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Thomas Winwood
@ketsuban.github.io

Things gamers believe about graphics card tech which I no longer believe are true: 1. Raytracing is only relevant for maniacs chasing hyperrealism. Reality: it's a different process for handling lighting which is much easier for developers than rebaking the lighting in the scene over and over again.

Thomas Winwood
@ketsuban.github.io

Everyone benefits from being able to arbitrarily change the scene without having to bake all the lighting again, or from light that responds to material properties. Once a large enough percentage of the audience has hardware that can pull off raytracing, indies will start taking advantage of it too.

Thomas Winwood
@ketsuban.github.io

2. DLSS is a band-aid fix for raytracing tanking performance, rendering the game at a lower resolution and then using generative AI to fill in the missing pixels. Reality: …it's just temporal antialiasing. Nvidia is marketing it as "AI" because they're marketing *everything* as "AI" at the moment.

Thomas Winwood
@ketsuban.github.io

(This one is tricky because the industry standard for antialiasing methods is a blizzard of acronyms that mean nothing to end users. I thought DLAA was "the good one" which just removed aliasing from an image whereas DLSS was "the bad one" which reduced the render resolution—they're the same thing!)

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Thomas Winwood
@ketsuban.github.io

3. You have to choose between raytracing and performance. Reality: a 16GB 5060 Ti will run Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p 60fps with all the raytracing bells and whistles and no frame generation. The problem is they're still selling cards with 8GB of VRAM, which is categorically not enough for raytracing.

Thomas Winwood
@ketsuban.github.io

We're still in the awkward transition period where a lot of people still have graphics cards that can't do raytracing at all (like my 1070 Ti) but raytracing isn't developers colluding with Nvidia or an excuse for them to not "optimise" (whatever that means). It's a new better way of doing lighting.