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.
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.
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.