PC Gaming

Doom the Dark Ages is possibly what they're referring to. ID skipped lighting in favour of Ray tracing doing it.

Bethesda Studios also has a tendency to use hd textures on features like grass and terrain which can safely be low res.

There is a fair bit of inefficient code floating around because optimisation is considered more expensive than throwing more hardware at a problem, and not just in games. (Bonus points if you outsource the optimisation to some else's hardware or the modding community)

I meant they also just don't bother to optimize texture sizes, didn't mean to imply they are directly related to ray tracing issues.

Also... more and more games are clearly being designed, and marketed, with ray tracing in mind.

Sure, its not absolutely forced on in too many games... but TAA often is forced on, because no one can run raytracing without temporal intelligent upscsling and frame gen...

...and a lot of games just feed the pixel motion vectors from their older TAA implementations into the DLSS / FSR implementations, and don't bother to recode the TAA into just giving the motion vectors as an optional API that doesn't actually do AA...

... and they often don't do that because they designed their entire render pipeline to only work with TAA on, and half the games post procrssing effects would have to be recoded to work without TAA.

So if you summarize all that: the 'design for raytracing support' standard is why many games do not let you turn off TAA.

...

That being said: Ray tracing absolutely does only really make a significant visual difference in many (not all, but many) situations... if you have very high res textures.

If you don't, older light rendering methods work almost as well, and run much, much faster.

Ray tracing involves... you know, light rays, bouncing off of models, with textures on them.

Like... if you have a car with a glossy finish, that is reflecting in its paint the entire scene around it... well, if that reflect map that is being added to the base car texture... if that reflect map is very low res, if it is generating it from a world of low res textures... you might as well just use the old cube map method, or other methods, and not bother turning every reflective surface into a ray traced mirror.

Or, if you're doing accumulated lighting in a scene with different colors of lights... that effect is going to be more dramatic, more detailed, more noticable in a scene with higher res textures on everything being lit.

...

I could write a 60 page report on this topic, but no one is paying me to, so I'm not going to bother.

Yep, thats gonna be significantly more powerful than my planned build... and likely somewhere between 500 to 1000 more expensive... but yep, that is how absurd this is, that all of that is still less expensive than a 5090 RTX.

I'm guessing you could get all of that to work with a 750 W PSU, 850 W if you also want to have a bunch of storage drives or a lot of cooling, but yeah, you'd only need that full wattage for running raytracing in 4k.

Does that sound about right?

Eitherway... yeah... imagine an alternate timeline where marketing and industry direction isn't bullshit, where people actually admit things like:

Consoles cannot really do what they claim to do at 4K... at actual 4K.

They use checkerboard upscaling, so basically they're actually running at 2K and scaling up, and its actually less than 2K in demanding raytraced games, because they're actually using FSR or DLSS as well, oh and the base graphics settings are a mix of what PC gamers would call medium and high, but they don't show console gamers real graphics settings menus, so they don't know that.

Maybe, maybe we could have tried to focus on just perfecting frame per watt and frame per $ efficiency at 2K instead of baffling us with marketing bs and claiming we can just leapfrog to 4K, and more recently, telling people 8K displays make any goddamned sense at all, when in 95% of home setup situations, of any kind, they have no physically possible perceptible gains.

And then to stick it to the man further you're running Linux of course, right?