Ray Tracing - Game Changer or Overhyped?

Ray Tracing - Game Changer or Overhyped?

  • Yes - Game Changer for sure

    Votes: 118 46.6%

  • No - Overhyped, not what was intended

    Votes: 135 53.4%
  • Total voters
    253
I wish the voting had a third option.....Wait until reviews. Cant comment on something we know nothing about.
 
Dion said:
oh my... You missed the point... High FPS > Low FPS but pretty gfx.. There does that sync? Yes High FPS with good settings is the best.. But we are talking about Ray Tracing.
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Right, but until we actually know what performance hit it actually entails, on the hardware in question, in which engine, and how extensively you can enable or disable certain settings and applications of Ray Tracing or the Ray Tracing portion of the engine used, your point doesn’t mean much.

What I was clarifying though, is that certain frame rates synced, are what I would call good enough to enable more graphical features. Your scale of high frames or low frames with eye candy are a gross oversimplification that really only applies if a decent synced rate isn’t reachable with eye candy. You (nor I) yet know if RTX can push that or not. Why not wait and see?

I’m not racing out to buy RTX until I know for sure of course, but it does look promising.

I also don’t know this for sure, but I would imagine a tricky dev might be able to split the methods somehow to use some combinations of RT and rasterized graphics. Maybe there’s something that would prevent it, but some kind of blended overlay seems like it could push a mixture of both to an adequate degree. Maybe someone who has more experience with the engines could chime in a bit on that.
 
It will release devs from spending so much time creating shadows. That time can only be used to make things better on would hope.
 
Cylocybin said:
It will release devs from spending so much time creating shadows. That time can only be used to make things better on would hope.
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That’s one application I had in mind with the blended overlay I mentioned. I still need to either read up or be told how that could work, but it seems like maybe a shadows only channel that gets applied to the scene after it’s rendered could work. Like an alpha channel for transparency maybe. Just what-iferizing though.
 
It think it would be cool if they released a RT core card only to run beside a non rtx to allow RT on older hardware (
ala physx dedicated gpus )
 
game changer - next gpu generation. right now... neat feature to tide people over until the next generation.
 
I would love to see games of the like of Kingdom Come Deliverance and the Witcher 3 with Raytracing. That would look insanely awesome.
 
cageymaru said:
I also want to add that I despise those newer Disney animated movies that everyone likes. I've made it a life goal to never watch one as I detest the graphics style. I love the way that the old techniques look like in Cuphead and even the Japanese anime.

Just wanted to get that out there before someone tries to convince me that Toy Story looks awesome so I should embrace ray tracing. /yawn Not going to happen.:)
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A lot of people started to wriggle off the fence after watching Land of the Lustrous put together a really clean computer generated anime. I agree that the pure artistic expression of hand/cell drawn animations is timeless an uncontested, however, the quality and expressions that todays computers can produce in animated movies can be breathtaking when done right.

Brent_Justice said:
Correction, Ray Tracing is going to be in 11 of those games, not 21. The other feature, DLSS will be i the others, but DLSS is not Ray Tracing, unfortunately DLSS is all that is required to call a game "RTX Enabled" but RTX doesn't inherently mean Ray Tracing.

https://hardforum.com/threads/rtx-d...ort-in-games-according-to-this-video.1966536/
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I'm looking forward to future implementations of ray tracing as much as anyone else, but I feel like DLSS is being way undervalued since most people just think aa is aa. I've doted on supersampling ever since I was able to force it so many years ago, and if DLSS is indeed a post process that can only improve the visual clarity of a scene, it would further reduce the burden of shaders and other resources otherwise dedicated to AA solutions. It's hard to really establish conviction one way or another without having a card yet, or reading any published reviews, so until then I'll continue to hold reserved hope. I agree that the nomenclature of RTX is being crudely abused here, since it doesn't strictly stand for ray tracing whatsoever, which is misleading in my opinion. However with the reduced by in cost for AI as demonstrated in the tensor cores, I'm looking forward to crafty developers further leveraging this new tool, as AI is the present and future of this industry.

Cylocybin said:
It will release devs from spending so much time creating shadows. That time can only be used to make things better on would hope.
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You forgot drawing photo realistic rocks, it's the most undervalued, and most repetetive job of any art department. However, fundamentally you are absolutely right, when developers can just set it and have accurate lighting and visual reproduction naturally, they will be able to focus on taking all the other elements of a scene up to the next level.
 
Brent_Justice said:
I'm going to say "Game Changer" but with the caveat of "down the road"

Ray Tracing is definitely a game changer, it's the goal we've been striving to get to forever, developers want this. *snip*
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The developer part is very important...then doesn't matter what "users/gamers/fanboys" think...and again, everything we have seen in games up until now has been a fake "simulation" of raytracing...this IS the future.
 
Factum said:
The developer part is very important...then doesn't matter what "users/gamers/fanboys" think...and again, everything we have seen in games up until now has been a fake "simulation" of raytracing...this IS the future.
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It sure is, the only question remaining will be if this future is now.. or somewhere down the road.. thank god for reviews.. when they do come out.

I for one will stay away from this if its less than 30% raw performance increase from 1080ti to 2080ti in non RTX enabled titles.

Especially if raytracing is only feasible at 1080p.. that would a hard fail imho.
 
RamboZombie said:
It sure is, the only question remaining will be if this future is now.. or somewhere down the road.. thank god for reviews.. when they do come out.

I for one will stay away from this if its less than 30% raw performance increase from 1080ti to 2080ti in non RTX enabled titles.

Especially if raytracing is only feasible at 1080p.. that would a hard fail imho.
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No at much a fail as not having raytracing hardware...the train is starting to go now...and again, I amuse myself with the influx of new posters at every launch...always very opinionated in a almost predictable manner ;)
 
We didn't have ray tracing hardware for years, hasn't stopped me from enjoying games. It may make some games and environments better, but at least from the Nvidia examples, there weren't any where I would have felt something was missing if I didn't have an example with ray tracing right next to it.

It's going to be very nice, for sure, but jumping in it with these cards doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Games I care about that support it aren't there, and the cards Nvidia are launching don't give me a lot of hope for ray tracing + 1440 or 4k @ 61+ Hz. If it came down to having smooth game play and better defined worlds or slower frames/lower definition but ray tracing, I would take the former. Nothing Nvidia has announced makes me overly optimistic that they are really there to offer a no-compromise vision.

I do think someone has to put the hardware out to get the ball started. With EVs, the early ones only had 30-60 mile ranges, and people would joke about it, but you have to start somewhere and show there is a market. Not everyone wants to make the compromise but I won't judge those that are fine with it, only makes the path for those of us that are willing to wait for a better experience easier.
 
Well, even without RTX features, and if we're flexible on the pricing (I'm not a fan either, but it is what it is) these are still going to be the fastest cards on the market with pretty much zero competition from any other brand. That alone makes them interesting. Now tack on the RTX features that may or may not be immediately interesting, and they're even better. We may not see this tech take off in every game imaginable right away, in fact, we for sure won't. However, I'd be willing to bet we will see a few compelling experiences come out of it that will just be a bonus on top of the already formidable cards.

They may not be the performance jump that everyone is looking for for non-RTX, but they are actually faster (I guess we'll know how much next month) and what else are you going to buy if you're [H]? There is literally nothing else if you're an enthusiast that wants the newest gear. Period. If you're sensible, then you wait a while and see how things take shape. If you're [H], this is what you buy whether you like it or not, because AMD and Intel sure aren't going to provide it any time soon. I wish there was some serious competition. I really do. It would push this tech, lower prices, and it would be good for everyone. That's not the world we currently live in though.
 
Game chamber 5-7 years from now when much if the image is ray traced. Meanwhile, it’ll be a small improvement. Certainly not worth it in the 2000 series, maybe by the 3000 it starts being worth it.
 
I think Ray Tracing has high potential to be a niche thing like PhysX which died after 2016 tbh.

But it has potential IF they can improve real time raytracing performance with each generation. Look 30-50 fps 1080p on Shadow of the Tombraider with ray tracing on is not gonna be a very enjoyable gaming experience.

However if by 2020 you are getting 100 fps+ raytracing at 4k then that's the kind of eye candy that many of us would love to have.

Right now -- novelty/niche. 2-4 years from now it will either become a standard fare or dead.
 
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Game changer in time, some growing pains. Necessity in easing development requirements with a much better lighting model where endless baking, extra light maps, shadow mpas etc. have to be made.
 
Ray tracing will eventually be a game changer, but it will need to mature significantly first, just like any other major advance, like 3D acceleration, HT&L, programmable shader logic, and adaptive display synchronization.

It's just that a couple of generations are going to be needed for it to both become ubiquitous enough for developers to put some effort into writing software to use it, and also for the hardware to get strong enough to make full scene ray tracing a plausible idea. It's not really a game changer if all it can be used for is shadow maps and reflections.
 
I see ray tracing as both a game changer and being overhyped. It can genuinely perform lighting effects that are impractical with traditional raster graphics. It also permits a massive increase in geometric detail which tends to be limiting factor in raster based designs. Both of those are a huge win in terms of image quality but there are clear downsides. Mainly performance because even with the high end RTX cards, the first wave of games appear to be targeting 1080p60 where are more traditional games are going for 4K60. This generation of hardware may even run some modern (but not necessarily new) titles at 5K60 with high image quality. Cranking things down a notch on the visual fidelity may make 8K feasible on some titles. We've been spoiled by fast video cards providing high frame rates at high resolutions but ray tracing is going to kick that down a notch.

One thing I haven't heard explored much is how nvLink will improve scaling in both traditional raster and ray traced enabled games. Ray tracing complexity is mostly linear scaling (at least with professional renders) so multiple RTX cards should have excellent scaling. Thus two RTX cards may make 2560 x 1440 possible for ray tracing but the raster titles should be fine at 5K on such hardware. This is something I'd love to see tested as multi-GPU has declined in popularity (well outside of mining).

This also ignores hybrid rendering which leverage ray tracing sparely or only for certain effects. Geometry will still be limited by the raster side but the improved lighting should be apparent. Performance curve should fall between the two modes.

On the plus side, this puts a demarcation line between PC games and console peasants.
 
power666 said:
I see ray tracing as both a game changer and being overhyped. It can genuinely perform lighting effects that are impractical with traditional raster graphics. It also permits a massive increase in geometric detail which tends to be limiting factor in raster based designs. Both of those are a huge win in terms of image quality but there are clear downsides. Mainly performance because even with the high end RTX cards, the first wave of games appear to be targeting 1080p60 where are more traditional games are going for 4K60. This generation of hardware may even run some modern (but not necessarily new) titles at 5K60 with high image quality. Cranking things down a notch on the visual fidelity may make 8K feasible on some titles. We've been spoiled by fast video cards providing high frame rates at high resolutions but ray tracing is going to kick that down a notch.

One thing I haven't heard explored much is how nvLink will improve scaling in both traditional raster and ray traced enabled games. Ray tracing complexity is mostly linear scaling (at least with professional renders) so multiple RTX cards should have excellent scaling. Thus two RTX cards may make 2560 x 1440 possible for ray tracing but the raster titles should be fine at 5K on such hardware. This is something I'd love to see tested as multi-GPU has declined in popularity (well outside of mining).

This also ignores hybrid rendering which leverage ray tracing sparely or only for certain effects. Geometry will still be limited by the raster side but the improved lighting should be apparent. Performance curve should fall between the two modes.

On the plus side, this puts a demarcation line between PC games and console peasants.
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There is good news on the second point. Kyle has ordered 2x 2080Ti's and 2x 2080's and 2 NVLink connectors. So we should hopefully see the scaling that it brings in the next couple of months, depentent on when it arrives.
 
RTX is a high-end Nvidia-only niche feature.
Just like Gameworks features (Godrays, Hairworks, etc.). Just like Physx.
Except worse, because only the highest of the high end cards support RTX in a meaningful way (powerful enough to actually leave it enabled while playing a game without tanking fps).

Unless and until ray tracing is in low-end cards, it will be niche-only.
Unless and until ray tracing is in cards from the competition, it will be niche-only.
Unless and until ray tracing is in OS driver support (DirectX, Vulcan, whatever) for all manufacturer's cards (ie. not "Gameworks"-type single-manufacturer-lock-in implementation), it will be niche-only.

Sure, the tech is cool and useful in certain usage scenarios and specific use cases, but for games if it's relegated to only the high-end cards from one manufacturer, game developers are not going to spend the required time and money to implement it into their games (I'm not talking about those games sponsored ($) by Nvidia to include Nvidia-only features) for the minuscule return on investment they will get from the tiny number of gamers with high-end Nvidia cards capable enough to support said features. It's simply not worth it.

I give ray tracing 10 years to become mainstream enough that even your mom's new Dell will have it with the baseline video card, and that's if the technology makes it into the competition's cards. That's what.... 3 or 4 video card generations from now at the current rate? And I think even that is wishful thinking, unless Nvidia somehow manages to get 100% of the video card market in that timeframe.

power666 said:
On the plus side, this puts a demarcation line between PC games and console peasants.
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No, that's not good. Game developers will build for the lowest common denominator. No RTX for you because it's a console port and not worth the time to implement RTX for the 0.5% of gamers with cards capable of seeing it.
 
Azrak said:
RTX is a high-end Nvidia-only niche feature.
Just like Gameworks features (Godrays, Hairworks, etc.). Just like Physx.
Except worse, because only the highest of the high end cards support RTX in a meaningful way (powerful enough to actually leave it enabled while playing a game without tanking fps).

Unless and until ray tracing is in low-end cards, it will be niche-only.
Unless and until ray tracing is in cards from the competition, it will be niche-only.
Unless and until ray tracing is in OS driver support (DirectX, Vulcan, whatever) for all manufacturer's cards (ie. not "Gameworks"-type single-manufacturer-lock-in implementation), it will be niche-only.

Sure, the tech is cool and useful in certain usage scenarios and specific use cases, but for games if it's relegated to only the high-end cards from one manufacturer, game developers are not going to spend the required time and money to implement it into their games (I'm not talking about those games sponsored ($) by Nvidia to include Nvidia-only features) for the minuscule return on investment they will get from the tiny number of gamers with high-end Nvidia cards capable enough to support said features. It's simply not worth it.

I give ray tracing 10 years to become mainstream enough that even your mom's new Dell will have it with the baseline video card, and that's if the technology makes it into the competition's cards. That's what.... 3 or 4 video card generations from now at the current rate? And I think even that is wishful thinking, unless Nvidia somehow manages to get 100% of the video card market in that timeframe.


No, that's not good. Game developers will build for the lowest common denominator. No RTX for you because it's a console port and not worth the time to implement RTX for the 0.5% of gamers with cards capable of seeing it.
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Who said Ray Tracing was only going to be on high end cards. I haven't seen any links to that.

AMD is going to be doing Ray Tracing
https://www.anandtech.com/show/1255...cing-for-prorender-and-radeon-gpu-profiler-12

Microsoft does support Ray Tracing
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/directx/2018/03/19/announcing-microsoft-directx-raytracing/
 
How does the interaction between HDR and ray tracing work? Will they both be used to provide amazing visuals or did we 'reset' the push for HDR and now ray tracing will be the thing to have?
 
Dayaks said:
From another thread:


4k ray tracing at >> 60Hz
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And yet Metro Exodus developers, 4A Gaming, say they hope to have their game when it's released running at 60fps at 1080p when Ray Tracing is enabled. The two game demos that journalists played at the event were 1080p and not reaching 60fps.

So who is right? And if it is running at 4K higher than 60fps, then surely that puts a lie to all the statements about real time Ray Tracing been difficult if the first generation desktop GPU hardware can run at those speeds?
 
reaper12 said:
And yet Metro Exodus developers, 4A Gaming, say they hope to have their game when it's released running at 60fps at 1080p when Ray Tracing is enabled. The two game demos that journalists played at the event were 1080p and not reaching 60fps.

So who is right? And if it is running at 4K higher than 60fps, then surely that puts a lie to all the statements about real time Ray Tracing been difficult if the first generation desktop GPU hardware can run at those speeds?
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I am sure it’s somewhere inbetween.

2070 can only do 6 GR where the 2080ti can do 10 GR (66% faster). I could see them maybe trying for 1080p on a 2070 as what they meant and a 2080ti handling 1440p.
 
reaper12 said:
And yet Metro Exodus developers, 4A Gaming, say they hope to have their game when it's released running at 60fps at 1080p when Ray Tracing is enabled. The two game demos that journalists played at the event were 1080p and not reaching 60fps.

So who is right? And if it is running at 4K higher than 60fps, then surely that puts a lie to all the statements about real time Ray Tracing been difficult if the first generation desktop GPU hardware can run at those speeds?
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Those 4K +90 FPS number were after 3 days with the hardware according to Gaijin's CEO.
I suspect the devs have had very little time with the actual hardware before gamescom, that drivers are very early etc.
Fact of the matter is that video (Enlisted) is running 4K at 90-130 FPS after 3 days of playing with the hardware.
 
Real time ray tracing has always been a game changer, just getting the hardware to make it happen was the problem. I have no illusions ray tracing on the RTX hardware is going to be suckish with a massive performance hit, but we have to start somewhere. If we get some good eye candy at 1080 60fps, id call it a success for now, apparently Nvidia is thinking the same according to the rumors.

Personally I think this is a really good time to make the push, no competition coming from AMD for a while :cry:, lots of cash on hand from the mining craze to weather any problems.
With the lack of competition they had time to develop the tech and can gamble on the silicon use to make it happen.

Hopefully the added Cuda cores make it fast enough for the bleeding edge guys to feel ok about upgrading as ray tracing right now, is very much in its infancy.

We need to make the leap and I think now is the time, knowing full well the payoff wont be for a loooong time.
 
I don't know what all excitement is about on old tect RT on the RTX that make people go pre order it's only hardware, But everyone to there own. A serious disadvantage of ray tracing is performance depending on scene complexity vs number of pixels on-screen maybe that's why Battlefield V was shot in only 1080p IMO

That's why it just hype at the moment unit the real games are out.
 
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Now let's get ID to make a single player Ray Traced GLQuake remake..... and maybe Epic to make a Ray Trace Unreal 1 single player. One can only dream...
 
Dayaks said:
I am sure it’s somewhere inbetween.

2070 can only do 6 GR where the 2080ti can do 10 GR (66% faster). I could see them maybe trying for 1080p on a 2070 as what they meant and a 2080ti handling 1440p.
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Ray tracing is pretty memory intensive from what I've read (on top of being a cpu hog) which is why the 2800 / Ti would be ideal. We still don't know enough yet though.
 
AORUS said:
I don't know what all excitement is about on old tect RT on the RTX that make people go pre order it's only hardware, But everyone to there own. A serious disadvantage of ray tracing is performance depending on scene complexity vs number of pixels on-screen maybe that's why Battlefield V was shot in only 1080p IMO

That's why it just hype at the moment unit the real games out next year 2019
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Because RT looks god damn beautiful and better immersion.

Even if RT isn’t for you there’s still DLSS which I am equally excited for. Or just faster cards in general.

I read somewhere that these cards should get a nice boost in VR as well, which is honestly the only place I could use extra performance.
 
Dayaks said:
I could see them maybe trying for 1080p on a 2070 as what they meant and a 2080ti handling 1440p.
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Well, how can you think that based on what we know? The hot topic all week on Ray Tracing has been games performance at 1080p on a 2080Ti. It's a concern to people buying the 2080Ti, and the 4A guy would know this. If the developer was pushing for 60fps on 1440p he surely would have mentioned that. And it's very rare for a developer to talk in minimum requirements, which is what the 2070 would be and it would be unheard of for any developer to talk worst case scenario.
 
Dayaks said:
Because RT looks god damn beautiful and better immersion.

Even if RT isn’t for you there’s still DLSS which I am equally excited for. Or just faster cards in general.

I read somewhere that these cards should get a nice boost in VR as well, which is honestly the only place I could use extra performance.
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To be sure we just have to wait on benchmark testing not Nvidia claim, looks good on video shot at 1080p But what about 4K UHD where it will push the card to it's MAX? then oh boy that looks beautiful then CTD because of the bugs ?
 
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Factum said:
Those 4K +90 FPS number were after 3 days with the hardware according to Gaijin's CEO.
I suspect the devs have had very little time with the actual hardware before gamescom, that drivers are very early etc.
Fact of the matter is that video (Enlisted) is running 4K at 90-130 FPS after 3 days of playing with the hardware.
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So 3 out 4 developers are struggling to get 60fps on 1080p, including one developer who has been working on RTX since January, was involved in the Demo in March and is aiming to have their game running at 60fps @ 1080p when Ray Tracing is enabled for the release next February.

And you have one developer who after 3 days is getting 90-130fps with 4K.

One of these results isn't using Real time Ray Tracing.
 
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