Much as I love the look of Quake RTX, it feels like it’s a barely there performance hog in modern games. You look at the benchmarks on the newer cards and so much is focused on ray tracing performance but I just don’t see that big a difference in Cyberpunk on an 3080 Ti unless I look really hard for it.
Am I alone in this? I’d much rather have 100+ non generated FPS at 4k over what raytracing is delivering in major titles. And by 4k I really mean my super modded Skyrim VR :)
Most games use it just for shadows, which doesn’t look too different from previous techniques of soft shadowing. Some also use it for various lighting techniques that again were already pretty realistic looking by faking how light works.
But the few games I’ve seen using full raytraced reflections are definitely noticeable and gorgeous. Actually being able to see your reflection on the street in the rain in Cyberpunk, for example, is awesome as hell.
I think that it might be a larger factor if levels were specifically designed around exploiting its strengths.
I remember that Fallout 4, which introduced godrays, had a mission, Call To Arms, that had the main character walking down a series of walkways made of gratings that really made the effect very noticeable.
I remember having to turn them off just to look anywhere near downtown without the game crashing. 🤷🏻♂️
Depending on the implementation, sure. But in something like Cyberpunk with RT overdrive, it’s night and day. Realistic lighting has a huge effect on a scene.