this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
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It's not a trick, it's just lighting done the way it should be done without all the tricks we need now like Subsurface scattering or Screen space reflections.
The added benefit is that materials reflect more of their natural reflection making all the materials look more true to life.
Its main drawback is that it's GPU costly, but more and more AAA games are now moving toward RT as standard by being more clever in how it handles its calculations.
Games visuals are riddled with shortcuts and simplification.
You don't think the way the water moves when your characters steps on a puddle, the smoke rises from fires or the damage on the walls are Physics Simulations, do you?!
It's all a variation of a procedural noise such as ~~Perkin~~ Perlin Noise, particle effects, or at best (for example, ocean simulation) some formulas that turn out to look good enough.
(Want to see Physics Simulations in 3D generated worlds, look at Special Effects in Films).
Improving one element of game space visual fidelity - reflections - is nice but it's unclear that it's worth its downsides (more expensive hardware, slower performance) given how everything else is still one big pile of "good enough" shortcuts.
RT is of course a shortcut too, it's not an exact representation of how light actually behaves...
If course, no renderer is really good enough unless it considers wave effects. If my game can't dynamically simulate the effect of a diffraction grating, it may as well be useless.
(/s if you really need it)
That's the thing: Ray Tracing as implemented on Graphics Cards (which is a subset of what's done in offline rendering for things like Film) only makes 3D rendering environments a bit more realistic in the domain of lighting, not even the same as reality, and this domain is only a small part of the big fucking pile of shortcuts used for realtime 3D rendering, so this improvement leaves all other ways a game space diverges from reality the same.
Mind you, this partial Ray Tracing thing tainting shadows next to brightly lit colored objects and doing proper realtime reflections for all reflective surfaces would be great if one didn't have to actually upgrade one's hardware and the performance loss was small, but that's not the case yet.
Yes, I'm sure every player spends the majority of their game time admiring the realistic material properties of Spider-Man's suit. So far I've never seen a game that was made better by forcing RT into it. A little prettier if you really focus on the details where it works, but overall it's a costly (in terms of power, computation, and price) gimmick.
The one benefit I see is that it simplifies lighting for the developer by a whole lot.
Which isn't a benefit at all, because as of now, they basically have to have a non-raytrace version so 90% of players can play the game
But in a decade, maybe, raytracing will make sense as the default
I've always said that, because the baseline GPUs are the RTX 3060 and the RX 6700 (consoles equivalent).... And those GPUs aren't doing amazing RT so, what's the point in pushing it so hard NOW for the 1% of users with a 4090 or whatever?
Hell, I got a RX 7900 XTX and for some games, my fps are not consistently at 60 fps
RT also makes level-design simpler for the development team as they can design levels by what-you-see-is-what-you-get method rather than having to bake the light sources.
Development and design can use RT all day long, that's not the issue. They have the benefit of not having to run ray tracing in real time on consumer hardware. At the end of the day, unless they want to offload all of that computation load onto the customer forever (and I really mean all RT all the time), they'll eventually have to bake most or all of that information into a format that a rasterizer can use.
Where is RTX being forced into? Haven't seen a game where it's not an option you have to toggle on first and it's not like RTX is a lot of additional work for the developer, seeing how it in fact reduces the work necessary to make a scene look the way it should.
Yes, it's stupidly expensive and not every game manages to benefit massively from it, but it can lead to some very pretty environments in games and it seems perfectly valid in those cases.
Also, some people do quite enjoy admiring the way the materials of various things end up looking. Maybe it's not the majority of players, but some people quite like looking at details in the games they play.
There aren't many but the new Indiana Jones and Doom games require ray tracing
To be fair... At least those 2 actually perform well.
Indiana Jones can run at high settings 1080p NATIVE at like 80 fps on a 3060, and Doom ran at like 80 FPS medium settings quality upscaled 1440p on my RX 6800XT which is like bad for RT lol
Subsurface scattering is not one of the things you get automatically with ray tracing. If you just bounce the rays off objects as would be the usual first step in implementing ray tracing you don't get any light penetration into the object, so none of that depth.
Maybe you meant ambient occlusion?
This. Personally I think you can't really expect gamers to know all of that. The only reason I know this particular fact is cause I'm using Blender. It's a bit paradox, but really just pointless to talk about the technical details of games with gamers.
raytracing still needs to do subsurface scattering. It can actually do it for real though. It also "wastes" a lot of bounces, so is usually approximated anyway
Even with raytracing there is still a lot of shortcuts and trickery under the hood. Ray tracing is the “cheating” form of path tracing.