I love ray tracing and path tracing when they’re done right. Ik fully ray traced scenes are hardly playable even on high end cards without upscaling but like if one has a powerful enough card, why not utilize its potential? Yet most people don’t seem to care about RT.
When it comes to upscaling though, I hate it, and I’m not even talking about frame gen. It makes things look blurry and causes annoying artifacts. I think playing on lowest settings with clear textures is more enjoyable long term than maxed out in 4k with a consistently blurry image. Also this new technology makes devs care less about optimization (which will backfire btw as we’re approaching the physical limit of transistor size).
i turn off upscaling and enable dedicated fullscreen immediately, and then i get mad if the game cant run well without it. it literally NEVER looks better. the edges are ugly, frame rate stutters, things look patchy cross hatched, weirdness, i hate it.
Clair Obscur (amazing) is the most recent offender. all the default settings it chose for my computer made it run like crap AND look ugly. disabled ai upscaling and enabled dedicated fullscreen, and the game looks beautiful and runs like butter on my aging 3070.
i have no idea why the industry started making these the default settings but i wish they would stop.
I don’t consider ray tracing to be in the same category as these other technologies, though. ray tracing can look fantastic as long as it doesn’t kill the frame rate.
I’ve personally hit the point where I don’t care much about graphical improvements, especially as someone with a vision disability. I’d rather have games run smoothly on any old console. Everything is advertising 4k meanwhile I’m still using a 720p tv lol
Ray Tracing isn’t used well enough to justify the performance hit in pretty much all but 1 game I have ever played (cyberpunk 2077; real time reflections off wet surfaces and glass really stand out and look fantastic).
And upscaling looks horrendous compared to just running at a native resolution. I prefer to not use it, but sometimes it’s necessary either because the game doesn’t let you not use it (mostly seen with console games) or because it’s so poorly optimized you need it to just get a baseline acceptable fps.
Efficient ambient-light ray tracing (like Lumen) is amazing. It contributes massively to making environments feel believable and immersive.
Path traced reflections and shadows are a indefensible waste of processing power (for now).
Upscaling and frame generation are crutches that are actively harming gaming right now. From disocclusion artifacts to unsightly “sharpening” distortions to developers/publishers skipping optimization because they expect DLSS/FSR will pick up the slack, it’s a cool thing that has unfortunately resulted in games being worse all around.
DLSS is amazing, if it’s available in a game I’m playing I use it.
Ray tracing and path tracing are incredible and the industry needs to quickly cut ties with all hardware that can’t do it. It makes game development significantly quicker, it looks better, and it has genuine gameplay advancements by the very nature of it (like being able to see reflections/shadows of off-screen enemies).
Hmm I decided not to interact with the answers a lot as they are personal opinions but yours is very radical so I decided to step in. Please keep in mind that not all people have an ability to buy any kind of expensive setup. Ray tracing is great but it indeed has a severe performance impact and not all manufacturers have efficient hardware for it yet so an ethical and nondiscriminatory way of implementing forced ray tracing will not be possible any time soon. Just something to keep in mind when forming a strong opinion.
an ethical and nondiscriminatory way of implementing forced ray tracing will not be possible any time soon.
Sorry but I just don’t care. Sometimes we need to just leave some people behind in order to move forward. Devs having to cater to people with 10 year old potato hardware is holding the industry back.
Yea that is kind of not ok.
It’s definitely ok. You’re not owed the ability to play every single game that releases on your hardware.
Thankfully some devs are now moving with the times and giving us games built on modern technology, like doom the dark ages and Indiana jones.
Graphics are, like it or not, the main thing the majority of people look for first when they go to buy a game, and raytracing is a ridiculously easy way to achieve that in comparison to the time and skill required to elevate traditional lighting to that same level of beauty. PS5 and XSX both support raytracing, and PC graphics cards that don’t are coming up on 10 years old at this point.
Any AAA developer is going to see those two facts, that it’s way cheaper and runs on most of the market’s hardware, and abandon development work on traditional lighting. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is RT-only, and it was a huge success.
DLSS is in a similar boat - it reduces the need to spend time and money on optimization.
Now, let me be clear, I lament both of these facts. I think raytracing looks gorgeous, and DLSS is usually a nice performance boost for minimal tradeoff, but I don’t think every game should look photorealistic, and some games just don’t look good with DLSS on. What I’m saying is they both make game development cheaper and faster for very little relative downside, so I wouldnt be surprised if all AAA games required raytracing within the next few years.
I barely know and don’t have a strong opinion about it.
I wouldn’t have finished The Last Of Us Part 1 without FSR, which I desperately wanted to play again for the nostalgia. That game is so fucking horribly optimized.
It’s not for me I don’t want be spending a thousand on a GPU and a hundred on a game that takes my whole SSD and refuses to run off a spinner
It’s OK.
I think it’s incredibly overrated. Modern games already look incredible without it, so I really don’t think it’s worth the cut in performance.
I do like upscaling, it lets me my poor 6650xt reach 75fps (my monitor refresh rate) on games where it can only get 60fps on native 1080p.
I don’t play those games that need upscaling to barely run ok. They aren’t getting my money, at least until they fix their shit.
in some situations it’s allowing me to put off buying a video card for a while which I appreciate
I personally don’t see much of a difference between RT and the established lighting algorithms, so that’s that.
Super resolution / upscaling is something I love, given that I play on a 4k TV. DLSS is black magic wizardry.
Raytracing and path tracing can look pretty nice and raytracing especially is worth turning on when it’s a game where it’s properly optimized. Unfortunately in many games, it really isn’t, which means the performance impact is too large compared to the visual benefits. So in many games, I don’t turn it on as I prefer the much higher framerate.
Upscaling technologies are pretty great. Especially in their current iterations, the image quality they can achieve from low resolutions is impressive. That said, they should be used as a way to get graphically advanced games working on low to mid-spec GPUs. Using them as a crutch to get unoptimized games working on high-end cards is not acceptable. Neither is pretending that upscaled and frame-generated performance is directly equivalent to native-res performance (looking at you, nVidia).
I like raytracing in that it actually makes the job easier for artists in many cases.
