Showerthoughts

29590 readers

2498 users here now

A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

Rules

All posts must be showerthoughts
The entire showerthought must be in the title
Avoid politics (NEW RULE as of 5 Nov 2024, trying it out)
Posts must be original/unique
Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

vatlark@lemmy.world

forkball@lemmy.world

quinten@lemmy.world

Thekingoflorda@lemmy.world

285

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

29 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] simple@lemm.ee 88 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Cyberpunk is a good example of gorgeous raytracing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pkuU0cGQu8

The problem is that proper raytracing is way too heavy for most machines, so game devs don't bother. The Cyberpunk example on max graphics would need an RTX 4090 just to run it over 60fps. No point in pushing tech that nobody can run yet.

Raytracing on older games looks great because they already weren't intensive to run, so developers can get away with maximizing raytracing while still running fine.

[–] Screen_Shatter@lemmy.world 22 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Control also did a fantastic job. At some point the reflections on the glass are almost too good. There is a puzzle where you need to look through some windows to solve it. I couldn’t see what the hell was going on because of the reflections and had to turn RTX off. It was otherwise great and I think the difference is dramatic.

[–] moody@lemmings.world 2 points 1 week ago

I've been playing Cyberpunk on an RX 7900XT at basically maxed out graphics, with only some of the raytracing reduced to get it to a consistent 60 fps. The game looks stupid good. But the raytracing is only for shadows and reflections and it has such a massive impact on performance, though I know my GPU is not as effective at raytracing as Nvidia would be.

Like the other reply mentions, Control also looks great with raytracing on, but the scale is not the same as Cyberpunk, so the framerates don't suffer as much.