this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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Showerthoughts

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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.

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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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[–] chryan@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I'm not a graphics engineer so I only have cursory knowledge of the topic.

The biggest benefits that ray tracing brings is the accuracy of lighting your scenes and being able to forego the "tricks" that you mentioned. These are almost always going to be screen-space lighting techniques and effects e.g. reflections (SSR) and ambient occlusion (SSAO).

Unfortunately, the bad news is that you'd still need to understand the 3D math and shader knowledge regardless of whether you can take advantage of ray tracing or not. The good news is there are numerous game engines and resources out there to help!

Hope you make something cool from the hobby!