PC Gaming

It really is a matter of personal preference. You don't need RT to have great lighting but it certainly can help if implemented correctly. I think old games like Silent Hill 2 have great lighting without RT. I think Cyberpunk 2077 looks gourgeous with path tracing. It really does depend.

You are not alone in feeling it's overblown.

Well-done ray tracing can be beautiful, but realistically, it doesn't matter to me. I'm not Narcissus; I don't play games to stare at my reflection in a puddle. My time and attention are almost entirely devoted to things that move too fast for ray tracing to matter, or reading text, or the geometry of a scene as I plan my approach to whatever I'm about to do.

If all other things were equal, I would gladly take the extra eye candy. But to me, it's not worth paying significantly more money for real-time ray tracing hardware and higher electricity bills.

Please wake me up in ten years or so, when every GPU does it well without measurably increasing power draw.

It's a gimmick to sell GPUs. Once we increase ray throughput by two orders of magnitude it will become standard because developers won't need to bake gi, etc, saving dev time. For now, I truly can't believe people don't find the dynamic lighting update lag jarring. It breaks immersion much more than less accurate but real time lighting. (at least on a 4090, maybe the 5090 can do it faster)

I can see the difference I just tend to hate RTX making a lot of places way too dark. I don't want realism, I want to see where the fuck I'm going. Maybe that issue will go away when RTX is the default but that isn't the case yet.

It's not worth the performance cost. I have A 3080 and play 2k Ultrawide (3440x1440) so the performance hit is crippling in games like Cyberpunk, but I can run everything maxed out without it, so it's a no-brainer.

Ray Tracing is just another gimmick like hair works.

Most games use it just for shadows, which doesn't look too different from previous techniques of soft shadowing. Some also use it for various lighting techniques that again were already pretty realistic looking by faking how light works.

But the few games I've seen using full raytraced reflections are definitely noticeable and gorgeous. Actually being able to see your reflection on the street in the rain in Cyberpunk, for example, is awesome as hell.

Disagree to be honest, it does depend on the implementation of course but full path tracing is pretty transformative on Cyberpunk, if that doesn't convince you I'm not sure anything will.

Minecraft RTX is probably the largest uplift from non-RTX graphics out at the moment. It looks incredible with it on.

Ultimately how good a game looks is due a lot more to how much effort and how clever the artists were than it is due to the graphics technologies used.

I just started playing the new Indiana Jones game, which runs fine with RTX off but some scenes look much better with RTX on, but then the game runs very poorly. In both cases the game seems to be optimized for individual frames over how the actual animation looks - there are cases where the shadows blink between different results, where any result would look ok in a screenshot but as an animation it looks awful. Also despite all the fancy graphics features, most of the world and especially the people just look kinda plasticy.

Meanwhile take some games like Destiny 2 and Helldivers 2, which use “outdated” graphics techniques and yet both look and run great.

Some games have a better implementation than others. I kinda disagree that cyberpunk doesn't look a lot better with it on but honestly if you have to swap over to fsr so you can use framegen for path tracing yeah that looks pretty rough even on my 3090

If you want to play a game that imo looks amazing with it and is 100% worth it play Control cranked to the max. Doesn't hurt it's a good game.

Most of the time I'm inclined to agree its overblown though.

This is going to come off as mean and I'm sorry, but if you cannot tell the difference between Cyberpunk raster vs path traced then I think you might want to make an appointment with an optometrist because it's fucking obvious lol.

When I played PT CP2077 the game looked nice... Until I started moving. I was constantly bothered by the terrible LOD in this game. No amount of RT or PT will save that from looking absolutely horrendous and being distracting in motion.

Please, fix LOD before slapping RT/PT in your game.