The most popular PC games still rarely use hardware ray tracing

[Jarenien]

Popular doesn't mean good though, and pretty much everything on that list is crap except Hollow Knight, but that one is still a AA game at most, if not an indie, so it really doesn't count.

All the major AAA Single Player games use RTX, and that is all that matters, not multiplayer games that want higher FPS on the donkiest of rigs.

 

[nnguy2]

But the 1di0t consumers will buy a XX60 class nvidia over AMD card because they can turn on ray tracing lol

 

[texasrattler]

This RTX BS reminds me of 3D TVs. Still can't believe suckers dig it.

Games with RTX OFF run much, much, much, much better. And look better too.

RTX just forces everything to be dark just to show the illumination of surfaces where the light shines.

Never understood the hoopla around this RTX bs. Drag your card down for what?

(And this is coming from someone who is using a 4090).

That's because of very few movies ever being filmed in 3D. A lot of the movies were being upscale instead of being filmed in 3D which was because it was a lot cheaper to do.
A lot of consumers at the time didnt know about all that. In time people realized n moved on from it. Also people cant handle 3D because they dont have depth perception n some get motion sickness.

At times 3D was cool when it was done right but it wasn't done right most of the time due to the cost of it.

 

[loki1944]

I'd rather have performance and not need de-resolution crap like DSR/FSR.

 

[loki1944]

Got a 5080, and I always turn on RT reflections. I hate the old way of doing that. Its always obvious and bad. If you move the camera up and down... left and right... pretty much sux no matter how you move.

Even on 3070, RT reflection on ultra performance is a must in a game full of water. Rather that than prettier higher ress game imho. It depends ofc. Some games dont rly need it. RT for shadows is a 100% turn off for me. Rarely I see a big improvement, and even then... not worth the fps drop.

RT often looks very fake. Like the worldis slathered with vaseline.

 

[Melkor Unlimited]

There are some major advantages for developers, games are much quicker to develop with RT, saving vast amounts of time and money, you can make your game more realistic looking if desired, there’s definitely reasons for RT, but we’re quite some way out before it becomes mainstream.

Power to make RT effects, ability to smooth "the feel" and enough memory to it at 1080p?
Steam HW survey says only 29.94% of all cards fit that description.
29.94% of desktops + notebooks. And no consoles.

In the other words it means developers do that RT related work for less than 30%.
And have to do the old fashioned work to not loose 70% of market.

Since Oct 17th, 2018 this technology managed to cover 30% of gamers.
Add few percents for those who have RT ability but not the power to run it if you wish.

It will take another 5~8 years to get where developers could drop non-RT cards from their support list.

 

[Melkor Unlimited]

It is so intensive, it should be its own discrete card

I actually really like this idea. A $2-300 ray tracing card that works no matter what your main GPU is.

Standalone chip or card would work for something like PhysX, where the amount of transferred data is low (relatively).
But not for something where you need share the scene geometry, light sources, textures, ... to RT units and back.

 

[Burty117]

Power to make RT effects, ability to smooth "the feel" and enough memory to it at 1080p?
Steam HW survey says only 29.94% of all cards fit that description.
29.94% of desktops + notebooks. And no consoles.

In the other words it means developers do that RT related work for less than 30%.
And have to do the old fashioned work to not loose 70% of market.

Since Oct 17th, 2018 this technology managed to cover 30% of gamers.
Add few percents for those who have RT ability but not the power to run it if you wish.

It will take another 5~8 years to get where developers could drop non-RT cards from their support list.

Exactly why I said "we'll pick this back up in the 2030's".

The key component is consoles, Just watching some interviews with Mark Cerny, (I could point you to several interviews that say the same thing), Rasterization has sorta hit it's limits hardware wise, if you want more performance, you need a bigger chip, Ray-Tracing though, they're still developing the cores at a rapid pace, the performance gains here are huge, the software isn't particularly well optimised for RT either.

I struggle to see how well consoles can achieve this myself, in order to keep backwards compatibility, you'll need (at least) the same rasterization performance as today's consoles, on-top of that, you need to spend most of your die space on RT performance, Unless dropping from 7nm to 2nm (or below, depending on when they plan on actually releasing these things) seriously improves die space efficiency, the next gen of consoles will need to be quite expensive.

 

[BbN48]

RT is pretty cool but the 'problem' is that many devs became so good at faking RT with raster graphics that there often isn't much difference. Not enough to justify the massive fps cost. Sometimes it really shines though. Look up NextGen Dreams on YT for some very impressive Cyberpunk 2077 videos.

 

[Jack77]

Decent GI feels way more natural than baked in-lighting. But you need at the very least 3090(Ti) level of RT capabilities to even consider it on 1440p.

We've had similar situations like with ray tracing before (remember the '90s and early 2000), but then hardware capabilities followed suit much faster. It was a competitive advantage for one or perhaps two generation, but then the advantage was gone. Problem now is that Nvidia has in 4 generations still not provided every card with that level of performance. (And/because AMD is still catching up; and following suit in providing lower tier cards with gimmicky levels of capabilities.)

 

[Jarenien]

I'd rather have performance and not need de-resolution crap like DSR/FSR.

Then you'll never have performance if you don't use that tech, but you do you...

 

[wiyosaya]

Surprise, Surprise!!!!

IMO, this, arguably, demonstrates the ability of Nvidia to sell crap no one needs.

 

[MasterMace]

Standalone chip or card would work for something like PhysX, where the amount of transferred data is low (relatively).
But not for something where you need share the scene geometry, light sources, textures, ... to RT units and back.

I'm sure they can address that with UALink/NVlink switches. People probably felt the same way 30 years ago when they started making discrete graphics cards

 

[Billybobjoey]

RT Reflections (in most cases) look way nicer than Screen Space Reflections and I wish they would be used more. The rest of the RT feature set I really couldn't care less about personally. I've been replaying the GTA 5 campaign recently on the new enhanced edition on my bazzite box with all the RT bells and whistles turned on, and while it does look nice, I don't think I'd be complaining if I didn't have them at all aside from reflections.

 

[Morphine Child]

The only thing Ray Tracing is good for is nostalgia, but only if you enable it in some RTX remake of an old game. Playing Quake 2 recently on a modern hardware but with framerate from 1997 and it was glorious

 

[Melkor Unlimited]

I'm sure they can address that with UALink/NVlink switches. People probably felt the same way 30 years ago when they started making discrete graphics cards

40+ years
1981: Color Graphic Adapter

 

[Stoly]

Power to make RT effects, ability to smooth "the feel" and enough memory to it at 1080p?
Steam HW survey says only 29.94% of all cards fit that description.
29.94% of desktops + notebooks. And no consoles.

In the other words it means developers do that RT related work for less than 30%.
And have to do the old fashioned work to not loose 70% of market.

Since Oct 17th, 2018 this technology managed to cover 30% of gamers.
Add few percents for those who have RT ability but not the power to run it if you wish.

It will take another 5~8 years to get where developers could drop non-RT cards from their support list.

How time flies. nvidia is dropped pascal support back in October 2025.

 

[Thrackerzod]

Ray tracing is the new "Blast processing".

 

[loki1944]

Then you'll never have performance if you don't use that tech, but you do you...

That's fake performance. Like running my 4K monitor at 1024x768 and cooing over the improved framerate like a well trained corporate parrot.