this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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Showerthoughts

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After six years of hardware ray tracing, the best examples of it are modified old games, like Quake and Minecraft. (midwest.social)
submitted 1 week ago by frezik@midwest.social to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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There might be a good reason for this. Raster effects were already really good in newer games, and ray tracing could only improve on that high bar. It's filling in details that are barely noticeable, but creap ever so slightly closer to photorealism.

Old games start from a low bar, so ray tracing has dramatic improvement.

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[โ€“] conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 43 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

It's just because newer games have too much to effectively ray trace, so they have to use it in a very limited manner. There are very few games fully ray traced.

Ray traced quake looks more like real video than a lot of those modern games do; it just looks like some kind of theme park/old theater costume type of deal with a lot of rubber because the materials aren't as good.

[โ€“] moody@lemmings.world 3 points 1 week ago

Yeah, for sure. Raytracing is very computationally intensive. It doesn't make sense to do full-scene raytracing unless you have hardware that's specifically designed for it. It works for something like quake since none of the scenes are particularly complex, but obviously you don't hit anything close to the same framerates as you would with raster rendering.