While RT is a single player gimmick I mostly turn off, it won't take many more increases like this to make it a very real feature. What will we see when developers start targeting these cards, or their successors?
If it's actually another 2x performance improvement, we're really only another generation away at most. On my 3080 RT caused a performance drop but I was able to decide the trade-off for myself, often it was still playable, I just needed to decide whether I wanted high refresh rates or not. Another doubling or two and it'll barely be a thought at all. The caveat with this still is it requires DLSS for best effect, which is barely a trade off in my experience.
I interpret it to mean that the graphical enhancements that RT can give you are only really appreciable if you're playing a single-player game that allows you to stop and check out how beautiful it is, while in a competitive multiplayer game, you're moving around too fast to really appreciate (or even notice) the difference RT gives you over fake reflections.
> you're moving around too fast to really appreciate (or even notice) the difference RT gives you over fake reflections.
You're also at a disadvantage running the graphics on High.
In any game that I want to play at a "competitive" level, I always put the settings to the absolute lowest settings so the computer always gets 100+ FPS.
No reason to even try to optimize. The point is winning, not it looking good. In fact, in some games, the developers have had to go back and make it more fair for higher settings because of low settings hiding tall grass.
It's a spectrum, not an either-or. Many people play competitive multiplayer for the sake of overall enjoyment, not solely to compete. For that, you want the graphics to be as good as possible, to the limit of what you can notice while playing the game normally.
We're past Quake-level graphics, but competitive eSports games, by and large, have deliberately simple graphics optimised for readability over flare.
If you look at LoL, Fortnite, Valorant, Overwatch, they're all kind of the same — fairly flat light, bright colourful characters against a backdrop of pastels and otherwise muted background colours. Texture detailing is discrete and everything almost looks like block colours if you squint. Rainbow 6 Siege, CSGO, PUBG are the same, minus the colourful characters.
Even if those games didn't optimise their engines for performance over visual fidelity, their visual design would make them fairly light weight anyhow.
Another reason why those game graphics is like that is they want to support many devices, including very low-end Nintendo Switch and MediaTek smartphones. Toon style looks good in low quality.
The reason behind the 4:3 low resolution is outside of scope for ray tracing or performance overall: most of pro players found out that widened picture and thus player models are easier to target precisely in motion (AFAIK the phenomenon hasn't being studied properly) and you're limited by vertical resolution of the screen thus 960 is the upper bound for a common 16:9 1080p panel.
For PC, at least judging from Steam charts, single player gamers are a substantial minority, but still a minority in terms of what games are popular. CP2077 is the only single player game currently in the top 10, and there are only a couple other primarily SP games in the top 20.
At no point of history have multiplayer gamers outnumbered singleplayer gamers. Even for MP focused titles like StarCraft 2, the majority (iirc the number was around 54%) of customers never clicked on the multiplayer button once.
You're looking at number people logged into an online service and thinking it represents anything about gamers that by definition aren't online. A typical sampling bias.
Sounds like you haven't paid attention to the gaming industry since eSports took off.
Overwatch and Valorant alone may have increased female participation in video games by double digit percentages. Also, the TV show for League, which was obviously aimed at women.
> You're looking at number people logged into an online service and thinking it represents anything about gamers that by definition aren't online. A typical sampling bias.
steam, ubisoft connect, origin, blizzard launcher, and rockstar are all online today, even for single-player games. I'm not sure where a significant number of non-platform-delivered games would even exist in 2022, I haven't bought a single game that didn't use steam or another platform from a vendor in ages.
The exception being GOG I guess, and to be fair there's a decent number of new-ish titles on that (horizon zero dawn) and I always make an effort to buy titles there when possible, but even still GOG's marketshare is minuscule in comparison to steam.
so no, actually, I disagree that there's some large repository of single-player games that are not showing up on steam or another equivalent.
I don't think that is a good metric. There are far more single player games available on Steam than multiplayer.
A multiplayer lives and dies by its community, so it makes sense that multiplayer gamers would coalesce around a relatively smaller number of games.
Multiplayer games are also designed far more around player retention. The unpredictability of human opponents, combined with various design decisions meant to keep players engaged, means that a multiplayer gamer may primarily play the same game for years. A solo player reaches the end of their game, maybe they even exhaust all the side content and achievements, but then they move on to the next single player game.
> What does "single player gimmick" in your sentences here mean?
When I've seen this written it's often explained as to do with the fact that single-player is a much more curated experience, where the developers can stage-manage where you go and even where you look, and discard resources they know you won't see again.
That's why single-player often looks way better than multiplayer, where a) the experience isn't that curated and b) fps matters much more.
“In /my opinion/, this doesn’t add enough to the game experience to justify the performance penalty. Also, my hardware isn’t strong enough to use it. Therefor it’s a gimmick! Herpa derpa!”
That may actually be giving too much credit. It’s probably more like “I don’t like it so it’s a gimmick that no one else should enjoy”
Divining people's real motivations is a skill wasted on HN news comments. If you're as good at it as you think you are, you should be brokering multi-billion dollar deals.
Gamers don't see it that way though because often, faked reflections are "good enough".
In some cases though, the faked reflections are noticeable and immersion breaking. I notice it in MS Flight Simulator. I'm flying over water and approaching a large city, and I can see the reflection of buildings in the water. But when I push the nose down, as the image of the buildings goes off the top of my screen, the reflections go away too. In reality, this wouldn't happen. But in the sim, it does because the reflections are generated by just inverting the rendered image of the buildings.
There's a map in Apex Legends where a section has a shiny floor. It fakes a reflection by rendering an environment-mapped texture. It does a decent job at making the floor look like it's reflective, but as you move around and compare what's being rendered to the actual geometry, you notice how it falls apart. But in a competitive FPS, you're not looking at the environment long and hard enough to notice.
Duke Nukem 3D had proper reflections, but it did it by actually mirroring all the geometry, a technique that only really works well if the geometry is simple.