even though i have the hardware to do so, i keep it off. Its just not worth it. I play games for the sake of playing a game rather than searching for visual "improvements"
Always on. I also don't buy new AAA games which don'T at least have raytraced shadows and reflections any more. It is a new standard and should be mandatory for every new game, with pathtracing also being an option in every game. In my opinion every new game should have path traced global illumination and ambient occlusion + reflection and shadows + ray reconstruction. If I start a game without raytracing I immediatly notive the incorrect shadowing, bad AO and light not correctly transfering object colors to other objects. The exception to this is lumen in Hellblade 2, that game looks good without raytracing because it has technically "software raytracing" by lumen. But the reflections again in Hellblade 2 are really bad which puts me off always I look at them and kinda diminishes the fun of playing.
@@williehrmann Could you explain why this is important to you? Because video games are by definition not real. Nothing in video games is real or would be this way in real life. Why then should lighting be most accurate? Shouldnt games be played for the sake of gameplay? isnt that what is most fun. I found games with the most artistic art style and the most unaccurate lighting to be the most appealing because they are more gamy and the game stays longer in my head. Realistic graphics is just boring, at least for me.
@@user-jx5xq8hu9e I mean I also like playing games with artistic graphic styles, but in different genres. As soon as I'm gonna play a story heavy title it has to be ultra realistic graphics for me to get the immersion. That is also why I never could watch animes or cartoons really. I just prefer plain camera recorded series and films. I catch myself often skipping any cutscene or dialogues when the graphics aren't right in a story heavy game. If the gameplay itself is nice I might still play but just skip every story part. If I wanna enjoy the story and understand the characters I need immersive graphics.
Ray tracing doesn’t make a game look inherently better it just makes it look a little different and that’s only in games that fully utilize RT like Cyberpunk and Alan Wake 2
@@jaytay420 Path Tracing, though demanding, to be honest looks unbelievably nice compared to Ray Tracing in other games, this is somewhat the only game that Ray/Path Tracing is worth it. You can turn on path tracing on a 3060 with DLSS Quality 1080p, bit expect 30-35 FPS with Drops to 25-30, basically PS4 performance but a bit better, if you are okay with that, turn it on, if you have stronger cards like 3080, you can jump up hugely on 1080p, even a bit on 1440p, but 4K it's a mess. You have two choices. Ray Tracing or FPS. Pick your Gear.
Ray tracing reminds me of Dolby Atmos. Cool to have, but I wouldn't even notice, unless I was trying to look out for it. Foe me. It's still a bit of an expensive sales gimmick.
I'd say ray tracing (not RTX) is a very expensive solution looking for a problem that's not worth the computational cost......for now. Fidelity, resolution, frame rate and frame consistency all matter in a gaming experience and at this point I'd rather play at a higher native resolution or grab a few more FPS than turn on ray tracing. Maybe once we get 50% better than 4090 path tracing performance for 300-500 bucks, ray tracing can be baked in as a minimum requirement, but I also think by them lighting engines will also evolve with tech like Lumen and Nanite in UE5. For now, upscaling is the more exciting tech, in my opinion.
I think i was at a 50/50. And this i the point, when you have a dev who cares about cube-maps for example and good implemented lighting, RT is less noticeable. People use RT to justify big spends on Graphic carts when this is nothing more then a graphic feature that comes with a high cost. The overall performance was quite bad in this gen from NVIDIA especially, but this is the price when you push RT performance instead. With the 5090 they showed a significant boost in rastorization performance and people kind of freak out about it, but in fact it is really just needed to be that much because in this gen they underperformed. RT looks good from the bump up, but this card will cost a lot obviously again. Overtime RT will be more present. Better optimized and in static environments you can bake in rt shadows, i think the CS devs did that?. We will see. For me the best use of RT is when it comes to reflections. A lot of work to spare for the devs and definitely easier to notice.
It will be worth when normal GPUs will be powerful as rtx 4090 is now. Until then its nice to turn on here and there but for me is mostly off, on Nvidia or AMD.. We all have 144hz or faster screens these days and i found using high refresh fps is more fun for me than watching shadows and reflexions. Ofc there are slow games like Alan Wake but its not my cup of tea..
personally, high fps on high refresh rate monitors in the most noticeable visual improvement on video games out of all the technologies that have come out so far. ray tracing is noticeable only if you stand still look at the scene carefully and know what little details to look out for, if even then. if you aren't specifically looking out for it, you won't have a clue if it's on or off while playing normally.
Comparing just a single frame doesnt realy show how good / bad RTX is... You need to be able to move the camera and see the reflections and shadows and the way these effects propigate around the scene as you move. This is what adds to the realisum and makes you belive the image is closer to reality and there for more imersive.
to me the non-RT looked better almost in all the games, meaning i guessed wrong mostly; thought the non-RT was RT. So it is a win win for me, i save money. have high fps and get the best looking picture. RT is at the moment not worth it, half the fps, high cost to get into it (highend RTX card needed) , fake framegen needed and non native Highres, but upscaling. Meh, i pass.
Ray Tracing is good when implemented right, like in Control, Metro Exodus, Alan Wake II and Cyberpunk 2077. Other games try to implement one solution or another and it is usually badly implemented. Some games you've shown are good examples of that. Elden Ring is not really noticeable, The Witcher 3 not noticeable, COD: Warzone is a "WTF" implementation... The problem with companies failing to add ray tracing is that the FPS will drop, no change will be seen and Ray Tracing will get a bad image among players.
CP: It was the contrast between light vs dark spots and the way the blue neon lights lit up the front of the bar that gave me the answer W3: It was the water Finals: I was wrong. I was going off of the reflections in the floor but I guessed wrong Elden Ring: The shine when you walked over the loot. I guessed right because of the yellow reflections on the armor, otherwise I wouldn't know Hogwarts: I guessed wrong Warzone: I guessed wrong but I didn't notice the difference, unlike Hogwarts and Finals I just took a blind guess. ETA yeah I completely looked over the background, didn't pay any attention at all lol When you were showing Witcher on/off, I actually prefer off. If you look at the boards they're more vibrant with RTX off, and Geralt's armor looks better too. Don't know if that's due to the pics not being identical but Geralt's armor looks sharper and more crisp with RTX off
I think that in Hogwarts it is most noticeable in the floor reflections. Yeah I should have mentioned about Geralt's armour, but yes It does look a lot sharper in the RTX off version. I think that this because the RTX off screenshot is a little closer to Geralt than the RTX on one. Not entirely sure though.
i mostly just tell it by a shadow as rasterization and ray tracing have completely different shadow techniques but yeah makes 0 difference while actually playing as you will barely notice while moving
First two games were easy to tell even if the difference wasn't much, the later games were much more difficult to tell the difference. The difference is there but overall when you're playing a game rather than looking for the small differences it would be very hard to tell the difference. Would have been nice to know the performance hit to judge whether its worth it. Personally I don't use ray tracing and prefer playing at 1440p with High settings rather than going for Ultra settings with ray tracing. If I had a much powerful GPU then maybe I would reconsider.
Lots of times I end up hating RT in certain areas like dark areas; it really make you regret cheaper display panels and black light bleed and then you are onto trying to figure out what to upgrade next; the bloom can be an issue if you dont have decent dimming zones as backlight bleed can make blacks really crushed and awkward for so many games that try to make more atmospheric visuals It becomes hard to see and i either get lost more easily since dark is really dark and areas just dont navigate as easily; I’m into a great thriller or horror game but everything looking wet and mirror like isn’t ideal; at that point just change the material composition of everything and get similar results to appearance Overall i believe at the very least it gives a variant of art direction, as developers can design one game and RT and raster can make up 2 totally different art styles which can accommodate not just playability but how one perceives surfaces to look or how environments are either lifelike due to their own subjective interpretation
for god sakes stop saying RTX on & RTX off. RTX is NVIDIA BRANDING, its their branding for raytracing supported cards. Just call it raytracing, not RTX.
@@endcaps1917 That's what he's doing he here. Here is naming a specific type of rendering to be called RTX, when it's actually has a name already called "raytracing." he is using the "brand name" instead of the actual terminology for what he is talking about.
Still so many users that do not have a powerfull enough GPU to turn on raytracing and actualy get a playable frame rate and enjoyable game... Untill this happens the ratio of haters to lovers will always be much higher.
4 years ago I would say: it's impossible to notice the difference. After 4 years, playing multiple RT games, I can definitely notice the difference and all my guesses in this video of whether it was rt on or off were right. I definitely prefer RT, mainly playing in an OLED screen, it seems they were made for each other. The shadows and ambient occlusion works much better with RT. And as to the reflections, RT is way superior in terms of being faithful to the image. Everytime i llay a full rasterized game nowadays I see how much better it could be if it was RT.
I play many games Cyberpunk, Witcher, Red Death 2 using Samsung Odyssey G9, rtx3080 at 1440p. Ray tracing is suck, it make the shadow darker but I prefer lighter shadow. Imagine taking picture of someone under strong light, probably you have to adjust the shadow lighter to see thing under shadow. Also looking into the small water drop and see the whole building behind, that's not realistic. Ray tracing is a scam, it's a lie, it makes things look worse and take away your GPU raw power, I played with Ray tracing on for couple days, and have to turn off for all of them, RT off is better
@@TbearMuhahah Ray tracing is not about making it "beautiful". It's all about realism, it's the way to go if we want to have more realistic games in the future. A dark place is a dark place, a place without light is dark as hell, and such things are only reproducible with ray tracing. A reflection exists even if you are not looking at the object in real life as well, again, only possible with RT. I agree with you, visually RT is not beautiful in many games, but it's the closest to "real" simulation of light that we could reach so far, mainly with path tracing. And as for reflections, they tend to exaggerate the water reflections. However we are surrounded by many reflection surfaces everywhere, but at this point you probably never paid attention to such details around you. In my home even the kitchen cabinets have reflections.
@@TbearMuhahah you could bake the shadows and colors in a game to look realistic (not the reflections) as it's done in many games so far. But it takes a lot of development time, and the result is still artificial. So RT also speeds up development time as it's already included on DirectX API. In a full RT game, you actually don't need to bake anything, just need to work with the light sources and materials. Now with AI + RT, game development becomes way easier than 10 years ago...
@@Vecchete When they showcase their tech they say it makes things more beautiful, I don't feel that and see that in my game. You say it's more realistic, and your kitchen has lots of reflection. What is it? Your shiny spoon and cup reflect the whole kitchen? You tell me you can see your kitchen reflection and I don't notice it? Create light source and then make rasterized shadow objects based on it is a method used by developers for a long time. Now with Ray Tracing your GPU create a light source and carry it with you all the time and generate object shadow based on it. Developers thank you for that, they do less work, more work for your GPU. A lot of good optimized games you totally don't need Ray Tracing, turn it on mean create your own light source, it's costly heavy and the visual is the same.
I can tell just when you move the camera up and down screen space reflections will disappear ray traced reflections won’t. But in all reality when you’re moving through environments fast screen space reflections are very convincing nowadays.
I don't think the changes for general lighting are as important to me. The techniques the use to fake it are good enough. What I'm more interested in is replacing the techniques that suck and distract me. I hate SSR but all I could ever do is turn it off. In cyberpunk, it's worth the loss of 30ish fps to get accurate reflections that don't vanish at the wrong viewing angle.
Depends on the game. Cyberpunk and witcher 3 with rt update do look noticeably better with rt. But i noticed little difference with pathtracing on in cyberpunk, just lower fps. So i leave that off
I got it wrong a few times. I have an RX 6800 (and a few years old now), I can enable RT in a few games and I don't see the benefit. In some games it really only drops FPS to unplayable levels. AMD and Intel do seem to be chipping away at it, but I think they're aware for most games it's not worth it. Especially if you consider the price differences. But yeah, we've all seen the demos of ray and path tracing that make older games look amazing... But I still think we're in that demo period - but do need to to make it a viable tech down the line for anyone outside of the very top Nvidia cards. I should say more casual games like Forza and CoD the AMD implementation works fine, but I just don't notice a real difference and FPS is fine too.
i usually play with RT with games like alan wake because it really changes how the game look with just a low RT even with DLSS enabled the games still look beautiful
I got them all right. IMHO RTX on makes water look more wet, bright lights are crisper and shadows/reflections do slightly better. I don’t bother with it to be honest. Of course I’m 42 so the ultra real detail doesn’t really appeal to me as someone who grew up playing 8/16 bit games on the regular.
Ray Tracing add real-time reflections and some bouncing. The real Ray Tracing is called Path Tracing, this one really makes difference, as it adds real-time reflections and light bouncing/spreading. Cyberpunk is the only game where you will notice the differences well, but it's not worth playing RT with low frames vs. non RT with good frames.
I definitely can tell the difference instantly from the fps drop. Graphically not really. My eyes more trained for watching framerate since I start pc gaming in the 90's using Riva TNT 8MB lol.
Raytracing is only really useful *if the games lighting was designed to make full use of it* Thats it. Otherwise, like in call of duty, you wont miss out on ANYTHING But Metro Exodus? hmmm some scenes make it completely worth it.
disagree with witcher 3, the out of city areas look MUCH better with RTX on. The RTX shadows probably make the biggest difference on grass/foliage especially at a distance.
W3 looks absolute breath taking with RT, problem is it still massively immersion breaking bugs and even worse they seem to have stopped supporting the game as the last patch was about 6 months ago😢
The example he used in this video was not a legit comparison. Like literally that was rtx on vs on. Water reflections with rtx on and off is literally night and die. Bullshit vid to craft the narrative that ray tracing doesn’t look considerably better which is an absolute lie. Being worth the fps cost is another issue entirely
there is SO MUCH WRONG with how video games FAKE reflections, that you only start noticing with rtx, to a point, where "once you do black you never go back", as all the fakery gets more noticeable and immersion-breaking, unless the style is consistently simplified/cartoony (where rtx is least useful and good visual design is key), like for example in "outer wilds". screen-space reflections (of water) have the huge issue, that they falsely-reflect skyscrapers, that are too far away from the reflective surface to really reflect it there, just because you can directly see them, the screenspace-reflection can just not reflect large-scale-distances correctly. RTY shadows make foliage look significantly better. rtx-patched-in-witcher3 shines here. even without foliage, RTX Shadows getting blurrier with distance-to-occluder becomes VERY noticeable with scale. This hugely changes space-themed games. Global-Illumination also adds a LOT to all genres with larger scope (you can see a horizon and fly/walk to it), you start to hate rasterized shadows rather quickly. Codsworth the flying robot in fallout4 has well done environment-map-reflections THAT ARE VERY WRONG while Codsworth is in the corner of a room, because fallout4 did not do enough sphere-maps in room-corners (that eat up memory), in favor of console-compatibility.
As a tech demonstration, rtx is great, but for gaming, give me consistent framerates as i am not looking at how beautiful the reflections are when I'm trying to actually perform the fun parts of the game.
Elden Ring has raytraced AO as well which is kind of obvious when it's on (at the highest raytracing setting only!) because it gets rid of Fromsoftwares SSAO that has pretty visible white haloing artefacts. The raytraced shadows are kind of whatever because it still follows the rasterised shadow map flaws in not every object casting dynamic shadows, so the main benefit of capturing small objects dynamic shadows (like grass) isn't applicable here.
The answer.... maybe, depending on the game, but most of the time not worth it since enabling upscaling and fake frame tricks to get the games to a halfway decent framerate often have their own detrimental effects. Let's see if I'm right! Yup, only game I see as really worth it is CP2077 with path tracing (since RT isn't ALWAYS better in CP2077 than default lighting), but I don't want to shell out $1,600+ for a GPU and then also have to use DLSS2 and 3. I also wonder how many of these games actually call it the Nvidia branded term 'RTX' and how many use the actual 'Ray Tracing' in the menus. RTX is basically the new 'Band-Aid', where many people call bandages 'Band-Aids' due to marketing, like in this video.
yep your completly right. It is alsways the same , every now and then nvidia comes out with a technology, which should be a "lifechanging" graphics improvement. First Advanced Physics, Tesselation, HBAO+ , Godrays , Hairworks, TXAA , Softshadows and now RT . Its rediculous
In 4k resolation..4090 is even can not handle 60 fps when rtx on on most of the games..with dlss help it reaches but graphic look shitty when dlss is on..so for rtx gpus are not ready at 4k..other hand you lose -%50 fps when rtx is on..and it doesnt change so much..so its so lame..you sell gpu which cannot handle rtx..😂😅😅 nvidia = scam people
4090 can handle 4k native with raytracing on in plenty of games like Jedi Survivor, Dead space remake, Avatar frontiers of pandora. And dlss quality at 4k looks indistinguishable and sometimes even better than native 4k. 4k performance dlss also looks great better than native 1440p. Dlss only looks noticeably worse than native when balanced/performance mode is used at lower resolutions like 1080p, 1440p. People who extensively use dlss like zwormz gaming and myself have a better idea than you, so spare me that nonsense that you wrote dude. And at 4k even with raytracing off, even high end GPUs have to use upscaling to reach 60fps and amd users are forced to use fsr which is inferior to dlss, that's how demanding 2023 triple A games are.
@@dhaumya23gango75 how does upscaling from 1440p to 4k look better than native 4k resolution? and who buys a 4090 to use upscaling???? are people that desperate for extra fps?
@@rehaanally9952 I am pretty darn sure you haven't used DLSS ever. I could go on elaborating on this but it will be like I am speaking to a wall, not ready to waste my energy. You do you.
imma be honest, i couldn't tell the difference in almost all of these, the only one i could guess right was the one with the scope, because the non rt one didn't have anything reflecting but i'm pretty sure that if i hadn't seen this same video idea from linus tech tips just a couple minutes ago, i wouldn't even have looked out for that detail and wouldn't be able to tell the difference. as of now, this tech ain't all that, nvidia is just using this as marketing to scam goofy nerds into buying their inferior small pp vram gpus at ridiculously high prices.
Biggest difference can be seen in motion. Raytraced shadows don't shimmer and aren't blocky. Then you have no weird artifacts on reflections and halo effect with ambient occlusion. It's a big upgrade when you actually play with it. If gpu can run it at 60fps, i'll leave it on. Frame gen is amazing, you don't even notice you're playing at 30fps, completely usable with cyberpunk and pathtracing on 4070Ti.
Toms Tech Table : RTX is simply too buggy to be justified and very subjectively better at best....in most of the cases is worse than rasterizing because it makes too much contrast in colors and causes shadows to be incorrectly drawn as well as texture tearing.
First of all difference or not, baking lighting takes time away from devs, with rt you can have better lighting faster, this shouldn't even be a question
Next time in Witcher 3 move the camera up and down and SSR brakes… And my answer of course I can tell the difference I play games with RT on since I had my RTX 3090 and now my RTX 4080. Worth the frame rate cost. If I play competitive titles I don’t care because I want to push out hundreds of fps so I turn down graphics but in single player games, no brainer to turn on much higher fidelity.
![เบิ้ล ปทุมราช - สาวสอง ( มีมี่ของอ้าย ) ft. ตาต้า,ต้องเต [OFFICIAL MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/mqlMjnP08XI/mqdefault.jpg)
How did you do ? Also do you usually play with RTX ON or OFF ?
even though i have the hardware to do so, i keep it off. Its just not worth it. I play games for the sake of playing a game rather than searching for visual "improvements"
Always on. I also don't buy new AAA games which don'T at least have raytraced shadows and reflections any more. It is a new standard and should be mandatory for every new game, with pathtracing also being an option in every game. In my opinion every new game should have path traced global illumination and ambient occlusion + reflection and shadows + ray reconstruction. If I start a game without raytracing I immediatly notive the incorrect shadowing, bad AO and light not correctly transfering object colors to other objects. The exception to this is lumen in Hellblade 2, that game looks good without raytracing because it has technically "software raytracing" by lumen. But the reflections again in Hellblade 2 are really bad which puts me off always I look at them and kinda diminishes the fun of playing.
@@williehrmann Could you explain why this is important to you? Because video games are by definition not real. Nothing in video games is real or would be this way in real life. Why then should lighting be most accurate? Shouldnt games be played for the sake of gameplay? isnt that what is most fun. I found games with the most artistic art style and the most unaccurate lighting to be the most appealing because they are more gamy and the game stays longer in my head. Realistic graphics is just boring, at least for me.
@@user-jx5xq8hu9e I mean I also like playing games with artistic graphic styles, but in different genres. As soon as I'm gonna play a story heavy title it has to be ultra realistic graphics for me to get the immersion. That is also why I never could watch animes or cartoons really. I just prefer plain camera recorded series and films. I catch myself often skipping any cutscene or dialogues when the graphics aren't right in a story heavy game. If the gameplay itself is nice I might still play but just skip every story part. If I wanna enjoy the story and understand the characters I need immersive graphics.
The best way to spot if Ray Tracing is on is by looking at the frame rate LOL
Lol what a comment.
@@rolgoldingamd gpu user comment
Thats why dlss come😊
I look at water. it normally gives it away
Ray tracing doesn’t make a game look inherently better it just makes it look a little different and that’s only in games that fully utilize RT like Cyberpunk and Alan Wake 2
Simply false, cyberpunk without path tracing is unplayable to me after experiencing path tracing.
@@jaytay420 get new eyes
@@jaytay420 first of all, I feel sorry for you. Second, we're talking about raytracing not path tracing.
@@jaytay420 Path Tracing, though demanding, to be honest looks unbelievably nice compared to Ray Tracing in other games, this is somewhat the only game that Ray/Path Tracing is worth it. You can turn on path tracing on a 3060 with DLSS Quality 1080p, bit expect 30-35 FPS with Drops to 25-30, basically PS4 performance but a bit better, if you are okay with that, turn it on, if you have stronger cards like 3080, you can jump up hugely on 1080p, even a bit on 1440p, but 4K it's a mess. You have two choices. Ray Tracing or FPS. Pick your Gear.
@@megadeth8592 says u rofl. Anyone who thinks rasterisation can come close to path tracing is restarted
Ray tracing reminds me of Dolby Atmos. Cool to have, but I wouldn't even notice, unless I was trying to look out for it. Foe me. It's still a bit of an expensive sales gimmick.
I'd say ray tracing (not RTX) is a very expensive solution looking for a problem that's not worth the computational cost......for now. Fidelity, resolution, frame rate and frame consistency all matter in a gaming experience and at this point I'd rather play at a higher native resolution or grab a few more FPS than turn on ray tracing. Maybe once we get 50% better than 4090 path tracing performance for 300-500 bucks, ray tracing can be baked in as a minimum requirement, but I also think by them lighting engines will also evolve with tech like Lumen and Nanite in UE5. For now, upscaling is the more exciting tech, in my opinion.
also energy consumption is ridicolous. Why wasting that much of energy for a tiny visual bump?
RT is game developer issue not gamer. If we stick to gamer mind set then our graphic will never move beyond half life 2 level of graphic.
@@arenzricodexd4409 exactly. It is what game developers want ant gamers dont care when you think of the tradeoffs.
I think i was at a 50/50. And this i the point, when you have a dev who cares about cube-maps for example and good implemented lighting, RT is less noticeable. People use RT to justify big spends on Graphic carts when this is nothing more then a graphic feature that comes with a high cost. The overall performance was quite bad in this gen from NVIDIA especially, but this is the price when you push RT performance instead. With the 5090 they showed a significant boost in rastorization performance and people kind of freak out about it, but in fact it is really just needed to be that much because in this gen they underperformed. RT looks good from the bump up, but this card will cost a lot obviously again.
Overtime RT will be more present. Better optimized and in static environments you can bake in rt shadows, i think the CS devs did that?. We will see.
For me the best use of RT is when it comes to reflections. A lot of work to spare for the devs and definitely easier to notice.
It will be worth when normal GPUs will be powerful as rtx 4090 is now. Until then its nice to turn on here and there but for me is mostly off, on Nvidia or AMD.. We all have 144hz or faster screens these days and i found using high refresh fps is more fun for me than watching shadows and reflexions. Ofc there are slow games like Alan Wake but its not my cup of tea..
personally, high fps on high refresh rate monitors in the most noticeable visual improvement on video games out of all the technologies that have come out so far. ray tracing is noticeable only if you stand still look at the scene carefully and know what little details to look out for, if even then. if you aren't specifically looking out for it, you won't have a clue if it's on or off while playing normally.
Comparing just a single frame doesnt realy show how good / bad RTX is... You need to be able to move the camera and see the reflections and shadows and the way these effects propigate around the scene as you move. This is what adds to the realisum and makes you belive the image is closer to reality and there for more imersive.
to me the non-RT looked better almost in all the games, meaning i guessed wrong mostly; thought the non-RT was RT. So it is a win win for me, i save money. have high fps and get the best looking picture. RT is at the moment not worth it, half the fps, high cost to get into it (highend RTX card needed) , fake framegen needed and non native Highres, but upscaling. Meh, i pass.
@@deejeemadrox1866 lol keep coping lil bro
Ray Tracing is good when implemented right, like in Control, Metro Exodus, Alan Wake II and Cyberpunk 2077. Other games try to implement one solution or another and it is usually badly implemented. Some games you've shown are good examples of that. Elden Ring is not really noticeable, The Witcher 3 not noticeable, COD: Warzone is a "WTF" implementation... The problem with companies failing to add ray tracing is that the FPS will drop, no change will be seen and Ray Tracing will get a bad image among players.
Witcher 3 is noticeable, especially outdoors.
CP: It was the contrast between light vs dark spots and the way the blue neon lights lit up the front of the bar that gave me the answer
W3: It was the water
Finals: I was wrong. I was going off of the reflections in the floor but I guessed wrong
Elden Ring: The shine when you walked over the loot. I guessed right because of the yellow reflections on the armor, otherwise I wouldn't know
Hogwarts: I guessed wrong
Warzone: I guessed wrong but I didn't notice the difference, unlike Hogwarts and Finals I just took a blind guess. ETA yeah I completely looked over the background, didn't pay any attention at all lol
When you were showing Witcher on/off, I actually prefer off. If you look at the boards they're more vibrant with RTX off, and Geralt's armor looks better too. Don't know if that's due to the pics not being identical but Geralt's armor looks sharper and more crisp with RTX off
I think that in Hogwarts it is most noticeable in the floor reflections.
Yeah I should have mentioned about Geralt's armour, but yes It does look a lot sharper in the RTX off version. I think that this because the RTX off screenshot is a little closer to Geralt than the RTX on one. Not entirely sure though.
i mostly just tell it by a shadow as rasterization and ray tracing have completely different shadow techniques but yeah makes 0 difference while actually playing as you will barely notice while moving
First two games were easy to tell even if the difference wasn't much, the later games were much more difficult to tell the difference. The difference is there but overall when you're playing a game rather than looking for the small differences it would be very hard to tell the difference. Would have been nice to know the performance hit to judge whether its worth it. Personally I don't use ray tracing and prefer playing at 1440p with High settings rather than going for Ultra settings with ray tracing. If I had a much powerful GPU then maybe I would reconsider.
Lots of times I end up hating RT in certain areas like dark areas; it really make you regret cheaper display panels and black light bleed and then you are onto trying to figure out what to upgrade next; the bloom can be an issue if you dont have decent dimming zones as backlight bleed can make blacks really crushed and awkward for so many games that try to make more atmospheric visuals
It becomes hard to see and i either get lost more easily since dark is really dark and areas just dont navigate as easily; I’m into a great thriller or horror game but everything looking wet and mirror like isn’t ideal; at that point just change the material composition of everything and get similar results to appearance
Overall i believe at the very least it gives a variant of art direction, as developers can design one game and RT and raster can make up 2 totally different art styles which can accommodate not just playability but how one perceives surfaces to look or how environments are either lifelike due to their own subjective interpretation
Quality vid👌
true🔥
for me, RTX on W3 is a complete waste of resources. What makes the game genuinely better graphically is the foliage ultra +
I prefer rtx on in cyberpunk, my GPU on the other hand hates me when I do that to it lol
I got most of them wrong, lol! I just looked for which one looked more realistic to me.
Reflections is cool on raytracing. I think reflections more noticeable.
for god sakes stop saying RTX on & RTX off. RTX is NVIDIA BRANDING, its their branding for raytracing supported cards. Just call it raytracing, not RTX.
I mean tbf naming a general product after a brand is supposingly common
@@endcaps1917 That's what he's doing he here. Here is naming a specific type of rendering to be called RTX, when it's actually has a name already called "raytracing." he is using the "brand name" instead of the actual terminology for what he is talking about.
Still so many users that do not have a powerfull enough GPU to turn on raytracing and actualy get a playable frame rate and enjoyable game... Untill this happens the ratio of haters to lovers will always be much higher.
4 years ago I would say: it's impossible to notice the difference. After 4 years, playing multiple RT games, I can definitely notice the difference and all my guesses in this video of whether it was rt on or off were right. I definitely prefer RT, mainly playing in an OLED screen, it seems they were made for each other. The shadows and ambient occlusion works much better with RT. And as to the reflections, RT is way superior in terms of being faithful to the image. Everytime i llay a full rasterized game nowadays I see how much better it could be if it was RT.
I definitely noticed the difference when playing on my OLED TV but struggle to notice much of a difference on my monitor unless they are side by side.
I play many games Cyberpunk, Witcher, Red Death 2 using Samsung Odyssey G9, rtx3080 at 1440p. Ray tracing is suck, it make the shadow darker but I prefer lighter shadow. Imagine taking picture of someone under strong light, probably you have to adjust the shadow lighter to see thing under shadow. Also looking into the small water drop and see the whole building behind, that's not realistic. Ray tracing is a scam, it's a lie, it makes things look worse and take away your GPU raw power, I played with Ray tracing on for couple days, and have to turn off for all of them, RT off is better
@@TbearMuhahah Ray tracing is not about making it "beautiful". It's all about realism, it's the way to go if we want to have more realistic games in the future. A dark place is a dark place, a place without light is dark as hell, and such things are only reproducible with ray tracing. A reflection exists even if you are not looking at the object in real life as well, again, only possible with RT.
I agree with you, visually RT is not beautiful in many games, but it's the closest to "real" simulation of light that we could reach so far, mainly with path tracing.
And as for reflections, they tend to exaggerate the water reflections. However we are surrounded by many reflection surfaces everywhere, but at this point you probably never paid attention to such details around you. In my home even the kitchen cabinets have reflections.
@@TbearMuhahah you could bake the shadows and colors in a game to look realistic (not the reflections) as it's done in many games so far. But it takes a lot of development time, and the result is still artificial. So RT also speeds up development time as it's already included on DirectX API. In a full RT game, you actually don't need to bake anything, just need to work with the light sources and materials. Now with AI + RT, game development becomes way easier than 10 years ago...
@@Vecchete When they showcase their tech they say it makes things more beautiful, I don't feel that and see that in my game. You say it's more realistic, and your kitchen has lots of reflection. What is it? Your shiny spoon and cup reflect the whole kitchen? You tell me you can see your kitchen reflection and I don't notice it? Create light source and then make rasterized shadow objects based on it is a method used by developers for a long time. Now with Ray Tracing your GPU create a light source and carry it with you all the time and generate object shadow based on it. Developers thank you for that, they do less work, more work for your GPU. A lot of good optimized games you totally don't need Ray Tracing, turn it on mean create your own light source, it's costly heavy and the visual is the same.
It's great on old Games like Black Mesa, but newer games with the plethera of lighting effects baked in, I'm not so sure.
I can tell just when you move the camera up and down screen space reflections will disappear ray traced reflections won’t. But in all reality when you’re moving through environments fast screen space reflections are very convincing nowadays.
I don't think the changes for general lighting are as important to me. The techniques the use to fake it are good enough. What I'm more interested in is replacing the techniques that suck and distract me.
I hate SSR but all I could ever do is turn it off. In cyberpunk, it's worth the loss of 30ish fps to get accurate reflections that don't vanish at the wrong viewing angle.
Depends on the game. Cyberpunk and witcher 3 with rt update do look noticeably better with rt. But i noticed little difference with pathtracing on in cyberpunk, just lower fps. So i leave that off
I got it wrong a few times. I have an RX 6800 (and a few years old now), I can enable RT in a few games and I don't see the benefit. In some games it really only drops FPS to unplayable levels.
AMD and Intel do seem to be chipping away at it, but I think they're aware for most games it's not worth it. Especially if you consider the price differences. But yeah, we've all seen the demos of ray and path tracing that make older games look amazing... But I still think we're in that demo period - but do need to to make it a viable tech down the line for anyone outside of the very top Nvidia cards. I should say more casual games like Forza and CoD the AMD implementation works fine, but I just don't notice a real difference and FPS is fine too.
i usually play with RT with games like alan wake because it really changes how the game look with just a low RT even with DLSS enabled the games still look beautiful
When doing comparisons like this, you REALLY need to find a spot that you can replicate.
Thanks for this! I loved all the comparisons (and I could barely tell the difference)
It's very easy to tell when you know what to look for and the implementation in the game. I got each one correct.
I got them all right. IMHO RTX on makes water look more wet, bright lights are crisper and shadows/reflections do slightly better. I don’t bother with it to be honest. Of course I’m 42 so the ultra real detail doesn’t really appeal to me as someone who grew up playing 8/16 bit games on the regular.
Ray Tracing add real-time reflections and some bouncing. The real Ray Tracing is called Path Tracing, this one really makes difference, as it adds real-time reflections and light bouncing/spreading. Cyberpunk is the only game where you will notice the differences well, but it's not worth playing RT with low frames vs. non RT with good frames.
Metro 2033
I definitely can tell the difference instantly from the fps drop. Graphically not really. My eyes more trained for watching framerate since I start pc gaming in the 90's using Riva TNT 8MB lol.
Raytracing is only really useful *if the games lighting was designed to make full use of it*
Thats it.
Otherwise, like in call of duty, you wont miss out on ANYTHING
But Metro Exodus? hmmm some scenes make it completely worth it.
disagree with witcher 3, the out of city areas look MUCH better with RTX on. The RTX shadows probably make the biggest difference on grass/foliage especially at a distance.
W3 looks absolute breath taking with RT, problem is it still massively immersion breaking bugs and even worse they seem to have stopped supporting the game as the last patch was about 6 months ago😢
The example he used in this video was not a legit comparison. Like literally that was rtx on vs on. Water reflections with rtx on and off is literally night and die. Bullshit vid to craft the narrative that ray tracing doesn’t look considerably better which is an absolute lie. Being worth the fps cost is another issue entirely
there is SO MUCH WRONG with how video games FAKE reflections, that you only start noticing with rtx, to a point, where "once you do black you never go back", as all the fakery gets more noticeable and immersion-breaking, unless the style is consistently simplified/cartoony (where rtx is least useful and good visual design is key), like for example in "outer wilds".
screen-space reflections (of water) have the huge issue, that they falsely-reflect skyscrapers, that are too far away from the reflective surface to really reflect it there, just because you can directly see them, the screenspace-reflection can just not reflect large-scale-distances correctly.
RTY shadows make foliage look significantly better. rtx-patched-in-witcher3 shines here. even without foliage, RTX Shadows getting blurrier with distance-to-occluder becomes VERY noticeable with scale. This hugely changes space-themed games. Global-Illumination also adds a LOT to all genres with larger scope (you can see a horizon and fly/walk to it), you start to hate rasterized shadows rather quickly.
Codsworth the flying robot in fallout4 has well done environment-map-reflections THAT ARE VERY WRONG while Codsworth is in the corner of a room, because fallout4 did not do enough sphere-maps in room-corners (that eat up memory), in favor of console-compatibility.
For Witcher 3, the RTX difference is generally indoors.
As a tech demonstration, rtx is great, but for gaming, give me consistent framerates as i am not looking at how beautiful the reflections are when I'm trying to actually perform the fun parts of the game.
After training myself on RTX on and off I was able to subconsciously identify RTX on but I consciously can't tell the difference.
Elden Ring has raytraced AO as well which is kind of obvious when it's on (at the highest raytracing setting only!) because it gets rid of Fromsoftwares SSAO that has pretty visible white haloing artefacts.
The raytraced shadows are kind of whatever because it still follows the rasterised shadow map flaws in not every object casting dynamic shadows, so the main benefit of capturing small objects dynamic shadows (like grass) isn't applicable here.
Shadows and reflections are the two things that pop for me when ray tracing is on.
Elden Ring has the shittiest implementation of RTX.
RT on in cyberpunk = looks like it just rained, everything is overly reflective, its annoying tbh
U clearly never seen the game with path tracing so u are bsing urself. Keep telling urself that
The answer.... maybe, depending on the game, but most of the time not worth it since enabling upscaling and fake frame tricks to get the games to a halfway decent framerate often have their own detrimental effects. Let's see if I'm right!
Yup, only game I see as really worth it is CP2077 with path tracing (since RT isn't ALWAYS better in CP2077 than default lighting), but I don't want to shell out $1,600+ for a GPU and then also have to use DLSS2 and 3. I also wonder how many of these games actually call it the Nvidia branded term 'RTX' and how many use the actual 'Ray Tracing' in the menus. RTX is basically the new 'Band-Aid', where many people call bandages 'Band-Aids' due to marketing, like in this video.
Got everything right, but doesnt really bother not having it
It's a very well marketed feature but in reality the tradeoff with performance is still too high.
Futility. I don't even play games on ultra settings. Ray Tracing is just marketing and a loss of 30-50% of game performance.
yep your completly right. It is alsways the same , every now and then nvidia comes out with a technology, which should be a "lifechanging" graphics improvement. First Advanced Physics, Tesselation, HBAO+ , Godrays , Hairworks, TXAA , Softshadows and now RT . Its rediculous
@@user-jx5xq8hu9e keep telling yourself that amd user
It's much better looking but hits the system hard
Are we all just going to ignore how funny the
'Don't have the capacity 😢"
actually was.
Big AMD fan, but that made me laugh 😅
RTX is an eyecandy for me, it's fun but at a cost, yet still it would be nice to have on a very powerful gpu..
Elden Ring only has RT shadows
Looks like it's still a gimmick that isn't worth the dip in performance
Rt on looks natural and more realistic
In 4k resolation..4090 is even can not handle 60 fps when rtx on on most of the games..with dlss help it reaches but graphic look shitty when dlss is on..so for rtx gpus are not ready at 4k..other hand you lose -%50 fps when rtx is on..and it doesnt change so much..so its so lame..you sell gpu which cannot handle rtx..😂😅😅 nvidia = scam people
4090 can handle 4k native with raytracing on in plenty of games like Jedi Survivor, Dead space remake, Avatar frontiers of pandora. And dlss quality at 4k looks indistinguishable and sometimes even better than native 4k. 4k performance dlss also looks great better than native 1440p. Dlss only looks noticeably worse than native when balanced/performance mode is used at lower resolutions like 1080p, 1440p. People who extensively use dlss like zwormz gaming and myself have a better idea than you, so spare me that nonsense that you wrote dude.
And at 4k even with raytracing off, even high end GPUs have to use upscaling to reach 60fps and amd users are forced to use fsr which is inferior to dlss, that's how demanding 2023 triple A games are.
@@dhaumya23gango75 The Dlss is Nvidia's best feature.
@@dhaumya23gango75 how does upscaling from 1440p to 4k look better than native 4k resolution? and who buys a 4090 to use upscaling???? are people that desperate for extra fps?
@@rehaanally9952 I am pretty darn sure you haven't used DLSS ever. I could go on elaborating on this but it will be like I am speaking to a wall, not ready to waste my energy. You do you.
I love path tracing. Without it, everything in game look flat
All that said should i buy a 4070Super or a rx7800xt ? helppppp
7900xtx
imma be honest, i couldn't tell the difference in almost all of these, the only one i could guess right was the one with the scope, because the non rt one didn't have anything reflecting but i'm pretty sure that if i hadn't seen this same video idea from linus tech tips just a couple minutes ago, i wouldn't even have looked out for that detail and wouldn't be able to tell the difference. as of now, this tech ain't all that, nvidia is just using this as marketing to scam goofy nerds into buying their inferior small pp vram gpus at ridiculously high prices.
Biggest difference can be seen in motion. Raytraced shadows don't shimmer and aren't blocky. Then you have no weird artifacts on reflections and halo effect with ambient occlusion.
It's a big upgrade when you actually play with it. If gpu can run it at 60fps, i'll leave it on. Frame gen is amazing, you don't even notice you're playing at 30fps, completely usable with cyberpunk and pathtracing on 4070Ti.
Toms Tech Table : RTX is simply too buggy to be justified and very subjectively better at best....in most of the cases is worse than rasterizing because it makes too much contrast in colors and causes shadows to be incorrectly drawn as well as texture tearing.
it doesn't worth it due to the high FPS drop. In the other hand, what it does worth is DLSS 3 and frame generation.
No one would play the game frame by frame.
Graphic details, scence design, resolution, effects, fluency is much more than ray tracing.
Far cry 1 has a raytracing. Land reflection. It is a demo level of ray tracing as always.
No.
id buy rtx if theyr at same price
First of all difference or not, baking lighting takes time away from devs, with rt you can have better lighting faster, this shouldn't even be a question
jesus... well that just made me AMD from Nvidia..... RTX on not worth the extra £s or the loss in frames for me. thanks for the video
Good luck with the drivers crashes and artifacts
@@jaytay420 drivers are fine on my ROG Ally…..
I may get called a "filthy casual" saying this but
I really can't tell the difference
Got them all wrong hahaha
Ahh yes spend 100$ more for some better shadows
Next time in Witcher 3 move the camera up and down and SSR brakes… And my answer of course I can tell the difference I play games with RT on since I had my RTX 3090 and now my RTX 4080. Worth the frame rate cost. If I play competitive titles I don’t care because I want to push out hundreds of fps so I turn down graphics but in single player games, no brainer to turn on much higher fidelity.
RTX off was better in all the comparisons except for COD.
None of them were right💀
Ray tracing is the worse!!!