Will "Ray Tracing Off" Modes Get Neglected/Look Worse In Future Games?

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:02]Hello gents exclamation point. Will rasterized visuals look worse than ever going forward with an increasing focus on ray and even path tracing studios might be tempted to invest less time and effort into the rasterized versions of their games. We've already seen games looking pretty bad in their non RT modes. Do you Do you think this trend will continue or might devs abandon abandon rasterized visuals uh for larger games and go with lower fidelity RT like Pragmata aka Dead Space?

[00:00:30]Dead Space. Oh dear. Uh for weaker hardware and focus on path tracing for stronger devices. Cheers. Well, this is an interesting point, isn't it, Alex?

[00:00:39]But fundamentally, you know, it seems to be like this is like the sort of glass half full view on the evolution of graphics and graphics getting better.

[00:00:49]And um yeah, I mean it it is the case that RT games are becoming more of a focus. And but there are still fallbacks to enable um non-RT hardware or to accelerate performance if that's what you want. Um I'm seeing this as just like the evolution of graphics as opposed to um a conscious effort to make rasterized visuals look worse.

[00:01:13]Right.

[00:01:14]Uh as an example, when software rendering was petering out, uh the software modes in a lot of games uh has were missing things like transparency effects, uh multi-texturing, uh you know, filtering on textures and stuff when you would turn them on and they were legacy support options towards the end just allow other people to play the game or if you for some reason didn't have like a power you had like a really low-powered graphics accelerator or GPU but a really strong CPU, then you can maybe get more performance, I guess. But uh yeah, I I kind of view it like that. I don't expect developers, if they have already a ray tracing mode, and they're uh spending a lot of their artistic time making the game that way, to find a perfect balance where they uh by trying to make them more similar to one another, uh kind of make them too similar to one another and you don't see the benefit anymore. There was a presentation at GDC by the developers uh at Sucker Punch regarding Ghost of Tsushima, and they mentioned how their one of their goals, which I kind of question whether or not it was a good goal, was to make it so that the hardware RTGI offers similar visuals to the game's standard GI, which wasn't using RT. And to And as a result of that, you know, there were scenarios where they there could have probably been way better visuals actually with the RTGI on, but it was like mixing systems there to make them more similar looking.

[00:02:54]And I feel like that isn't a way forward that I don't know if I agree with and I don't think a lot of devs will want to do because it the the pre-dev time to make that actually work is probably not too great.

[00:03:07]And then, you know, like you're essentially not giving the people who bought better hardware like the better visuals maybe that they crave.

[00:03:15]Uh so I don't think that's pretty good.

[00:03:16]I think in the future more devs will uh abandon rasterized visuals, and I do think they're going to look worse and worse because the games are going to be designed around technology that is fundamentally different and allows different lighting scenarios, different gameplay scenarios, and the there are no fallbacks for those things in rasterization. They just look worse, and that's how it's always been, but people are now starting to see that that is the fact. Um I think people just kind of did have rosy vision about a lot of things like it areas in games that are indirectly lit and moving objects have always looked terrible in rasterized games.

[00:03:52]Like just people just kind of got used to it. Um so a lot of games when they design it around it like uh what is it? Not Pragmata, Dead Space, but uh Resident Evil Requiem. Like the game's opening scene is just indirect skylighting, which is pretty bad in rasterization if there's moving objects, so I feel like uh I feel like this is just the way forward and it's how things have been always. Mhm. Yeah. Yeah. Um I'm just looking at the Steam hardware survey top 20 GPUs. Um Um there's a Well, obviously the vast majority of them support ray tracing. I think there's like maybe four that don't out of the 20. And of the uh some of the ones in there uh integrated graphics, um GTX 1650, they're going to be having trouble just from a memory perspective in running the latest games anyway, whether they're using ray tracing or not. So I think there is sort of like a you know, obviously, you know, [laughter] as more advanced graphics hardware appears, um the needs to accommodate um non-RT GPUs diminishes. I do think there are, you know, good reasons to have that fallback though because, you know, um proliferation of handheld devices, that's something that's something that's quite you know, and then of course integrated graphics in general on laptops, you would like to be able to run your games, right? But the focus is clearly moving on. Um John?

[00:05:12]So this [clears throat] this makes me think about the whole like uh a lot of people don't like ray tracing, right? We've been very positive on ray tracing and do like it. But I I've really wanted to take the time and like try to understand like what is it about this that people don't like? And fundamentally, I think it comes down to uh different tolerance for various visual artifacts, right? Like when I talk to Alex, for instance, uh you're very much somebody that sees floating objects, you know, poorly indirectly lit scenes, you know, you see all the issues that rasterization can offer or struggles with, right? And that bothers you. Um a lot of people don't actually notice or care about that stuff.

[00:06:00]And what they do care about is image uh consistency and like uh I guess temporal stability, right? And one of the downsides to ray tracing as we make our journey to increasingly more sophisticated tracing, uh it has been this the whole denoising aspect and all the other sort of like temporal instabilities that are introduced along the way. And I think we generally fall on the side of we're willing to tolerate some of those uh temporal instabilities uh in favor of the increased lighting precision. But if you're somebody that wasn't bothered by the lack of precision in those scenes and just never noticed it, um then you're going to find these new techniques, especially on lower-end hardware, to be annoying. A lot of people do. They don't like to see those artifacts.

[00:06:52]That's what their eye picks up. They didn't pick up the other thing.

[00:06:55]And I And so in that sense, I fully understand and I can respect uh why people look at this stuff and they don't like it. I do think there is quite a gulf in terms of the quality of the ray tracing implementation and that some games are far noisier than others.

[00:07:12]And unfortunately, it's not just the RT noise, either. There's plenty of other uh issues that can arise with modern rendering techniques because it does rely a lot of on uh sort of like averaging things together across frames, right? This sort of temporal update, you know, it's whether it's anti-aliasing, denoising, etc. All of that stuff does add up. And older games definitely just look different. Um For instance, it's the same with TAA where it's like, you know, people don't like TAA. It's like, why?

[00:07:42]Well, they think it looks softer. But it's solving in-surface aliasing, which is something that's always driven me nuts. But some people don't care. They want those like super sharp MSAA'd edges. And again, that's kind of their prerogative.

[00:07:56]And I I think the challenge to software engineers here is just how do we how can we solve these problems with temporal stability uh in a cheap enough fashion that most users of our game will not experience those problems. And I think that is something that companies have been working towards, right? That's where ray reconstruction was born. That's the reason for its existence. The same with AMD's solution.

[00:08:25]Like they're they're clearly working towards this. They're working towards techniques to sort of remove these issues.

[00:08:31]Like I would say DLSS has reached the point where it does genuinely in many cases look significantly better than native 4K because it is actually trying to reconstruct a super sampled image rather than just like a native 4K image.

[00:08:45]But it certainly took a while to get there and not every implementation is created equal.

[00:08:49]And so when we're talking about removing rasterization versus RT, the conversation then it gets tricky because obviously, to make rasterized visuals match or look anywhere near ray traced visuals, but with it requires a lot of work from the development side. Basically, a completely separate pipeline.

[00:09:11]And if you already had those capabilities in there, it you can do it.

[00:09:16]There is a time punishment for it, right? Like there's a huge time cost to baking out lighting.

[00:09:22]Uh this is something that the id guys talked a lot about when they shifted towards ray tracing for Doom Eternal or sorry, for Doom the Dark Ages because if they had continued with the Doom Eternal method, uh the amount of time spent baking out the lighting would have increased like tenfold. And it would have just made adjusting the map design and like working on the game far more difficult and probably would have added like another year to development. So like there is a cost there.

[00:09:48]But it's finding that balance where you can make it look good enough to please as many people as possible, and that's just not easy. So I really I I don't know. I've just been thinking a lot about this problem because like a lot of people push back against it and I just wanted to understand why. And I think I see why. I I think it's a lot simpler, John. I think it's a lot simpler.

[00:10:08]Basically, um you had a whole generation of games that were built with rasterization in mind and then you had like these tacked-on ray tracing features. And um uh a lot of people turned on those ray tracing features, saw their performance drop by 40, 50% and couldn't you know, couldn't really see a a huge upgrade to the experience in line with the um with the performance cost. And therefore, ray tracing is a scam. I think that's the sort of main argument I've seen. I think that's where it stems from, Rich, but I don't think that's the whole argument either, right? Like there's a lot of people that pushed back against Doom: The Dark Ages for instance versus Doom Eternal. You saw so many comparisons where you're like, "Look what we had in 2020 running at like 1,000 FPS, you know." Yeah. Mhm. I mean, um It's interesting that Dead Space, Prag Mata, is brought up in this question because um uh it's one of these games where clearly the developer intention is to have ray tracing active and without it, it kind of looks a lot worse, which I could think is kind of like regardless of his point there.

[00:11:12]That's really interesting, Rich, cuz I actually saw people arguing against the path traced version of Prag Mata even.

[00:11:18]>> And the reason was was like they're like, "Oh, it looks darker without path tracing."

[00:11:24]But I'm like okay, I get that, but like the blue lights over there like directly in front of you produce no no actual like scene light. They're just like dots that show blue. Mhm. Right? And I guess so there's also this disconnect between what something should be and what I guess personal preference. Like they're like, "Oh, I like the darker look." And that's fair enough, but like if the artist places a light in the scene like should the light cast light or not?

[00:11:55]And that's kind of like gets into the weeds of like this whole artistic stuff cuz clearly there is a big blue light there. But even in the normal ray tracing mode, like it doesn't really like produce the kind of glow that you would expect.

[00:12:09]>> [snorts] >> Uh only in the path tracer does that stuff factored in. Like you're kind of picking and choosing the lights and man, it's complicated in terms of like how you approach this stuff. Yeah, I think you know, the other thing of course is that um you know, it is Prag Mata is built I think with ray tracing in mind, but it is [clears throat] a ray tracing technology that's defined by the technical limits of having to run the game at 60 hertz on a console. It's you know, is is that the developer's intention or is it the developer's being forced to make compromises because of the technology they got to deal with.

[00:12:38]It's a really, really tricky uh conversation there.