this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2025
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That is a prominent example of forced RT... basically, as I described with the TAA example in my other reply...
idTech 8 seems to be the first engine that just literally requires RT for its entire render pipeline to work.
They could theoretically build another version of it off of vulkan-base, to enable you to be able to turn RT off... but that would likely be a massive amount of work.
On the bright side... at least the idTech engines are actually well coded, and they put a lot of time into making the engine actually very good.
I didn't follow the marketing ecosystem for Doom Dark Ages, but it would have been really shitty if they did not include 'you need a GPU with RT cores'.
...
On the other end of the engine spectrum:
Bethesda... yeah, they have entirely lost control of their engine, it is mangled mess of nonsense, the latest Oblivion remaster just uses UE to render things slapped on top of Gamebryo, because no one at Bethesda can actually code worth a damn.
Compare that to oh I dunno, the Source engine.
Go play TitanFall 2. 10 year old game now, built on a modified version of the Portal 2 Source engine.
Still looks great, runs very efficiently, can scale down to older hardware.
Ok, now go play HL Alyx. If you don't have VR, there are mods that do a decent job of converting it into M+K.
Looks great, runs efficiently.
None of them use RT.
Because you don't need to, if you take the time to actually optimize both your engine and game design.