November 16th marks the 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2. Back in 2004, Half-Life 2 left an unforgettable mark on a generation of gamers. Learn more about the...
Am I the only one that doesn’t really give a shit about ray tracing? For mediocre gains, you get a punch in the face on performance. I’ll take 144Hz on a game over ray tracing any day.
Better visuals and much faster/cheaper for the developer to make.
We are still in the infancy of the technology and the vast majority of games with ray tracing doesn’t fully utilise it as they must compromise to support normal raster, leading to half baked implementations on engines not designed with ray tracing in mind.
That’s fair. I did watch a video comparing them, and what stuck with me was how they mention how good we got at faking lighting and making it so convincing that the reflections are real, it’s hard to sometimes tell the difference. For me on a 2070s with 3440x1440 resolution, it’s not worth it at all.
Mmm I disagree completely. RT (when done well and done right) looks absolutely fantastic and worlds better than raster lighting. Play Cyberpunk 2077, compare Path Tracing on vs. no RT at all. Or Metro Exodus. Focus on reflections. Also RT shines more in motion than with static scenes. There are many games where RT doesn’t do nuch or looks bad (Resident evil games) but in others it looks great. It really depends on the game. You can’t judge this tech based on some bad implementations.
I don’t really either. Once it gets fast enough it’ll be common, but we can do really good approximations right now.
The thing that really hurts HL2 in terms of looking less dated is the old low-poly BSP geometry. Modern games and engines use landscapes and models because they can do it fast enough now. But I don’t think Source can handle that level of detail.
What blew my mind was how I heard Titanfall 2 uses the source engine. That game looked really good. I did only play it on the steam deck though, so my resolution and screen size weren’t crazy.
In general, I agree, but I think you underestimate the benifits it provides. While ray-tracing doesn’t add much to more static or simple scenes, it can make a huge difference with more complex or dynamic scenes. Half Life 2 is honestly probably the ideal game to demonstrate this due to its heavy reliance on physics. Current lighting and reflection systems, for all their advancements and advantages, struggle to convincingly handle objects moving in the scene and interacting with each other. Add in a flickering torch or similar and things tend to go even further off the rails. This is why in a lot of games, interactive objects end up standing out in an otherwise well-rendered enviroment. Good raytracing fixes this and can go a really long way to creating a unified, but dynamic look to an enviroment. All that is just on the player’s side too, theres even more boons for developers.
That said, I still don’t plan to be playing many RTX or ray-traced games any time soon. As you said, its still a nightmare performance wise, and I personally start getting motion sick at the framerates it runs at. Once hardware catches up more seriously, I think it will be a really useful tool.
Yeah, also does anyone else remember when the best video card was like 600 bucks? I never did buy one of those. And I’m not buying the top end cards at 3k or whatever they are. I built my whole last computer for less than that.
I find when I play, if I’m not looking around focusing on the graphics (like playing the game) I don’t notice it. Cyberpunk 2077 at 3440x1440 with ray tracing on makes me get like 24FPS. Without it, I can get above 60.
Same. It depends on the game though, obviously. If I’m playing Deadlock or something similar (fast paced and competitive) I’m not going to go for graphics fidelity. But anything single player? 60 FPS is perfectly fine and ray traced lighting can make a huge visual impact. Both Alan Wake 2 and Cyberpunk looked great with RT and well worth forgoing 100+ FPS.
IMHO it was a nice, but not worldbreaking gimmick, that was overhyped to sell. Like polygons count, like antialias, like monitor refresh rate… things that of course have their utility but over the years have been the target of marketing.
Am I the only one that doesn’t really give a shit about ray tracing? For mediocre gains, you get a punch in the face on performance. I’ll take 144Hz on a game over ray tracing any day.
Better visuals and much faster/cheaper for the developer to make.
We are still in the infancy of the technology and the vast majority of games with ray tracing doesn’t fully utilise it as they must compromise to support normal raster, leading to half baked implementations on engines not designed with ray tracing in mind.
That’s fair. I did watch a video comparing them, and what stuck with me was how they mention how good we got at faking lighting and making it so convincing that the reflections are real, it’s hard to sometimes tell the difference. For me on a 2070s with 3440x1440 resolution, it’s not worth it at all.
Mmm I disagree completely. RT (when done well and done right) looks absolutely fantastic and worlds better than raster lighting. Play Cyberpunk 2077, compare Path Tracing on vs. no RT at all. Or Metro Exodus. Focus on reflections. Also RT shines more in motion than with static scenes. There are many games where RT doesn’t do nuch or looks bad (Resident evil games) but in others it looks great. It really depends on the game. You can’t judge this tech based on some bad implementations.
That’s the first game I tried. Looks great, when it comes to a room and playing I find those details skip my brain and prefer smooth 144Hz instead
I don’t really either. Once it gets fast enough it’ll be common, but we can do really good approximations right now.
The thing that really hurts HL2 in terms of looking less dated is the old low-poly BSP geometry. Modern games and engines use landscapes and models because they can do it fast enough now. But I don’t think Source can handle that level of detail.
What blew my mind was how I heard Titanfall 2 uses the source engine. That game looked really good. I did only play it on the steam deck though, so my resolution and screen size weren’t crazy.
Same here and with the price of GPUs, raytracing is expensive as hell for the wallet and it’s straight up not a good value.
In general, I agree, but I think you underestimate the benifits it provides. While ray-tracing doesn’t add much to more static or simple scenes, it can make a huge difference with more complex or dynamic scenes. Half Life 2 is honestly probably the ideal game to demonstrate this due to its heavy reliance on physics. Current lighting and reflection systems, for all their advancements and advantages, struggle to convincingly handle objects moving in the scene and interacting with each other. Add in a flickering torch or similar and things tend to go even further off the rails. This is why in a lot of games, interactive objects end up standing out in an otherwise well-rendered enviroment. Good raytracing fixes this and can go a really long way to creating a unified, but dynamic look to an enviroment. All that is just on the player’s side too, theres even more boons for developers.
That said, I still don’t plan to be playing many RTX or ray-traced games any time soon. As you said, its still a nightmare performance wise, and I personally start getting motion sick at the framerates it runs at. Once hardware catches up more seriously, I think it will be a really useful tool.
Yeah, also does anyone else remember when the best video card was like 600 bucks? I never did buy one of those. And I’m not buying the top end cards at 3k or whatever they are. I built my whole last computer for less than that.
if I can get a solid 60fps with ray-traced reflections, I’ll take that over 144. Reflections and shadows do a lot for me
I find when I play, if I’m not looking around focusing on the graphics (like playing the game) I don’t notice it. Cyberpunk 2077 at 3440x1440 with ray tracing on makes me get like 24FPS. Without it, I can get above 60.
Same. It depends on the game though, obviously. If I’m playing Deadlock or something similar (fast paced and competitive) I’m not going to go for graphics fidelity. But anything single player? 60 FPS is perfectly fine and ray traced lighting can make a huge visual impact. Both Alan Wake 2 and Cyberpunk looked great with RT and well worth forgoing 100+ FPS.
IMHO it was a nice, but not worldbreaking gimmick, that was overhyped to sell. Like polygons count, like antialias, like monitor refresh rate… things that of course have their utility but over the years have been the target of marketing.
I’m right there with you. I’m happy if a game can maintain a solid 60hz.