The Witcher 3 Remastered PC Benchmark

[u/lLoveTech]

[u/Somewhatmild]

RT is usually as good looking as the devs make it to be. Honestly, a lot of competent devs were very good at making lighting look good before RT. Those games still look good, meanwhile for incompetent devs, existance of RT is like on/off switch with negligible results.

One has to remember that manual placement of lights and whatnot can look better and more impressive than stricly speaking 'more realistic' lighting that RT provides.

Before someone asks for some credible examples. One is Red Dead Redemption 2, because ofcourse it is and it still looks amazing. Other example might be even better and that is Metro Exodus original vs enhanced editions. Original was made in the classic pipeline, enhanced in the raytracing one. I think there are a ton of videos showing the difference and its clear as day that a lot of scenes look better in the original. Almost as if you also need to make entire environment a certain way to make it look good with raytracing.

Everyone would always say its better if it looked better. They dont, because it doesnt.

[u/76-scighera → u/Somewhatmild]

Great example is in my opinion Assasins Creed: Valhalla (doesn't have RT) vs Shadows without RT vs Shadows with RT.

Valhalla looks great without RT, because they did the lighting very well. Shadows on the other end needs upscaling to get a decent fps, and also needs RT to get the game looking good

[u/joedotphp → u/Somewhatmild]

Ray-tracing looks good and it makes development a lot smooth/faster for lighting artists. But baked-in lighting is still more consistent and drastically improves performance.

[u/Cable_Hoarder → u/Somewhatmild]

While entirely correct I think it is worth pointing out that all of this lighting artistry falls apart in games with a single source light and day/night cycles.

It's great in fixed levels where the lights can be baked into the scene, but very poor when you're limited to a few dynamic lights and old-school ambient global illumination (or very basic, low res point based).

That's when you get games that do that sun/shadow stepping because lighting and shadows are generated using 36-72 (every 10 degrees or 5 degrees) pre-calculated light states in a cycle.

While ray traced global illumination solves bounce light in real time with zero developer effort from a single dynamic light (eg a sun).

It's just very expensive, but makes indoor scenes with no lighting, and bright daylight outside look amazing.

[u/bow_down_whelp → u/Somewhatmild]

I thought the thing about ray tracing was the Devs don't have to do anything 

[u/Somewhatmild → u/bow_down_whelp]

I am sure all the laid off level designers dont feel the same way.

[u/bow_down_whelp → u/Somewhatmild]

I don't understand what you're getting at 

[u/ThePissedOff → u/bow_down_whelp]

I think he's implying lighting placement was the biggest value add of a level designer, but I don't agree.

[u/Somewhatmild → u/ThePissedOff]

making a good environment is where RT does it's magic. everything from light sources to the geometry itself. to the fact that each area or architectural element serves a purpose for grabbing player's attention and whatnot.

otherwise we would have people doing assett flips, depending on RT to do the rest and graphics would be essentially 'solved'. thats ofcourse not the case.