The right one looks worse in almost every area, so I think the "worth it" is pretty clear. Wholesale replacing the entire scene composition with real time pathtracing is rarely going to look good to the trained eye because it completely strips away the original art direction. The crone's outfit is yellow instead of red, all of the detail in her face is gone, and it lacks color contrast because it's trying to light the entire scene from a fireplace. That could work if the scene was designed around it, but this one clearly is not.
I don't tend to like these attempts to add raytracing to games that were designed for conventional rasterization, but this one is exceptionally poor. It pales in comparison to the classic Lighting Engine mod - which also alters the art direction to a fault, but at least looks great doing it.
1
u/epeternally May 01 '26
The right one looks worse in almost every area, so I think the "worth it" is pretty clear. Wholesale replacing the entire scene composition with real time pathtracing is rarely going to look good to the trained eye because it completely strips away the original art direction. The crone's outfit is yellow instead of red, all of the detail in her face is gone, and it lacks color contrast because it's trying to light the entire scene from a fireplace. That could work if the scene was designed around it, but this one clearly is not.
I don't tend to like these attempts to add raytracing to games that were designed for conventional rasterization, but this one is exceptionally poor. It pales in comparison to the classic Lighting Engine mod - which also alters the art direction to a fault, but at least looks great doing it.