this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2025
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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.