It took less computational power to put a man on the moon than it does to make the shadows look 2.03% more realistic.
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
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Ok, but a 20 year old calculator is more powerful too.
I would laugh if it wasn't true. But also, people underestimate how realistic light and shadows can really sell a scene. It just shouldn't require the electricity of a refrigerator to do it.
A lot of that is just poor implementation on the developers end. They go “oh the engine we bought supports this? Well let’s do the bare minimum to enable the setting.” And you get games that don’t even look better, but run like ass.
Well, yeah, ray-tracing is actually a lot simpler to implement, because you just implement things the way physics works and then that works in most situations as you'd expect (i.e. how physics works).
All the lighting techniques we used in the past were just faking lighting in ever more intricate ways. Computationally much less intensive ways, which is why we bothered with them in the first place, but it's genuinely quite a bit of work.
There's some ways to optimize ray-tracing itself (e.g. pre-bake the lighting into scenes), but many times it's also a matter of mixing ray-tracing and more traditional lighting techniques, which brings in that additional work again.
Which is then why it'll be done less and less, the better hardware becomes. Because if publishers can sell to a wide audience without putting in that work, they absolutely will not put in that work.
This, but unironically
The trouble with this is that every single statement in it is true.
What do you mean you don't like seeing a perfect real time reflection of the NPC across from you in a puddle that costs you 95% of your frame rate?
Even without RTX scenery can look damn near real. But the moment there is a human in the scene, the uncanny valley fucks everything up. I don't even get it because animals can look perfect and not trigger the uncanny valley effect, but humans always do. RTX won't ever fix that.
I always thought that was just a me-thing. People will be like "Oh it looks so realistic", which a) I consider a bad thing, like I'm seeing reality plenty times already, why would I want more of that? But also b) no, it does not? Even the games with the biggest budgets continue to have NPCs that look as stiff as if they're three days dead. I'd say "with a puppeteer's hand up their rear" since they do move their mouths, but frankly, even puppets move around more than NPCs do.
I mean I agree but damn the new Diana jones game looks gooooood boi