What do you think is the foremost barrier to Ray Tracing in gaming today?

foxpants on 03/09/2021 - 10:14
Last edited 03/09/2021 - 12:19 by 1 other user

We can fairly well bank on Ray Tracing hanging around in a big way. All major vendors currently have or have announced hardware Ray Tracing capabilities in their discreet graphics cards and consoles, there's a standard API for it and it is slowly but surely starting to gain traction among developers and gamers.

What do you think is the biggest hurdle to overcome for Ray Tracing in the next 0-3 years?

I realise some people barely care about graphics at all, and that's fair, obviously gameplay mechanics, a compelling story etc etc may be way higher up the list for you, but here I am just talking about Ray Tracing and graphics, try keep the comments related to that.

If you select the 'performance hit' option, I'd love to hear what hardware you have, what resolution your monitor is, what RT games you've played etc, please elaborate on that experience.

Poll Options expired

• 2
  Lack of current games with any Ray Tracing effects at all
• 0
  Lack of current or upcoming games with compelling enough Ray Tracing effects
• 28
  The performance hit for enabling Ray Tracing on current hardware is too high
• 8
  The cost of hardware that has decent Ray Tracing performance is too high

• 

  Presence on 03/09/2021 - 10:21

  +7

  Given how difficult it is to even buy a GPU I'd say consumer demand isn't there for a technology that requires higher performing hardware.

  • 

    tanksinatra on 03/09/2021 - 11:23

    +1

    agree. Lack of GPU's

    • 

      foxpants on 03/09/2021 - 11:34

      +4

      It's a tough one, because GPU's are just flat-out silly expensive now anyway, new ones with good RT perf, second-hand ones without, and everywhere in between.

      I wonder what this question's answer would look like if, in some magical fantasy scenario, you could buy any RX6000 or RTX30 card at their MSRP today. Assuming that magical scenario was the case, then what would the barrier be, the performance or the games?

• 

  YeemaiI on 03/09/2021 - 10:22

  +5

  To me, realistic god rays and fancy reflections are not worth the rather significant 30% FPS drop.

  • 

    Jugganautx on 03/09/2021 - 10:35

    +2

    Godrays, blur and DOF are the first to go in every game i play.

• 

  Ryanek on 03/09/2021 - 10:31

  +6

  My wallet

• 

  jv on 03/09/2021 - 10:32

  What do you think is the foremost barrier to Ray Tracing in gaming today?

  The algorithms.

• 

  hellousyd on 03/09/2021 - 10:33

  +1

  The technology is still a long way off. To get good decent playable frames certain cards are pulling upwards of 200-300W. We might see some sustainable/justifiable performance by the time the RTX 5000 series launches.

  Who knows, maybe by then cloud gaming will be the norm. Especially with the silicon shortage and increasing price for raw materials, I don't see it being a barrier that will be overcome anytime soon.

• 

  RobBoss on 03/09/2021 - 10:54

  +2

  All three, but TBH performance hit is not as big of an issue for 30 series cards. The issue, at least I think, is the lackluster implementation of the lack thereof of Raytracing in games. For the untrained eyes, there is almost no difference in raytracing on vs off. The only game I can think of that is worth turning raytracing on is Minecraft.

  • 

    foxpants on 03/09/2021 - 11:29

    +2

    Yeah I have a 30 series and all the ones I've played that I liked also have DLSS to mitigate the hit. I found the effects and performance to be great in Control, Metro Exodus Enhanced and DOOM Eternal. Not at all noticeable and worth it in Dirt 5, Shadow of the Tomb Raider for RT shadows, totally useless effect. Minecraft and Quake RTX are a fun glimpse into the future, but clearly shows that we don't yet have what it takes to have fully Ray/Path Traced modern AAA titles.

• 

  pegaxs on 03/09/2021 - 10:59

  +4

  Price. You can have anything if you are just prepared to pay the price for it.

  • 

    Switchblade88 on 03/09/2021 - 11:13

    +2

    This needs to be a poll option

    • 

      foxpants on 03/09/2021 - 11:24

      +1

      Submitted report to ask that option to be added :)

• 

  QuickdraW on 03/09/2021 - 11:48

  +1

  Realism isn't necessarily wanted in a game. Media is often used to take a break from the real world so being different can be desirable. I prefer stylistic visuals like overwatch over something trying to imitate reality.

  • 

    foxpants on 03/09/2021 - 11:57

    +1

    I tried to address that in my text, this poll and discussion isn't really about the value or personal like of realistic visuals, but within that realm of visual advancement, what's going on.

  • 

    Zachary on 06/09/2021 - 13:51

    I'd be up for a super realistic game - be good 2nd ultier (however the hell you spell that word) life. Virtual Reality makes it more so; imagine you in a fantasy world with graphics that look as real as its real life counterparts if they exist but are just rendered pixels that you can touch, feel, taste, see and hear. Sign me up for this shit!

• 

  TheBird on 03/09/2021 - 12:12

  I see it as a WIIFM/commerce thing. Unless customers are given reasons for which they care about, they're not going to fork over money. If the customers aren't going to fork over the money, the developers aren't going to make it a high priority to spend resources on those features.

• 

  spackbace on 03/09/2021 - 12:41

  This feels like a uni/tafe assignment…

• 

  affable on 05/09/2021 - 17:54

  I think ray tracing's old school, Unreal Engine 5 wipes the floor https://youtu.be/47I2N_l47mw

  • 

    r33tom on 05/09/2021 - 22:28

    +1

    Ray tracing still exist in unreal engine 5. it will just be bundled in with the global illumination implementation rather than a stand alone implementation with unreal engine 4.

    Ray tracing is the future of video games and definately not "old school" it's such relative new technology for video games due to the processing power require to do real time Ray tracing. Animation studios has been using it since the early 2000s where Ray traced scenes took weeks to render.

    It's why that unreal engine 5 video demo looks so good, if they don't use Ray tracing there is no way those shadows and lighting will look that realistic.

    • 

      affable on 06/09/2021 - 06:00

      Well I was raytracing on IBM mainframes back around 1988 so it sure feels old school to me! Especially when the compute dept used to ring me up complaining I was hogging an entire 2000 user machine. I even attended a lecture at UTS by John Lassiter himself back in the 90's.

• 

  r33tom on 05/09/2021 - 22:15

  Give it time and eventually the GPU cores will be fast enough to run games with Ray tracing without any significant impact to performance, if it's like the physX implementation than expect around 5 years.

  Look at PhysX which was the last major tech upgrade to GPUs released by NVIDIA back in the mid 2000s. For the older people on here that was gaming back then would have experienced the same pain they see now with Ray tracing. Back then you need to buy dedicated physX cards to play games that has physX enabled and if you don't you saw a 40-50 % performance hit. And it took another 5 years before the GPU got fast enough and now physX is not even an option in games. It's just enabled by default.

• 

  Zachary on 06/09/2021 - 13:43

  The performance hit for enabling Ray Tracing on current hardware is too high

  Should be fixed if game developers and nividia worked together to get SLi back working with better performance gains than 50%…maybe the full theoretical 100% performance increase with two cards? And 200% increase with 3 and so and so forth.