Why are so many new AA/AAA games dropping hardware ray tracing lately?

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Daryl_ED@reddit

Nvidia better drop the RTX of their branding lol

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Basically all games are now multiplatform, and since consoles have weak ray tracing hardware, all games and engines need to have software-based lightning anyway. Since there are now software-based GI techniques like Lumen, hardware RT doesn't have that big advantage

Nvidia )and (AMD) mid-range GPUs have improved at snail pace, slower than ever. RT launched 7 years ago, yet RTX5060 and sometimes even 5070 don't perform well on 2.5K-4K + high settings + RT features even on older games.

I don't think RT or path tracing is dying though, there are now rumors that PS6 is going to have \~5080-5090 level RT performance, so it should allow developers to focus on RT

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ProfessionalB0ss@reddit

I don't think RT or path tracing is dying though, there are now rumors that PS6 is going to have ~5080-5090 level RT performance, so it should allow developers to focus on RT

Simply not possible, no AMD card has that, those are 1200$+ cards

Look at 9070XT at best is where the PS6 will be

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dudemanguy301@reddit

Lumens hardware mode was heavily neglected until UE5.4 and onwards. EPIC themselves didn’t start recommending hardware RT Lumen until version 5.6.

Yeah until next gen consoles take off and leave this gen behind in oh probably a decade or so given how cross gen time works. We will be using software ray tracing like lumen as the main thing not hardware rt. Unless everyone learns to optimize hardware RT like ID can. Still rt so.the main benefits are there just not as good looking

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IezekiLL@reddit

Yeah. Nvidia GPUs can reach any height, but due to console market importance the real indicator is AMD. We need to waith for PS6 on UDNA+zen5/6 to appear and then we will start to see actually raytraced games.

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SireEvalish@reddit

Unreal Engine 5 makes it easy to use SW-based ray tracing, which most of the games you listed use in lieu of HW-based solutions. Of course, every one of those games would probably look/run better if they added a HW option, but I digress.

Here are a list of titles released in 2025 that contain HW RT features:

ARC Raiders
Assassin's Creed Shadows
Avowed
Cronos: The New Dawn
Doom: The Dark Ages (full path tracing available)
FBC: Firebreak
FC 26
Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced (Actually one of the better recent RT implementations, BTW)
Little Nightmares Enhanced Edition (Not 100% sure)
Little Nightmares III (Not 100% sure)
Ninja Gaiden 2 Black (though it's implemented poorly)
Oblivion Remastered
Outer Worlds 2 (though it's implemented poorly)
Rise of the Ronin (Not 100% sure. Likely since it's a PS5 port which has HW)
Spider Man 2 (technically an older title from PS5, but supported HW RT)

Dying Light: The Beast appears to be getting RT in an update in the next few weeks. We'll see what happens there.

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MC_chrome@reddit

Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced

Is it not a little bleak that a 12 year old game is one of the better representations of an emerging technology?

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fire2day@reddit

I find that older games get the biggest uplift from it. A lot of newer games look just as good with baked-in lighting as they do with raytracing.

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Silent-Selection8161@reddit

If you ask most developers they'd agree RT is maybe a modest improvement on baked lighting at most, and what they really like about it is being able to just go and make levels quickly of whatever size without worrying about baking the lighting or how much disc all the baked lighting takes up.

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Plank_With_A_Nail_In@reddit

But the game still needs baked lighting as it needs to run on non RT cards so no developers are getting this improvement.

You haven't asked any developers lol you are putting words in their mouths.

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No_Fennel4315@reddit

Except, games really don't have to run on non rt cards anymore. Have you seen the statistics of how many people are on cards that support hardware ray tracing? The vast, vast majority. It will show soon enough, it already has.

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Flippantlip@reddit

One of DOOM's devs, I think the director? Can't recall who, there's a technical-interview online, where he goes really in depth about their tech-choices and what they were excited about.

RT was a big one of em: https://youtu.be/DZfhbMc9w0Q?si=ivnnCKl8Gw4bLfq8&t=913
"Without this feature (ray tracing), we'd have to elongate the build-time by a magnitude of years".
He continues to explain that, level-design-wise, designers can now immediately see how lighting affects a scene -- and make minute changes, that they would otherwise either not notice without baking, and or would take a really long time to process properly.

I.E: Even if the end-user does not have access to RT, the development engine does, so game-designers can still exploit the feature to get a quick way to demo the level.
The feature does not prevent the devs to also bake the lighting afterwards, when they are happy with how everything looks.
(The latter bits about baking was not part of the interview, this is my assumption)

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Strazdas1@reddit

If you have any dynmic light sources baked lighting either looks awful or you have to put a shitload of effort to hide it and bloat game size to 50+ gigabytes.

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fire2day@reddit

Oh yeah, I’m not discounting how great of a tool it can be for developers.

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radspot77@reddit

GTA5E released in 2025.

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Busy-Scientist3851@reddit

Nah. It's still very much a legacy non-PBR game, just has better more realistic shadows and sunlight, not much else.

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SireEvalish@reddit

It's a combination of a few different things, really.

Being an older game means the rasterized rendering isn't particularly heavy by modern standards. While the game has been updated over the years, especially when they ported it to PC/PS4/XBO, the core technology was designed to run on PS3/360. Assets and geometry aren't crazy by modern standards.
The engine is being used for GTA6, so work done to get RT working in it can likely be applied to that game as well. They can basically use GTA5 as a test bed for the features in GTA6.
They weren't under any sort of time crunch or release pressure. They could spend as much time as needed (within reason, of course) to get it running well.
Rockstar implemented what I consider two of the most important RT features: Ray-traced global illumination and reflections. I'm of the belief that when done well these can have impressive boosts to overall image fidelity and "correctness" of the lighting in the world. It's especially noticeable in a game like GTA5 which has a variety of different lights, shifting times of day, and lots of reflective surfaces.

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Strazdas1@reddit

The PC version wouldnt run on PS3/360 at all. the gap is huge. They also had to invent a new way of streaming data just to make it run on the PS3/360 due to how slow its data transfer rates were. A one-off technology that got abandoned for PS4/Xbone/PC as it wasnt needed there.

They can basically use GTA5 as a test bed for the features in GTA6.

I think thats exactly why we got the enhanced edition.

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Strazdas1@reddit

Its a remaster of literally the most popular game in a decade.

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Realistic_Village184@reddit

I don't see why it would be. There are lots of older games that are used as essentially tech demos, like Portal RTX and Quake 2 RTX. What about that seems bleak to you? It's not like no new games have hardware ray-tracing. Am I missing something?

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VotesDontPayMyBills@reddit

Criticizing Unreal Engine 5 because current PCs can't handle it like other engines is similar to the backlash CryEngine faced when Crysis debuted: great graphics demand substantial hardware. Moving on!

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geo2160@reddit

I don't know if you're just young or just forgot how Crysis looked at the time. Crysis 1 was pretty well optimized and the jump in image quality from other games in that generation was huge. Crysis 3 was criticized for bad optimization because it used to render out of bounds tessellated textures to make Nvidia look better in benchmarks.

UE5 is responsible for 90% of the badly optimized slop from the last couple of years.

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Hytht@reddit

Crysis 1 was heavily single threaded

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geo2160@reddit

As opposed to which games? Mainstream Quad core processors were 10 months old at that time. Even dual cores were barely 2 years old.

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vanBraunscher@reddit

Yeah, the games industry was hilariously slow in adopting more than one core usage. Some franchises had been dragging their feet well into the late 2010s even.

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AntLive9218@reddit

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-Purrfection-@reddit

You can see the difference here. For example UE5 Lumen has a software and hardware version.

https://youtu.be/O6GC8TZbJmI?si=5wMd4YtRy3x40rTu&t=1193

Basically the software version is tracing into a low quality version of the game world, so reflections for example aren't ideal for sofware RT, but Global Illumination doesn't have to be so accurate so it works better. Software RT can be run as a generic compute shader, so any GPU can run it, but it's lower quality and less performant.

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RT is always on. You're just using RT running on your GPU shaders instead of the hardware accelerated version on your RT cores. That's the difference between software lumen and hardware lumen.

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Cheap-Plane2796@reddit

He said it runs like ass with rt on, you say it rubs better with rt off. Ok?

It looks hideous with rt on and worse with rt off btw. Gross looking game.

They re shitting out games at breakneck speed and it shows in the quality. Huge step down from avowed in polish and graphics

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Vb_33@reddit

That's because RT Lumen in the outer worlds 2 is RT reflections, indirect lighting and shadows. On top of enabling RT Lumen people are then cranking up all the RT options to max (reflections, shadows, global illumination etc). DF has said for ages that going above high on UE5 settings is heavily punitive and not worth it for current gen hardware, you can check out their TOW2 review to see them say something similar. Even software lumen at very high is super punishing.

The real question is, is very high bringing value for the performance it demands and the answer for software lumen is generally absolutely not (couple exceptions in TOW2), as for HW Lumen its better but in TOW2 it's bugged (shadows don't work right) and very high isn't worth it currently.

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Gearsper29@reddit

This is a cpu bottleneck. It has nothing to do with 5090.

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the_nin_collector@reddit

no. Please read stuff first before posting false news.

"The Outer Worlds with ray tracing can't hit 60FPS at paltry 540p resolution with an RTX 5090 and 9800X3D - ray tracing 'performance' mirrors Borderlands 4 fiasco"

Just Google it. RT is straight fucked.

Digital Foundry confirms as well.

Modern CPUs barely matter these days in modern AAA games.

Please learn to interpet what you are reading before you accuse someone for false news.

A significant part of ray tracing calculations are done by the cpu. So ray tracing greatly increases cpu load. The Outer Worlds has bad cpu utilization in general and with rt it probably hammers 1 or 2 cores.

Thats why with RT it has a frame cap even with 9800x3d of around 60-70 fps no matter the gpu or the resolution. zWORMz Gaming got around 73 fps with a 5090 at 4k dlss quality and the same fps at 720p but with less half the gpu utilization. This is obviously a cpu bottleneck.

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AIgoonermaxxing@reddit

zWORMz Gaming got around 73 fps with a 5090 at 4k dlss quality and the same fps at 720p but with less half the gpu utilization.

Because ray tracing itself is very old tech , we are looking at new techniques that give the same quality and perform at higher rates , also most the world doesn't have Nividia RTX GPUs , many of us just didn't bother to upgrade from the 2070.

When the price of a ps5 is cheaper than the latest Nvidia GPU , expect gamers to look elsewhere.

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Bannedwith1milKarma@reddit

Because their customers turn everything on, then complain about performance.

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Verite_Rendition@reddit

It's a shame this is being downvoted so much. Even if the OP is (probably) reading into things a bit too much, they do raise a good topic of discussion - albeit one that's probably more about game development practices than hardware.

BF6 strikes me as a particularly interesting case. BF5 was a marquee title for hardware RT (yes, NVIDIA, we get it: BF5 has reflections!). So having it absent from BF6 is a major shift.

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Cheerful_Champion@reddit

BF6 strikes me as a particularly interesting case. BF5 was a marquee title for hardware RT (yes, NVIDIA, we get it: BF5 has reflections!). So having it absent from BF6 is a major shift.

RT in BF5 was already killing performance. With how much is going on in BF6 it would be impossible to run it on anything below 5090 with multi frame gen enabled.

Someone in EA, shockingly, decided to do thing that makes sense and drop RT and focus on performance. I believe that once their engine will be updated in the future to handle RT better and RT hardware will improve they will start implementing it in BFs again.

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MC_chrome@reddit

I’ll be the one to say it: first person shooters don’t need raytracing. You aren’t going around admiring the environment like it’s Cyberpunk 2077.

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moofunk@reddit

It's more than just appearances. RT rendering is far more robust and is the ultimate way to render. You don't need 100 tricks to make your game look good, if it relies on realism.

The rendering process is simpler, it scales easily and relates more with extremely mature offline pipelines. You can use similar artistic techniques to what offline CG artists use.

That is why I think future game engines, not the behemoths that exist now, will be a lot smaller and rely fully on RT, and dump the difficult labor of fidelity on the GPU and whatever RT acceleration techniques it uses.

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MC_chrome@reddit

RT rendering is far more robust and is the ultimate way to render

Sure, at a massive compute cost.

Have you seen how much of the die that NVIDIA’s current raytracing implementation takes up? We are almost 6 years into the RTX era and we still don’t have multiple tiers of cards that can ray trace competently at decent frame rates.

I think raytracing will reach its ultimate potential when it can be done entirely in software without needing specialized hardware.

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moofunk@reddit

We are almost 6 years into the RTX era

Getting there will take 15-20 years, and after that not much will change, except fidelity, resolution, power consumption and more AI assist. This is a long haul project that will take 10 GPU generations to solve.

I think raytracing will reach its ultimate potential when it can be done entirely in software without needing specialized hardware.

Not going to happen. The hardware is what forces it to be fast. It always has been since the 1970s. Then you can be clever with AI denoising and things like that, but the core reason we have RT in games in the first place is the extreme parallelism implemented in hardware, secondarily very good AI denoising.

Even offline raytracers have become more GPU oriented over the past 10 years, because it simply is much, much faster and scales so very simply, and only the old dogs like RenderMan or Arnold still use CPU for final render.

We observed also for a while some 20 years ago with offline raytracers that CPU based ones try to use many clever tricks to speed up global illumination, by using irradiance caches and various sparse sampling tricks, allowing many different sampling settings and things like that. You can simply brute force your way through that with a GPU to get the same image using simpler methods, so those features are now gone again, i.e. less software, but more speed.

I know you think of software based "path tracers" like Lumen, but they cannot grow in accuracy and speed as fast as hardware based RT will be able to over time, because they use less robust tricks to function and are plainly less accurate. They are mostly a product of many consumer GPUs still being too slow for RT.

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Strazdas1@reddit

Getting there will take 15-20 years

Well fuck them then. Getting there shouldnt take even 5 years. this utter stagnation in tech adoption in games is ridiculous and developers need a good ass whooping for this.

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moofunk@reddit

Getting there shouldnt take even 5 years.

Physics won't allow that. Realtime raytracing is a hard number-of-samples per second problem. More samples = sharper and more stable image.

RT engines still need to be maybe 10x-100x faster to compete with offline raytracers for image quality. Then they also need to consume much less power.

We're able to touch the bottom end of it now, which is a tantalising prospect for changing game development (any kind of 3D visualization) into a very simple, ubiquitous raytracing by default method.

The good news is that all you need to do is throw transistors at the problem with no change in algorithms.

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Strazdas1@reddit

Nothing to do with physics. Realtime ray traving is viable on even budget cards of this generation. They dont need to be faster, they need to be implemented.

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moofunk@reddit

Everything to do with physics. This is a problem that can't be solved outside of throwing more transistors at it, as has been done over the past 50 years.

Realtime ray traving is viable on even budget cards of this generation.

What you're getting in current games are only a smidgen of what you can do with raytracing.

The current top end RTX solution is a huge compromise to get responsive frame rates and must use AI upscaling and sophisticated AI denoising to work.

The criticism that modern games look as good as they do with RTX on or off lies in rasterization/raytracing hybridisation, where the rasterizer helps the raytracer with primary rays. You don't get any of the benefits of simulating real cameras with raytracing, i.e. real accurate DOF, real lens flares and real motion blur. You don't get caustics, you don't get light scattering or subsurface scattering without tricks or special arrangements. These are too compute intensive for real time.

As it is, even with low image quality demands, RTX fails the first goal of actual real time raytracing: Converge an image fully in a single frame. That's impossible at the moment, because the GPU plainly can't calculate enough samples fast enough per frame. In Quake II RTX, you can converge in about 500 frames on a 2080Ti, so maybe 125 frames on a 5090. You need to get down to 1-3 frames.

Forget indoor scenes generated with only bounced light. You can't do those in realtime at all without burying them in noise.

Play around with Omniverse for a bit and compare the RTX scene rendering with Iray scene rendering. There is a stark visual difference. RTX still takes several seconds to converge and is very noise riddled, where Iray takes about 100x longer to converge, but is also much more accurate and has much less noise. You really want Iray's several minutes long render to be the realtime goal, hence GPUs need to get 100x faster.

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VastTension6022@reddit

I think raytracing will reach its ultimate potential when it can be done entirely in software without needing specialized hardware.

That's like saying rasterization will reach its ultimate potential when it can be done entirely on the CPU without needing a GPU.

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Wait_for_BM@reddit

I think raytracing will reach its ultimate potential when it can be done entirely in software without needing specialized hardware.

We has fully software RT back in the old days, so that's a wrong conclusion. The physics and math for RT are well know for a long time. They (e.g. Pixar) had been rendering them frame by frame that takes tens of hours for ages. There is no wishful thinking that it can be make to runs orders of magnitudes faster. RT only become more main stream accessible when we can do some of the limited RT in real time.

We need the specialized hardware in GPU to accelerate RT. Specialized hardware always beats doing it on pure software on a general purpose processor. i.e. without specialized hardware.

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Strazdas1@reddit

Well, now that you said it, maybe dont say it again. Its a stupid thing to say.

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BighatNucase@reddit

I think that's too broad a statement really. I think it makes perfect sense for a game like Battlefield 6 to focus more on making things as smooth as possible for gamers because it needs to be a standout hit for the franchise to continue going on; it's better to have slightly dated graphics and no complaints about performance than to risk it. Super competitive shooters similarly don't really need it either for obvious reasons. Singleplayer shooters though? I think it would be silly not to try and push things a bit graphically even if it's just an option.

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Western-Helicopter84@reddit

Ray tracing is not only for the visuals. Ray traced global illumination can decrease a lot of development time & cost.

Don't know where you're getting those performance numbers, here's a 4060 getting 70-80fps at 1440p/RT with no upscaling.. I also used to play the game at 4K DLSS quality (so 1440p) on a 4070 and had no issues making the game out.

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Cheerful_Champion@reddit

Don't know where you're getting those performance numbers

At least on Old Reddit, it shows the percent of votes that were up-votes ("% upvoted"). So you you can infer the downvotes from that information.

I don't use New Reddit, so I don't know if and where that information is located there.

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letsgoiowa@reddit

Wait where do you see that? I've been on Old Reddit since my account has been around and that feature vanished for me like 7 years ago.

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Verite_Rendition@reddit

Top right-hand corner. Case in point, this post:

this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025

462 points (83% upvoted)

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letsgoiowa@reddit

Ohhh just the posts for me not comments

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Sevastous-of-Caria@reddit

Bf6 did the sensible thing. Bf5 RT was slow, outdated and unoptimised. Excluding it made bf5 the most optimised AND visually pleasing FPS out there.

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not_a_gay_stereotype@reddit

Bfv had the easiest to run RT I've ever seen in a game and it looked great on the mud and water. 2042 only had RT global illumination and you basically couldn't tell the difference and it tanked your FPS.

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Vb_33@reddit

You wish BF2042 had RT Global Illumination, in reality it only had RT Ambient Occlusion which is the cheapest (to run) and most unnoticeable RT effect of the whole batch.

At least BF5 had RT reflections which are more noticeable and in BF5 had great fidelity. also BF5 was the first RT AAA game, it paved the way for modern RT games, I run BF5 with RT reflections on all the time and it's great.

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Ehh, BFV was rough performance wise. It got fixed later gradually.

But also BFV being 7 years old and 3 generations of gpus released also helps.

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Sevastous-of-Caria@reddit

Im still impressed cards like 5050 can extract 250fps easily. Same as CS2 while having 64 player lobbies with terrain deformation. Physics, vehicles and explosions.

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letsgoiowa@reddit

5050 at 250 fps???? Show me because my 3070 is certainly not doing that

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2nm or 1.8nm sounds more feasible.

PS5 pro launch price was already 700$

PS6 will cost 800-990$ even if it's 1.8nm or not lol

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Exciting-Ad-5705@reddit

Pro consoles are usually more expensive.

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Good_luckapollo@reddit

Usually the costs go down for manufacturing and the pro console comes out at the old consoles MSRP. PS5 pro is an anomaly given that didn't based on modern economic and manufacturing problems.

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digital_n01se_@reddit

that was because the cost per mm2 of silicon decreased, but that's not the case anymore, we are getting more transistors, but those transistors are expensive, and the price rarely goes down.

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Noreng@reddit

Not necessarily more cache, but GPCs

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digital_n01se_@reddit

I think that the modern workloads became "too general purpose" to fit into the classic GPU insane parallel scheme, perhaps GPUs would benefit from a more complex front-end capable of proper branch prediction and out of order execution, or smarter cache design.

I'm concerned about the power draw, 3090, 4090 and 5090 increased the power to 350W, 450W and 570W TDP

If someone can clarify my ignorance, I would be glad.

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Noreng@reddit

The entire point of GPUs is SIMD, if you're trying to not use SIMD on a modern GPU it's a skill issue rather than a hardware issue.

I don't know exactly what's causing the poor utilization in Ada and Blackwell, but it's likely a case of front-end.

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digital_n01se_@reddit

Imagine a branch inside SIMD code, some sequential thing that would lose performance if you execute it on the CPU and then travel across PCI express due to latency.

Some workloads waste performance due to this CPU -> PCIe -> GPU travel, GPUs don't work well with sequential code, some tasks can't be vectorized furthermore.

I think that's why some tasks fit better on a AVX capable CPU, the SIMD units are close to the CPU, minimizing latency.

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digital_n01se_@reddit

u/Noreng

I realized that it's far more expensive to develop such complex GPUs than optimizing code

A GPU GPC capable of that would be much larger, that means less GPCs per die, therefore less performance, and the performance upflit is questionable.

thanks for your clarification

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KennKennyKenKen@reddit

Never made sense a multiplayer shooter was pushing the boundaries of graphics.

They did the right thing this year by focusing on optimisation. And they did an amazing job.

It doesn't get enough credit. My 5 year old 3080 can run the game at nearly 200fps. Insanity, so pleasantly surprised considering how many unoptimized games have been coming out

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Techhead7890@reddit

EA being EA, the cynical part of me thinks there was a business deal or some weird business strategy to include it and the mainline devs couldn't convince the producers and managers to drop it lol.

And then again I think you also discount the amount of campaign only folk. It's not as bad as in RTS where competitive PVP is brutal and tiny, but sometimes people are okay with less performance on a singleplayer experience that looks good.

Well, we have to remember all the really important stuff isnt 3nm. All of the actual gates will still be in the 17 to 24nm range. Its only some features like the interconnects and maybe cache that'll be 3nm.

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SERIVUBSEV@reddit

And expect to see an even larger allocation of die space to RT in the next generation

This is simply the case of AMD being terrible at marketing, and having to catch up at any nonsense jacket man makes up to hype his products.

Ray Tracing looks good, but it performs 100x better if doing in game development phase instead of real-time when someone is playing the game.

Remember, real time RT is only needed on shiny surfaces and water. It is not the groundbreaking tech that gamers have been made to think.

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Glebun@reddit

Remember, real time RT is only needed on shiny surfaces and water.

That's not true, though. It makes a difference on all kinds of surfaces, and it can only be baked in if the light sources and the surfaces that the light falls on are stationary (or move along predetermined paths).

It makes a difference with regular non-glossy surfaces. Watch RTX on-off comparisons for any game, including Cyberpunk - you will see that the light and its color affects surfaces like walls (just like it does in real life).

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account312@reddit

the surfaces that the light falls on

Which, to be clear, includes an NPCs and the player character.

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SomniumOv@reddit

can be baked in

dynamic lighting, day and night cycles, modular prefab games like the Elder Scrolls ?

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Taeyangsin@reddit

Or in games with very variable props/destruction, hard to bake lighting into something like Teardown I'd imagine.

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macholusitano@reddit

I agree. Here’s an upvote.

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Doikor@reddit

No. And expect to see an even larger allocation of die space to RT in the next generation of consoles, as 3nm provides enough transistor density to afford large RT engines that 7nm did not

This doesn't really help as the price per transistor hasn't really gone down (and nobody expects it to).

Yes there is space for it on the die but nobody will buy a $1500 PS6

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Keep-Darwin-Going@reddit

It is more like the initial launch with more like Nvidia push for it. When leave to market force it make sense not to use it. It only works on the best gpu now and it cost too much for majority of the gamers, why would you spend so much effort to let 1% of your target audience enjoy a little bit more compared to better game play.

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theoutsider95@reddit

Edit: Just for context, this thread was sitting at 52% when I wrote this post. So it was being downvoted almost as often as it was being upvoted

Because OP cherry picked few titles that didnt come with HE RT. If you check the games released this year most of them have HW RT.

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From-UoM@reddit

Software Lumen is the reason UE5 performance sucks ass

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jonydevidson@reddit

I see you never used Unreal Engine.

More than likely the culprit is bad programming and low usage of instanced static meshes because if you don't do ISM, every copy of a mesh that you might have in the loaded level will have its own draw call every frame.

Lumen is kind of set it and forget it, bounces are bounces, they don't care about geometry so in theory it scales very well. That's why your empty UE5 project with Lumen on runs at 200 FPS - what tanks it over the course of development isn't Lumen.

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temo987@reddit

More than likely the culprit is bad programming and low usage of instanced static meshes because if you don't do ISM, every copy of a mesh that you might have in the loaded level will have its own draw call every frame.

Iirc the only parts of software RT remaining are unfortunately core to how Lumen itself works. Lumen retains low quality world space lighting in the surface cache for stable lighting. It traces into the cache using real geometry (hardware Lumen) or SDFs (software Lumen) to gather and mixes screen traces where possible to clean up reflections, hide uncached lighting and cover missing or misaligned geometry. If Im getting this right the only leftover software parts running in HW mode are screen space gathering and trace mixing which is kind of core to the technique in general because of how poor the surface cache is. Even Cyberpunk PT needs screen traces for missing stuff like smoke.

Imo Lumen itself needs a bit of a rethink to change how it's caching lighting. The cached lighting basically needs screen traces because it's so low quality. I don't know of any solution except almost path tracing (which could work with the cache to reduce variance) but that's still extremely expensive. Lumen was a bit too designed to make software tracing bearable

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Different_Lab_813@reddit

Explain how Software RT is using HWRT just because they using compute shaders doesn't mean it's using RT cores.

I said:

Software Lumen doesn't use HWRT so not sure what relevance your point has.

You said:

It does.

My original comment was questioning why bringing up SWRT is relevant when this thread is about HWRT.

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From-UoM@reddit

Ah shit. My bad.

I MISREAD. Thought your original comment was HWRT doesnt use SWRT

My mistake.

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Calneon@reddit

Aah OK that makes sense, no problem :) glad to work it out.

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From-UoM@reddit

Yeah. Sorry about. All good now.

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From-UoM@reddit

Oh shit I just realized what happened. Sorry, it wasnt you that misread it.

It was u/Different_Lab_813 how did

Here is my comment he replied to

>Even the Hardware RT Lumen implementation still runs parts software RT.Lumen

I never said anything about swrt using hwrt

https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1on70rj/comment/nmuq92g/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

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alelo@reddit

i guess SW RT is like SW PhysX?

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From-UoM@reddit

Not quite. The quality of Software RT is lower.

PhysX on sw and hw runs the same simulations afaik. One just slower than the other. I could be wrong here though

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And only happened until DX12 was adopted.

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Petting-Kitty-7483@reddit

The stutter predates software lumen by at least two gens. Ue3 had it if you pushed the maps large enough even. It just didn't reach the breaking point until devs started pushing the engine haed like ue5 maps do.

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Sevastous-of-Caria@reddit

There was a great video showing gpu execution pipeline and its execute time problems with UE5.

https://youtu.be/c3zZtVBspzU?si=pIi_G2Anl68-ZbyN

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The 5060 can run RT in quite a few titles depending on your requirements. (Since it's the second-lowest-end NVIDIA GPU you obviously shouldn't expect 100+ fps.)
For example (all in 1080p, all native/no DLSS): Cyberpunk RT Ultra 45 fps, Veilguard Ultra High 52 fps, F1 24 72 fps, Resident Evil 4 98 fps, SW: Jedi Survivor 64 fps

Games in the same test suite that weren't playable with those settings: SW Outlaws 22 fps, Alan Wake II (RT High) 19 fps, Black Myth: Wukong (full RT, path tracing I think?) 14 fps.

5/8 ain't bad for such high settings on a fairly low-end GPU. Could probably hit 60 fps in those games with DLSS Quality and some non-ultra settings.

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Vb_33@reddit

All RT titles run on a 5060 well. Hell most RT titles are built to run on a 2060 Super and PS5 (see Assassin's Creed Shadows).

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fuzzynyanko@reddit

This is a good point. The most popular card on Steam is still probably the RTX 3060.

Just because they are both called xx60 doesn't mean they are the same. Twice now nvidia's downgraded what the xx60 class of GPU was, moving it low and lower on the stack

To illustrate this, there use to be a 1030, there isn't a 5030. What would have been a 1030 is now a 5050. (and i'm being generous and ignoring the 1010)

So while xx60 use to be the middle of the stack, now they are just the second to last.

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Strazdas1@reddit

To illustrate this, there use to be a 1030, there isn't a 5030. What would have been a 1030 is now a 5050

This is nonsense. What used to be 1030 is called integrated graphics now. Its simply not worth making GPUs that are as good as integrated graphics.

So while xx60 use to be the middle of the stack

It was never middle of the stack.

midrange performance is now at least a xx70.

It always was.

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skycake10@reddit

That's just a reasonable priority for a game like BF6. It's an online competitive game where good and consistent performance is king for most users. There's no reason to use RT if half your users are going to turn it off for performance reasons.

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DabuXian@reddit

Competitive gamers dont care about graphics at all, if you click through BF6 twitch streams almost everyone plays on the lowest settings. You could use that argument to advocate for all mp games to look like battlebit or minecraft, why even bother with graphics at all.

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Strazdas1@reddit

yet another reason to not like the sweat boys.

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Darrelc@reddit

Gamers have become incredibly hostile towards graphics technology.

Are you sure? There's a lot of throaters out there

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Key-Pace2960@reddit

Multiplatform releases mean that you have to develop for consoles that use RDNA2 which doesn't really have any RT acceleration hardware with mentioning and are pretty much just brute forcing it.

Unfortunately that means that software RT solutions like Lumen are often prioritized in spite of it not running meaningfully better if not outright worse than hardware RT solutions on NVDIA, Intel and current gen AMD cards while also looking a lot worse.

That being said hardware RT isn't going anywhere, if anything we're starting to see games with mandatory hardware RT.

As much as I like it I also don't think it always make sense to implement RT outside of an enthusiast POV. Battlefield 6 for example is a fast paced shooter that needs to run well for a broad audience. I definitely would have appreciated RT, but I get why it wasn't a priority. Most people probably wouldn't have used RT anyway in order to maximize their framerates in a competitive shooter.

Imagine being worthless pig that is clueless about gpus and their perf

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hardware-ModTeam@reddit

Thank you for your comment! Unfortunately, your comment has been removed for the following reason:

Please don't make low effort comments, memes, or jokes here. Be respectful of others: Remember, there's a human being behind the other keyboard. If you have nothing of value to add to a discussion then don't add anything at all.

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F0czek@reddit

5070 ti not enough i suppose

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hardware-ModTeam@reddit

Thank you for your comment! Unfortunately, your comment has been removed for the following reason:

Please don't make low effort comments, memes, or jokes here. Be respectful of others: Remember, there's a human being behind the other keyboard. If you have nothing of value to add to a discussion then don't add anything at all.

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Dangerman1337@reddit

By that logic Monolith was being lazy mandating DX 9.0 cards for FEAR in 2005?

Sure the GPU market is bad because Cyrpto Boom and then AI boom and AMD not releasing competitive architectures until now but its not unreasonable for Devs to drop near 10 year old hardware.

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Different_Lab_813@reddit

Tell me you know nothing about mesh shaders without telling. Mesh shaders have nothing to do with image being blurry or games running worse. Quite contrary usage of them improves performance, they offer way better geometry culling.

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KennKennyKenKen@reddit

I mean the last few dooms were a benchmark of optimisation, running at like hundreds and hundred of fps even on modest hardware.

If you begin by rasterizing your image, you get only the shapes, and you still have to fill them in. At this point you can use RT as well.

Technically PT doesn't have to be realistic or complete, but ending at first hit would pretty much defeat the entire point of doing it.

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From-UoM@reddit

You can have RT without doing every pixel like PT does

Not rocket science

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Strazdas1@reddit

The amount of games with a sensible implementation in those 6 years can be counted on 1 hand.

thats some mutated hand with dozens of fingers you have.

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Valuable_Impress_192@reddit

I said sensible brother

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epraider@reddit

I personally disable it nearly every title, despite having a rig that can handle it reasonably well. It’s just not worth the performance hit, and in many games I actually just completely dislike how it makes the game look.

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From-UoM@reddit

OP is specifically taking about Hardware RT.

RT is pretty much in evey UE5 with Lumen Software RT

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Petting-Kitty-7483@reddit

And several other games like kingdom come 2 with their software RT implementation. Plus it's not like most the games that have hardware RT required it.

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loozerr@reddit

Maybe the hype is finally dying and developers are realising that slightly more accurate lighting isn't worth halving your fps for.

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Strazdas1@reddit

Maybe developers dont want to deal with nonsensical lies like your comment.

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loozerr@reddit

Point out the lie. Ray tracing isn't worth enabling even in games which do it relatively well like cyberpunk.

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Strazdas1@reddit

here are two lies in your comment:

slightly more accurate lighting

halving your fps

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Darrelc@reddit

Maybe the hype is finally dying and developers are realising that slightly more accurate lighting isn't worth halving your fps for.

It's fine because not only will they sell you the problem, they'll sell you the solution too (FG)

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Seanspeed@reddit

Except plenty of developers are proving that when they custom tailor their own tech for RTGI, they can achieve fantastic visuals without any massive performance costs.

Also, we're getting lots of UE5 games now, with RT as standard.

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Dangerman1337@reddit

Problem is that games are taking longer and sometimes you have to make things look uneven with raster to meet deadlines.

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loozerr@reddit

That's a management problem.

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MarcCDB@reddit

RT is not ready for prime time yet. Hardware is too weak for proper implementation.

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Strazdas1@reddit

HW not too weak unless you are on console.

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scytheavatar@reddit

EA said it themselves, a significant number of players use potatoes to play their games. Ignoring them would be a fucking stupid idea. The failure of Doom The Dark Ages should have made it clear hardware ray tracing has lost the war.

You’d think by 2025 we’d see more games pushing full path-traced or at least hybrid hardware RT.

Full path-tracing is not practical in 2025, it's probably not practical until the PS7 era.

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Strazdas1@reddit

Not catering to the worst players would not be a stupid idea at all.

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leeroyschicken@reddit

Ignoring them would be a fucking stupid idea.

Addition of optional features wouldn't mean ignoring those players. There must be another explanation, even a simple one that they didn't even bother.

The failure of Doom The Dark Ages

Hard to pinpoint that on the technology, when the game itself was just underwhelming. As far as I am aware, it runs just fine on consoles, which would make bulk of the player base anyway.

Full path-tracing is not practical in 2025, it's probably not practical until the PS7 era.

That sounds about right, with high end PC enjoying it few years prior.

Personally I am of the opinion that the tech will be used as a baseline more in the future and that will allow software to catch up and provide us with more performant solutions. For example, reflections are not slow because of the ray tracing calls ( though those do have overhead ), but by virtue of simply adding a lot of extra shading - the game engine could somewhat reliably guess the clarity of such reflection and then simply downgrade the quality of shading as much as possible or even exclude things from it completely.

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EiffelPower76@reddit

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Thistlemanizzle@reddit

They can likely add it later. The market is too small. I think we’ve had enough data to determine if it moves units, unfortunately enthusiasts are a tiny market and they only buy a $70* game once.

*This isn’t about the rising cost of games and live service monetization. I think legitimately RT doesn’t have a good ROI right now. It sucks because it’s awesome.

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bubblesort33@reddit

Large teams like can support it for the few customers that want it, but it does add a lot of cost if your project isn't setup for it. If I was patching a game every few months and had to pay for extra time to tune the lighting for RT years after the launch of the title I might start skipping and removing it as a supported feature. Depends on how well the Lighting Team is setup to do this type of tweaking.

I wouldn't be surprised if industry telemetrics were indicating that relatively few users bother to turn on ray-tracing.

Even with frame generation, the FPS hit that comes with ray-tracing is noticeable enough on my 4070 TI Super that I almost always turn it off im. I'm sure plenty of others are doing the same.

I would prefer they spend more die space on rasterizers or frame gen accelerators (if that exists. I don't know how frame gen works but I assume there's a special core for it?)

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someguy@reddit

It's a gimmick until the average GPU is fast enough to do full hardware raytracing, without any lightmapping tricks, at a constant 60+ FPS.

Right now even high-end GPUs are just too slow to realistically replace traditional lighting techniques.

You basically have to implement both, which is twice the work, for a bit of eye candy.

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fixminer@reddit

Lumen can use either software, or RT hardware if the developers enable that.

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Lighthouse_seek@reddit

Imo it's the reality that a lot of PC players don't have high spec machines and these studios need enough of an addressable market to make money

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ammar_sadaoui@reddit

ray tracing is still early access technology for me at least

it will stable by rtx 8060 or 8070 for games like cp2077 to get ultra on rt with 180fps until than i perfer high frame rate than ray tracing visual

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MumrikDK@reddit

Are we watching hardware ray tracing quietly die before it even became standard?

No, that's basically impossible. RT isn't something that's just a matter of personal tastes. The current RT trade-offs are.

RT isn't some gimmick Nvidia made up and pushed. They just jumped in early. RT has basically since the beginning of 3D acceleration been viewed as the obvious long-term goal for realtime 3D rendering. We'll get there somehow no matter what.

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devinprocess@reddit

Companies don’t want to spend money on a feature that a lot of gamers cannot use, and thus not get a return on their investment.

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kwirky88@reddit

It’s going to go the way of vr: the hardware is simply too expensive and the experience has got a low ceiling in quality. I’d rather play a game without the latency and artifacts of frame interpolation and at very high refresh rates than have slightly better reflections.

I’ve written Ray tracers in a few programming languages, I know what it is, but the hardware hit its just too hard. I always turn it off.

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Ray tracing is largely placebo. You don't appreciate it unless when compared side by side with traditional lighting and then the interest is driven by the need to justify the $$$ spent on stronger hardware.

It's pointless if you ask me. And bottom barely of nice-to-haves

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RT will never die, it's here to stay forever

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reveil@reddit

The 5/8 on brand new card is not bad it is totally horrible. A brand new newest generation card should handle 1080p ultra settings with 60 fps without any issues on 100% of games. Plus assigning 45 fps a passing score is just not right. The 60 fps is the minimum that should qualify for a pass. So this is exactly the problem I'm describing. Entry level cards need to reach a level of performance to run the path traced Cyberpunk on 1080p ultra without dlss with stable 60fps. Until then RT is not worth it for the vast majority of people. Look at the steam hardware survey to see what people are still running.

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ibeerianhamhock@reddit

I think what you’re observing is actually the opposite of what you think. Games are dropping support all together for pre calculated light maps and either are going 100% forced ray tracing or a software based solution like lumen (which ofc also has a hardware version).

You’ll see more and more games either have software 100% dynamic lighting or hardware 100% dynamic lighting from here on out imo. I think most games with software dynamic lighting just don’t bother with a hardware option.

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EiffelPower76@reddit

"are all those RT cores on our GPUs just going to waste now?"

"Are we watching hardware ray tracing quietly die before it even became standard?"

Not at all. RT/PT is here to stay

Simply, not every video game use the same technology, and that's perfectly normal

Developers are free to use whatever technique they want to achieve a graphics engine that runs great on the most configs and looks good.

You will always have games like Cyberpunk 2077 that makes usage of RT

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teutorix_aleria@reddit

Consoles. Lumen runs on everything out of the box so anything on UE5 can rely on it without making seperate HW accelerated RT options.

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larso0@reddit

Pretty graphics is overrated. It looks good at screenshots, but the physics and gameplay is the most important. I'd take early 2000s graphics with good physics any day, over ray traced beautiful graphics where I can't interact with the environment.

There probably exists games that does it all, but they probably won't run well on my GPU anyways. I'm not going to buy a very expensive electric space heater of a GPU and upgrade the electrical grid in my apartent, just to play a handful of games.

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ClerkProfessional803@reddit

The problem is we never really needed RT in the first place. Probe based GI, compute based lighting, and PBR did all the heavy lifting after x360 gen ended, and we had amazing performance vs visual balance up until nvidia decided to force the agenda. The industry followed suite, but AAA is now basically UE5 vs everything else, and software Lumen is simply easier to implement.

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My take is as follows:

Ray tracing isn’t necessarily better; it’s just a different approach to lighting vs. traditional raster. It has advantages over raster in terms of more complete glitch-free look, but it also has drawbacks; it’s fundamentally more expensive, people are less experienced with it, getting over these two requires substantial effort to rewrite the whole stack.

I think Death Stranding 2 was the best example of this. Some people asked why DS2 didn’t opt for RT. The answer is, RT is not needed. DS2 looks great, it’s made by competent artists that are master of raster-based graphics, RT merely as a sauce on the top is just taxing for questionable gains. Same with the likes of Battlefield 6. Performance is king, RT as a mere addition was a fancy flash during the last few years, but not anymore.

The good way to approach RT is what id Software and its partners are doing; replace majority of raster with RT, make it look comparable to traditional raster, and as a useful tool that accelerates graphics development. Indiana Jones and Doom TDA are made in a relatively short production cycle compared to other AAA games, and it runs great on a modern hardware. It’s not flashy sauce that RT initially promised, but this is the way forward.

So, RT is closer to us than ever. But it’s not in a way that it was advertised.

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Lumen is RT. Hardware or sofware is matter of techincal implementation, but it's still RT. Lumen handles almost all RT effects, expect shadows. What you see now are games started development 3-5 years ago and for the most developers it's their first expirience with real time RT. When they started their projects, most PC RT capabilities were on par with modern consoles and could handles 1-2 RT effects at the time. Even now, path tracing is mostly reserved for high end PCs. So when you combine lack of expirience implementing RT with weak hardware that can't hadle a lot of RT effects no matter how hard you optimize, you end up with sofware lumen. Easy to use multiplatform system to add RTGI and reflections that was alaviable since UE5 launch. And yeah, BF6 is competetive multiplayer shooter, it should run for as many people as possible, half empty lobby is 10 time worse than lack of fancy lighting.

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insolentrus@reddit

I don't know why are you asking. Answer is obvious. Its useless shit that divide fps by 2.

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reddanit@reddit

Whenever you look at hardware RT support/performance on GPUs and consoles that people have at home today, surprisingly large chunk of customer base will not be able to run heavy RT.

As a game developer, this means that unless you want to severely limit your customer base, your game is required to have a decently looking rendering pipeline that doesn't need strong hardware RT acceleration to work.

With that being the case, you can now follow one of two major paths:

Add entire RT rendering pipeline to your game. This lets you take a lot of advantage of visual improvements from RT, but it also means you have to do a bunch of things twice, separately for each rendering pipeline. This is expensive.
Add a dash of RT effects. Those by their very nature cannot be massively impactful, since they work mostly on top of already complete standard rendering.

He is taking about hardware RT

Almost all UE5 games, which are a lot use Lumen Software RT

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quizical_llama@reddit

Not sure exactly but I would love some data on how many people actually enable it. It's the first thing I turn off in any game.

Maybe devs are just not seeing the benefits of adding it unless they are being directly sponsored by daddy Nvidia