this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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That’s not what ray tracing is about at all. Reflections, imo, are the least interesting part of ray tracing.
shame most people who implement it don't agree
Can you share any examples? I have yet to see an rtx enabled game that was unusually shiny. Most non RTX game already tend to have way too much specular reflection but the few RTX games I've seen were way better with that.
Have you had a look at the RTX trailers of games? Most just show of how great the reflections are and barely anything else. It's like " Look! We've got RTX now! See that puddle? Now you see yourself in there! That's why we added more puddles!"
I partially disagree, GI is easy to do most of the time with baked lighting, but reflections (especially more diffuse reflections) are hard unless you have very simple environments or tons of gpu resources to spend on rendering alternate camera angles. Even the more modern rasterized reflection techniques such as parallax corrected cubemaps or screen space reflections break easily if you look at them wrong. Raytraced global illumination and soft shadows are still great though, but are more easy to get around with regular rendering in most games where the environments are very static.