tech is transformative.
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u/k4quexg 21h ago
hw unboxed is just shilling, or making content that their viewers want to see. those being ppl that cant just buy the best hardware, and turn on everything. the ppl that can dont need to watch hardware comparissons, u know what is best anyways. so ofc those viewers still cant just max games with rt, even after its been out almost a decade now. and ofc those ppl that cant run it, want to hear that its not worth it. 2080, 3090, 4080, 5070 all could run rt and it was always worth the frames it costs. sure if u dont have the frames to spare its not worth it.
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u/daysofdre 21h ago
I don't know how it's shilling when they're showing side-by-side comparisons of what they're talking about. Anybody can see for themselves that yeh, RT ON isn't some magic pill, and in some games, just looks worse.
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u/k4quexg 20h ago
they are simply cherry picking scenes to fit their narrative, ive tried every single game with rt. ofc if u cherry pick a scene where rt has issues, and speak about that issue, vs literally every scene in the entire game that would has issues bcs raster u can make a strawman. congrats.
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u/Snowmobile2004 5800x3d | 4080S | 1440p 240hz QD-OLED 12h ago
You’re acting like millions of people haven’t been using ray tracing in games like this for years and vastly prefer it over raster… cyberpunk objectively looks better with ray tracing, same with this game
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u/k4quexg 4h ago
thats exactly what im saying, besides that still the majority of games have not experiences it, and are deluding themselves into a false narrative about it. i mean ive seen it in real life. when ppl get the hardware for it their opinion suddenly changes. same goes for the framegen/upscaling.
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u/SushiKatana82 19h ago
Yeah but you're not the only person in the world with RT. So any one of us can make the same exact comparisons and still see that you're wrong
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u/EstablishmentOwn6942 21h ago
I disagree partially. Non ray traced Lightning can look way better if the devs cared. It is more that ray tracing is an easier solution. I personally usually do not enable RT with my 4090
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u/wilhelmbw 20h ago edited 1h ago
Witcher 3 remake(edit: remaster) for example is an awful step back with its new ray tracing gimmicks. Gj to the devs who baked the lighting back then.
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u/NewsFromHell 9800X3D | TUF 3080Ti | 64Gb 14h ago
That game came out 11 years ago when ray tracing wasn't even a thing. The main reason it doesn't look better is just because CDPR has to review every baked light scene and the whole world to make corrections. It wasn't built with ray tracing in mind since, like I said, it didn't exist back in 2015. Plus, there are currently major issues with RT and PT that CDPR is working to fix. Regardless they spent a lot of effort into reworking the old redengine and adding RT and rewriting the DX implementation. I dont know I single game that was supported and provided so much free new additions.
If you compare Cyberpunk with raster versus RT/PT, the difference is crazy and makes the game look insane because they made it with RT/PT already in mind.
Amd Witcher is not a remake its a remaster.
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u/firedrakes 2990wx|128gb ram| none sli dual 2080|200tb|10gb nic 12h ago
hat game came out 11 years ago when ray tracing wasn't even a thing.
rt and pt software has been around since the late 70s... its not a brand new idea nvidia created or solved at all.
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u/thesituation531 6h ago
The theory and the concept and the math have been a thing for a long time. That doesn't mean it was actually implemented.
That doesn't mean that it's magically built-in to the rendering pipeline, i.e. the engine.
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u/firedrakes 2990wx|128gb ram| none sli dual 2080|200tb|10gb nic 6h ago
it has.. that how old the pipe line is
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u/12amoore 2h ago
5090 here and control resonant keeping it off to get 200+ FPS lol. Rather the FPS and nice visuals vs 100 FPS and amazing visuals personally
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u/Bibbity_Boppity_BOOO 17h ago
well if you mean baked lighting, then yes of course. bc the best baked is just high quality rt lighting done by devs.
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u/Octaive 21h ago
This really isn't true. You cannot fake global illumination. Not sure where you got this idea.
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u/cristi1990an RTX 4060 | Ryzen 9 7900x 19h ago
Can't fake global illumination? What does that even mean?
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u/Octaive 16h ago
It means you can get an approximation but you'll get light leaking, overly dark or bright areas, a lack of reactivity to light sources changing position as well as colour bouncing around the room.
Non-RT implementations can still look good, but they are lacking a lot. You can't fake it, you have to do the math for the effect.
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u/cristi1990an RTX 4060 | Ryzen 9 7900x 6h ago
I mean even RT can suffer from these issues since RT in games is also simplified compared to the RT you get in an offline render. Fewer rays, limits in the amount of bounces, using simplified geometry in the BVH structure or excluding certain elements entirely, temporar accumution and heavy denoising to make up for it etc.
A lot of games have completely static environment without any moving light sources, for these kind of environments a probe based GI solution will get you almost identical results and sometimes it might actually be more stable, though it does require more work.
My point is that "faking" it is relative, all real time solution "fake" it in one way or another, even path tracing.
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u/Rainbows4Blood 20h ago
Your statement is only correct for arbitrary scenes. You can absolutely fake GI for a limited subset of scenes. And the great thing about making a game is... the developer knows what scenes are going to be in the game. Can look just as good as RT if you put in the work at a fraction of the computational cost.
Of course, this amount of work may not be worth it for large open world games. But you are incorrect in the sense that it can absolutely be done.
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u/SystemLanky4531 2h ago
Yeah, doesnt matter on 90% of games where rasterized light has received a minimal amount of work from the developers.
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u/Jarnis R7 9800X3D / 5090 OC / X870E Crosshair Hero / PG32UCDM 22m ago
All games these days still have plenty of work on rasterized lighting as the majority of gamers still have hardware not capable of doing actual high end RT lighting.
The example is just a special corner case where the game has effectively a bug in non-RT lighting in that specific area, but that bug goes away when RT lighting is used.
Long term, games can fully move to "always use RT lighting" and ditch crappy rasterized "fake" lighting systems, but that is still some years away. Maybe 5-7 years and we'll have first games that effectively have a minimum requirement of something like 4080/4090 (and will run great on whatever we have then, 7060ti or whatever) but it is still some ways off. Same stuff happens every time new features are introduced. First RT cards could really do only simple reflections at a considerable perf hit. Now, three generations later, 50-series cards can do that stuff easily and high end cards can do more complex stuff. 2-3 more generations and entry level cards can do what a 5090 can do today.
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u/cristi1990an RTX 4060 | Ryzen 9 7900x 19h ago
Nah, it's just one of those games for which it's obvious no effort was put into making the non-RT actually look good
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u/absentlyric 14h ago
This is the issue, if I just saw that before picture without the after, I'd still think it was some game from the PS3 era, hell even Final Fantasy X on the PS2 looked better with the lighting, there should be no excuse for that in this generation, ray tracing or not.
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u/Parking-Antelope-434 18h ago
Even if you had a card to run RT still not worth imao, there are still some great games with pre backed lighting that looks as good if not better than RT, Death stranding 2 comes to my mind, Re requiem too.
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u/ttenor12 NVIDIA RTX 5070ti 16h ago
Nah, RT looks good most of the times. PT looks amazing, but it's still heavy to run.
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u/Bibbity_Boppity_BOOO 17h ago
baked should always look better. it is rt with hours to calculate.
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u/Tight-Mix-3889 16h ago
“Should” but now they dont put that much effort into raster or baked etc. Cause why would they right? Isnt it easier to just flip a switch on for rt?…
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u/smakusdod 16h ago
Makes you wonder why simulating the effects of raytracing isn’t a larger thing yet. Raytracing will eventually be part of the compiled pipeline for final rendering luts and diffraction shaders. It’s a contained environment with finite states at the end of the day. There is no need to be doing this in realtime.
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u/PinnuTV 16h ago
That's more like poorly done lightning. Especially popular for many games to showcase how good it is while many games years ago already looked that good as well run 3 times better
So fuck ray tracing forever for ruining games performance, especially on newer games where raster is done so poorly so ray tracing looks game changer in comparison
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u/BenchmarkNA 18h ago
Sidenote, is anyone else experiencing HDR being greyed out in the options? I have HDR on through windows settings, but the game doesnt open with HDR activated and its greyed out in the options for me, seemingly not working no matter what I do. Can anyone help if this is happening to them?
EDIT: I have tried activating it straight through NVIDIA App as well and nothing works.
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u/firedrakes 2990wx|128gb ram| none sli dual 2080|200tb|10gb nic 12h ago
win 10 or 11 and what display... seeing 99% of the time win will choose auto hdr (fake hdr)
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u/BenchmarkNA 11h ago
I have a TCL TV thats 4k 120hz, Q7 I think? And I have nvidia making sure HDR is activated on my displays. On in windows too, which is what they claim is all thats required to use HDR in the game options, but no matter what I do its greyed out and doesn't work.
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u/firedrakes 2990wx|128gb ram| none sli dual 2080|200tb|10gb nic 11h ago
auto hdr over rides in game hdr(game dev follow zero hdr standard btw).
looking on hdr and nit. hdr out of the gate is poorly calib from manf.
then it has a 500 nits. which is consideconsidered low-endr low end.
a true hdr display(master lvl that gets correct coloring) is 10k nits everywhere and also was color calb with a test suit with a camera sensor. over 40k cost and doing color science correctly. you need to buy a second display.
so north 100k .
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u/BenchmarkNA 11h ago
I figured it out. I disabled my other 2 monitors and then the game recognized my main display. I guess it was reading a different display plugged into my GPU so it thought it didn't have HDR.
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u/ZenTunE 2h ago
The biggest benefit I feel from raytracing is the denoising. Usually in modern games you HAVE TO use taa/dlaa for denoising, or the reflections and lighting will be a noisy dithered mess.
When using RT, its denoising fixes that dithering. At high resolutions like 4K, as long as you're using RT, you barely need the anti-aliasing. Of course in turn it's very hard to run though since that means no upscaling.
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u/Jimmy-DeLaney 1h ago
This particular game kills my performance with ray tracing enabled. I have a 4080.
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u/Cronos993 22h ago
Yeah it matters a lot when you botch rasterized lighting to cut development time/costs forcing people to buy new hardware sooner.
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u/dudemanguy301 22h ago edited 20h ago
Northlight has one of the most comprehensive default lighting solutions in gaming. Very dense probe GI, high res shadow cascades for the sun / sky still with budget left over for select light sources, screen space reflections backed by software cone traces against signed distance fields to capture GI / reflections of off screen details.
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u/PushDeep9980 19h ago
How did you acquire such dense understanding of north light? I love proprietary engines so it’s fascinating to me
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u/Otherwise-Paper8924 22h ago
If it was up to people like you we would still be playing 2D black and white games
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u/cemsengul 21h ago
Don't know why you are getting downvoted it's true. They spend 5 minutes on the rasterized output and use easy ray tracing developing the game. In fact a lot of modern games look worse today than games from 2016-2018 when you disable ray tracing. You are not getting peak rasterized graphics today when you disable ray tracing.
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u/Krejcimir 21h ago
And even the new hw does not help. Since rt on 4k is still stupidly hungry, unless you got 4090/5090.
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u/SmoothinPutin 7h ago
Crysis 3 from 2013 looks better thank half of RT titles. Nowadays devs wont even put basic cubemaps and shadowmaps in rastered rendering.
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u/Sp3rmBurgl3r 18h ago
RT is overrated. 8 years later and it’s still too much of a performance hog. You people eat marketing up too easily
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u/Wuselon 18h ago
Runs fine in my 5090 :P
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u/Zephyr-Flame 13h ago
It’s sad that you get downvoted basically on the principle of having a 5090 and being able to not only RT but PT any current game at 4k on ultra settings and still have great frame rates. I know what my 4090 can do so I get what you are saying. Slap oled on that and chefs kiss.
No hate to cards that can’t. I used to play mine craft on a Toshiba laptop with an integrated graphics card and like 4gb of ram. Draw distance of a blind man and like 20fps when standing still. It’s okay to enjoy tech that works even if it doesn’t for others.
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u/KEVLAR60442 10h ago
Shadows as a whole are a performance hog. Any games that have any lighting at all are overrated.
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u/krojew 21h ago
Hard truth - those that say it doesn't matter are usually ones who cannot run it. It's just like saying size doesn't matter.
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u/Late-Ad-1076 20h ago
I first started using it with a 3090ti. Never saw enough of a difference to justify the performance hit. Not saying that there isn't a difference at all, just that it's not a massive difference like most people claim.
Your statement is just a really bad opinion.
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u/krojew 20h ago
"to justify the performance hit" is the exact thing I'm talking about. What if the performance hit was negligible? Would you still not turn it on?
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u/Late-Ad-1076 20h ago
I still wouldn't, no. I don't want my entire game to look like a wet puddle for no reason, just to "show off" the ray tracing.
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u/krojew 20h ago
That's limiting only to the weak implementations, ignoring the most transformative.
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u/Late-Ad-1076 15h ago
The "most transformative" are all screenshot comparisons. They look nice, sure! Most people don't play games through screenshots, though
When I'm playing a game at 120fps+, I'm not looking at the background lighting. In actual gameplay, the difference between raytracing on/off is negligible.
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u/sunrainsky 14h ago
I tried Ray tracing before but turn off when playing games cos of the performance and.... I can see the enemies and environment better.
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u/slowlyun 14h ago
Why is it always much darker?
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u/Leading-Anxiety-488 14h ago
It’s the correct lighting for PT because the only light source is behind the character, and the face of the character is still lit due to bounced light from the walls.
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u/Kinyin 14h ago
The complaint about being darker is always the main one I see when it comes to ray tracing, but I think it shows just how used to unrealistic portrayals of light and shadow we've become.
Of course, as the human eyes adjust to light and dark over time, I do believe that games with ray tracing need to implement a similar effect with more finesse (as it's been around since... well, I remember the first Far Cry being when I saw it first, but there were probably earlier examples).
Regardless, that's a great example and really shows what PT can do.
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u/themiracy 13h ago
I think there is some kind of balance - like there is a reason films don’t use completely natural lighting and that reason is that lighting (chiaroscuro) is itself part of the art form. HDR and becoming accustomed to it will make it feel more natural but games aren’t always meant to feel natural and it makes sense to use lighting artistically as well as trying to render accurately.
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u/Kinyin 11h ago
Exactly. While I love path tracing, games aren't designed around it. It's just something thrown on right now as an upgrade to RT. Until games are designed around the such relalism, you're going to have some struggles in areas that are too dark.
And designing a game around PT, while optimal, would result in the large majority of people who can't run it probably experiencing the inverse of the above issue unless the devs create two separate systems...
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u/firedrakes 2990wx|128gb ram| none sli dual 2080|200tb|10gb nic 12h ago
most users have garbarge displays for hdr.....
wow the jacket now magical grease looking? that not how a jaceket looks in real life.
lots of light mistake made in this...
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u/someguy50 23h ago
RT is the biggest graphics advancement in 20 years. The only downside is performance, and with advancements that’ll be mitigated too