Do you think ray-tracing drops performance too much on consoles?

Trunks0 said:
Upsides to a closed system. You can get exceedingly clever and refine techniques. I expect as these consoles age, your going to see more and more RTing, not less.
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That's what I'm hoping, as I am not poo pooing the new consoles I will probably get a PS5 later on.
 
After watching numerous 4k videos of Cyberpunk at the highest Ray Tracing settings (PC) and seeing it's implementation in many other games I can definitively say that, to me, Ray Tracing is the most overhyped and worst "bang-for-the-buck" graphics effect(s) out there. For the expense of hardware and the performance cost I would NEVER use it at all...at most maybe a very low setting.

I don't get it, maybe when a couple years have passed and we have even more powerful hardware (again, waste of resources though) and developers have figured out how to use it very well and efficiently it'll be great. For now there are many other games that have plenty good enough lighting, reflections, shadows, etc.

I was showing my wife comparison shots and videos of Cyberpunk (@4k) at various graphics settings and she could barely notice a difference. :nuts:
 
I turned RayTracing on in Battlefield V and just kind of wandered around checking things out. I was just left with the impression of...wait, this is it? Even though it very obviously ran like crap on my 1080Ti, all the effects are still there as far as I understand it.

I don't think that's a very good representation of the tech though, to be fair. I'm still open minded about it and am all for the new techs pushing things forward.
 
OverclockN' said:
I turned RayTracing on in Battlefield V and just kind of wandered around checking things out. I was just left with the impression of...wait, this is it? Even though it very obviously ran like crap on my 1080Ti, all the effects are still there as far as I understand it.

I don't think that's a very good representation of the tech though, to be fair. I'm still open minded about it and am all for the new techs pushing things forward.
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BF5 is very basic implementation of Ray Tracing, water reflections and maybe some metal reflection but that's about it.
 
Honestly I think ray tracing will need to be fairly mature and performant before it really justifies itself. Modern PBR rendering has already gotten us 90% of the way there, at a fraction of the cost, so RT just doesn't make as big of an impact as it would have if it had launched several years ago.

Of course eventually RT will dominate, but for the time being it's going to be mostly used for water and window reflections, often at much lower quality. Console devs will learn how to use it sparingly to add a bit of extra flavor and pop to certain scenes.

I'm even hearing alot of people saying that the newest RTX cards are not quite there yet. I suspect next year's cards will be solid for RT though.
 
They'll optimize the ever living crap out of it to work as best it can.

Look at the Nintendo switch and its limitations....and somehow the devs were able to get Doom Eternal running on its 5 year old mobile chip....at a decent enough quality level.

RT and current gen is a little bit of a different case though as visual quality is the RT centerpiece...so sacrificing visuals to get RT running makes RT kind of pointless to use whereas on the switch they have to figure out how much to sacrifice to get something to look and run decently...assuming it can even run the game adequately at all without looking like pure ass.
 
SubCog said:
Honestly I think ray tracing will need to be fairly mature and performant before it really justifies itself. Modern PBR rendering has already gotten us 90% of the way there, at a fraction of the cost, so RT just doesn't make as big of an impact as it would have if it had launched several years ago.

Of course eventually RT will dominate, but for the time being it's going to be mostly used for water and window reflections, often at much lower quality. Console devs will learn how to use it sparingly to add a bit of extra flavor and pop to certain scenes.

I'm even hearing alot of people saying that the newest RTX cards are not quite there yet. I suspect next year's cards will be solid for RT though.
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At the moment the developers that support RT seem to think lets put loads of puddles and store fronts everywhere to show this amazing new tech off losing performance in the process.

Sasquach said:
They'll optimize the ever living crap out of it to work as best it can.

Look at the Nintendo switch and its limitations....and somehow the devs were able to get Doom Eternal running on its 5 year old mobile chip....at a decent enough quality level.

RT and current gen is a little bit of a different case though as visual quality is the RT centerpiece...so sacrificing visuals to get RT running makes RT kind of pointless to use whereas on the switch they have to figure out how much to sacrifice to get something to look and run decently...assuming it can even run the game adequately at all without looking like pure ass.
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That's a good point, sacrificing game detail to get RT in the game then makes the RT quality suffer, this then becomes too much of a sacrifice to make.
 
Sasquach said:
They'll optimize the ever living crap out of it to work as best it can.

Look at the Nintendo switch and its limitations....and somehow the devs were able to get Doom Eternal running on its 5 year old mobile chip....at a decent enough quality level.

RT and current gen is a little bit of a different case though as visual quality is the RT centerpiece...so sacrificing visuals to get RT running makes RT kind of pointless to use whereas on the switch they have to figure out how much to sacrifice to get something to look and run decently...assuming it can even run the game adequately at all without looking like pure ass.
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I honestly don't believe that the majority of game developers these days really optimize their software that much...just look at how powerful hardware is now and how poorly looking and running a lot of software is compared to that power. I believe that with all the projects that a development studio is given and the time constraints they often have, they simply just make things "good enough" and send them out. Heck most games aren't even "finished" when they ship now and they force you to download a half dozen or so updates (often totaling several times the size of the original game) shortly after the game releases...and sometimes you're lucky if they continue to support the software much at all after launch.

I'll use UbiSoft as an example...for AC Valhalla the game ran slightly worse on the Xbox Series X compared to the PS5, despite having more powerful and capable hardware in every respect. It wouldn't take much work to get it running the same or better but ALL they did was release a patch that allowed the variable resolution to dip even lower on the Series X so that the frame rate would be more stable...NOTHING ELSE! Developers are lazy and inefficient now and I don't believe they (most developers) put a shred more work into a project than the bare minimum...all they do is slap all the stuff together and if it runs poorly they just cut stuff out until it reaches their minimum targets, they never do the very time consuming process of going through everything and optimizing it.

Nintendo does exceptionally well because some of their in-house development is top notch and they will spend several years making something run well...although even Nintendo is starting to get sloppy these days on some projects.

I think another problem is that, in some ways, it's not a bad thing for a game to run poorly anymore because it gets a lot of attention for benchmark purposes..."this game taxes hardware to it's limits so we'll use it for all our benchmarks going forward". Your game gets more attention and publicity being used as the "hardware torture" game when it could probably run a lot better if it was extremely well optimized.

I don't like the way the video game industry is going...games are getting insanely expensive to make, take longer to make and still aren't finished, are often infested with microtransactions and pay-to-play structures, and aren't optimized worth a damn.

I know the Series X and PS5 games will get a lot better over the next few years but I really don't think we'll ever see games that are very well optimized and use all their hardware to its maximum potential
 
MyTMouse said:
I honestly don't believe that the majority of game developers these days really optimize their software that much...just look at how powerful hardware is now and how poorly looking and running a lot of software is compared to that power. I believe that with all the projects that a development studio is given and the time constraints they often have, they simply just make things "good enough" and send them out. Heck most games aren't even "finished" when they ship now and they force you to download a half dozen or so updates (often totaling several times the size of the original game) shortly after the game releases...and sometimes you're lucky if they continue to support the software much at all after launch.

I'll use UbiSoft as an example...for AC Valhalla the game ran slightly worse on the Xbox Series X compared to the PS5, despite having more powerful and capable hardware in every respect. It wouldn't take much work to get it running the same or better but ALL they did was release a patch that allowed the variable resolution to dip even lower on the Series X so that the frame rate would be more stable...NOTHING ELSE! Developers are lazy and inefficient now and I don't believe they (most developers) put a shred more work into a project than the bare minimum...all they do is slap all the stuff together and if it runs poorly they just cut stuff out until it reaches their minimum targets, they never do the very time consuming process of going through everything and optimizing it.

Nintendo does exceptionally well because some of their in-house development is top notch and they will spend several years making something run well...although even Nintendo is starting to get sloppy these days on some projects.

I think another problem is that, in some ways, it's not a bad thing for a game to run poorly anymore because it gets a lot of attention for benchmark purposes..."this game taxes hardware to it's limits so we'll use it for all our benchmarks going forward". Your game gets more attention and publicity being used as the "hardware torture" game when it could probably run a lot better if it was extremely well optimized.

I don't like the way the video game industry is going...games are getting insanely expensive to make, take longer to make and still aren't finished, are often infested with microtransactions and pay-to-play structures, and aren't optimized worth a damn.

I know the Series X and PS5 games will get a lot better over the next few years but I really don't think we'll ever see games that are very well optimized and use all their hardware to its maximum potential
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I think they'll optimize it if they're forced to. In Nintendo's case the hardware is so far behind the current gen they have to optimize it if they determine some current gen title has a chance of running on it acceptably.

With the xbox and ps5, yeah they are super powerful and as devs get their code gets moore efficient we'll see more optimized games later on, as is the norm for new hardware releases. But if something like RT takes such a performance hit to use and they want to showcase it now, they'll have to optimize it to get that quality/performance balance.

Of course it then becomes a question if its worth the time and effort to make that optimization. And if the game is broken on release they have to fix the bugs before they can get to optimizing it.
 
With consoles it will start to come down to engine level optimizations and then some developers just refining that into exactly what they want. Because right now, you can't just use RT globally and have it reduce your workload. Nothing can really handle that yet.

So developers have to get clever to even bother. Right now, I think developers should try and use it to save some effort on sub-sets of things. Like using RT for shadows to cut down on having to fake & bake shadowing or for reflections so they don't have to get clever with SSR and Cubemaps.

All that said... some engines are getting crazy good at faking all this. UE can look photo realistic and blend non-real-time RT effects to make it all look amazing in motion.
 
I agree, I think shadows is all you need or want right now ray traced. Everything else is pretty subjective and trivial right now for what you get in return for the hit in performance.

With that said, Gears 5 on xbox series x is probably the best looking game I have ever seen. Is there any ray tracing in that?
 
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