Is Ray Tracing a Waste of Money?
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- Опубліковано 15 жов 2024
- Is Ray Tracing the Future or a Gimmick?
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The human eye can only see people crying about gpu prices
I'm glad someone else is talking about it. I really dislike the marketing around RTX on. Ray tracing is too expensive computationally for gamers to invest in hardware for it. Ray tracing is for hyperreaslism which is NOT what most games are going for. Cyberpunk, in no way, looks like real life. So are losing our minds buying into more expensive hardware pretending things look better in fantasy worlds where the image are made to look a certain way for gaming aesthetics more than anything else.
The real benefit to ray tracing is for content production. What most people don't know is a lot of lighting is baked into game textures as a start and dynamic lights influence it a bit from there. If the game script changes and now the lighting is different, they have to reprocess the asset with the new lights, and they might find that nothing quite looks right anymore and have to put in more labor to balance things out. Ray tracing, if the core is implemented well and the assets, makes it possible for the same asset to be correctly represented and then it should react to variable lighting more correctly and naturally. Note: none of that is necessarily better or more realistic.
Just like this guy, despite being an ex-hobby (2D) game dev programmer, and having written a ray tracer myself, when I look at RTX on/off I have the same opinions: 1) that's barely a difference 2) that's a very artificially reflective surface all of a sudden or 3) I like RTX off better.
I'm with you bro. I have the 4070ti and it's cool but I don't use ray tracing that much and hogwarts crashes on me all the time. So I'm getting the 7900xtx. I'd rather ultra settings with more fps then ray tracing. Now that's just my opinion.
I completely agree with 5:10 and I feel it is the case when I turn on rt in any game or watch showcases on yt if one were to just switch them around I would not be able to tell at all rt doesn't really look better it just looks different
LOL! That was a funny point he made because it highlights fanboy behaviour. The fanboys would defend it.
I agree. RT is mostly gimmick. I would want more raster performance. More options lead to more dissatisfaction. 🎉
More raster is no less gimmick than RT. For most people all they need is 1080p60 medium. GPU like RX6600 are more than enough for that.
6:00 just says it all... he is SO right about that :D I am SO glad I bought a 7900XTX instead of anything else.
Me too the 7900xtx is priced just right to get 4080+ graphics and just click the Ray tracing OFF and its perfect.😁
As a 3D artist, I loooooove ray tracing, but since RTX was introduced almost 6 years ago, we've had what, maybe 3 good games that actually use it well?
Realistically, I think we will have to wait for the release of next-gen consoles for RT to really pick up. Until it becomes playable on MOST hardware, I just don't see that many game developers willing to dedicate resources to something that only a small percentage of gamers will be able to see.
Eventually possibly important. Right now…primarily a waste of money. A proper ray-traced game…which somehow is magically now called path tracing courtesy of Nvidia marketing…more than triples the numbers of transistors to be properly rendered. That’s a lot of processing power to just throw away.
Back in the day I really liked the idea of GPU-enhanced physics, too. Had both a high-tier Nvidia card and a mid-tier set up for when it might come to fruition. That gimmick sure sailed, didn’t it?
As I always say RT is a top 1% concern, DLSS is ok on a 4k panel if you use DLSS quality because it drops down the res to 1440p so you retain graphical fidelity but DLSS or FSR on a 1440p panel is horrible and on 1080p it looks so bad. RT might be the future but we aren't there yet because the entry price is so high, till AMD or Nvidia produce a $300USD card that can do RT 1080p native its not going to catch on for the majority.
Right now you need minimum an RTX4080 and a 4k panel to even use RT and DLSS while retaining grapahical fidelity which here in my country would cost you around $3300 not even factoring in the cost of your processor, board etc. For a full top end gaming rig with a 7800x3D and 4090 with 4k panel would cost over $7500 here which is imo not worth spending for shiny puddles and shadows.
Whenever I have an option for RT or DLSS I turn off RT and run native 1440p because the frame times with RT and DLSS enabled make the game feel like its running at 30FPS, FPS counter might say 60FPS but it doesn't feel like 60FPS to me when playing. I was an early adopter of Turing 2080Ti I tried RT in Battlefield V and was disappointed, the 2080Ti at the time wasn't really much better than my 1080ti was and considering I paid $1050 for the 1080ti and $1599 for the 2080ti imo the price increase didn't justify at least to me 30FPS shiny puddles.
I then moved to the 3090 and tried RT in Cyberpunk and again anoither 30FPS high frame time experience with just over 55FPS with DLSS quality which looked washed out to me. So when the 4090 released I decided not to even bother because I don't play newer games anymore, I mainly play Deep Rock Galactic, BF1, BFV with some The Finals sometimes. I spent $4849 on two GPU's and in that time frame RT only slightly got better performance wise, the 2080Ti could do 30FPS 1080p and the 3090 could do 30FPS 1440p both being 30FPS experiences with high frame times.
No other GPU makes any sense for me to move to at this point except the 4090, the XTX is only around 35% better than my 3090 so I would be paying $1700 for 35% performance, it just doesn't seem justified to me. If I bought the XTX that would come to a grand total of $6549 for GPU's... For what? A 60FPS downscaled experience that feels like 30FPS?
From how I see it all the RTX branding and RT has done is make it harder for my friends to afford upgrades and made devs even more lazy relying on downscaling then calling it upscaling in order to get their games in a playable state. I was talking to my friend last night the poor guy couldn't even run the finals without crashing so I recommended him a 6700XT, its the only card worth buying that offers reasonable value.
Honestly its great we have a healthy second hand market here becaus if it wasn't for that none of my friends would be able to spend $850 on a 7800XT or $2200 on a 4080 or even $900 on a 4070. PC gaming is in a messed up place and has been now for years.
I agree with most of what u said. I think raytracing will be part of future games, but right now its very far from being efficient, optimized let alone mainstream. In terms of image quality only path tracing is really worth it and only in very few outdoor scenarios in Cyberpunk 2077 aka a lot of glass areas in a city, reflections, rain, lots of neon lights. And only one card can somewhat run it. The 4080 is too weak.
I dont mind upscaling if it looks nice. I personally dont see a difference on an upscaled 1440p image and hope FSR gets better. In Cyberpunk I use Intels XESS with my 6700XT and light ray tracing for my personal sweet spot.
Nvidia tries really hard to justify their GPU prices based on this one alpha state feature, which I find absolutely rediculous. The performance jump from 3080 to 3090 was a joke, considering the extra price. Same with the 3060 to 4060. In both generations they cheaped out on VRAM for no reason..The 3070 is a horrible waste of money, same goes for the 4070ti, the 4080 and the 4090 (for gaming only). Even if the performance increase was actually there this time with the 4080 to 90, it didnt justify the even more insane price.
I own a 6700XT and right now and I feel extremely underwhelmed to upgrade because I dont see a reason to invest a ton of money for a GPU which runs a badly optimized feature in some games. I see decent value in the 7900 series if u have older GPUs than the 6000 series to upgrade from. But with mine I feel like Im (positively) stuck between having enough performance for 1440p gameplay while not having enough performance to gain from any reasonably priced upgrade. The 4090 for 1000€ would be a justified option for me which will never happen. The 7900 AMD series feels good in rastorization performance and can deal with raytracing, but I feel like its not a good enough investment for me cause the GPU wont be able to deal with future titles with implemented raytracing (like in 3-5 years). It just feels like GPU-wise we are stuck at having past technology but having to deal with heavly-load future features in 1-2 years. So buying any high end GPU now feels like a short term investment for the future (and 4090 prices and actual quality/features of the card are an absolute joke).
So for me to even consider an upgrade I would need a good performance uplift with the future 8000 series by AMD and more included ray tracing transistors for a good price or (my hope) a very aggressively priced battle mage GPU (600-700€) from Intel with the performance of a 4080 but with insane features like 20+ GB VRAM and being able to deal with raytracing. Intel has to establish itself in the GPU market and this is the perfect chance. Considering Nvidia I lost all hope and I dont expect anything. They have been scamming gamers so hard for the last couple of years that even making a possibly good deal in the future would feel bad just cause of what they did in the past 😅
@@Greenalex89Yea I agree with you. For you an upgrade to a 7900XTX would be quite a significant performance increase but for me 35% just doesn't cut it not for $1700. IF the 5090 is 130% more performance over my 3090 I might consider it but going by Nvidia's pricing I wouldn't be surprised if its $1899USD which will translate to around $4000 here for base models which is pretty insane. Plus yea it doesn't sit right rewarding them for scummy practices so I'll keep a close eye on AMD's next generation but both AMD and Nvidia are into Ai now anyways.
6700XT is a phenominal card for the money and honestly if its running your games fine just keep it, its what I did with my 3090 since I mainly play potato games like Deep Rock Galactic. Another thing for me was the games, nothing really catches my interest in the current release cycle. There wasn't a game that made me feel I needed to upgrade to play. I was interested in Robocop Rogue City but the game is still a buggy mess even after multiple patches.
Nvidia make more from the Ai sector now so just as with the mining situation they follow the market trends and capitalise on it. Is what it is I guess but my next card I will keep for more than 3 years, I might even just keep this 3090 because honestly it runs my games fine.
None of these GPU's will keep up with Ray Tracing in the next 3-5 years, its a promise of future support IF you buy the latest and greatest GPU to be able to run these console ports with RT or PT tacked on. Nvidia release RTX and only the top card can even run it with DLSS (2080Ti) at 1080p and still not even hit 60FPS. Then the 3090 releases which gave us 50FPS at 1440p with DLSS then they released the 4090 which did allot better at 1440p even native but still not bordering on high refresh rate panels. Then they gave us Path Tracing which raised the performance bar even higher, a 4090 can't even do it native 1440p max settings. Maybe the 5090 will do it but the bar will be raised again to something else.
That's all this is, we keep chasing that bar that always exceeds our grasp and the price just keeps getting higher and higher. DLSS4 probably wont even be supported by the 4000 series along with any new technology so you will have to buy a 5000 series card to use any new features. After buying a 2080Ti, 2070S, 3070 and 3090 and experiencing RT and PT yea PT is cool but not worth $3300 imo. My 3090 does like 15FPS Path Tracing 1440p lol and 25FPS DLSS quality haha. Next gen it will be SUPER PT with DLSS4+Frame Super sampling generation ONLY supported on Nvidia RTX5000 series for the low price of $999 for a 5070 haha.
The way I see Battle Mage is Intel throwiong their hat into the Ai arena since Nvidia is making big bucks from it. AMD are creating an entire APU SOC dedicated to Ai also other stuff. All of them will jump in on it which isn't good for us gamers.
Its all a short term investment Bro but I guess it depends which games you play. For me my 3090 would probably last me another 3 years since I play potato games but if you want to experience the latest games with all the features you'll have to let Jensen into your wallet.
Thanks for the raply, I appreciate it.
Ray tracing is a gimmick
Path tracing is the only thing worth anything
Ray tracing may not look different to the gamer but it is paradigm shift in terms of game development. In rasterisation, devs need to manually go scenen by scene and fiddle with the lighting to get it perfect while with ray tracing all of the effort is no wdoen automatically. This means that games can be made for less money or the scale of games can be expanded for the same dev time. This is going to be huge especially for indie games since may be for the first time ever we could have a AAA-level game from an indie dev or studio.
You're almost right, but not quite. Ray tracing as a high level rendering techniques gives you certain effects for free -- mainly reflections and transmission, but many still have to be implemented explicitly and tweaked to look right. While ray tracing is an easier core lighting system to work with to get it right than rasterization, at the end of the day things aren't suddenly "easy" now for game devs.
Also, main thing is you are not seeing capitalism at work here. Games being made for less money does not mean games will be made cheaper to the consumer, and they aren't all coming out bigger and better. Game publishers are squeezing more out of consumers from the microtransactions end, and hardware manufacturers like nVidia are certainly squeezing more from the GPU end. So everyone but the customer wins with RTX On, and it's being sold to us like we need it?
The biggest problem i see with current ray tracing is that it only looks good when you're standing still and and staring at the reflections instead of just playing the game. I think RT will be much better in the future.
No it wont
the purpose of RT is not to look better necessiraley, it is supposed to look more "realisitc " . Thats the only thing
@@BastianRosenmüller what the fuck is realistic about video game? You can't even get close to lvl of realism the reality has. So why bother with dumb gimmicks? Maybe we need better games. All these new AAA titles are pure shit. Game quality has dropped like crazy over the past 15 years. And I am not talking about graphics.
@@sasagrcevic475 Yep you are right! RTX is just a gimmick for NVDIA to sell their overpriced cards and game devs which focus on that just make shitty games which may have realistic lighting but lack completely in gameplay. For me Indie games like Valheim, Hollow Knights, Roboquest , Stardew Valley and Outer WIlds safed the past years of gaming
In games, they often use shortcuts for things like light and how things look, but ray tracing changes that. It makes lighting look real, which makes games feel more alive. Sure, right now, it might not seem worth the extra power it needs. But just like any new tech, ray tracing will get better and make even bigger differences in our games in the future. Just look around your room and notice all the shadows, reflections, and indirect shadows around you. Even in the latest games that use path tracing, these effects are only represented in a very simplified and rough way.
Super interesting video, especially the part of the human perception of having more choises. I upgraded my gtx 1070 to a 7700xt and super happy about it the only games that now I'm playing with RT are Cyberpunk and Ratchet and Clank (i play in 1080p) also if i need to use a bit of fsr and AFMF on Cyberpunk i can play it at ultra with RT at ultra on 80 fps if i don't remember wrong (i use the fps counter only when using the game for the first times only to see if the performance are good with the settings). The games that now are implementing RT are doing it in a better way in the sense of optimization and choises of not adding it in scenarios where the differences are really poor. There are games like hogwarts legacy that have a poor rt optimization beacuse in benchmarks it runs great with all ultra with rt ultra but in my experience it in the beginning starts excellent but then there are stutters every 5/10 seconds and then it goes at 15 fps (mirrors are ridicolous) ( I have 16gb of ram 3200 and a 5700x so i don't think there are the problem also use SAM). Continue posting this type of videos and I'm sure your channel will grow a lot now or later.
4k is the real deal for me... if it performs good i will make it better by using a higher resolution even if i have to lower some settings or use dlss/fsr.
Very nice points! I use RT only when I don't need DLSS to maintain 60 min fps. If I'm tempted to use DLSS, I rather turn RT off because I don't see why I would want lowering my fps AND the image quallity. There is just no point in enabling both technollogies at the same time.
Excellent video with very well made points and agree with everything you have said. I believe ray tracing is the future but it is not something the vast majority can experience and enjoy right now. Was certainly disappointed with RT after buying a 3090 last generation (I play 3440x1440p). I now have a 4090 and in most games prefer not to use ray tracing. However I have to say while Alan Wake 2 is jaw droppingly beautiful without RT on, when it is turned on, it is unbelievable. When you are in the cafe and can see such realistic reflections in the counter and windows, it is just on another level. Though I still spend most of my gaming time playing Warzone which doesn’t need a 4090 lol.
amazing video bro best one i’ve seen on ray tracing
Man you hit every nail on the head with this analysis. From the point about wanting something because it’s out there to the psychology of the human brain making justifications for things that at the end of the day are gimmicks or just flat out unnecessary. I have been debating for a few months now what GPU my new PC that I built a few months ago will get, AMD or NVIDIA. And I’ve been leaving 4080 super for most of this time. But now I’m realizing that RT just isn’t really ready right now. Maybe next gen or even after will it be the standard. So until then I think getting a 7900xtx nitro is the way to go. A lot more VRAM and better raster performance in most games than 4080.
Thank you for the comment. Feedbacks like this make really make a difference. :) I'm glad you've like it.
the raytrace effect is overdone a lot of the times. yes, light does reflect as it would irl, that is, if every surface was polished and super clean
Absolute high end ultra settings PC gaming is a trap :P the very best GPU/processor/RAM has lifespan of 1 year at most, before its replacement is launched. Going midrange is not just cutting price in half, it's also cutting upgrade frequency in half. PC gaming since the nineties was always about tweaking settings so the game ran optimally on your machine. Maybe in 10 years.
After two months of debating with myself about upgrading to 4070ti super or 4080, this video reached me at the perfect time. Thank you!
I've been saying this ever since I got an RTX card. Just like you said. It doesn't look better, it just looks different.
Tbf control is one of the first implementation , and now days anything can do good performance in raster only , so if u dont care just stick to old hardware
Using still shots to judge the difference between RT on and off is kind of silly. The shadows, lighting and reflections staying high quality and realistic in motion is what makes it stand out. Would be like using a screen shot to compare playing at 60fps and 120fps. The picture looks the same, the extra frame rate must not do anything. LoL
Ray-tracing looks even worse in motion because the image is smeared beyond recognition until you stop moving.
RT would never pick up with the way Nvidia price their graphic card. US$500 can't run RT properly with a healthy FPS margin than it does not make sense for developer to fully utilise it. Now they just throw a few low gpu resourse feature and called it RT supported, leaving fans to spot the different between RT and non-RT.
when I go outside I check reflective surfaces and stuff regularly and notice that a surprising amount of surfaces reflect your surroundings
pathtracing is nonsense ( atleast right now ) but medium raytracing - so just reflections and shadows - looks great
the problem with the raytracing revolution really is reflections- they look horrible nowadays and i don't know why they looked better 10 years ago
but when i look into a mirror without raytracing in a modern game it makes me think my GPU is broken lol
Love your vids
The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle😄
I got 4070 and the first thing i do is turn off ray tracing.i rather be playing at 150 fps plus after 2 sec ingame i dont even notice it
I tried RT in fortnite and it changes lighting quality significantly. I will keep using it
Lmaoooo and this makes you a better player ? Nobody cares about lighting and shadows.
Oh you want the game to destroy your frames and look pretty I got you 🤣
@@xbox360J I have 80fps its enough for me
also used rt in fortnight with epic everything got 55-70fps depending on where i was on the map. most of the time you cant tell the difference the biggest uplift like all rt comes from reflections. but is it really worth going from a native 1440p 120fps to 55-70 no its not. even my friend with his 4080 was like half the time with rt you cant tell the difference. lumen without rt is the goat not to much of a performance hit and is 90-95% the effect of rt.
@@zackmandarino1021Lumen IS raytracing. All hardware raytracing does is allowing skinned meshes to show up in reflections
The only game where Raytracing really makes a huge difference is Cyberpunk 2077. In other games, its a nice add on but most people won't notice a difference. My priority is 120fps + with 1440p.
I only loved RTX in the Retro games implementations like Quake 2 RTX, there is where i find it useful and cool. (and it runs in any card rt capable) i mean i played it on a RX 6400
anything below a 4070ti is probably a waste of performance and money if you want real ray tracing (path tracing) since at that point dlss cant make up the loss in performance without majorly hindering image quality. (raytracing like the psycho setting in cyberpunk for example is not worth the performance cut for the fidelity)
nvidia should just rebrand their below 70 series cards back to GTX since people who are buying their cards for RT and tensor cores are probably not doing it at the low end so there is no reason for it to have those features in the first place. best case scenario maybe they can find some sort of inbetween where the cards can still support DLSS without the ray tracing functionality to make things more affordable and competitive at the low end.
Ray tracing is 200% a waste of money
When you are actually gaming instead of benchmarking, it's kinda meh.
RT is a gimmick that you need to keep turning on and off to see what it adds. I have a 4090 and don't care as at 4k it still tanks performance.
I love raytracing. I dont know how anyone can't see how much it adds to the fidelity and immersion of a game.
I remember when HD tvs started becoming available for the general public. Tons of people swore they couldn't tell SD from HD. It's some sort of weird denial.
Its because fomo..no mattee what raster performance you get ..you know you want to dial every setting on.
And you can turn it on and see it for yourself but cant have it ...that drives people nuts..
Its all fomo thats you chose the rtx card.
FPS > RTX
RT nvidia fooling the world into buying higher priced gpus lol
Ray Tracing is a good thing, I have an RTX 4090 I bought it for CUDA but I am also a gamer and I played the hell out of Cyberpunk 2077 with Path Tracing and Ray Reconstruction, very transformative. Also I own an RTX 3080 12GB and I can optimize my RT experience in games. I hate Screen Space Reflections, I would be more happy with only Cube Maps if RT isn't available but if RT available it gives you a much better image quality because SSR not brake every time when I look around in the game. But my best experience had with RT Global Illumination which basically fixes light leaking from proble lights. If there is night in a game I don't want to see well lit corridors, looks very unnatural. So maybe RT GI is the most important RT implementation I would need if I had to choose because it is the most pleasing for my eye. And yeah until we need Frame Generation and upscaling to hit 60+ fps with RT until it remains a gimmick but it is the future as you said.
I really don't care for RT. even when playing Cyberpunk on my 6800xt in 4k it was gorgeous and was pretty smooth.
fun video but I still think DLSS is better (Im still choosing which card to buy)
You are right. DLSS is better and with NVIDIA you have both of them.
@@HardwareAccent btw, have you tried to UV your card? Im curious what would be the power draw while watching yt for example.
I've done some simple undervolting but I can't see much difference. Wathing youtube draws about 66W on 7900XTX.
I have an oled I dont need rtx
If you're a gamer it is probably a waste of money comparing to AMD gpus. If you're doing creative work, nvidia is the way to go.
RTX is an scam
With AMD you can use Frame Generation in e v e r y Game , make not sense in every Game but you could do it , at least with RX 6000 + RX 7000 , you have 60-70 FPS in 1440 P with Raytraying ? you get 110 -130 with FG on . AFMF is not meant to reduce Latency = not for competetive online shooter Games like CS Go , even if you are in a CPU limit FG still will deliver nearly doubble the FPS ua-cam.com/video/4O3Rm1P88Cs/v-deo.html
It's like buying a Brand new Ferrari then loading bricks in the boot for a race, it's a waste of money and kills FPS, its for the RTX 4090 fan boys who spend way too much on these cards just to get a shiny floor in a game.. I mean they added it to minecraft for god sake. 🤣🤣🤣
The same way high resolution, high referesh rates are waste of money.
7900xtx