Poll: Do you care about ray tracing / upscaling?

[Aapje]

If RT worked great on amy GPU from iGPU up, things would look very different. RT can produce far more realistic lighting and reflections than shaders ever will be able to.

But this is exactly why I don't care about it all that much now. It's just so demanding that the benefits are not worth spending so much more, having much lower FPS, having so much more power draw, etc.

 

[Mopetar]

I look at it as the sort of thing that you might want to turn on if you're already at 160 FPS on ultra settings. Even if it's not a massive visual upgrade, the FPS doesn't matter as much and it's a way to get something out of a top dollar premium card that you don't get from mid-range cards.

The upscaling is more useful for older cards, but that assumes support still exists by the time anything you're buying now reaches that age.

 

[AdamK47]

I have a 4090. Didn't buy it to upscale from a lower resolution. 4K native for me.

I add some ray tracing options if there is room and can maintain at least 60 fps.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

NO to both for me. They're fine as optional side features, but they should absolutely never be pushed instead of legitimate hardware progression. I have a 2070 and voluntarily never use them aside from occasional testing.

- Thats kinda funny cause I voted "Yes, they are important" for essentially the same reason you voted no. They are side features at the moment but both are important in how they affect our ability to play games and at what quality. I think Ray Tracing has another two or three gens in the pipe before it can properly replace rasterized lighting models, and upscaling is a great way to squeeze a bit more life out of your card in year 4 or 5 or something, but they are both important nonetheless as they appear to be the future of the industry.

 

[Justinus]

I feel like this poll will be biased. For starters, anyone who doesn’t have decent RT hardware (or haven’t played a proper game with RT) will vote no. Also, those that want to justify their purchase will vote yes.

If RT worked great on amy GPU from iGPU up, things would look very different. RT can produce far more realistic lighting and reflections than shaders ever will be able to.

Upscaling otoh is just a way to sell slow hardware.

Ah yeah blame the consumer for not embracing and adopting the technology. Smort move.

That stance is like someone saying "well this automotive poll is biased because most people have never driven an electric car. If every car was electric people would love them"

Except not every car is electric. The vast, vast majority aren't. And most people can't afford or don't want an electric car because of the shortcomings and high purchase price.

Not every GPU can do raytracing, and even many of then that can from all vendors can't do it without massive compromise in resolution or framerate. And very few people can afford are willing to spend big bucks for the high end expensive cards that can, and even they come with massive compromises.

Don't blame consumers for immature technology that is expensive and doesn't perform well.

 

[Golgatha]

I have a 4090. Didn't buy it to upscale from a lower resolution. 4K native for me.

I add some ray tracing options if there is room and can maintain at least 60 fps.

Same except I prefer high (80+) FPS at 1440p. It's nice the 4090 can play older games using very little wattage as well.

 

[amenx]

Upscaling on 4k res is a very appealing option to have. I can see its drawbacks on lower resolutions, but on 4k is where it shines. Cant lump it together under a general heading "upscaling" because its not visually equal on high to low resolutions.

 

[coercitiv]

For starters, anyone who doesn’t have decent RT hardware (or haven’t played a proper game with RT) will vote no. Also, those that want to justify their purchase will vote yes.

I find it interesting that in order for your observation to be true, evaluating the importance of the feature must come after the hardware purchase, not before. If it were otherwise, then ownership of the hardware would be less relevant, since we could make a decision before the purchase or, even more interesting, we would be incapable of changing our minds after buying the hardware. Therefore, the purchase is apparently free of this debate: I don't know whether I care for RT or not, but I'll just let this card here make the decision for me!

 

[GaiaHunter]

RT will be important when we stop talking about it, like we stopped talking about anisotropic filtering and AA.
But nVidia is a software company and the subscription comes with a piece of hardware, so there will be something else like it used to about physX or tessellation.

 

[Oyeve]

I have yet to play a game that actually looks better with RT on than off. The only game I really even notice it is Control. Maybe Destiny 2. But I actually don't see RT at all on Vyberpunk 2077. I just feel the hit in FPS.

 

[Mopetar]

I have yet to play a game that actually looks better with RT on than off. The only game I really even notice it is Control. Maybe Destiny 2. But I actually don't see RT at all on Vyberpunk 2077. I just feel the hit in FPS.

There are some titles where it produces nice looking effects, but part of the problem is that you won't really notice unless you stop to look at the scenery because during regular gameplay it's not something your brain will focus on.

The bigger problem is that most games aren't built around having to confirm to realistic lighting. Obviously they try to make something that doesn't look obviously wrong, but when you can fake lighting you can build levels that wouldn't work with RT because you aren't limited by real light.

If you had a title that were built from the ground up to use rat tracing for the lighting and geared the environmental design to showcase the sort of things that are much harder to fake, then you'd certainly have a very impressive title, but no game I can think of is built that way. Maybe NVidia should just throw a pile of money at some developers to make something where it's RT only and can act as a tech demo in part. Do a neo noir type of game and it'd be a perfect fit.

 

[Aapje]

@Mopetar

Exactly. So the good looking ray tracing games will mostly only come once the consoles can do raytracing, so they can fully switch over to it, rather than hack it into a rasterized game, which at best means the PS6.

 

[NIGELG]

The guy who started this poll hates Nvidia. I hate Nvidia too even though I use a 3070 but Ray Tracing is an important tech. if it can be done right.

Maybe in a few years it will be truly ready for the mainstream, but it made a difference in Metro Exodus, Quake 2 and Control when I played those games.

Hopefully one day soon we will not need upscaling to run Ray tracing games properly.

 

[Mopetar]

If it takes console adaptation to get us there, then it'll probably be more likely PS7 generation before games are built for RT.

The next generation of consoles isn't going to have the power unless there's some massive breakthroughs made in the next year or so that still have time to work their way into the hardware for the next generation of consoles.

The next generation of consoles are going to hype 8K gaming as the reason to upgrade.

 

[Aapje]

If it takes console adaptation to get us there, then it'll probably be more likely PS7 generation before games are built for RT.

Consoles are such an important market that they will always determine the lower limit. And since it's not realistic to fully build a game for RT and then also make it great for raster, as long as consoles do raster, games will at most be raster + a sprinkle of RT.

 

[Mopetar]

Consoles are such an important market that they will always determine the lower limit. And since it's not realistic to fully build a game for RT and then also make it great for raster, as long as consoles do raster, games will at most be raster + a sprinkle of RT.

That's essentially what I'm saying. Consoles won't have the horsepower for anything built from the ground up for RT lighting so I don't expect to see it being used in that way for another decade.

 

[CakeMonster]

We are like 3 years into this generation, and I think Digital Foundry said the current consoles have GPU power similar to the 2070.

We could estimate the power of the next consoles by looking at which ever flagship card (980ti? 1080ti?) is most similar to the 2070 in performance, looking at when that was released, and then make a ton of assumptions. But its not completely impossible to make a guess. Like for example, say a 5090 will be similar in performance to whatever mid range card will be out 2 or 4 years later and probably equal the next gen console performance. But that also of course presupposes that the next generation arrives at the 'regular' interval.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Once I turned on ray tracing, it's hard to go back. Everything just looks flat in comparison. DLSS helps me keep the performance up when using ray tracing if the frame rate ends up too low. Also DLSS works as a better AA than other options at 4k. If I can run a game at 4k I will just turn on DLSS Quality for the sharpening because it looks better than native 4k. The extra framerate is a bonus at that point.

I'm the type who wants everything on ultra. If I buy a game on PC I'm not going to turn it down to PS5 graphics levels. I have a 4080 though so maybe that changes how I feel.

 

[Geegeeoh]

Once I turned on ray tracing, it's hard to go back.

Where did you find this revolutionary transformation?
Not even the latest Cyberpunk Overdrive Mode impressed me.

 

[Geegeeoh]

5) I'd love they drop all the upscaling crap

They used to supersample at higher resolution!

 

[coercitiv]

Not even the latest Cyberpunk Overdrive Mode impressed me.

The Overdrive mode does pull some impressive feats, but it also shows how "rasterized" the emperor's clothes were to begin with. I say that because people argued RT on Cyberpunk was amazing, now we find out that most RT modes in Cyberpunk were still heavily reliant on "raster" lighting effects. In other words, the more impressive Overdrive is, the weaker Ultra/Psycho appear, and the more biased people turn out to be when claiming RT Ultra was revolutionary.

I remember enabling RT Ultra in CP2077 and having to take screenshots to tell the difference in lighting between modes. They were there, easy to spot with two images side by side, but very hard to "feel" if I had to move in and out of the menus to enable/disable RT. I also had difficulties registering which of the images looked more realistic, in the sense that I had to actively think about the sources of light and ponder which lighting was more accurate.

Back then I was somehow confused by this result, it made no sense that traditional lighting techniques could be a match for RT precision lighting. However, with the introduction of Overdrive we got access to more analysis in the mass-media, which revealed the older "Ultra" and "Pscyho" modes still use plenty of traditional lighting as a "cost cutting" measure.

This explains why I was underwhelmed and why people have issues with "RT lighing" in blind A/B tests. The front of the can says "Ultra Natural Orange!", but the small label on the back is "contains up to 30% orange juice".

 

[Geegeeoh]

I bet, at this moment, most people would fail a blind test of Raster vs RT...

But marketing has won.
Again.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I would love it if UE5's Lumen kills off RT.

PS6 launches with no RT cores coz devs are told to use UE5 if they want RT effects. Or better still, we get some kind of Lumen accelerators in PS6 GPU.

 

[DeathReborn]

I would love it if UE5's Lumen kills off RT.

PS6 launches with no RT cores coz devs are told to use UE5 if they want RT effects. Or better still, we get some kind of Lumen accelerators in PS6 GPU.

I'd hate it, having just 1 game engine is a terrible idea. Any respectable gamer would hate it if everything had to use UE5.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I'd hate it, having just 1 game engine is a terrible idea. Any respectable gamer would hate it if everything had to use UE5.

I see plenty of benefits:

Easier to find plenty of UE5 experienced developers

GPU vendors have to optimize mostly for one engine

One engine to rule them all. The best graphics quality and speed.

Games reach to market quicker since the artists/designers don't have to wait for the engine programmers to get their stuff ready before they can dive in.

Not sure what a gamer's respect has to do with the game engine. Most of us don't care what engine the game is using, as long as the game runs well. We only come to know of the game's engine if the game's graphics are better than anything else on the market or if the game has serious performance issues.

I can see that having a single engine would cause most games to look and feel the same but that's where the truly creative game studios will excel as they will be able to customize the engine for their own special touch.

And no one can force a single engine onto anyone. For the consoles, UE5 would be more of a recommendation than being mandatory. Anyone wanting to develop their own engine (like the crazy Japanese or German game dev studios) would be free to release their games two or three years late into the console cycle.