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.