Half-Life 2 RTX
Ray tracing appeared in 2018 as a breakthrough in graphics, but gamers were divided into camps regarding the necessity of this «feature».
Seven years later, most gamers believe that the feature is still not a must-have. Most of the complaints are about performance drops and the lack of significant visual improvements that would justify the additional burden on «hardware». For example, the recent announcement of the Half-Life 2 RTX demo even made some jokes, the game still has to withstand «hardware».
According to the results of a new survey, 67.3% of players believe that RT — is more of an optional «feature» rather than a standard that should be implemented in games. The reason is simple: a significant drop in performance due to a small difference in visual quality. In another similar survey conducted two years ago, 50% of respondents already doubted that this technology was worthy of attention.
Even modern graphics cards are experiencing technical problems, as they cannot provide stable frame rates in many games with RT activated. For example, Cyberpunk 2077 looks amazing with ray tracing, but even on top-end «hardware» the game often crashes with FPS.
In a discussion on the forum NeoGAFthat gamers said that the visual quality of the game does not necessarily depend on RT technology. Death Stranding, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Stellar Blade — all these games look great without ray tracing, thanks to good work with lighting and textures.
«I’m thankful if games have RT, but if there are no RT features, I’m still contented. But my opinion has changed after seeing so many games suffered from adding RT feature, where imaged quality and clarity is not that good», — said one player.
Players agree that RT will one day become a mandatory part of games. But they think it will take 10-15 years. Among the arguments about 2036-2044, they pointed out that this requires medium graphics cards that will more powerful than RTX 4090 and will be able to handle RT without a significant drop in FPS. Meanwhile, most players prefer to turn off RT to get a stable 60 or 120 FPS. It’s likely that this trend will continue for a few more years (or, as some say, decades).
Source: Tech4Gamers