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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ส.ค. 2024
- Tim and Steve discuss the result from their latest poll on the main Hardware Unboxed channel regarding Ray-Tracing and whether it's being turned on by gamers.
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RT is nice but the fact that we are in the third generation of GPUs branded around this tech and we still can't benefit from it without destroying performance creates this natural distaste in the community.
This is actually a really interesting comment / observation. This many gens on and the tech doesn't feel there yet. True, eh?
3 of my friends work in game development and all of them and most of their friends who get drunk around me (I’m always a DD since I don’t drink and want people to be safe) DESPISE ray tracing and wish it was never introduced and I have honestly never heard one positive thing about it from any of them. Most are “code artists” but 1 of them is a graphic designer and she hates it most. BioWare, blizzard, and EA are the companies they work for so maybe it’s better in other companies. My point to this is even the people making the games don’t want this technology so what’s the point?
Bruh interesting little insight, thanks for sharing. Never considered the angle of those who dev games and what RT is like to work with / implement, from work load perspective. @@jimdob6528
@@jimdob6528 The point was that Nvidia was trying to throw a feature at people that it could tout itself as a champion at despite not being good at it. It's like declaring yourself the winner of a race of 2 and the criteria was whatever the victor thought it should be, regardless of objectivity.
@@jimdob6528
I don’t drink either, I never cared for beer.
I’ve heard there’s some decent alcohol free drinks nowadays.
That is a step forward.
The 15% are probably 4090 owners.
And trolls
@@fabrb26 As a 4090 owner, I can confirm your statement lol
4080 no problem.
@@jaquestraw1 Yet on CP77 Path Tracing not even the 4090 can get 60fps in 1440p without upscaling let alone 4K, and that's a 4 year old game now
@@fabrb26 That's true.
I dont use ray tracing, I’m really a big fan of pure FPS with as little latency as possible
As a pure fan of Hulkamania and the nWo I would have to say I agree with you there brother.
single player games don't need lowest latency. Also, if you do care about latency, Nvidia REFLEX is the bset in the industry, so you have to buy Nvidia.
so you are playing at 720P at lowest settings?
@@ugurinanc5177no i just dont turn on dlss and rtx, so i dont need to run at 720p for a reasonable fps with rtx
@@deivytrajanMan marketing works so good on some of You needy guys. I bet Nvidia reflex won't pass a placebo kind of test to 95/100 gamers. They won't notice any difference in 30 mins of gaming. What they will notice will be the input lag from dlss and fg. Close to 95% players will feel it.
I think there is a benefit to using RT in a couple of games that can utilise it well but it's still in it's infancy and no matter how much upscailing you use, the tech on GPUs isn't there to handle it for the most part (unless you're willing to spend heaps for consistent performance).
I got a 4070 super to update my rig that I kitted out to be future proofed at 1080p. At that res, my 4070 super handles Ray tracing in pretty much every game and gets above 60fps. On games like cyberpunk and Alan Wake 2, I can't crank it all the way up, but with the second highest RT setting and DLLS quality, I average north of 70 frames, which is a good experience in story mode games for me.
@@rosswrld1143
1080p on a $600 card and you still can’t crank it up in every title. That’s the problem. The ray traced future is coming but this is not it
@@stebo5562 I get your point, it's still way too unoptimized for most people to invest in it for sure. However, given how unoptimized it is, I'm just happy that I can use it at all lol.
it's been in its infancy for over 5 years now though and should by now know how to stand up by itself.
@@Bunnywitch_Elena That is true. I just feel it was ridiculous to launch ray tracing when it clearly wasn't ready for the masses as Nvidia did with the 20-series card. It was a case of "just because you can, doesn't mean you should." Especially when the tech isn't there yet to sustain it (aside from DLSS).
RT really is more for devs than the end users. It basically made their jobs much easier with correct lighting right out of the gate. Its also really tough for end users to appreciate its benefits when some devs can accomplish 90% of RT fidelity without a massive hit to performance. Maybe when 4070 RT level performance is under 299 we will no longer need to have this conversation. But today? For most folks Its not worth the performance hit.
so when they decide to abandon all other lighting mechanics we're gonna be stuck with having to use RT with really bad performance (unless you wanna spend $5k on pc) or really shitty graphics (worse than now) with decent performance. Sounds like a spit in the face to consumers
How is it then that these devs can't optimize even to the shit performance standard that we have now.
The games that have the most noticeable raytracing are also the most difficult to run with it enabled. Most people don't have a 4080 or 4090 so they turn it off to keep performance high. If their cards could handle it, they'd probably turn it on every time.
That depends, at least with Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition.
This game not only looks 100x times better, but also runs super well. Too bad, this is my ONLY example
I have a 4090 and still leave it off. Ray tracing is a crap gimmick.
@@CasepbX It really depends on the game. There are plenty of games where the visual difference is barely noticeable but it tanks your performance. But Digital Foundry has shown that certain games like Alan Wake 2, Dying Light 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Control, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, amongst others look totally different thanks to ray tracing.
It's not a gimmick to have lighting be more realistic. Screen Space Reflections disappear when the object being reflected is no longer on the screen and cube maps don't accurately represent what's actually happening in the game world.
I have a RTX 4070ti and the only reason I use it is because GeForce experience enables it and even than I sometimes go into my settings to disable it because in some games like RE Village I was getting 60 to 70fps and the game looked awful. I was able to turn up my other settings and disabled RT and the game looked so much better and was getting over 120fps in 4k with dlss
@@CasepbX liar lmao
I figured from the $600 mark of GPUs I could only realistically use raytracing with upscaling and frame gen. Heck even seems the case with the 4070ti. I've had all those cards decided to go with amd in the end and use the rx 7900xt.
Realtime RT, is to me the biggest regression we have ever experienced in gaming. We literally stepped back 15 years in time. This might sound provocative but hear me out.
For me, the absolute biggest leap I felt in gaming history, or at least the last two decades was when I played Half Life Alyx for the first time. I played it when I got my HP Reverb G2, and I ran the game at a resolution of ~5000x2500@90Hz. In that game I interacted with the world in completely new ways. The physics interaction and animations were just out of this world and unlike anything I have yet experienced. The game made me feel like no other game has done before. I actually felt true presence, dread and unease getting into certain situations (like with "Jeff" or when getting the flashlight/shotgun the first time), which I can gladly say I have never felt in computer/video games before. Many times the game looked so incredibly real in the headset that my brain treated the environments like actual real life places, and the game was able to do so using rasterized techniques. It does have RT lighting, but it is baked using rasterized techniques with dynamic elements (like dynamic shadows and certain interactive lights).
I think this is a testament to how very little real-time RT does to the gaming experience, and I just wish game development focused on great gaming experiences and scalability instead; Creating amazing games that performance scale to portable devices like the Steam Deck, high refresh rate monitors, 4K TVs and of course... VR.... ALL of those targets, are completely excluded with real-time RT. That's why it feels like a MASSIVE regression. It feels like we stepped back 15 years in terms of performance and what developers can do with gaming; And I have not yet found a game where real-time RT is "actually" transformative to interaction, enjoyment or immersion of gameplay. It's a visual sprinkle with insane performance costs, and artifacts.
You're not wrong but you're missing a lot with your statement. First off you can't compare VR resolutions to common screen resolutions as VR uses temporal resolution and also foveated rendering in which it really only renders at full resolution small portion on the middle of where your eyes are looking, etc etc, there's a lot of optimizations for VR really, also the reason Alyx managed to look so good despite technically not using RT was because it did use RT, just not in real-time, it used pre calculated lighting which can give you similar results to real time RT BUT comes at the cost of it simply not being dynamic. It is static and doesn't allow for example, for an open world experience with day/night cycles, etc. This is something that's inherent to the kind of game that Alyx is, if we discarded RT altogether we would be limited to this kind of linear, static game and no other option would be available unless you wanted to have way worse lighting, shadows, etc like already happens with open world games like The Witcher 3, GTA V, they all don't really look as good as the best looking games of their era, because they had to compromise in quality to achieve their worldview. That's why in Witcher 3 if you enter a random hut, or a mansion or whatever, there's always light leaking from the corners, that's why sometimes it's hard to tell if an object is on the ground or floating in games since the don't have proper light occlusion, that's also why characters inside cars in cyberpunk with RT off shine way brighter than the rest of the car, because characters can't be lighted by static lighting, they are inherently dynamic so the car has baked-in lighting and looks dark while the character is literally being directly illuminated by the sun and sky instead of the limited reflected light that enters from the windows, simply because the dynamic lightning system cannot account for the car's shadow inside itself because the car walls are too thin and the resolution of the dynamic lighting is so low.
You see, there are ways to go around the limitations of raster rendering and there's plenty of games that can be used as an example of this, like Crysis 3, Hellblade, etc, but that means limiting what you can do in your game which means you either don't make the game you wanted and compromise to have a good looking game or you do what you want and become victim of criticisms for having bad graphics in your era. It's a balancing act. In 4 or 5 years once even low end GPUs can do raytracing fast enough it will bring about better games simply because Devs don't need to deal with this bullshit, they don't need to spend months tuning lighting in a single area to make it look good, they don't need to leave small houses or cars with bad lighting because the lighting just works. That's the magic of raytracing, no, it's not going back 15 years, it's introducing a revolutionary new feature that does make all games look better even the ones that had exceptional raster lighting, they still had inaccuracies, what it bring to the table really is, it makes the games quicker to develop, it allows Devs to invest their time into content instead of trying to make the game look good coming up with ways to zig-zag around the limitations of raster. That's not a weird thing the transition from 2D to 3D games also meant a lot of hardware couldn't cope and run the games fast enough. That's normal, that's the cost os a new feature, you need higher end equipment and it takes years to trickle down tl the mid/low-end segments of the market.
Alyx took a lot of time to develop and it was an expensive game to develop, Valve could take on this cost, they are literally the most profitable company in gaming, but most Devs won't invest that much time and effort, they can't ,they will just drag themselves to bankruptcy if they do.
Having good animations, physics, etc has nothing to do with having raytracing or not, it just has to do with if the developer invested time and money into developing these things, and they don't because they can't, valve can, but then, Valve mostly don't make games anymore, raytracing will allow these developers to maybe justify investing time into those things because they don't need to invest it into making their game good looking, and yes, there will be plenty of Devs who will just continue half-assing their games, take this saved time to Launch more games instead of making better games, but still it accounts as a benefit for all.
If you don't have the proper hardware for raytracing, just don't enable it, but also don't demonize raytracing for that, wait for your turn to be able to play those games.
Amd cards are really bad at ray tracing.
@@marcosvictor4935the first rtx cards came out over 5 years ago. The first cards branded as raytracing capable released over half a decade ago, yet the vast majority of people still can't turn raytracing on and get 30+fps. The only way to achieve that is to buy into a $800+ card that will be considered obsolete in raytraced games in one or two years time. Raytracing should be well on its way to the average consumer market by now, not only available to the people with the most money. It's obvious what nvidia is doing, they're squeezing as much money out of people's pockets as possible before the raytracing craze becomes normalized.
Is raytracing in general a gimmick? No. But Nvidia have turned it into one. This hurts devs too, what's the point of using raytraced lighting to develop your game if you have to also keep developing typical lighting techniques aswell? As of right now, raytracing techniques in video games absolutely have gimmicky qualities to it.
Companies push ray-tracing for gaming hard, because competence in this technology (RT cores and RT clusters) helps them improve AI computing. Just business.
not bad as such, just 1 gen behind Nvidia. Nvidia push it hard because they have the lead and can market it. But RT does not add any real noticeable difference when I play games with it on or off, I'm just worried that it will never be good enough on lower end hardware. RT will remain a gimmick until your sub $300 card can run full path traced at over 60fps at native resolutions of at least 1440p, and preferably over 4k. This is not going to happen for another 10 years or more.
Since Path Tracing is available, I only play Cyberpunk with Path Tracing enabled (I get an average of 100 fps). There's no way I would play it without path tracing.I am a casual player, I only play single player games, visual quality is most important to me.
I have a 4090 and I don't give a damn about it. I vastly prefer higher frame rate over a shiny surface that I will never even notice.
I did use a 3080 for a few months, and ran hardware RT in Cyberpunk and Control (as well as in some tech demos), and the changes to image quality were not that big of a deal imho. In some situations, ray tracing actually looked worse than traditional lighting (though it definitely did look significantly better in some scenes).
There were multiple occasions where I had forgotten if RT was turned on or off, with some instances where I thought it was on and was marveling at some awesome lighting effects, only to realize that RT was actually currently disabled.
I didn't notice a big improvement to image quality in Control, and the game did run noticeably smoother with RT off. However, the performance was still good enough that I would usually leave RT on, though only after I had done a lot of testing with it on vs. off. I will note, however, that a lot of the best lighting effects and nicest looking scenes looked great even without ray tracing. Even with hardware RT on in Control, a LOT of the lighting effects were still using screen-space or other traditional lighting techniques rather than hardware RT, which is why some lighting effects look the same whether RT is turned on vs. off.
I agree. It might just be me but the difference between ray tracing and path tracing seems really small too. Definitely not worth the fps hit imo.
Have you tried Metro Exodus EE?
I'm using RTX 3080 too but the performance hit is so massive that you just have to use DLSS or FSR to get barely 60FPS which is just dealbreaking for me when I saw minor improvement in visuals. As you said, in some games, the visuals are quite a lot better with RT but in many games, it didn't make much difference.
In my honest opinion, if you wanna do RT with max graphics and above 60 FPS steady without DLSS/FSR at 1080p or 1440p, just get RTX 4080 or RTX 4090.
I’m sorry what? Ray tracing in control is incredible compared to raster. Control is full of highly reflective surfaces such as glass and mirrors. The difference in atmosphere alone between Ray tracing and raster is insane. I’ve played through control twice, once when it came out and I had a 1080 and once when it came out and I had a 3080ti and the second time it felt like I was playing a different game.
I’ll give you that in some titles Ray tracing isn’t that great, like shadow of the tomb raider where it’s barely implemented but in games with such strong implementation as control the difference is night and day!
@@cardiacresp not played that on pc. Hated it. Might try it out to see how it looks though.
As someone who reserached ray tracing as my university thesis back in 2004 (at that time it was minutes/frame we're talking about just to render 27 speheres in the void with 2 rays). I'm super facinated by real time ray tracing we have today. I wholehartedly agree that real time ray tracing is still in it's infancy and even though it has been available for a few years now we (ray tracing enjoyers) are still early adopters.
3 things need to happen for more mainstream acceptance of raytracing in games.
1. Cost. Meaning that you don't need to spend $600+ on a GPU to have reasonable performance playing games with ray tracing. I payed too much money on a 4090 because I am facinated by it and want the best performance I can get. But you should be able to turn on ray tracing on a $300 GPU and have reasonable performance. More important than frame rate is frame time and latency. Like what Steve says, it doesn't matter if I can hit 60fps if the latency is too high and the game feels off.
2. Visual quality. A lot of games have ray tracing options that are just throw away, they don't look good and it's not optimized so you get a huge performance hit and it still doesn't look that good. It's just there for a marketing buzzword. More games need to get to the level of Cyberpunk where when you enable ray tracing it's a big visual difference.
3. Consoles. I guess this is linked to both 1 and 2. But the ray tracing on consoles suck for the most part. And as much as this community enjoys building gaming desktop computers. Consoles are the largest piece of the gaming market. When consoles get visually good ray tracing and can output a reasonable performance at a price of $500. Then I think we have most if not all the puzzle pieces for mass acceptance of ray tracing.
And I don't think it will happen until the next generation of consoles. So 2027-28. By then we would would have had 2 more GPU generations. By that time I think ray tracing can truly be enjoyed by the masses. It would just by default be turned on and you wouldn't be bothered by it.
Here’s a thought I very rarely hear expressed by game and hardware critics: I’d rather game developers use the AI horsepower in these new cards to make NPC AI better (like more naturally-conversational NPCs in RPGs, smarter enemies in combat) than to use the AI horsepower on frame generation to compensate for framerate drops from using raytracing. I think chasing raytracing fidelity isn’t nearly as interesting as all the other things devs could do with the hardware to make games better.
I have a 7900XT and still never use RT. Yes, it is great when standing still and enjoying the view in CONTROL.
However, when actually playing a game, you rarely notice the extra polish due to the dynamic of it. And when you have dynamic, you want good FPS and Frametimes - not your face reflecting in a glass of water.
Sacred words.
Agree. I have the same card and have turned RT on in Control to see how pretty it looks only to move the mouse and toggle it off.
less RT more performance. RT is just a gimmic to sell absurd pricing GPU's
Are you blind? Are you anti-technology? Path tracing makes games look almost like real life. It's the highest video setting. If you care about fps, just play all games on low lol
People who think like this should just use an Rx 580 play everything at 720p with FSR ultra performance. Visual quality obviously doesn't matter to you. Reminds me of the people who "couldn't see a difference" in HD and SD when HD tvs started becoming readily available.
@@deivytrajanyou dont need tensor cores for path tracing, rt is a gimmic
Ray-tracing is definitely not a gimmick. Actually simulating light-rays is incredible, but it's also something that is so incredibly expensive in terms of performance, that it is still irrelevant. But hey, at least Pixar can use the RT cards to make five lazily written movies that look good per year. Granted, I don't have an RT card, so I don't know how much the visual uplift actually is.
@@catalerso You don't *need* them, but man are they a lot better at it.
RT is a very impressive feature, but unfortunately this GPU generation is not ready to fully expand the power of this beauty. If 600 Dollar GPU cant justify itself in RT then current gen definitely not ready. Maybe Nvidia 50 series and Radeon 8000 will change the industry, handling RT and some more features like AI changing NPC behavior
As someone with an RX 6750XT RT is out of the question for me in a lot of games lol. In the few games that I can turn on RT and not suffer a huge performance loss I actually question if it really is RT or if it's RT by a technicality (RE4 Remake and Dead Space Remake).
Nah Man don't feel the missing out. Turn off aall cause there are only 3 games with path tracing in the game. And tbh they are not some piexe of art games.(rdr2 cough)
AMD can't do Ray tracing at all. The 7900xtx runs worse than the 4070 super.
the 6750xt is an amazing 1440p high setting card F* raytracing and enjoy your games mate .
false xtx is at 4080 3090 level so by your logic the 3090 can't do ray tracing at all got it@@grattjer
@potatorigs2155 the 4070 super does raytracing better than the 3090. That is true. You can always run games with settings turned off to get good performance too. AMD makes the best cards if you turn some graphics off. Basically the newest thing is raytracing. AMD cards can't do it and that's fine. Graphics from a few years ago are still pretty good.
When ca 2 fps was good enough: The first 3D-games I played was F/A 18 Interceptor and Stunt Car Racer on Amiga 500. Cars were a box with 4 round wheels. Planes a little more detailed, e.g. showing wings and tail. Google the games to see examples.
FPS: 2 up to 10, I estimate. 2 fps was un-smooth enough to be noticed, 10 fps was very smooth.
Resolution: 320X256 with generally 32 colors (from a 4096 colors palette), if I remember correctly.
I actually ray-traced a scene with 320X256 resolution in a raytracing 3D-program. Not many objects. One frame only, no movie clip :D Renderimg-time was many hours, I remember it as 12+ hours. CPU @ ca 7 MHZ, RAM 512 kb standard + 512 kb RAM extension-card = 1 MB in total RAM. Integrated OCS gpraphic chipset.
The games was really about being fun to play, great music in menu and in-game, great in-game story and also art created in a 2D-painter program somewhat similar to Paint in Windows (e.g. Deluxe Paint IV). Something I often miss in modern games.
only time I used ray tracing is by accident when an update turns it on, from where i notice the performance dips and swiftly turn it off.
Man, certainly didn't expect to see my comment in a video, even if not specifically pointed out :) But yeah, just like I said under the poll, it really just depends on the overall performance of the game and on what kind of game it is, as in whether a certain performance drop for improved visuals is worth it (given that the overall visual advantage of RT is still on the minimal side in most instances). In a fast-paced action game like say Returnal where the visual impact is also fairly minimal, probably not, because you won't notice it as much and you'll benefit from better framerate. In a slow-paced adventure-ish game like say Alan Wake 2 (that also doesn't perform all that great regardless of RT in the first place), it makes sense to enable at least some of it, because you'll be able to enjoy it more and losing some performance won't be the end of the world.
I think there's a little copium being huffed by ray-tracing evangelists. "I spent so much money on this; it _has_ to be awesome! How could anyone _not_ want this?!"
Some of us used to play Elite on a BBC Micro when it was released in 1984!
I have a 4090, in 3440x1440 OLED resolution. I turn RT on, in a couple of games where it makes a real difference like Alan Wake. Alan wake is just about playable with all the RT at max with DLSS quality. I’ve switched a couple of other settings down a little, so I can keep my 1% lows above 60 fps. In most other competitive titles I don’t ever switch it on. If the 5090 has a significant RT uplift I will maybe buy it, as I really do like the extra eye candy. However, I’m probably more likely to skip the 50 series , as I mostly play competitive games, as I like gaming with friends so don’t often play single player titles.
GPUs are stupid expensive. Developers don't want to optimize. We are at an empasse.
I always used RT, even when I had a 3060Ti. Even more so now that I have a 4090. It's amazing.
Ray Tracing Destroys your performance and IT LOOKS WORSE than traditional baked lighting. You are spending more money for a worse user experience.
Try telling this to the believers of the NV cult.
^ This, but they keep being told that it's somehow better than native, optimized graphics and they eat that nonsense up and then cry that they have to buy some overpriced Nvidia card 'Coz RayTracing.' It's both sad and laughable. Unfortunately a fair amount of tech tubers encourage this idiocy as well.
Destroys performance? Definitely.
Looks worse? I don't know about that.
FPS is more important to me, but I specifically bought a 4080 Super so that I can use ray tracing. With DLSS and FG I am playing Cyberpunk on Psycho with path tracing at 90 fps. If performance felt bad I would definitely turn RT down or off.
Are you running on 1440p? Also, do you feel any input lag for activating FG?
@@jonascarvalhodearaujo8038 depends on the game. I usually play at 4K especially if I’m going to be using upscaling. For Cyberpunk I have it set to 4K Ultra DLSS performance on RT Overdrive with path tracing on plus FG. I get mostly mid to low 80’s and everything feels smooth to me. The 4080 Super seems a bit overkill for 1440P in most games unless you’re playing at ultra with ray tracing or you have a 200+ hz monitor. I also prefer to use DLSS from a higher resolution because it just looks better. FG does increase latency but so-far it hasn’t been enough for me to feel it. I have only used it in Cyberpunk and Alan Wake 2 though, because most of the games I currently play either don’t have it or don’t require for me to use it.
@@77Asiris Cool! Thanks for the reply ^^ I'm waiting my 4080 super arrive from the store haha can't wait to test it.
What do game artists think about ray tracing?
The time saved having real time dynamic lighting as opposed to "hard coding" light rays indoors etc?
They still seem to have to hardcode a lot of lights, especially since RT is really only partial ray tracing. Path tracing is actually real ray tracing, but it is even harder to run.
I think the reason why some people don’t like how ray tracing looks is because the game artists have a harder time controlling what the lighting is going to look like with ray tracing. By hard coding the lights in raster, they have more control over the final look
I would like to max out the settings on pretty much any game and have all the "eye candy" possible at a steady 45-60fps. As long as things are smooth and there's little to no stutter, I couldn't care less what the actual fps is. So many people spend so much time and money "tweaking" settings and running benchmarks instead of actually playing games.
Some types of games benefit more from a higher fps than others. Racing games (especially sim racing games), or competitive shooters, both obviously benefit more from a higher fps.
I literally could not care less about ray tracing. Everything in driver development from the last 5 years (DLSS, FSR Frame Generation etc) has been created to try and hide the fact that the performance impact of turning on ray tracing is catastrophic and the technology simply isn't worth the performance hit for a minor sometimes indiscernible improvement to image quality.
Another issue i have been seeing is games that straight up target raytracing visuals, so the games end up with extremely poor lighting and shadows in their rasterization mode
I'm definitely in the sometimes yes/sometimes no camp, primarily because not all RT implementations are equally good/worth using. E.g. i played an indie FPS called Industria recently and the RT there gave some of the edges a weird shimmering that really bothered me and the SSR alternative looked pretty good most of the time, so it just wasn't really worth the performance hit.
Control was the game that kinda sold me on the capabilities of Ray tracing. Imo the best implementation of Ray tracing so far by a decent margin given how good it looks and how well optimized the game is with it on (play with a 4070 super at 1080p, average north of 100fps at native).
I don't care for ray tracing personally. High FPS is much more important for me, because the incredible smoothness and low latency feels so much better than lower FPS gaming with slightly prettier visuals.
I get 70-90 fps with RT. If it's above 60fps, I'm good. But, what we don't want is spikes, I rather want 60fps stable than 50 - 80 fps spikes
i bet most people who simp for rt aren't able to tell the difference if u test them on it. usually to tell the difference you gotta have prior knowledge for what to look for and actually sit down and check it out, like seeing if there is a proper reflection on the glass of your scope on a gun for example. rt is def not worth it for now imho, especially given the extra cost of buying a good nvidia gpu and the performance hit in fps and latency.
I think whats also important to note here is that your viewers who respond to polls are heavy enthusiasts - likely the common people care even less about whether ray tracing is on or off.
EDIT: Just got to the point where Tim was like "most people don't even buy gpus capable of rt" so yeah it makes sense.
For the new survey linked in the description, I feel like there should be a distinction between the MSRP of the card and what we actually paid for it. I got my 6700 XT used for like $250, but the MSRP is a laughable $480 and I never would have paid that much for it. On the flipside, many people overpaid for their graphics cards during the recent shortages.
the performance hit is too much, i always disable ray tracing
I think as much as cards have advanced in ray tracing technology and capabilities, ray tracing techniques being used in games have advanced further and have become more demanding. I think this is especially true if you look at games that first came out like Control and compare it to a games like Alan Wake that now enables path tracing. Admittedly, path tracing is more of a significant advancement in image quality than the original ray tracing. However, to get decent performance would take a rtx 4080. Certainly, not every gamer can afford that.
I think Ray Tracing worth it on high-end nVidia cards and upscaling is worth it as well. DLSS is now almost as good as native and what is native to be honest? TAA? that ruins the native "nativeness" and with DLSS you get a better picture overall and over that you enable Path Tracing or some great Ray Tracing and you are in the future. For example in Cyberpunk 2077 I would never go back to Rasterization because the game just looks so much better with PT. Real time lighting is the future like Lumen and Hardware Accelerated Ray Tracing.
I enjoy doing those surveys, hope there will be more of them.
The most significant use of RT from what I've seen so far is Spider-Man Remastered. Those building windows and cars looks gorgeous with RT on.
I bought my 3070 over a 6700XT because even if it had more VRAM I wanted to try RT, now I have to turn it off in every game and I have to turn dowm textures too...
Should have went the 6700xt
If only they had made a 16GB version of the 3070. That would have been great. They had a plan to do that, and to call it the 3070 ti, but the 3070 ti just ended up being a slightly faster 3070 with the same amount of vram. They also had a plan to make a 20GB version of the 3080 (and would have called it the 3080 ti), and that also would have been great.
@@syncmonism Miners would have scalped them to hell and back, at least I got my hands on a 3070 back then, not like I could choose much it was either a 3070 for $600, a 6700XT for $650 or a 6800XT for $800.
I think RT is worth it
This clip shows exactly why you guys shouldn't focus so much on which cards have decent RT perf and which ones don't. Until the "RT race" becomes the new "Tessellation race", the point is moot.
Rt actually make the graphic looks so much better in games like cyberpunk,but in some games the performance hit is just too big for what you get.I have a 7900xtx and usually I don’t use ray tracing,but when AFMF came out I wanted to try it in cyberpunk(not path tracing,just normal ray tracing)and the visual improvement is quite significant.If you don’t go too aggressive with upscaling you can get a quite decent experience with improved visual quality compared to pure raster+ultra details without upscaling
Exactly what they said: RT is always a compromise. It's either worth it to you or not. And it varies per game of course: both the impact/implementation as well as the fps goal you have. The majority of PC gamers clearly still prefer more FPS without compromising. On my 2070 super (laptop) and RX 7800 XT it never was worth my while in my opinion.
I have played Cyberpunk with an RTX 3080 and I didn't think the visual quality improvement was all that good overall with RT on. I actually found the visuals to be worse in some scenes. More realistic doesn't always mean prettier. In some areas, I found that textures actually looked WORSE when ray tracing was turned on, especially in somewhat dark areas where there wasn't a lot of light. DLSS also was having some weird ghosting, artifacting, and other issues sometimes, and obviously I needed DLSS on to be able to run with decent hardware RT settings at 1440p.
I like the idea, accept that the hardware isn't quite there yet across the board and know that RT capable GPUs are hella overpriced and not worth it from my perspective in life at time of writing.
in blind test some people liked the look of cyberpunk with RT off . I get it rt = realism but some people is not looking for photo realism. I can go outside for that lol
XD @@potatorigs2155
Sometimes it feels like it is the opposite of optimising game. Just let it bruteforce by tracing rays instead of thinking outside the box how to get similar result in performant rasterised(or mixed when possible) way
Game developers have had plenty of time to perfect all the visual effects using rasterization (pixel shader effects and texture blending) to a degree that makes real-time RT kind of a late guest to the party. The hardware implementation of RT is certainly a nice thing to have on hand, but the price that makes it useful is still too steep for most of the user base and thus the studios to consider serious investments in their development tool chain. This is the reason we are still to see RT-first graphics engine (and a title running on it), instead RT is being dragged as an afterthought in the overall design plan. Some games don't even implement properly mastered PBR assets -- a prerequisite for realistic RT rendering.
I think its cool to have it for reflections, lighting and other effects are not that noticeable. I liked it for control works for that aesthetic.
36 % was probably the 20 series users.
As a budget orientated gamer, RT is out of my price range. I have nothing against the idea of RT, but the level of hardware needed to run it makes it a very heavy cost-to-value technology.
It's neat, but not the craziest visual uptick. Games already look so good, been a number of years. Fun + enjoyment > high end visuals in 2024.
2000$ usd for RT gpu.... really, really tough to find interest in that.
i like RT just for shadows and lumen.... reflection usual tanks the performance...
There comes a time when RT is on by default in most games because most hardware can run with it, that is when RT will really become a thing. Until then, RT is just a marketing strategy for both GPU sellers and developers.
I love RT but I can’t use it on my 3070 because of my low VRAM in the games I play. I only need 60FPS in the games I use it in
IMO only competent RT card is the 4090 and thats at 1440p. Everything else you have to compromise on settings a lot in order to get RT to be running okay. The tech still ain't there yet.
im not sure why but even when the frame rate was good enough and i had free sync enabled, there always seemed to be some kind of input delay that i noticed. idk if its just me though, i seem incredibly sensitive to stutters and the like.
A lower frame rate typically comes with increased input lag, so that makes sense. And, yes, some people are more sensitive to it than others. It also depends on the control method and type of game that you play. You will likely not notice input lag as much in games where you are using a controller instead of a mouse, though racing games are probably an exception to this, as changes to latency tend to be more noticeable in racing/ driving games.
@syncmonism nah not that kind. I tried limiting to the same frame rate I had with RT on and I still felt some kind of wierd delay/microstutter hitches. I couldn't quite figure out what exactly caused it but the only variable was RT on
I’ve got an Asus Dual OC 4070 and it’s only now I’ve started to use RT in games with tweaked high settings at 1080p. With DLSS I can more or less max out my monitor in the games I play. It’s only gonna get better from here
The more you realise how much of a factor fps is in fast paced games the less you care about visuals, devs and gpu makers care about pretty pixels because its an easy thing to flog but when I went from 110fps or less to 160 or more with an absolutely noticeable improvement I won't be dialing up the graphics until any game can give me that which is already hard enough given how little devs care about optimisation....
Ray-tracing, is a performance hog and visually games could do without it. yet, it its an older game, maybe it is something nice to implement, yet it reduces the focus to "what seems to be real", and lessens the effect of the artists intend.
in conclusion I think raytracing is just a gimmic to bolster AI sales and make it something "people want" where it would be perfectly fine visually without, raw compute is way better to have for performance per watt and silicon size reasons in my opinion.
Real gamer here. 3 pc gamers in our household with a sometimes pc gaming 4th (wife.) We do not give a shit.
rigs:
-570 mobo/6900xt/5600x3d
-550 mobo/6700xt/3600 cpu
-450 mobo/5700xt/4500 cpu
-450 mobo/1080ti/3600 cpu
More than enough to game for 6-8 more years easily. No thought for RT/dlss or any future triple A titles as they have been absolutely terrible for years. Looking at you Rocksteady/ Activision/Bethesda. Terrible. It is fine being an fps snob and for techfluencers that make money getting brand loyalist to part with thousands they do not need to spend it is fine. Marketing. Hell Apple wouldnt be anywhere near as popular based on price and performance if it wasnt for marketing. No actual gamer thinks about fps over 60 as it is useless but every gamer brought up and into pc gaming post 2012 (all zoomers) just take your word for it but would all game fine for their needs on a 5700xt or 2070 quite happily for years.
RT on expensive monitors is not relevant unless you have a budget of ~$1000 for gpu
I think the right question to ask is how RT is compared to game physics. You can use RT and the game will still suck because the game physics is so bad. Light is important for visuals but it's not even close to be a significant part of game enjoyment. This is what should be understood. We need better games, not better RT and better GPUs.
I would like to see more experimentation with gameplay design from game developers.
There are good games that refine and improve upon proven gameplay concepts with iterative improvements and excellent polish (Half Life 2 comes to mind), and there are the more janky experimental games which are rough around the edges, but do some really interesting things (the original Deus Ex, or Fallout New Vegas come to mind). It's extremely rare for a game to be both well polished and also to have very original gameplay, but there have been some games like this, with Super Mario 64 being a good example.
A reason why physics, and dynamic environments in general, have decreased over time is because it is impossible, using rasterised lighting, to make those types of game look graphically appealing, and like it or not, graphics is a major selling point of AAA games. RT enables AAA level graphics in any environment with no tailored work, this doesn’t just mean ‘devs do less work’, it also means that the world can dynamically change while keeping a consistent graphical quality. As RT and later, PT, become the norm, AAA games will become more and more dynamic. TLDR worlds and gameplay will be less and less limited by what is possible to make look good.
4060 can actually be competent for ray tracing on some games. I played through all of spiderman, dyingh light 2 and metro exodus enhanced edition with my 3060 12 GB, 1080p DLSS Quality.
Yes there were instances where the fps dropped below 60 especially in spider-man. But i have a variable refresh rate display so its not a huge problem on singleplayer games.
The visual quality was worth it for me
I only use ray tracing if it makes a visual difference to my eyes and doesn't drop my fps to a point i don't like, maybe how ray tracing is used in game needs to be more optimized
RT in most games is not implemented correctly for it to be worth it. The only game that I know of that implements full RT correctly is Cyberpunk 2077 and even then I can’t tell the difference while playing. The only way I can tell is by taking screenshots while playing with it on and off and then compare them side by side. The only reason I use RT is because I use GeForce experience and a RTX 4070ti but even then I sometimes go into settings to disable RT. RE Village looked awful using GeForce experience with RT on. I disabled RT and upped some settings and the game winded up looking better and I went from 60 to 70fps to over 120fps at 4k with DLSS
Submitted a survey response. Rasterization performance and VRAM capacity are king for me. RT is almost completely useless. Upscaling tech is a definitely a cool feature to have as long as it doesn't look like complete garbage AND it's not required to run a game at a reasonable frame rate on a current generation GPU without RT on. I see upscaling as one of those features that's a stop-gap measure for aging hardware before you've had a chance to upgrade.
So, little reality check... (not for Tim/Steve, I know you know this shit)
Most people are not on a 4070 Tie super... Most people are not on a 3070... Most people are on something more akin to a 2060, maybe a 3060. Most gamers do not go out and buy a new GPU every cycle... If you're playing on a 2060 Ray Tracing CRIPPLES your performance... Most gamers are not interested in spending 2000 USD on a computer... and if you get a 4070 TIe supper, and a cpu fast enough that it won't bottleneck that GPU your talking at least $1700 USD. Lower end hardware (the shit the vast majority of us actually buy) is not capable of Ray Tracing even at 1080p while still maintaining an acceptable frame rate. People don't get into PC gaming for 30 fps... on a PC that is not an acceptable frame rate...
In my opinion, the real RT cards for gaming will be the RTX 6000 series from nVidia, and maybe the RX 10000 from AMD :D When RT processing and inclusion in shaders will affect users by 10-15% and not like now from 50 to 100% (to drop to 1 fps)
With the way things are trending there is no indication that this will be the case, maybe for games released now or already a few years ago (Cyberpunk). But with the current trend, the games of 2026-2027 will be just as demanding to the 6000 series as currents games are to the 4000 series. You will still half your framerate or worse, you will still be relying on upscaling from 1/4 resolution using generated frames. The needle has not moved since RT was introduced, the perf hit of RT is still the game, the cards just got faster. It's like there is a major tech breakthrough needed to test that.
RTX cards arrived way too early if we’re only now seeing acceptable RT performance with the 4080, but thats still with dlss and frame gen. I almost don’t wanna try CyberPunk RT because I might need dlss or frame gen on my 4080 to hold 100+ fps 😅
I just don't get the entire premise of ray tracing. It is supposed to improve image quality, but it halves frame rate. So to get your frame rate back you have to use up-scaling (which reduces image quality) and/or frame generation (which introduces shimmering, smearing, latency, artifacts etc) which all further reduce image quality. The end result is a worse looking image with worse performance and worse latency. The whole thing is stupid, just turn it off and run high refresh, native resolution, rasterization. Even if you're happy with the level of performance offered by ray tracing, you could have bought a GPU that was half the price to deliver that same performance in raster with a negligible difference in image quality. Ray tracing as a technology simply isn't ready yet and the multiple band aids they have had to invent to try and make it work just proves the fact.
I like RT a lot. Especially when it's the main/only source of lighting. It makes a massive difference when its done right. Look at Metro Exodus vs the Enhanced Edition. Or Portal RTX, Avatar, Quake 2 RTX, modded Minecraft. We have had physics based rendering for a long time now. Physics based real time lighting is the obvious next step.
And as far as early 3d, yes it was way harder to run than 2d. Its why games that where wire frames with a single color plain over them ran at like 10fps. It also looked worse than 2d games at the time. I think most people would agree SNES games visuals have aged much better than ps1 and n64 visuals on average. Because 2d was much easier to run. The Sega Saturn focused on 2d gaming, it runs 2d games better than the ps1 and n64. Segas thinking when developing it was gamers havent cared for anything but 2d games so far.
5 years ago we where about 5 years away from RT starting to really look good, and really start taking off. We are at that point now. There is a reason the 3 games that nearly every gaming site/publication/fan had as the best looking of 2023 where Alan Wake 2, Phantom Liberty and Avatar: FoP.
It's hard to play Metro Exodus vanilla once you played it with RT on. The GI based lighting is simply better. Same with Dying Light 2. Yesterday I started playing CP2077 again but this time with PT on. I'm just walking around, enjoying the sights. I simply refuse to belive when people say that they can't see any difference between no RT and PT in CP2077.
The avatar game is well optimized for a RT game
@@stebo5562 yeah, it's well optimized. Especially if you have an Nvidia GPU. It's around 20 percent faster on a 4080 than an XTX. Not as extreme of a difference as some other games with RT.
@@Sp3cialk304
I play it on 7800xt. 70-80 fps at 1440p. Looks amazing
@@stebo5562 yeah that's doable if you lower enough settings. 7800xt gets about 45fps at 1440p ultra.
Feel like the poll should've been split in two, one for AMD and one for NVIDIA GPU owners. With my 6700XT, disabling RT is not up to preference, but is actually a must since it just simply cuts my framerate down by ~70-80% while offering relatively marginal visual benefits even in games like Cyberpunk. Taking screenshots with it enabled is cool, but that's literally as useful as it gets. If I had something similar (based on raster perf) from NVIDIA however, like a 3060/4060 Ti, I'd probably consider turning on medium/high-ish RT while also maybe increasing upscaling to a more aggressive level to negate some of the performance hit. Who knows, maybe DLSS isn't *quite* good enough to make it a fair compromise, but it would at least take some consideration and testing to decide, which definitely isn't a case for AMD graphics cards, at least compared to their NVIDIA (or even Intel(??)) counterparts. And yeah, this might all be different for higher end cards that start from a higher base framerate and have much more to sacrifice before giving up, but from what I've seen in general, if a game is playable on an AMD GPU with RT on, that either means the visual benefit it next to none, or that the card could easily provide an infinitely smoother experience with it off.
It’s not worth it on most nvidia cards either. Not everyone has a 4090
Why would you turn up DLSS and ruin your quality just for RT. Especially at lower resolution...that makes no damn sense.
Seeing people say crap like “I need all my games to be 4K ray-traced” legitimately feels like such a disconnect from reality because virtually no one is playing 4K RT games at playable framerates without significant quality hits from upscaling.
It depends on the game. I would turn on RT reflections in Spider-Man, but I wouldn't turn on RT in Cyberpunk... for example. I still don't think it's viable for the majority of the market at this point, but I believe it could replace raster... eventually
It really depends on the game and what rt your using if games allowed for what you can apply to ray tracing like cyber punk allows for reflections on puddles etc which doesn't impact performance as bad. some settings can be quite pointless like this video points out is shadow quality settings in games can be a resource hog but produce very little extra detail between low medium high. I rather the gpu focus on something my eye may catch which is reflections in puddles etc stand out more then a buildings shadow for example.
Raytracing is a tool to achieve a goal, not the goal itself. I remember when "real" 3D came, Quake was heralded as the greatest thing and the future (of course there were 3D games before that, but Quake was heralded as the pioneer of a new era just like Doom before that), but all I could think about was how fugly it looked and how blandly it played compared to Duke Nukem 3D and was definitely not the future I wanted. Of course then Unreal came and I was finally convinced, but that was a much bigger difference than Cyberpunk RT off vs Pathtraced. Raytracing is not the be all, end all, its just another tool in the toolbox to achieve a vision for the game.
i think the only game worth turning this setting on is in, minecraft bedrock rtx, and java too, but bedrock rtx is soo good
Ray tray is just the latest feature in the development history of 3D graphics. It’s not bad, in fact it’s great when running well.
What IS bad is that even expensive GPUs that are now in their 3rd generation since the technology’s debut are still far too weak to run this feature adequately. The current price inflation of GPUs is just rubbing salt into the wound.
Latest?
Its a quite old and has been used cgi and vfx for a while now
@@R4K1B- I was referring to ray tracing in PC gaming, and its performance on current gen GPUs, in context of the video.
3 generations of "early adopters" and still RT is fpr the most part just a gimmick.
Must appreciate NV's marketing team and shills who have brainwashed people to run and early adopt their "radical feature" packed gfx cards.
I myself am a 3060ti owner but that was because I got a used one last year for around 230$.
Had there been an good AMD equivalent used card seller in my area, I would have gone with that option.
Unfortunately the total domination of NV results in truckload of used NV cards to choose from.
Not that 3060ti is a bad card(especially if you get 1 for around 200$), but never use RT and dont plan to use it to see "marginal" improvement at steep performance hit.
RT really matters when you stop, stand still (playable character, that is....) and take a screenshot of the scene. In any other case, you barely notice RT...
RT is kind of like the ultra setting. You don't enable it, unless the game is getting old and you're running more modern hardware, or the game isn't very demanding to run in the first place. It's just too expensive performance wise. _However,_ it can still be a big improvement in visuals.
the question to ask , is RT worth the extra cost if you gotta use up scaling to run RT at a decent frame rate?
Sure, it's a question for you to ask yourself, the relevance to the rest of us is obviously subjective as you can see in the survey results.
I think a lot of games would look so cool with 3D ray-tracing.. like sonic hedge hog, mario bros, league of legends... anything with fairly simple models could look amazing I think.. some like sonic the hedge hog was so good because it looked 3D.. if you had it actual 3D.. it would be amazing.. as someone who's done ray-tracing i can imagine the difference.. i seen the spiderman video where he reflects in the window and that's cool but it's not shiny chess pieces reflecting off each other.. age of empires and starcraft and so many games like them will look so cool i think
I am using a 7900 XTX from ASrock for almost a year, upgraded from a 1070 Ti, I bought it with MSRP, My 3 most played games doesn't support RT (GTA 5, Java Minecraft, [First gen] Cities Skylines), I am play CS1 when I am writing this and it is using 16.3GB of VRAM, 4080 doesn't have enough VRAM for me while being more expensive and simliar performance if not worst, and I don't want to pay almost double the price or more to get a 4090
Starting @12:45 You make the argument for AMD Graphics cards and their better rasterization performance.
Nobody ever said that RT was an entry level of even mainstream feature. Rasterization is still the way to go with a sprinkle of RT.
I just want games to be optimised the time wasted on ray tracing the Devs could use actually optimizing there games to run better.
What is that watt indicator on that gpu in the b roll shots
The strange thing is that I was enthusiastic about RT a few years ago. It seemed like it would really improve graphical quality a lot. But in reality the differences are negligible. You reallly have to know what to look for me it simply is not worth it.
It is more artistic to have hardcoded reflections than realistic raytraced reflections. One is intended to reflect things on purpose, other is the lazy approach to have everything reflected.
If I can play with RT enabled and maintain a FPS of 90+ I keep it on, my G-Sync monitor has G-Sync range of 80-240Hz so I like staying in that range.
I also never use DLSS, some games let me use RT while maintaining high FPS, such as Hitman with RT and framegen looks great, but still looks great without RT.
The biggest improvement for me was when i added my voodoo 2. Unreal blew my mind.
the only RT i like is Reflections . i like seeing myself in windows and mirrors .
You could see yourself in the mirror in Duke Nukem 3D (a game from 1996)
I tried ray tracing. It can look nice but in the end you won’t notice the different while playing the game. And with the massive performance hit it is just not worth it.
light effects hide the view / scaling makes far objects so blurry.
im always turning off these kind of settings despite that i got more FPS with lower latency
It's a poorly executed gimmick that's isn't worth the frame hit. Almost every example of RT is just an over exaggerated reflection mess and it washes out the contrast
For my entire history of playing PC games (and some console games), if there's an option for a higher frame rate, I will take it. Lower the resolution, turn down quality settings, whatever it takes. The same techniques to get 160 fps on my CRT back in the day work to get 160fps on my G-Sync display today. Ray tracing is currently 100% at odds with reaching my goals.
I'm poor, but I have never been one to complain about cost. Its simple economics, if the card was overpriced for what it does it will not sell. If 600 dollar and up cards are selling, they are worth the price, the value is based on what you actually do with your money, not what you think you should be able to do with it. Why would someone buy a 300 dollar card and complain about the card not performing like a 1000 dollar card. If you want a certain level of performance pay for it. If you cant afford nice things, fix that. You as a person will ALWAYS have to go to the mountain, the mountain will never ever move to you, barring a really big earthquake.
I didn't expect there to be nearly 25% interested in RT.
I've always seen it as a gimmick: with the required GPU power, you can get so much more graphics uplift in other areas.
RT is just a minor detail and shouldn't deserve so much GPU power allocation.
I own a zotac 4070 and i use raytracing at 1440 in everygame and honestly im not pixel peeking so i can actually enjoy the Rt without really noticing all this messyness that yall always say will happen in such scenerios. I even targeted RT games (control, alan wake 2, CP2077, etc) to see if RT is a noticeable improvement, and in my opinion, RT definitely makes some games look marginally better. At 1440p DLSS looks basically the same as native to my naked eye. Not getting crazy aliasing or frame drops. As a previous console player, the performance hits are definitely worth being able to enable the feature.
I also don't know if I agree with the narrative that if you're not playing With Max setting with Rt on at native and getting 60+ FPS then Raytracing is pointless. Basically, telling everyone that their experience is inferior, so it's pointless to consider. I guess not native = terrible experience. That's what I'm understanding.
I could enjoy RT in games like Baldur's Gate; games that are slower paced where you can really enjoy the scenery. In action games, gameplay is just way more important. Graphics just need to be good enough to allow for the right level of immersion.
Ray tracing is a gimmick in some games the old way of doing lighting looks better and you don't take a FPS hit. The GPUs are way to high priced even the so called budget cards are way to much money, motherboards are also out of control with their pricing