Comment on Anon turns on raytracing
frezik@midwest.social 22 hours ago
The best examples of raytracing are in applying it to old games, like Quake II or Portal or Minecraft.
Newer games were already hitting diminishing returns on photo realism. Adding ray tracing takes them from 95% photo realistic to 96%.
MurrayL@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
I disagree - adding RT to games that weren’t designed for it often (but not always) wrecks the original art direction.
Quake II is a great example; I think the raytraced version looks like absolute ass. Sure, it has fancy shadows and reflections, but all that does is highlight how old the assets are.
Lv_InSaNe_vL@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Portal with ray tracing is a really cool demo, and Ive used it on the past to show off ray tracing. But man its just not as pretty as the old portal because it lacks the charm, its like those nature photos that are blown out with HDR
AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
I always loved the graphics of Portal 2 but didn’t really see the appeal of those from Portal 1. I think the “with-rtx” version was more on the portal 2 side, so I was fine with it.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Same with Minecraft. Minecraft looks like crap, and improving the lighting, shadows and so on just shows that off even more.
Minecraft is a game that’s deliberately not about the looks.
AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
I disagree, I think a lot of raytraced shaders successful make the game look better while still leaning into the stylized look. I also think it’s unfair to say the game looks bad originally. It doesn’t look realistic, but it has a consistent and compelling visual style.
Look at the Minecraft update trailers for example. They go in that direction even further, by simplifying all of the textures. Yet even with the perfect offline path tracing, it doesn’t look bad.
ArsonButCute@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 hours ago
I’m a big fan of raytraced Minecraft, but I also generally use texture packs that benefit from ray tracing. I’ve found that rather than something for realisim, finding a high resolution cartoony texture pack makes RT shine for Minecraft. Because yes, the game looks bad on purpose, lean into that and make it cartoonier too.
It makes for great survival horror when you’re on the cutest cartooniest texture pack you can find and you’re out after dark without a torch or lantern and its just pitch black except for the light of the moon, barely illuminating silhouettes against the deep purple sky. You see the monsters approaching. You turn a corner and see it, the most adorable thing you’ve ever seen, with death in its eyes made visible only by your own reflected moonlight. It’s too dark to run. Good luck.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 16 hours ago
Which is sometimes a nice benefit. Not to talk about the “layer” in a specific color that suddenly goes away if you enable levelsplus in Reshade. The most extreme example i’ve seen was Elex 1.