Rtx really shines when applied to a low-fidelity game like Q2. The difference isn't as profound in modern titles where a plethora of lighting techniques and tricks approximates physical lighting closely, though.
I wonder if in the end (should we eventually see universal adoption) raytracing will prove more of a boon towards developers rather than end users, as it has been with many other hardware advancements.
> The difference isn't as profound in modern titles where a plethora of lighting techniques and tricks.
That's the key thing though, RTX removes the need for all those tricks (which are tricky to get right, humans are good at spotting lighting flaws in a scene) which is a net win for the game developers who can focus that time/effort elsewhere.
Ray tracing removes a huge development workload, you no longer have to think about modeling light. It's like real life, you simply have materials and light sources, and bang everything just works and looks natural.
But... That's the biggest benefit of raytracing/path tracing. It's why the movie industry is already all-in on it and has been for years. It's just in games where for some reason gamers don't understand the benefits and are so eager to dismiss it if they don't immediately see everything look 10x more amazing or realistic, entirely missing the point.
Perhaps many games do not require realistic light, rather some type of simplistic model serves gameplay well enough, I do not know what kind of light modeling was used in Sunset Overdrive, but that type of oversaturated lighting works for some games.
I guess better tools for developers could mean in a benefit for the player: less time working on one thing could mean more time in others, giving more room to improvement. I guess...
I'm somewhat sceptical because I'm not really seeing this happen anywhere throughout the software development industry. Sure, we get more software than ever, and we get it faster and cheaper, but it's all bloated low-quality (web\electron) apps that are often less usable than their ages-old counterparts. Same thing is happening to games in some extent - most developers choose development speed and convenience over performance.
I wonder if in the end (should we eventually see universal adoption) raytracing will prove more of a boon towards developers rather than end users, as it has been with many other hardware advancements.