Even After 4.5 years Raytracing is STILL BAD

Raytracing produces beautiful graphics that get closer and closer to the way that light naturally behaves, but even after 4 1/2 years, it most cases it's still bad and is just not worth using unless you got a 4090. in some games RTX is beautiful but in some game, you cant even tell it's on, RTX is going through those same growing pains. I still don't recommend it, unfortunately.

Also, if you are an aspiring YouTuber, trust me, you need this; I have had a video pop off cuz of this.

[jakeroon]

I am not a fan of "modern games" where the ground always looks like it's been waxed over after having 5 coats of gloss expoy then finished off with a fresh coat of baby oil. Same for all the character models, they all look like they are covered in sun tan oil, even over their clothing. Who thinks "realistic" looks like this?

[eineatombombe]

A lot of games use baked lighting, which is basically raytracing saved to a texture. That's why there's no difference.

[sundaekick]

2:17 dude cmon I cant even see the shadows on that.. I know elden ring RT shadows are useless but, Its just fromsoft saying "we can do RT too and we are improving our engine".

[matthewkingsmill]

I think it depends on the game. Metro Enhanced on PC, Cyberpunk with Psycho RT, Dying light 2 are a few games built with great implementation and I would both notice if it’s turned off and wouldn’t want to go back.. but for the vast majority of games it seems to just be implemented after…

[RobloxianX]

5 years, 9 months, 2 weeks and 2 days later, Ray Tracing is still bad.

[yetidynamics]

Real time raytracing is more for Devs, it makes it easier to setup scenes (and materials) and have them look good, without resorting to a lot of Tricks and Fakes, it will eventually be common place.

[NinjaKiller]

Path tracing on Alan Wake 2 and Cyberpunk makes an insane night or day difference. Path tracing specially in CP2077 ads a whole new dimension to the immersion

[Judie-Nator]

Ray Tracing can be absolutely great if implemented properly. I'd say the games that benifit from it the most are Open world games or games with lots of dynamic lighting, as baked or probed based lighting struggle with large, opened ended environments, expecially ones with lots of occulsion like cities. Of course, scifi games work great with the reflections, and games with dark interiors can really benifit from the shadows and ambient occlusion brought with raytracing.

[TGTRUMR]

The only real sense of Raytracing is saving the devs some work.
Realtime GI is possible sinve Crysis 3, Realtime Shadows and Lights since Doom 3 (though STALKER is a great example too).

And no one bothers about physically correct reflections when you have really good SSR + good Cubemapping.

Raytracing offers real differences only in details if the game has great lighting + great AO.

I think we need devs that are also gamers more than Raytracing.

[MaunoMattila]

Ray Tracing Deception

Here's the real deal about Nvidia's promoted RTX tech:
* Most visible effect is massive hit to FPS
* Path Tracing proved that Ray Tracing has been flawed all the time
* Ray Tracing is only partly used and games still rely on ambient occlusion for the most part
* Nvidia lists only _five_ games (two of them been Minecraft) with "Full RT" implemantion after many years of marketing it
* Doesn't bring anything "new", since effects like reflections/lighting have been there already
* They marketing Says: "Eyes will immeaditely tell the difference", so who is going to admit he is "blind"?
* It's Nvidia's new "PhysX gimmick" to make easy money with overpriced GPUs with ridiculous power need

There are some radical new gaming techonologies which do improve the experience like HDR screens, G-Sync/FreeSync and DLSS etc., but Nvidia's ray tracing is not one of them.

Prime example of ray tracing implementation is Cyberpunk 2077. And it was nicknamed "Cyberbugs 2077" and ray tracing at first was very badly implemented (excluding AMD support etc.). The game was delayed and buggy, most probably because too much time was spent to trying to ray tracing working.

The game obviously was implemented solely for ray tracing "showcase", since the lighting is just horrible without ray tracing. Thus the comparison "ray tracing ON vs OFF" with Cyberpunk 2077 is not valid or fair. It was always meant to work only with ray traching and shouldn't be played without it, but who really can play it with full Ray Tracing on?

Cyberpunk 2077 with Nvidia RTX 4080: ~110 FPS (RT OFF), ~50 FPS (RT ON) and ~30 FPS (RT with Path Tracing ON).

New path tracing implementation revealed how poor Nvidia's ray tracing actually was.

Path tracing or "full-implemented ray tracing" wasn't on with the launch of Cyberpunk 2077, because no GPU really can handle it. The truth is, that when they fully implemented it (as path tracing), it dramatically changed the lighting and it started to look like when RT is OFF! I remember watching an older video about ray tracing of Cyberpunk 2077 and the whole point was to show how incredible the lighting is now inside of a car when RT is ON. However, when the path tracing implementation of ray tracing came out, the lighting inside of car was totally changed and is now close to the old ambient occlusion style!

I feel sorry for the players, the developers and the competition for swallowing the bait. Ray tracing has not been and will not be game changer for a while, atleast this kind of ray tracing. It's not what it's been marketed.

PS. I do have Nvidia GPU.

[Darkseptor]

I guessed every one of them right (almost got fooled by requiem), but As someone who finds ray tracing very interesting, I personally think games are a lot more clearer/ cleaner when you have RTX off which is something I personally prioritize in video games. RTX (even if its well implemented) just sometimes looks like a lot of colorful bloom was added. But it really just depends what people want out of a game

Great video though. Glad someone was able to nicely lay it out for people who are interested in Ray Tracing.

[maravreloaded]

Ray Tracing was the Blast Processing from our times.
A gimmick made to sell the futuristic tech of current consoles.

[syntaxed]

DEV POV: without raytracing its alot of work to get shadows and reflections in your game. One has to render the scene to a depthbuffer, cube array of textures if we are talking pointlights - Each "cube" needs 6 textures so you have to render the scene 6 times, to cover everything from the perspective of the pointlight.
If you have 10 pointlights you render the scene 60 additional times lol...ofc culling will help but not perfectly.
We can then use this depth texture, which is just a blackwhite texture to find out what is in shadow or not.
This is called shadow mapping and its how its been done for like 30+ years...Its crap, its fakery and alot of wasted energy so devs opted out and instead bakes raytraced light and shadows instead, or atleast where possible.
The same process is also done for reflections...you can see the incredible and astonishing amount of wasted gpu power on simply re-rendering the scene to a bunch of textures which at the end of the day does not give you perfect shadows or reflections.
- Raytracing solves all of this shittery and I couldnt be any happier.
You dont see any difference atm because they have baked raytraced light in most games. But rest assured - in a few years the hardware will be able to path trace in realtime and those shadows and reflections are oh my oh my sweet looking.

[FelixOnn]

Honestly, RTGI in The Witcher when you have tons of grass and tress looks really good. Adds good complexity to the image

[Enigma]

The only case where RT has managed to become good would be with full path tracing in cp2077 with dlss frame gen, upscaling and ray reconstruction on a 4090. Anything before that is just a side grade compared with rasterization, with slightly better (pick one of) shadows, global illumination or reflections, but for much worse performance, for twice the price obviously. I have gotta say though that sometimes I have to really examine the image even in cp2077 to tell the difference between RT and raster, because both looks pretty good.

[lagaddict]

Waste of money

But i respect Nvidia because they have customer's who will buy anything at any cost even if that "anything" doesn't worth at all

[OOOcannal]

After testing RT, I always end up turning it off and preferring to increase the resolution. It ends up being prettier on the eyes than turning on RT and having to use upscale methods like DLSS/FSR to achieve a playable framerate...

[TheDarkSide]

Ray Tracing is a game changer when we're talking about realism, but when we're talking about "looking good" ray tracing can't compete with a good art director and a good color grading...

[SMGJohn]

So many dislikes from people who need to justify their expensive purchases.
I find it rather ridicules that RT does not make big enough difference, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition is a good argument for why RT is amazing, its not even path traced its just regular RT yet looks superior to Cyberpunk 2077 with path
Minecraft RT is another huge change but also, Minecraft does not really hand itself well to a photo realistic art style just because the game was never designed with it in mind, it looks nice in pictures but as a game its something most people just turn off hence why Minecraft RT aint that popular but also cause it runs like a dog.
I have more faith in raster catching up to path tracing with simulated light bounce, colour cast and greater shadow accuracy. Light maps are also much quicker and cheaper to make these days even in 8k resolutions it takes a studio only 1 day to compile 8k resolution light map for a huge world map, and a few minutes for small indoor scenes using render farms, a week on a beefy computer.

[Trigger]

its not the direct lighting that makes a difference, software has done a really good job imitating direct ambient lighting, ray tracing picks up the slack in reflections of objects projecting that ambient lighting and more impressively, compound ambient lighting, they cast across a scene, seeing full objects in water puddles/glass like real life, having the hue of the reflected light on objects projected in the room based on object colour and object texture or finish... ray tracing allows for this stuff much better than software artificial lighting.

Some games are going to do it better than others as well, sometimes the games and the cards interaction may affect quality of the effect, but to say it's bad is BS, it's a marvel of engineering that it can do it at all, not to mention it's getting better as AI cores learn to interact with RT cores or whatever garbage AMD is trying.

The other thing that bothers me about your argument to us the viewer is trying to show us RT in a static image that most certainly lost allot of it's pop being compressed for youtube consumption vs the native screen you are viewing it on. Dude, I'm on a 1440p monitor watching a video at 1080p that I can only window because full screen makes it look like dog water due to interpolation making up info on every second pixel basically. But it's a static image, RT is dynamic and would lend itself much better to a rendered scene than a photograph, it's kind of the point...