Talking Point: Has Ray Tracing Been A 'Complete Waste Of Time' For Xbox Series X|S?

I may be in the minority here but I don't really know what ray tracing is nor do I care. Good games are good games regardless of graphics.

I have just completed metro exodus and the lighting is exceptional on series s. I do think that higher resolution might have been preferable instead, but it was a great experience either way, and at times it looked amazing. Watchdogs legion had ray tracing on series s, and looked great, although the game wasn’t my cup of tea unfortunately.

Otherwise I’m not sure of many other series s games that have it!

If resolution was 1080p, maybe rt could be an option for every game

But going from 1080p to 1440p 4k is just way too much for these GPUs. They cant even do 4k60 with no rt, rt is even more demanding and you can barely notice the change from baked lightning.

On the next gen maybe rt will be normal at 4k60

As the article notes, sometimes it's really impressive (metro), but many times it isn't much (Cyberpunk).

@Sixor I have noticed this gen the option to drop the resolution in favour of graphical is basically dead. I've recently been "banished" from the main 4k TV to my 1080p monitor, would be nice to not be wasting resources of the Series X on 4k.

Definitely not a waste of time. It might be an overused buzzword but it is not a waste of time and games should be using it when they can.

@el_pieablo

With each generarion people care even more about how games look and not if it's fun or not. That's why we have so many movie-sque games.
Really sad.

I've played a couple games with RT and 60 fps and it looks cool but I'm never going to trade off higher frame rate for RT.

To my eyes 60 fps does more for visuals than either 4k or RT. 30 fps modes look so choppy.

Problem with RT is its really expensive and having it on means taking a huge dip in framerate. I'm still amazed Spidey 2 can have it on and still keep the 60fps, easily the best usage of it this gen as well as it really helps sell NY's open world.

With FSR 3.1 coming to Xbox, the performance may improve enough to be worth it. But really, some of the most gorgeous games don't have RT. So why do we NEED it? Especially if it's a forced feature with no performance option. But again, if FSR 3.1 (planned to be used in Indiana Jones) is as advertised, it could be a game changer.

100% yes, especially when the true jump this gen so far has been deeper systems/ more emergent gameplay

It's ok. But only just. On a huge tv screen and a properly optimized game its worth it. But most games sacrifice performance to get it running properly and in the end I would rather have buttery smooth gameplay over ray tracing.
Besides, imho, great art design more than makes up for ray tracing and other fancy graphics.

I've seen implementations of ray tracing that were truly impressive — so I wouldn't say it's a waste of time — but I've also seen ray tracing applied to games retroactively, eg: Half Life 2 and Portal, which I felt actually detracted from the game's aesthetic, so I wouldn't say it's the technical leap that manufacturers would have us believe.

On my burned in plasma TV, I have my own version of ray tracing and it isn’t good…..

It's an expensive function on the current consoles that need too much compromises for it to even work. And from what I've understood from guys like Digital Foundry is that AMD cards generally don't perform well with RT functions, especially for a GPU that is at least 5 years old now in technology terms.

I quite like it. And the few games I've played it on have felt fine in 30fps (or whatever it may be). I've just finished Control and seeing your reflection in the windows, amongst other things, just made it seem like a more real building to me.

I tend to play around with it on and off and see which I prefer. But I do often then have it on.

Yes. That is all.

I just want 60fps.

this generation of consoles is simply not power enough for 4k/60fps/RT... next maybe.

Never really got to use it on series s think it works ok for re 2&3 remake on series s so I'll eventually give it a try but however it is it doesn't seem like it was meant for this generation from what I hear would rather decent frame rate and resolution

People argue if real-time raytracing all together is a waste of time - especially when there is little to no perceptible difference between the rasterized lighting and the ray-traced lighting.

I'd say it's too much for current-gen consoles.

But I don't think RT is a waste of time.

Here's why: it's a huge "time saver" for developers - especially as character models and environmental effects get increasingly more complex. It just starts to get harder to convincingly "fake" proper lighting when more and more objects are on screen or there is more geometric complexity of a scene. That doesn't mean games will come out any faster, it just means that artists can focus on something else more interesting now that lighting elements are handled via RT.

4A games (makers of Metro) has switched over entirely to an RT studio because of the time it saves by not worrying about rasterized lighting "issues".

Rather than having to approximate/handcraft shadows, light placement, bounce lighting, ambient occlusion, etc. having a full RT (or better yet, path-traced) pipeline lets the artists be more like set designers - they place the lights where they want for the desired look without having to worry about ensuring the other aspects of lighting are properly addressed - they just "work".

This opens up more possibilities for artists since the lighting model is completely "trivialized" - perhaps artists can make scenes even more complex. Character models looks more complex. Perhaps even new gameplay mechanics will emerge when light doesn't have to be quite so "hand crafted".

3D at one point looked way worse than 2D Sprite-work. 3D also ran horribly (Star Fox was 15fps, Ocarina of Time was like 25fps, etc). Yet, switching to 3D helped overcome certain obstacles in order to focus on other things that would have become an absolute nightmare using 2D sprites. We are starting to get to that point with lighting, too.

3D rendering has all but become trivial at this point because major players in technology took it seriously enough to actually try to advance it. While it feels like Nvidia is the only one driving the RT train.

So, while the technology certainly doesn't have a huge benefit right now, I do want to continue to see it get used in the future until it becomes a "standard" so developers can focus on improving things elsewhere rather than worrying about whether the GI looks right, or if the shadows are animating at the proper speed and proportions, or if a probe light to simulate "darkness" is too light/dark, etc.

i would have taken starfield at 720p or less even to get 60 fps. bla bla pc bla bla.... no

Yes. The Xbox Series and PS5 have chips that can only go so far in terms of Ray Tracing. Their gpus are actually AMD’s first attempts for that, and they are severely underpowered. My mobile rtx 4060 has 11tf and much, much better ray tracing capabilities. MS and Sony should’ve waited for the mid gen refresh to include chips with better ray tracing features.

I don't even know what ray tracing is

I generally fail to notice the benefits of ray tracing and tend to avoid using it if I can so I would say that yes, it's a waste of resources in general.

I keep ray tracing on in Halo Infinite and GTA Online. Most of the time I would prefer RT over 120 fps, but for some reason Halo lets me do both in the video menu. It's nice to have, even in The King of Fighters XV.

RT is a great tech, but it's putting the cart before the horse. Get stable rendering at smooth fps at target resolution first. THEN worry about costly slow lighting options. Just because we can render RT in less than half an hour a frame these days doesn't mean it's ready for doing it 60 frames a second.

@Lup I think modern "core gamers" can be split into two camps: Gamers and technophiles. The industry has spent so much time focusing on the latter and forgetting about the former they spent themselves into an unrecoverable hole.

Honestly, though I blame nVidia. They started really pushing that with their tech demos and sponsored games (Crysis) and influencing (then PC) game development to always be pushing the graphics tech as the showcase of the game. Consumers and devs are part of that, but I think nVidia is really what paved the road to technophilia replacing gaming in much of the industry.

And thus we have the $1800 GPU which will soon be old and replaced with, what, a $2400 GPU? Remember the days what that's the price of stuff Pixar bought from Cray and SGI?

Whole industry's Cray now.

@NEStalgia On one hand, I agree with you, but then you see thing things like the Nintendo Switch almost being the highest selling console of all time - beating out consoles with considerably more power.

I would bet a vast majority of people don't even open the Options menu of a console game and simply play on "Default" settings. And I bet those people couldn't even tell you if a game is 30fps or 60fps. 1080p or 4K. Rasterization or real-time RT. They simply don't care.

I know I have gotten to that point. I play on whatever Graphics Mode is the default because I just stopped caring and want to play the game.

The only reason I go into the menu is to ensure spatial audio settings are set (because I care more about that than fussing over Performance or Quality).

That being said, I still stand by what I said about why I want RT to become standard: to take some of the load off artists during development.

@GamingFan4Lyf Absolutely. People trust the devs to set it "right"or don't even know there's a choice. Though "customers aren't informed enough to know or care about quality or performance" is an ugly stance. And customers may perceive a game to be "better" or not based on quality or performance/smoothness without knowing why. It took Tom Cruise telling everyone soap opera mode sucks before they paid attention but he was right off course

And often the marketing people not the devs decide the default.

But I do agree about eased lighting implementation. Once hardware supports it.

@Lup some of my fondest memories are playing Monkey Island 1 on the Amiga or games like WCW V World on PS1. Graphics arent all it is, I agree with you, it's a shame it's all about this except from indies

@NEStalgia Ugh, all that smoothing in TV's is terrible - I turn off all video processing on my TVs.

I do set "film mode" on my TV - but that's for 24fps films and is not soap opera mode.

I will say, if the Default Mode is hot garbage...I do switch it.

I play Final Fantasy XVI at the default Graphics Mode because the 30fps is actually a lock and it's stable where the 60fps isn't.

I did the same for Final Fantasy VII Remake (though I stopped playing a few hours in to focus on FF16 because I try to discipline myself to playing and finish 1 game at a time).

I turned RT on in Resident Evil 4 because the SSR on water bodies was really bad and extremely distracting. The unlocked framerate was covered by VRR.

I left it in Quality Mode on Jedi Survivor.

I left Alan Wake 2 in the Default Mode.

I changed to Performance Mode on Redfall because the game was virtually identical between modes except for 60fps.

I switched to Performance Mode in Elden Ring because those games need to run higher than 30fps and VRR ironed out the framerate drops.

But I understand what you mean about people potentially not getting the best experience either due to marketing decisions or plain ignorance.

Honestly, I wish we didn't have modes. I miss the days of games just being "as is" on consoles. If I want to fiddle with settings, I'd go back to PC gaming. Well...except for 120Hz Mode...I understand having that choice as 120Hz is not standard.

But if a developer wants to make a game target 4K (or 1440p) 60fps on consoles, then make it the best game possible at a locked 60fps on consoles.

If a developer wants to target 4K (or 1440p) at 30fps on consoles, then make it the best game possible at a locked 30fps on consoles.

And no, I don't think developers should get crapped on for making a 30fps with no other options. Usually, you can tell when 30fps was a target as the Performance Mode is extremely compromised and uneven.

I really like Ray Tracing and the most impressive games using it are from Insomniac on PS5.
But also some XBox games make interesting use. But I understand this topic.
I'm kind of a graphic whore sometimes and I often prefer quality mode.

YES, as long as it comes with compromised frame rate I don't care about it. I did not try a quality mode in at least 2 years

Most of your gamers don't really even know what or care what Ray tracing is, they don't and wouldn't know any different unless it was pointed out to them but, these days? EVERYONE knows frame rate, everyone knows what their games chugging.

Ray tracing is the Blast Processor for the new generation

@GamingFan4Lyf lol you went from saying you leave the defaults to having a list of reasons each game uses which settings 😆

And remember not only so consumers play default settings decided by marketing people, they play it on their TV with default saturation that looks like a clown was butchered in a crayon factory 😂

I think the thing with modes is, back when there weren't modes the game was tailor made for the hardware and scraped every trick in the book to max it. There was nothing more to give. These days they didn't make console games at all. These are all PC games. Made for PC. Even the Sony exclusives... Xvi and rebirth are clearly made for the PC build and it happens to have a ps contract. Can't say about Sony in house games because none have been released for this Gen, but it's pretty clear pc is a first priority now. And it appears was at MS

60fps, 4K and raytracing were all over ambitious for this generation (and even more of a joke previously). I wish we’d stop reaching for the sky graphically and focus on making cheaper, better games.

Ray tracing is still in it's infancy. It'll take a year or so to become mainstream. It needs better hardware/software so that fps impact is minimum.
I'm looking forward to other Generative AI gameplay techniques - more interesting.

I wish games would still look like the best looking of 360 era (halo 4 and gears 3) so the development wouldn't take 5-6 years but 2-3 like it used to.

The consoles simply don't have the hardware to make ray tracing worthwhile and are basically rubbish at it. Even in the PC space AMD are pretty bad at it, so realistically you need a high end Nvidia GPU for it to be worthwhile at all

I honestly don’t know if I’ve even played a game with ray tracing yet… I always go for the performance option if there is one.

This just comes down to the old argument of higher fidelity graphics v frame rates. I tend to be happy with 30fps, if the fidelity of the graphics is worth it - and it often is, for me - so long as it’s a locked 30.

I always usually at least have a look at any ray tracing options, just to see if I think they’re worth it. Sometimes they are, but not always.

I don’t agree with the notion that devs shouldn’t bother pushing the envelope with trying to achieve high fidelity graphics though, especially when optimising for lower spec hardware. If previous generations of game development had stuck to that, we’d still be plodding around with wireframe models now!

@NEStalgia Yeah. LOL!

Okay, so maybe saying "I don't care" was a little misleading. I do care to a certain degree (and I am aware of the pros and cons for each mode), it's just that the default setting is perfectly fine for the vast majority of games.

For me, the only thing worthwhile this gen brought was solid state drives for much, much, faster load times (but expansion card prices are RIDICULOUS!).

Honestly not think of another feature I use consistently that matters or impacts in positive way.

The 'failure' or RT on consoles isn't because of the tech. Its the weakness of the AMD GPU in this area compared to Nvidia and mixed signals and information to gamers from devs. RT is a series of different effects, it's not just a switch that is flipped.

It can noticeably help in games like Metro Exodus or Spiderman 2. Many games use a minor effect like shadows and then claim "Ray Tracing!".

Go see Alan Wake 2 or Cyberpunk 2077 in 'Overdrive' mode. Those will show you what's possible.

The problem is the paper launch shows us it was theoretically possible. They just did nothing with it. Sony then doubled down on this where Microsoft dropped the ball. Never again will I buy a beta console.

Its a cool addition to gaming but when i'm in the middle of a game i'm not looking at the puddles to see how good the reflection is. Its cool but if running RT effects the performance of the game i turn it off.

ray tracing and anything else to do with graphics is a waste at this point . gaming has way bigger problems that need addressing

To me it's how they use it. The cost of performance for it is not worth it. I get the effort baked in lighting of textures requires but even still. To me glass or puddle reflections I don't care for. As a programmer or artist I'd say sure. As a player I couldn't care less.

Same with walking scenes. To set the pace or not. Or to have us walk around and appreciate what the rooms were filled with of objects. I mean to me a Musou with many enemies is a bit much and their AI but I mean objects in a good, the bricks, the wallpaper. I just don't care. I've played enough games. I didn't need the walking and talking. I didn't need the oh the game has to have me listen to the dialogue, or make the game longer by having us walk or because everyone else had to have their COD4 MW1/Rage 1 car scene moment equivalent.

We didn't have it the gen before for a reason. The same reason 2D games don't have that nonsense.

Unless it's used for a mechanic gimmicky if they want to offer one with water physics, lighting, or not (cough why the SSDs if we get scripted rifts Rift Apart, give me a gimmicky experience) I don't care how good the game looks.

I have cared for gameplay/mechanics since forever game developers. There is a reason if platformer logic your character moveset sucks in platforming, combat or navigation the game in part sucks which is why in many cases i hate RPGs your story isn't good enough for me and your level design isn't either. So it's down to combat hmm passable or not worth my time. Japanese Tactics RPGs it is these days. Boards, grind, get in and out. Fair visual novel scenes. Not tactics battle, world to explore, dialogue and the upgrading is tedious.

I care about song structure since many years now. Not lyrics. Not everyone has my radio unless it's relevant enough to say and not Borderlands/Ratchet levels of annoying. If you need a cutscene have it not drag it out. If want a reputation or charisma skill point/detective clues relevance system add it then dialogue selection and the reactions not meaning much.

Like I get some graphics techniques but ray tracing hasn't been one of them I see performance benefit for just so we get better lighting, reflections I didn't care for on glass buildings any more than I did a mirror in an old game just once was good enough or windows with outside sites to see.

I already didn't care seeing oh the reflections inside a cupboard. To me just having 1 mirror is good enough. Having ray tracing for lighting or reflections on buildings when you can have less glass buildings oh wait modern day cities sigh.

I mean some areas in PS3/360 games had mirrors like Alpha Protocol besides it's good dialogue system and mission selection where Last of Us had a broken mirror but it was pushing other goals for it's level design I get that.

I mean if Mario Kart 64 or other racing games can have footage tracking the player on some TV like screen then just whatever fake/pre-recorded footage. There is a reason why mirrors/TVs with footage can be done on hardware if it's done right or benefits the game. That can be impressive I find. I don't hate mirrors but I don't need a cupboard/glass modern era building with them scale to make me impressed for the ray tracing I already don't care about anymore to offer it of performance cost.

Even a mechanic with ray tracing like benefits with light puzzles or something would be nice.

I'd be fine with just a torch or something else to compensate, I've seen a PS1 homebrew game to prove that point slightly without lighting or other details not that that is a lot to go on but still (or does that need baked in lighting too to achieve the effect? and level design, does a light source and less tunnels or something to make the lighting work out in level design).

I believe it will always be a waste of time until performance is at the point where more FPS wouldn't be noticeable. I don't know what that number is but I suspect it's significantly higher than 1000. A good few generations of display technology to go yet.

Everybody Loves Ray(mond) Tracing.

I like it if you can get it in 60 FPS. IN CP77, Ray tracing is great for a picture, but at 30 FPS, no thank you.

Also. What game is in the picture? I've played Metro Exodus 3 times and never seen that.

If it isn't Metro maybe start crediting where the pic came from.