Comment on Half-Life 2 RTX | Demo with Full Ray Tracing and Dlss 4 Announce

TimboSlice@discuss.online ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Makes sense.

  It is the fundamental problem with anything with “realistic” “raster” lighting. Visually you want it to look like what a city street actually looks like. Lamp post there with a nice bright bulb in it. But the actual lighting needs to look like it was filmed on a sound stage with a blue filter because THAT is “realistic”. So you have a lot of lighting trickery and so forth. The texture of the light source/bulb might be super bright but it is actually three invisible light sources that project the light that was baked into that scene.

  When you switch that over to RTX? Maybe you hand tweak it so you actually get light from that street light. And, as anyone who has actually walked around a city at night can tell you, that shit is bright as hell… which makes all the areas where a street light isn’t REALLY dark and kind of creepy. Or maybe it is the phantom light sources that made things look nice that now make things look wrong.

  We ran into this a lot at the start of the RT generation. Some parts of Control looked AMAZING and other parts look like… an office building. Some parts of Cyberpunk 2077 looked gorgeous and straight out of a Nicolas Refn film and others looked shiny and splotchy.

  Its why I am so excited that the new DOOM is going to require Ray Tracing. That is gonna REALLY suck since I am “Team AMD” but it also means that level designers will be targeting one lighting scheme and can design around that.

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  • GoodEye8@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I’ve been saying for some time that the biggest reason ray tracing looks lackluster is because it’s being held back by games needing to support rasterization. We’ve mastered rasterization which means any scene you can rasterize will look almost identical to a ray traced scene. And you don’t see scenes where ray tracing would blow your mind because those scenes most likely can’t be rasterized, which means they don’t added to the game. So for the end user ray tracing looks kinda meh because you don’t really get any significant benefits and the marginal differences between ray traced and rasterized scenes are not worth the performance cost.

    It’s like having a 3D engine but you can only use it for 2D games.

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    • FunnyUsername@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      you perfectly nailed the reason i don’t even use rtx. the side by sides just arent good enough, in the actual games. I can’t justify the additional performance hit when i literally cannot tell the difference in reflections when swapping between the two on a real gameplay setting. sure it looks different, but better? more often than not, no. obviously this all varies in degree game to game depending how it was designed. Hogwarts Legacy rtx DID look better, but it wasnt enough to justify it. the baked scenes were great looking too.

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