I love ray tracing and path tracing when they’re done right. Ik fully ray traced scenes are hardly playable even on high end cards without upscaling but like if one has a powerful enough card, why not utilize its potential? Yet most people don’t seem to care about RT.
When it comes to upscaling though, I hate it, and I’m not even talking about frame gen. It makes things look blurry and causes annoying artifacts. I think playing on lowest settings with clear textures is more enjoyable long term than maxed out in 4k with a consistently blurry image. Also this new technology makes devs care less about optimization (which will backfire btw as we’re approaching the physical limit of transistor size).
i turn off upscaling and enable dedicated fullscreen immediately, and then i get mad if the game cant run well without it. it literally NEVER looks better. the edges are ugly, frame rate stutters, things look patchy cross hatched, weirdness, i hate it.
Clair Obscur (amazing) is the most recent offender. all the default settings it chose for my computer made it run like crap AND look ugly. disabled ai upscaling and enabled dedicated fullscreen, and the game looks beautiful and runs like butter on my aging 3070.
i have no idea why the industry started making these the default settings but i wish they would stop.
I don’t consider ray tracing to be in the same category as these other technologies, though. ray tracing can look fantastic as long as it doesn’t kill the frame rate.
Efficient ambient-light ray tracing (like Lumen) is amazing. It contributes massively to making environments feel believable and immersive.
Path traced reflections and shadows are a indefensible waste of processing power (for now).
Upscaling and frame generation are crutches that are actively harming gaming right now. From disocclusion artifacts to unsightly “sharpening” distortions to developers/publishers skipping optimization because they expect DLSS/FSR will pick up the slack, it’s a cool thing that has unfortunately resulted in games being worse all around.
Ray Tracing isn’t used well enough to justify the performance hit in pretty much all but 1 game I have ever played (cyberpunk 2077; real time reflections off wet surfaces and glass really stand out and look fantastic).
And upscaling looks horrendous compared to just running at a native resolution. I prefer to not use it, but sometimes it’s necessary either because the game doesn’t let you not use it (mostly seen with console games) or because it’s so poorly optimized you need it to just get a baseline acceptable fps.
The first game I played with Ray tracing is still the best one, that being Control. Due to how the game is filled with glass the Ray tracing names it all act realistically and it’s great
I wouldn’t have finished The Last Of Us Part 1 without FSR, which I desperately wanted to play again for the nostalgia. That game is so fucking horribly optimized.
I think they usually bring negligible improvements in visual fidelity, provided the traditional methods are well implemented.
I also think it’s silly to focus on these while the physics coding hasn’t kept up. Even showcase trailers often have weapons clipping through armour. A slightly more realistic shadow isn’t going to immerse me into your world if the slightest touch sends a huge bear carcass flying through the air or my sword clips through walls.
overused imo. I don’t care about upscaling, I’d like to see the raw frames myself. this is prob gonna be an unpopular opinion but I think the new Thousand Year Door game looks shit compared to the original. there’s no need to make cartoony games all raytraced and reflective. it just looks uncanny and bloom is overused so much in games in general too
I’ve personally hit the point where I don’t care much about graphical improvements, especially as someone with a vision disability. I’d rather have games run smoothly on any old console. Everything is advertising 4k meanwhile I’m still using a 720p tv lol
I don’t care for either of them, personally. Simple as.
I’m a simple guy. I don’t need super ultra realistic graphics/ray traced reflections, I don’t need things upscaled to “look better”. I don’t care about any benefits it could give. If the game runs and looks good enough on my 2010s TV monitor, I’ll be fine.
I am definitely not the target audience for this kinda technology.
RT is fine, but I turn off DLSS.
I prefer 3440x1440 over 4K so my GPU is a bit happier. I also «only» have 165 Hz, which is enough for me. Won’t replace the 3080 untill it strugles with this setup
It’s fine, but I really don’t like the trend of devs just using upscaling as default rather than properly optimizing their game.
The new “Dune Awakening” has great visuals in general. But sometimes elements (like bushes or inventory items) are extremely blurry. I blame improper use of anti-aliasing.
I barely know and don’t have a strong opinion about it.
It’s not for me I don’t want be spending a thousand on a GPU and a hundred on a game that takes my whole SSD and refuses to run off a spinner
I dont like ray traced lighting, it doesnt feel right and isnt worth the performance cost. I do like raytracing for sound. Scenes look better when they’re handcrafted.
Upscaling sucks. It looks so bad. But the tech is really cool and it allows people to run games at higher fps (only if they have a card with a ton of ai cores).
DLSS is amazing, if it’s available in a game I’m playing I use it.
Ray tracing and path tracing are incredible and the industry needs to quickly cut ties with all hardware that can’t do it. It makes game development significantly quicker, it looks better, and it has genuine gameplay advancements by the very nature of it (like being able to see reflections/shadows of off-screen enemies).
Hmm I decided not to interact with the answers a lot as they are personal opinions but yours is very radical so I decided to step in. Please keep in mind that not all people have an ability to buy any kind of expensive setup. Ray tracing is great but it indeed has a severe performance impact and not all manufacturers have efficient hardware for it yet so an ethical and nondiscriminatory way of implementing forced ray tracing will not be possible any time soon. Just something to keep in mind when forming a strong opinion.
Graphics are, like it or not, the main thing the majority of people look for first when they go to buy a game, and raytracing is a ridiculously easy way to achieve that in comparison to the time and skill required to elevate traditional lighting to that same level of beauty. PS5 and XSX both support raytracing, and PC graphics cards that don’t are coming up on 10 years old at this point.
Any AAA developer is going to see those two facts, that it’s way cheaper and runs on most of the market’s hardware, and abandon development work on traditional lighting. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is RT-only, and it was a huge success.
DLSS is in a similar boat - it reduces the need to spend time and money on optimization.
Now, let me be clear, I lament both of these facts. I think raytracing looks gorgeous, and DLSS is usually a nice performance boost for minimal tradeoff, but I don’t think every game should look photorealistic, and some games just don’t look good with DLSS on. What I’m saying is they both make game development cheaper and faster for very little relative downside, so I wouldnt be surprised if all AAA games required raytracing within the next few years.
an ethical and nondiscriminatory way of implementing forced ray tracing will not be possible any time soon.
Sorry but I just don’t care. Sometimes we need to just leave some people behind in order to move forward. Devs having to cater to people with 10 year old potato hardware is holding the industry back.
Yea that is kind of not ok.
It’s definitely ok. You’re not owed the ability to play every single game that releases on your hardware. Should PS2 owners still be getting every 2025 game released on the PS2, with no games allowed to be built with capabilities requiring better hardware than the PS2?
Thankfully some devs are now moving with the times and giving us games built on modern technology, like doom the dark ages and Indiana jones.
