this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
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ray-tracing? Sure let's give it a try.
Ok I don't see a difference and my fps dropped by a 100.
High performance lighting? We had a tool for that.
It was called texture baking.
The big benefit of raytracing now, imo (which most games aren't doing), is that it frees games up to introduce dynamic destruction again. We used to have all kinds of destructible walls and bits and bobs around, with flat lighting, but baked lighting has really limited what devs can do, because if you break something you need a solution to handle all the ways the lighting changes, and for the majority of games they just make everything stiff and unbreakable.
Raytracing is that solution. Plug and play, the lighting just works when you blow stuff up. DOOM: TDA is the best example of this currently (although still not a direct part of gameplay), with a bunch of destructible stuff everywhere, and that actually blows up with a physics sim rather than a canned animation. All the little boards have perfect ambient occlusion and shadows, because raytracing just does that.
It's really fun, if minor, and one of the things I actually look forward to more games doing with raytracing. IMO that's why raytracing has whelmed most people, because we're used to near-flawless baked lighting, and haven't really noticed the compromises that baked lighting has pushed on us.
Oh yeah. For example the game "Teardown" uses a software ray tracing for lighting. Most Minecraft shaders also do ray tracing I think...
Of course these are voxel based examples which are a lot easier on the processor. You need hardware ray tracing for high poly destructible structures and I have absolutely nothing against the technology.
I just don't like how the technology is abused by studios to push out unoptimized games running at ~50 fps on 3090s
Oh, does it? I was literally thinking to myself that Teardown was an interesting example of destruction, and wondering how they did their lighting. RT makes perfect sense, that must be one of the earliest examples of actually doing something you really couldn't without RT (at least not while lighting it well).
But yes, agreed that recent performance trends are frustrating, smearing DLSS and frame gen to cover for terrible performance. Feels like we're in a painful tween period with a lot of awkward stuff going on, and also deadlines/crunch/corporate meddling etc causing games to come out half-baked. Hopefully this stuff does reach maturity soon and we can have some of this cool new stuff without so many other compromises.