I partially disagree, GI is easy to do most of the time with baked lighting, but reflections are hard unless you have very simple environments or tons of gpu resources to spend on rendering alternate camera angles. Even the more modern rasterized reflection techniques such as parallax corrected cubemaps or screen space reflections break easily if you look at them wrong. Raytraced global illumination and soft shadows are still great though, but are more easy to get around with regular rendering in most games where the environments are very static.
Comment on Half-Life 2 RTX, An RTX Remix Project - Announce Trailer
NewNewAccount@lemmy.world 10 months agoThat’s not what ray tracing is about at all. Reflections, imo, are the least interesting part of ray tracing.
AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 10 months ago
ValorUp@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Can you elaborate? Thanks!
NewNewAccount@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Ray tracing is about implementing light and representing its behavior. Because reflections are, of course, a huge part of that it gets a lot of attention. Ray traced reflections allow things that aren’t otherwise on screen to be reflected without resorting to other clever tricks.
But other ray traced features implement light in (my opinion) more interesting ways. Global illumination, ambient occlusion, and shadows can all be implemented via RT and because they’re not limited by screen space information can be more accurate and, thus, impressive.
Light and objects in the world look like they belong and just look “right”. The way a sliver of sunlight can subtly light a room or the way an object appears grounded with accurate shadows can make non-RT lighting look wrong.
Check out Digital Foundry’s video on Metro Exodus Enhanced and they’ll surely go into some examples here.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 10 months ago
shame most people who implement it don’t agree
icesentry@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Can you share any examples? I have yet to see an rtx enabled game that was unusually shiny. Most non RTX game already tend to have way too much specular reflection but the few RTX games I’ve seen were way better with that.
pfannkuchen_gesicht@lemmy.one 10 months ago
Have you had a look at the RTX trailers of games? Most just show of how great the reflections are and barely anything else. It’s like " Look! We’ve got RTX now! See that puddle? Now you see yourself in there! That’s why we added more puddles!"