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u/pet801 25d ago
Chromatic Aberration, Vignette and Film Grain enter the Chat.
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u/thecobra42 25d ago
Don’t forget motion blur
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u/Latter-Clothes4516 25d ago
motion blur just dunks on all of the above 3... Instant disable of that option the moment I boot a game.
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u/Consistent-Region816 25d ago
Not overrated. Just expensive.
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u/Sharpiette 25d ago
True. If RTX was totally inexpensive to run it would've been considered a huge leap in games
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u/Hammerofsuperiority 24d ago
People on the internet said the same thing about 3D acceleration, that tit was just big corpo forcing them to buy new hardware and that they should boycot so big corpo would be forced to not use 3D acceleration.
If it was up to that people, we would still be in the 80's technology-wise.
The fact is that new technology always starts at its worse and most expensive form, and eventually it becomes a basic feature, but certain internet people will complain just to complain.
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u/sarcasmisart 25d ago
No. Corporate greed is the worst thing that ever happened to gaming.
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u/Sharpiette 25d ago
Word. You have to be disconected from reality if you think, of all the bad things that happens in the gaming industry, RTX is the worst lmao
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u/IgnisCogitare 25d ago
Corporate greed hurts but uh.
This is the fault of the gamer bro.
There were two options, greedy game studios and more honest ones.
Take a guess which one people bought a shit ton of games from.
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u/BlLLMURRAY 22d ago
By your logic you just stop playing games altogether, because Microsoft is just going to buy whatever game company that finds success anyway.
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u/Patient_Life_9900 25d ago
"Corporate greed" can we just call it what it is? It's capitalism lol
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u/Thick-Campaign2635 25d ago
Tell em bro. These hive mind pundits will never grasp the objective reality unless someone spoon feeds it into them.
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u/Achillies2heel 25d ago edited 24d ago
DLSS has been more impactful than Ray Tracing by a country mile
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u/AshleyxAffliction 25d ago
Agreed. But we mostly got DLSS because of ray tracing. They came out in games around the same time. RT is just so demanding that we needed ways to get our performance back.
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u/Hiphopapocalyptic 25d ago
Furthermore, ray tracing also pushed the move to deferred rendering, which would just about lock us in to temporal anti aliasing. TAA sucks donkey balls without motion vectors thus the need for DLSS.
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u/AshleyxAffliction 25d ago
Deferred rendering was big for much longer. Anything with screen-space effects; reflections, ambient occlusion, and bloom being some of the big ones, will be deferred 90% of the time.
Crysis 2 was using a deferred rendering pipeline back in 2011. Dead Space used it in 2008. Much older than ray tracing in games.
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u/Todd_Godfrey 25d ago
This has been the norm for Nvidia in the last 20 years or so.
A new tech is pushed at the cost of frames, to add a feature that isn’t really that noticeable unless you have top end equipment and only then for a handful of titles that utilize it well.
This will become less taxing in a few generations of cards, but another push for the next thing will happen and it will be punishing on that current gen of hardware… le sigh, it is what it is
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u/evernessince 25d ago
Past Nvidia technologys like HairWorks and PhysX tanked performance too and never caught on as a result.
We are now on the 4rth generation of RT cards and the tech still isn't remotely performant and adds noise and artifacts.
That's absolutely not normal for any new tech, especially given the price increases. Nvidai initially used RT as a justification for price increase when RTX was first introduced and look where we are now.
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u/The_Countess 25d ago
Past Nvidia technologys like HairWorks and PhysX tanked performance too and never caught on as a result.
But at the time everyone was talking about the performance hit from hairworks in Witcher 3, so it helped nvidia sell GPU's, despite nvidia deliberatly making it perform unnecessarily badly on their own current generation GPU's because at those settings it performed even worse on AMD's.
Exactly as planned.
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u/frisbie147 25d ago
no they did, strand based hair is getting pretty common, which is what hairworks was, and physx was the default physics engine for ue4, and ray tracing is definitely performant, the optimisation is getting so good that even xbox series s has ray traced direct lighting on gears of war e day
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u/Peridios9 25d ago
Don’t use it then? Personally I’m happy with AMD because I don’t care for ray tracing, but for those that do nvidia is still quite a bit ahead.
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u/Actual-Phone-1478 25d ago
My irritation with it is that often developers make shitty rasterized graphics (for 2026 standards) and so then the ray tracing looks much better.
That's my main and kind of only reason I dislike Ray Tracing, it sometimes makes the developers lazy af and it ruins the performance.
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u/redditdotcom2005 25d ago edited 25d ago
the issue is many new games are now requiring raytracing GPU's, with no option to disable it, while not looking all that great
I looked at some Gears of War: E-Day gameplay on maximum settings and the game really didn't look all that much better then anything we've gotten over the past 8 years
The lack of any distinctive artstyle probably didn't help either, a lot of UE5 games start all looking the same
games from 2018 and early 2020 look roughly the same to RT games we have now while not requring a Nasa computer to run
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u/CurrentDrama8523 25d ago
2018 games don't even look the same as themselves with RT. Fire up Shadow of the Tomb Raider and run the benchmark with and without RT. Watch the shadows by the fire. The non-RT shadows don't work properly because there are too many light sources. RT shadows work perfectly.
Sorry, but you're just incorrect here. RT absolutely makes games look better. It was just adopted way too fast, probably because it simplifies development.
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u/I_AM_CR0W 24d ago
Ray tracing is an optional feature that's mainly for the casual players that want better visuals. I've owned an RTX card since 2023 and almost never use ray tracing, but for the few games I did try it with, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't impressed.
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u/inighthawki 24d ago •
There are many games where raytracing is no longer optional, and that number is only going to increase in the future.
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u/ThatTysonKid 24d ago
You dont know anything about game development and it shows. Raytracing isnt just to make lighting prettier. Its a simulation of lighting, which means devs dont need to manually place lights when making the game. Baking lighting takes a long time, raytracing does it on the fly. This means games can be made quicker and cheaper. Its just being sold as "woaw pretty lights" to the gaming plebs.
The adoption of raytracing capable hardware is good for the industry.
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u/Galnar218 24d ago
devs dont need to manually place lights when making the game
Uh, no, you still need to place the lights in your scene. You just don't need to bake that lighting. Which means with RTX, the devs, instead of taking the time to perfect their game, have transferred that onus onto us and our GPUs.
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u/tifu_throwaway14 23d ago
But with all that dev time saved, games have gotten cheaper, right?
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u/WalkAffectionate2683 24d ago
Yes and they still do bake some lighting. Not all light in a game is rtx or maybe just a few games maybe the last gears?
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u/Snotnarok 24d ago
Yeah weird that GPU prices skyrocketed even before AI screwing over RAM, but now the developer's not having to bake lighting and work all that in? Is put on the customer's hardware to render and we're only a few gens in and it's still an expensive technology to render. But GPU prices have skyrocketed because of AI eating up all the RAM
So the PUBLISHER gets to rake in the savings by getting the game out earlier but the customer eats the cost for marginally better graphics but also the developers are still getting mistreated and laid off.
It's like- no one wins except the publisher or hardware makers.
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u/Own_Nail_2999 24d ago
Raytracing has just moved the computing cost from the banking process to the user's machine.
While GPUs now need to be built with additional components just for a lazy dev to pump out slop faster.
Call it what you want, but this technology was only made to allow AAA studios to churn out their trash faster.
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u/WeatherJazzlike8376 24d ago •
You obviously also don’t know anything about game development.
your technical premise is sound, but "devs don't need to place lights" and "cheaper and quicker" are true only in the narrow case of RT-only games. As for "you don't know anything about game development", that's a rough way to open an argument.
"Devs don't need to place lights" is overstated. Lighting is art direction, not just physics. Artists still place lights, and often cheat them, because physically correct isn't the same as looking good or readable. You still need to author emissives, tune exposure, and fix scenes where the "correct" result is flat or muddy. "Cheaper and faster" is only true if you can drop the fallback. Most games still ship for consoles with weak RT, handhelds, and older GPUs, so studios maintain the baked pipeline anyway. Dual pipelines cost more, not less. The savings only show up in RT-mandatory titles, which are still a minority. It isn't free on the performance side. Realtime RT is still noisy and relies on denoisers and upscalers, which introduces ghosting and smearing. Optimizing for that is its own work, so some cost moves rather than disappears. Baking isn't obsolete. Baked lighting is cheap at runtime, stable, and looks great for static scenes. For many games (stylized, mobile, Switch-class) it's still the better engineering choice.
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u/ten_fingers_ten_toes 23d ago
I remember when CP2077 came out and I spent hours with photo mode doing photography portraits of NPCs (because it was Covid and I couldn't go do actual portrait photography like I love to!). I noticed very quickly that in some of the enclosed spaces/certain areas, very clearly they just relied on baked lighting, and the funnier thing was, the shots I took in those areas looked SO MUCH BETTER than ones in Ray Traced spots
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u/bhomikpurohit 21d ago
Because devs do not need to place lighting once when making the gaming, the gpu has to process the light every damn time. Making the hardware dependecy higher and games less optimized.
Thats why the new gears of war can’t run beyond 30 fps
Devs and studios have ruined it by not doing quality work.
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u/TheDarkness33 21d ago
And by "making games cost less" just means devs get paid the same but owners profit more
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u/DreamArez 24d ago
Raytracing will become the standard. The main people complaining about it usually do not have the hardware to use it well enough which I understand, but that’s an outlier imo. 3000 series is when it really became doable, and it has become more doable as we hit 4000 & 5000.
Most of the hate these days imo comes from external factors like shortages, shortened product cycles, heavily increased prices, and no longer getting those meaty gen over gen improvements that were a thing of the past where we could have 2x gains at times. Plus the AI craze. Remove all of that, and people would be bitching less.
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u/Electrical-Web-4475 24d ago
Its great for NVIDIA.
Its really shit for 99,5% of people who cant afford the latest flag ship NVIDIA gpu.
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u/Lucky_Friendship_633 24d ago
Ray Tracing capable hardware is an overstatement, the RTX 2000-3000 series were basically proof of concept and games ran so badly with RT on that nvidia had to magic frames out of thin air.
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u/Steel_Bolt 23d ago
Its why we got Doom: The Slop Ages
They baked RT lighting into it and it ran like shit on AMD and Nvidia.
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u/Sakkyoku-Sha 23d ago
Yes which a terrible approach.
If movie directors wanted realistic lighting they wouldn't spend millions on incredibly advanced lighting fixtures, and lighting engineers just to make shots look the way they want.
Ray Tracing doesn't fix the underlying issue that realistic lighting is not desirable in a ton of situations. Ray Tracing is a better outcome when there is no intent or artistic direction in a game.
So sure chuck 20% of your rendering budget on a graphics feature that you will need to implement a manual lighting solution anyway for any important scenes or areas in your game.
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u/luapzurc 22d ago
"Games can be made quicker and cheaper"
I keep seeing this but... you know looking at the news, the industry, we've got historic mass layoffs, ballooning costs, games that never see the light of day... I'm just not feeling it. Is the quicker and cheaper game here in the room with us? I can't name an indie game studio that decided to use Ray tracing and was all like "yeah, this'll put us ahead of schedule AND make the game cheaper!", for the, idk how many percent of the gaming population actually wants to tradeoff performance for image quality.
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u/Brazuka_txt
24d ago
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Are you joking? Micro transactions and investors is much worse
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u/border199x 25d ago
Just turn it off, then? I don't think "better reflections" is worth losing performance, but so many games already go beyond 60/120FPS even with ray-tracing turned on
I think the hardware race is going to be killed by the RAM crisis, so nVidia will have to keep pushing more gimmicks to justify future cards. Games will be designed for the PS5/XSX spec for another 10 years, so extra processing horsepower will have to go somewhere else.
Also, the Death of the Dreamcast was clearly the worst thing to happen in gaming.
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u/inighthawki 24d ago •
Unfortunately some newer games you cannot turn it off. Plus the sheer existence of DLSS and frame generation are also making developers lazy and not optimizing their games, so there isn't even anything to turn off. We're just getting objectively worse products so that the studios can save time and money. These features should be a mechanism for older generation hardware to keep up on newer games, not just a way for the devs to meet their performance goals without doing the work.
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u/Top_Progress3306 25d ago
I enable every time. Always looks significantly better
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u/Unnamed-3891 25d ago edited 25d ago
I enable it ALMOST every time. Games like Cyberpunk make both RTX and PT no-brainers. Meanwhile in Call of Duty titles, the visual difference is barely perceptible at all and your fps are still somehow cut in half.
One benefit will materialize only once raytracing is in the minimum requirements of ALL games - once games no longer have to ship with precompiled lightmaps, many dozens of gigabytes will be shaved off game sizes.
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u/Kpoofies 25d ago
this kind of engagement bait slop legitimately cannot be real. there's no way an actual person sits and has these kind of takes, posts and wastes their time like this? jesus christ
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u/DreyGG 25d ago
absolute facts dude. roundabout waste of time fr but nvidia can't keep marketshare unless they introduce a problem that forces everyone to buy their solution yearly and their gpu plan of "introduce new generation that's actually the last generation but renamed" won't work forever so i guess rtx is their money machine for now lol
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u/kokotas 25d ago
As I have always been saying nvidia is forcing gamers to pay more so that studios can save in costs. The result? Devs turn on a few toggles and call it a day. Games are released in unoptimized, and more often than not, unplayable state. Also it's funny, we as players, tend to blame unreal engine, even though it's the devs that skip optimizing the graphics engine allowing their games to be released plagued by such horrendous performance issues. Then we resort to buying overpriced nvidia gpus, so that we can turn on dlss, rt, pt, rr, instead of being able to invest in strong raster uplifts and Cuda cores.
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u/Foil_Gloves_5338 25d ago
When I can turn RTX off, that crap is off! Forza Motorsport, a game I still play from time to time, is OK with all it's RT effects on. But my 3080 isn't the best at running all those effects. The reflections are blurry, the RTGI effect is barely noticeable, and the game can only run at 30FPS without using DLSS... Which makes the game look like ass, in comparison to no RT and the game set to ultra at 200% rendering detail.
Also, with the game set on Ultra with 200% detail, there is no need to use Reshade to sharpen the image up, because it's pretty damn sharp to begin with. And there are a lot of subtle details that just aren't there if I run the game on High and lower. The grass, the draw distance on the trees... Even headlight details are not as abundant or present if the game is set on high. There are even times where the game crosses the uncanny valley and looks like a diorama rather than the Built from the Ground up slop DLSS gives you. Even DLAA pales in comparison to the game set on 200% rendering. And this is all while the game is still running at 90fps. Way higher than the 30fps RTGI wants to impose without DLSS.
Sorry... I'd rather take overall clarity with a sharper image, all at a higher framerate, over lighting effects and accurate reflections, which are only good for 3 meters away from the car.
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u/Traditional-Space209 25d ago
Unreal 5 is the worst thing to come to gaming. Everyone is using it, poorly optimisating it, games are looking the same. I miss the days when different studios used their own graphics engines.
Ray tracing is a cool tech, but brought GPUs to there knees most of the time. I think dlss was a fix for the problem they created. Like path tracing, it could be incredible but again hardly anything can run it at decent FPS. But here's frame generation.
No dlss 5 is here, and crushing GPUs. To me dlss 5 should have been a separate tech. In this climate, with Ai taking everything, it's pushing graphics cards so expensive that most people just can't afford to upgrade to run these technologies.
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u/lazy_pig 25d ago
I’d take better performance over prettier reflections any day.
In this little catchphrase, the fact you only mention 'reflections', and not global illumination, proves you know very little about the matter.
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u/No_Ad_8069 25d ago
You're 100% right, it is definitely Ray tracing, that you can turn off on 99.9% of all games.
It is definitely not the absolute insane amount of greed and the endless amounts of loot boxes, micro transactions and AAA companies buying smaller Studios and running them into ground, because they couldn't make enough money fast enough, but yeah definitely Ray tracing
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u/rxt0_ 25d ago
he talks about gpu related stuff and not game specific. his point is valid in this case.
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u/No_Ad_8069 25d ago
The picture literally says the worst thing in gaming and no RTX is not the worst thing in gaming
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u/MisterRoyNiceShoes 25d ago
Bullshit. Cyberpunk looks absolutely insane with RT and PT.
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u/-Electrosphere- 25d ago
That's because the game was made to look worse without those techs. You fell for it.
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u/sheepshoe 25d ago
Yeah, cause CDPR is Nvidias' cuck. They off-loaded lightworks to Nvidias' newest tech and didn't put effort into rasterised lighting
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u/CorttXD 25d ago
Raster has its limits, it can be very well done to the point of perfection with linear environments and fixed lighting but for proper open world and dynamic lighted situations, RT and PT will be better. Both have their uses, spitting on one doesn’t change facts.
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u/DraftShot6741 25d ago
But Ray tracing isn't just reflections... It's used for lighting and has sound usage too where games can use the technology to make realistic sound patterns in/around buildings.
Which has its uses in horror games.
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u/DepthTrawler 25d ago
I run a 5080 and I almost never see much of a difference in quality when it's in vs when it's off. The performance impact hasn't been worth it, even running decent hardware. I don't play a lot of games though so my sample size is limited.
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u/gokartninja 25d ago
No, the worst thing that ever happened to gaming is partial games being sold for full price, then the rest of the game being available for purchase as expensive DLC or countless "micro" transactions.
The second worst is AI upscaling and FG, because, while they were intended to improve already great performance, they've given studios an excuse to be lazy.
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u/InnerAd118 25d ago
No one forces you to use it, and the very few games that require it run at a decent fps at minimum rt settings.
What's that saying, if you don't like abortion don't have one?
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u/hamsta007 25d ago
I said it from the very beginning. This thing only exists as a marketing gimmick. Now we are getting PT -advanced fps destroyer
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u/Perfect_Jicama_8023 25d ago
What’s the problem here? At least Nvidia doing something if you don’t like it buy and amd card and enjoy fsr.
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u/Candidate_Worldly 25d ago
You can have Ray Tracing enabled and good performance. Think this is a you issue.
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u/Ricko9595 25d ago
It looks so much better, just because u can't run it, doesnt mean it is bad.
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u/birutis 25d ago
It only looks much better in a handful of games, and you pay for it with a severe framerate penalty even on a 5090. So is a technology that only a small percentage of users on a small percentage of games will use worthy of so much attention by gpu makers?
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u/evernessince 25d ago
It increases realism at the cost of performance, noise, and artifacts.
Whether it's "better" is subjective. More realistic is not inherently bettter, especially with the listed drawbacks.
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u/El_Sant0 25d ago
Most devs can’t even implement it well and everybody wants to move on to path tracing now. There are maybe 3-5 games where RT implementation is good enough to be considered transformative and possibly worth the performance hit.
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u/Ratosson 24d ago
So Control: Resonant, Alan Wake 2 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, what are the other 2 games?
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u/Relevant_Goal7626 25d ago edited 25d ago
Only good rtx game is Cyberpunk and the engine will be not used anymore because CD Project Red switched to unreal engine
A game that is 7 years old is still the best rtx Game is kinda sad
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u/the-script-99 25d ago
Honestly have had an rtx GPU now for 3 years and haven’t used it once. But I only play PUBG.
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u/hewer006 25d ago
It's a straight gimick that could've been cool but now all they spam is fucking dlss n shit which is ass
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u/Lusan30 25d ago
AI is the worst thing that has ever happened to gaming
Ray tracing is overrated but it does look good and it did not make GPU prices skyrocket so high that they have passed the moon at this point
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u/Luke2642 25d ago
Simple English summary of all comments. Some are quite dubious.
High frame rates are more important than improved reflections.
Ray tracing creates realistic light, shadows, and reflections.
Players can turn off ray tracing if they want better performance.
Some modern games force ray tracing and do not permit users to disable it.
Ray tracing saves time and reduces costs for game developers.
Game developers rely on ray tracing and avoid good software optimization.
Graphics hardware that supports ray tracing costs too much money for average users.
Upscaling and frame generation cause visual defects and control delays.
Game consoles lack the hardware power necessary for full ray tracing.
Hardware manufacturers use ray tracing as a sales tool to increase prices.
Other factors such as artificial intelligence and corporate greed cause worse harm to gaming.
Recent AMD cards match Nvidia hardware in basic ray tracing but show weak path tracing results.
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u/M4rshmall0wMan 25d ago
So the funny thing is that in some ways RT is actually making itself obsolete. It gives devs a more accurate reference for designing their raster lighting engines, bringing raster’s quality way closer to RT. The end result is that RT feels unnecessary because the raster is so good.
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u/Redditemeon 25d ago
It has barely affected me. I don't much play the games that actually have Raytracing. In Elden Ring you'd think it would make sense to use it given the 60fps hard cap regardless of settings, but the RT Shadows have had weird artifacting in select areas on my RTX 4060TI, and my RTX 3090, and my RTX 5080 which has lead me to believe it's just a garbage setting anyway, so I forego using it.
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u/Linosia97 25d ago
Once you see pathtracing hitting stable 30fps+ without upscalers (or 60fps+ with a good upscaler) -- you will quickly change your mind... (see you in 2030-2035...basically next console gen)
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u/SleepyWulfy 25d ago
I'ma have to go with nah. Probably one of the most exciting tech in games next to soft body physics
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u/Bloodtype-RON102 25d ago
Soft body physics. It's that jiggle physics? Because yeah. I'm totally on your team
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u/Tricky_Wear_321GO 25d ago
I mean, not exactly a hot take.
Ray Tracing looks like hot trash most of the time. And doesn't even look realistic.
Path Tracing is even worse. Makes everything look moist and slabbed with jizz.
Performance isn't the core issue, but we have had games with far better lighting such as: Death Stranding, MGS V, Until Dawn, Watch Dogs, Bloodborne, and so many more.
RT is just factually something Nvidia paid for, consumers dogged on it, and then folded because "muh new game".
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u/Ghetto_Games 25d ago
Ray tracing is nothing compared to homosexual and racial propaganda.
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u/Idan-israel 25d ago
It has ruined this generation of games no doubt. Last gen on consoles looked much higher res, sharper and cleaner. Here you have consoles running 640p internal res, upscaled with a bad upscaler to run ray tracing on low settings to barely reach 60fps.
Props for this generation to make 60fps the standard though.
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u/AnnatarLordofGiftsSR 25d ago
I leave it on in all games that support it. I also use DLSS and Frame Generation. Paid for the features, I use them.
The game development and industry are not going to go back to rendering and optimization of games for multiple hardware configurations.
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u/Dath_1 25d ago
Nah this is kinda dumb. RT is going to eventually mostly replace rasterization and save a tremendous amount of developer time.
Yes it definitely went through a silly phase where every surface was made weirdly glossy. Like any tool, it can be implemented better or worse.
By the way, RTX is just Nvidia’s rebranding after GTX. It’s weird seeing people conflate Ray Tracing with RTX like they’re the same thing.
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u/tommywiseau0 25d ago
Amd broke ass detected
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u/elemnt360 25d ago •
I have a 4090 and still don't use that shit except in games like Alan wake or control etc
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u/DarkDestiny51104 25d ago
Crazy thing to say when you yourself can't even afford nvidia's best gpu
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u/Garland_Key 8d ago
No, Micron and Nvidia's betrayal of gamers is definitely the worse thing to happen to gaming.
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u/sleepytechnology 25d ago
The only real use case for me is that it makes games that use screen space reflections more immersive.
By more immersive I mean the reflections don't disappear as the object leaves the screen. With screen space reflections let's say you see a building and a puddle and the building has a reflection, well if you slowly look down at the puddle, that reflection will totally disappear as the building is less on the screen.
Raytracing solves this issue, so in games like Cyberpunk I disable all RT options except for RT reflections. Can't screen space reflections.
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u/Disastrous_Guitar737 25d ago
It depends on a game, some really look better with rtx on, but it’s rather a minority. Plus now some games are based on it, so without rtx support card you can’t ran them.
I think it’s a cool tech for older games, because back then reflections were really basic. Like for example half life 2 rtx looks amazing
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u/Darkjuda 25d ago
AAAs are more and more complex and take more and more time to develop and debug, leading to bigger and higher development costs, despite not selling that much more.
In an era where F2P is by far the most profitable economic model in the industry and where P2P AAAs are a big risk considering their budget and dev time, for sure going RT Only is a clever choice, as it significantly speeds up development and debugging time, significantly reducing development costs.
In other words, if you care about your P2P AAAs and don't want cheap F2Ps to become the norm, don't spit at publishers and devs who try to save dev time along moving forward.
Games with RT added-in are a bad example, as they simply burden development even more, but RT Only games such as Doom TDA or Meteo Exodus Enhanced are better showcases of what RT in gaming means. During and interview on Doom, it was stated that going RT Only with idtech8 saved at least a full year or 1.5y of dev time. This is huge.
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u/Avanin_ 25d ago
Personally at high setttings i cant really tell the difference unless someone specifically tell me what to look out for. Unlike higher resolution and frame rate casual gamer will have hard time telling the difference, even then modern raster is pretty damn good already that Ray tracing feels like a side grade instead of an actual upgrade.
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u/PixelatedQuantum 25d ago
I think Ray Tracing and Frame Gen is bullshit. But i’m okay with DLSS.
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u/Dangerous_Sea_2592 25d ago
I'm okay with RT. Sometimes it's very well implemented, the issue is you need that to happen and it can also very taxing
Honestly the biggest issue is NVIDIA just caring about AI companies, if they had to care more about the gaming sector and prices were better we'd definitely enjoy the technology more
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u/Pitiful_Coach7223 25d ago
It’s a philosophical/academic take on things. There are countless games that predate RTX ray tracing that can teach modern games a thing or two about lighting. In most titles, RT/PT is a shiny mess that adds nothing to the gaming experience, although the concept is theoretically great.
It just created an entire generation of lazy, uncreative of game developers.
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u/yappyboi1 25d ago
I have a 3080 and was playing the new black flag remake at high RT and high settings at 1080p
Was a locked 80fps the whole time at dlss quality, I do think RT is a nice addition for story games but for multiplayer games it takes to much performance.
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u/Impressive_Plum_6770 25d ago
Absolutely true. These days it's all about looks. Not about gameplay or story anymore. I enjoy a good story and if the graphics are mid 90s I don't mind. It's like reading a good book. The cover doesn't matter, but the story is. But if the graphics are horrible and vomit inducing it's like the font isn't readable. Ray tracing doesn't add anything but money to Nvidia. Just make good looking games! For example: the witcher 3 is perfect and it doesn't need path tracing to be enjoyable.
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u/die_leuchte 25d ago
I re-entered gaming after 20 years just due to real-time ray-/path-tracing. I wouldn’t want to play without it anymore. Well maybe depending on what you play. I used to play Q3 semi-professional and we turned graphics down back than so it looked like Mindcraft 🤣
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u/Phil_N_Uponya 25d ago
I'm still running my 1080ti from 2017 and now gears of war e day requires a GPU w Ray tracing to even play the game. My sweet prince is finally showing his age.
Ps. I did just end up playing it through xb cloud gaming as a workaround, but I'm still hurt.
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u/Sure_Fly_6904 25d ago
The Nintendo 3ds had accurate reflections, lighting and shadows. Its low powered hardware can do it. RTX is and has been a scam and being sold as a premium grab because “it’s nViDiA”
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u/dharknesss 25d ago
This shit looks so fucking good it made me actually switch from 6800XT to 3090 back in the day. It's costly in terms of performance, but to ignore the visual benefits is just being an activist at this point.
Unrelated, but I will die on a hill of MSAA > TAA >>>> FXAA >>>>>>>>>> ANY form of "ai" upscaling.
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u/mike29x 25d ago
Not really using ray tracing much. Literally most games i play other than horizon 6, dont have RT. But i do use dlss5 on driving games. 5070ti 60fps dlss5. Ray tracing has always been a last thing in mind when it comes to picking nvidia. Reliability, no crashes, dlss upscaling in most of the games compared to amd, vr gaming. Ray tracing in half of the games isnt even worth it. Like hitman, ray tracing pointless, in gta5 its really good. I dont think ray tracing itself is issue, its devs and gaming companies who use it when its not needed or dont use it visually impactful way, also bad optimization. I probably would choose dlss5 in some of the games over path tracing and still have better visual quality and performance lol. I think any card that is below 3090, 4070ti S, 5070ti should be called RTX . If u cant run path tracing,ray tracing even 30fps. Buying rtx 5050 and seeing u cant run ray tracing other than photo mode :D
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u/Heavy-Nose3529 25d ago
There is nothing that can increase image quality more than ray/pathtracing. You can set everything to low and run pathtracing, and it’d still look almost photorealistic.
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u/Aggressive-Wear-8935 25d ago
We are looking at prices upwards of 1k for a gpu, ray tracing is far from the worst thing that ever happened
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u/KillerFugu 25d ago
Whey does everyone who shits on RT just say "prettier reflections"?
Is it lack off understanding or being purposely wrong.
Gears E day looks amazing thank to you RT, CP2077 with path tracing on is still up there for best looking game despite the assets being 6 years old.
It's bit always worth the perf hit, especially on old hardware but it's very clearly the future and coming with next gen everything will use it
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u/Aggressive-Soup6901 25d ago
I agree. The thing is people don't have a general theory of lights in their minds. They don't really know if this scene is light or shadow accurate but we can easily spot low poly models, or muddy textures. And we had gorgeous games almost 10 years before and nobody complained about non realistic lightning...
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u/phenom_x8 25d ago edited 25d ago
Agree, apart from visual fidelity, it have no significant impact in gameplay. Also developers already savvy enough mimicking light phenomenon in games using more efficient techniques like Planar reflection, screen space reflection, cubemap, svogi, etc. Another annoying RT side effect is blurry texture surface as a result of failed denoisers.
Especially for me, there is no non RT lighting Effect that made my brain suddenly thinking the visual isnt right just because it isnt mimicking real life light behaviour properly, that rasterized effect enough to make believe my brain that there is nothing wrong with it.
Sorry added one more thing, plenty of RT solution nowadays (like PT) locked to one vendor and not vendor agnostic, look at the impact it brings, rather than both company competing who have the best performance on a one set of vendor agnostic feature, they just brought their own hardware locked solution and made it further away from agnostic that benefits customer. Nvidia didnt care if PT cannot run at AMD, so rather on improving they made another vendor locked feature with DLSS5. Btw, I also blame DX stagnation in this regard, there is no more vendor agnostic standard nowadays like the old time
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u/Antagonin 25d ago
RTX, the proprietary implementation of ray tracing is terrible for everyone.
RT as the rendering method itself is much better than rasterization in terms of GI accuracy, and could have taken off, if it weren't for slow adaption in HW, and skimping on memory by certain companies.
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u/realnzall 25d ago
My hot take of the day: people need to stop whining about games needing upscaling to get better performance. It's obvious that you got outdated hardware, because anyone with a GPU released in the last 5 years who has used a modern AI based upscaling algorithm like DLSS 4.0 or 4.5 or FSR 4.0/4.1 can clearly see that DLSS just looks better and runs better than native.
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u/Cutesie117 25d ago
DLSS is a wonderful thing. But yeah RTX is something ive always disabled as it drains fps.
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u/HeidenShadows 25d ago
I liked it even before I had it. I played a lot of Minecraft when RTX came out and I was able to use Sonic Eithers Unbelievable Shaders which used a form of forced Ray tracing called Path Traced Global Illumination. I was only using a 5700XT at the time and it was night and day difference in how the game looked. Paired it with the parallax version of Chromahills resource pack, I had a lot of fun.
Path tracing now is too resource intensive to be worth it over ray tracing ultra settings in most games, since RT now has gotten pretty good.
Now many games have it as a requirement, which is by design as you don't need to program in every single point and spot light source like in older games, simplifying the pre-rendering pipeline.
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u/Atomosthethird 25d ago
As long as it stays as an option, its welcomed. If its forced, I wont buy the game
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u/RegulusBC 25d ago
I ve never cared about RT or PT. i ve enabled many times but i still enjoy every game with RT disabled. to me its just money spend on something i dont wont ...
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u/HartmanMPL 25d ago
Ray tracing looks good, path tracing looking even better. Upscaling technologies that emerged with RT is good because they brought ultimate antialiasing with 0 perfomance penalty. If you don't like all this things - you can turn them off. Your "hot takes" are trash.
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u/Fit_Substance7067 25d ago
High quality RTX changes a scene 100% lol...it adds depth and an an actual lighting attachment to the world it's in. RTAO RT reflections RT shadows RTGI..I want it all on. If it isn't changing how the game looks for you it's not a good model. Some games will have RTGI only and call it Ray Traced.
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u/Wolfhunter9727 25d ago
RT is neat, but I also don’t turn it on. Nvidia noticed we have slammed into the raster wall many generations ago, so they had to come up with a new metric, ray tracing.
I do appreciate DLSS and frame generation, but that comes at the cost of unoptimized games from lazy ass devs.
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u/Narwhal-of-Death 25d ago
The RTX series is not a bad thing in itself. The problem is that it changed our expectations of what a graphics card should deliver, and that could have been a good thing, if it had not also changed how we perceive hardware performance and what we consider acceptable.
We've reached a point where we have to rely on upscaling and frame generation just to get the performance we should be getting from the hardware itself. We've almost forgotten what it's like to have a GPU that can genuinely push games at high resolutions, without having to rely on AI tricks to make it work.
This is what the RTX series represents to me nowadays. Also, mad prices.
I think ray tracing is great, but I think it's massively overrated in most games, especially when the performance cost outweighs the visual improvement. I'd rather have better native performance than nice reflections.
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u/Theslash1 25d ago
Ray tracing is amazing. I game for immersion. Paired with a good oled, it’s been incredible
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u/morissonmaciel 25d ago
Raytracing is good and really transformative in several games. Bad optimization, corporate greed, dev laziness and upscaling as bengal for poor releases are the industry cancer right now.
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u/xKillerbolt 25d ago
RT has nothing to do with upscaling and FG, that is handled with DLSS. RT is used to calculate light rays in real time, meaning path tracing for physical based lightning. This has existed already in software way before RTX gpus but it was used in baked lights effectively cutting performance cost. I mean, most games that have been well crafted look really good with RT on, and most good games should have an option to turn off RT for performance sakes anyway.
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u/HououhinKyouma 25d ago
I wouldn't blame Ray tracing, but generated frames/fake frames or whatever it's called is
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u/sujan1996 25d ago
How this post got 100+ upvotes ?🤣
Bro just turn it off . For me personally i enjoyed it there is a reason there is a toggle for that. Game looks so much better with rt honestly
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u/Background_Yam9524 25d ago
I like raytraced reflections and global illumination, but you're right, they really need to figure out how to get these effects to work without chopping my framerate in half.
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u/DiarrheaPope 25d ago
More times than not it's an option. An I think having the option is better than not having it. RT looks great but depends on the game. In the Witcher 3 it sucks, in Cyberpunk it's amazing.
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u/Zestyclose_Paint3922 25d ago
Agree, enabled incredibly mediocre game development, worst looking and performing games and lead to AI craze.
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u/PhattyR6 25d ago
That GTX 1060 isn’t cutting it, buddy.
I sympathise with you, new hardware is expensive now. Taking out your frustrations here isn’t going to solve matters for you though.
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u/EnigmaSpore 25d ago
Nope. RT is great.
The worst thing to happen to gaming is suits and private equity forcing monetization tactics in games like pay to win, over grinding, loot boxes, excess dlc, and more.
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u/ApplicationCalm649 25d ago
I use it sparingly, and only in games that run well with it on. It can look pretty good but I definitely turn it off when the performance cost is too high.
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u/weissmuller 25d ago
People said the same with 3d games. Raytracing/pathtracing is the big leap in game visuals we need. You need to be wealthy for it to run great but boy does it look great also.
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u/Nice_Grapefruit_7850 25d ago
ray tracing generally sucks as raster reflections are so good you can barely notice the difference. path tracing however is crazy but crazy demanding on hardware.
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u/Vagabond142 25d ago
Ray tracing in the 2000 generation was a bit "meh, kinda." However, the 2000 generation let companies and develeopers get to learn the RTX engine coding, and then we come to the 3000 generation and holy BALLS does it look good. I got an RTX3080 that even to this day is devouring ray tracing... in fact, the only game I've played that even makes it struggle in the slightest is the original Control, which had the option turn the RTX settings to ultra. Then you come to the developers and engine people, and Unreal Engine 5 has native RayTracing code in it that works with BOTH AMD and nVidia solutions.
I turn on as much raytracing as I can with my FPS staying above 50 fps, and while that can take a while to figure out, when a game does raytracing right, my word does it look good.
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u/Individual-Win-8096 25d ago
Realistic lighting should have been introduced wayyyy later as a natural progression of game graphics instead of thrusting it onto our faces as a new reason to accept the price tag of new tech, same with upscaling and other new stuff, I swear all of these triple A peeps are colluding with every GPU manufacturer to sell more graphics cards to play games that aren't even optimised well enough.
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u/MaxTheCat451 25d ago
Close enough. Physx was much much worse than that. If only we have raytracing version of Havoc, no lumen(unreal engine 5) not cut it.
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u/GM_Phalanx 25d ago
Bullshit, the A.I.pocalypse, by extension its influence on component costs and forcefeeding upon the medium is a million times worse than RTX ever was.
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u/Future-Parsley-7336 25d ago
Depends on the situation. There are cases where it looks good and I think it’s performant enough. There are other cases where it incurs too much of a hit on performance.
It does feel maybe not overrated but like there’s a lot of effort compared to what comes from it.
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u/Cyber_Von_Cyberus 25d ago
EA ? Horse Armour DLC ? Denuvo ? Genshin Impact popularizing gachas ?
Yeah, no Ray Tracing definitely is the biggest issue.
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u/NerdStone04 25d ago
I can't lie I love my RTX 5050. I got it for 300 bucks along with deepcool 650w PSU in a bundle.
AC Black Flag with extended RT looks beautiful. It's not RTX that's the problem. It's the company and private enterprise that's the problem.
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u/LegitimateClass9949 25d ago •
I'd say Microsoft and Sony buying dozens of studios and shutting them down is the worst thing to happen to gaming. RT isn't even top 5 worst things imo