Ray Tracing is MANDATORY Now

Yep it’s true, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is the first game that was developed from the ground up to use Ray Tracing… not just as an OPTION to make the lighting a little more realistic… but as a core - REQUIRED - component of the game. Does that mean every game’s FPS is gonna suffer? Or are we going to enter a golden age of Ray Traced Bliss where we can no longer tell the difference between reality and the metaverse? Do we all need NEW Graphics Cards?

Huge Thank you to these creators for allowing us to use their footage:

Purchases made through some store links may provide some compensation to Linus Media Group.

Purchases made through some store links may provide some compensation to Linus Media Group.

CHAPTERS
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0:00 Intro
1:09 Testing a game that REQUIRES Ray Tracing…
4:02 What is the difference?
7:18 Why are Developers ANGRY?
10:01 But what about the FUTURE?
11:45 There is HOPE!

[r.g]

We went from the RTX 3090 being tagged as the "8K Capable GPU" to the 5090 barely managing 4K

[user_____M]

People that sold their kidney in 2022-2023 for the 3000s series still have a spare.

[DarkStalker-oclk]

It is clear, the more time passes, the more you have to buy and the more you buy, the better jackets will appear at conferences

[ZRay]

Idk, spending $2, 000+ on a GPU and another $1, 500~2, 000 on the rest of the system and then another $500~1, 500 on pheriperals (roughly $5, 000) for an end-game system and getting 60FPS using a technology that barely makes the game look better is definitely not worth it... still boggles my mind that in 2025 we are still talking about 60 FPS in 4K native

[SomeoneOnlyWeKnow.]

I use a card that supports ray tracing, but I generally only turn on it on to have a look at the graphics for a minute and then turn it off when actually playing anything.

At the end of the video Linus makes a point that to run ray tracing in real time, some corners have to be cut. The corner I choose to cut is ray tracing.

[isnikomusic]

>RTX mandatory game comes out
>I dont play it
Never have I seen an easier solution to this problem

[randomkitty]

- RTX mandatory game comes out
- Mod gets made to bybass rtx restriction

[Reactork]

In fairness, the long render times for offline 24+ hour renders is usually due to caustics and other more advanced rendering things, as opposed to basic ray casting.

[danielgould]

2:40 There is no point in photorealistic global illumination and reflections when you still have characters that move like this, with robotic movements and feet sliding across the floor. Increasing the photorealism just makes it surreal.

[imTheAny]

The main problem is, I don't want a 2000$ GPU to perform "okay" at max settings. A flagship GPU used to be able to crank all the settings at at least 1440p and perform great with low input latency. But right now, at 100+ FPS we are getting input latencies 20+ at minimum. That is NOT optimal. Yes you can say "oh well, it's not that bad". But I'm not paying 2000$ on a fricking GPU to get only "not that bad" performance. 2000$ is multiple minimum wages in some fricking countries.

[TheButterAnvil]

It's very annoying that these conversations always end with gamers being told that they need to compromise and use AI to make these solutions work, when it seems pretty clear that large swaths of players want to make the compromise of not having ray tracing. That is a compromise! Why does the compromise have to be Vaseline on my screen, ghosting, and input latency? Why must the floor be dragged up just so that we can get a tiny bump up on the ceiling?

[connorisgaming]

Is nobody going to mention that rt lowest in the Indiana jones game looks and performs worse than what a well implemented raster experience would?

BTW It is hilarious reading the comment section with people holding a knife to each others throats about which one is better🤣🤣🤣

[NoKi]

Remember when Reshade was the go-to for manipulating shaders at no space cost? Now we have to deal with developers shipping +200 GB games and acting like non-baked lighting is the reason...

[LineArckG]

You get : Increase in hardware and game costs, increase in power consumption, loss of performance for debatably "better" graphics.
I get : Lowered production cost, more profit.

[xafiat]

Current prices just make me appreciate my GTX 1080Ti still working flawlessly even more.
Oh if I ever will make an investment so worthwhile again?

[AurrenTV]

Love how the only graphical advances we make nowadays are rendering out everything at run time that's completely fine being baked like it's always been for next to no noticable graphical advances but a ton of performance and power usage downsides.

[btarg]

As other comments have said, I treat RTX like how I used the 3D on my Nintendo 3DS. Turn it on for a bit, go "wow those are cool graphics" then turn it off to get acceptable 60+fps at 1080p

Step 1 - make a problem that people want, Step 2 - sell expensive solutions.

[kaystephan]

The problem with Raytracing in games is simply that "fake" lighting and shadows have become SO good over the years (cause devs had to work like that for decades) that it looks really similar to raytraced lighting. Because of that the gain from RT is often minimal while the performance cost is gigantic. Cyberpunk 2077 is an exception because a cyberpunk setting is ideal to show off light effects because of many reflective metallic surfaces, artificial lights etc. More natural environments however often show hardly any difference. Also RT is still in its infancy. In some games like Hogwarts it causes weird effects like making everything look wet. Also raytraced reflections are usually very low res to make them viable for real time computing at all. Real time lighting is a great technology but it will only really be viable when full blown Pathtracing with a high rays-per-pixel count is viable even on entry level GPUs at native resolution (imo at least) and until THAT is possible we still have a way ahead of us.

[TheTakenKing]

Some lore :

For people who are still confused between raytracing and path tracing, outside of Nvidia terminologies, the difference is just that raytracing is an algorithm, recursive Monte Carlo raytracing is path tracing.

Typically one bounce shadow rays allow you to simulate direct illumination and the more MC sampling you do from each recursive bounce the more indirect light you gather using something called Multiple Importance Sampling (MIS). Path tracing has flaws though since MIS is not perfect, there are places where the probability density function being used to sample rays have too much variance and end up as firefly effects etc. Photon mapping and other similar approaches typically negate this to some effect through "storing" photons at each point of ray triangle intersection. Since games use a biased form of MC sampling (they do a for loop over recursive bounces essentially) they can denoise effectively by increasing samples and running anything from something as simple as a Gaussian kernel over the output or using Denoising Autoencoders (ray reconstruction) which are just neural networks designed to fill in small gaps in data ie denoise.