[klaussilveira]

It's funny how, in my opinion, whenever the RTX On/Off comparison shows up, the older has better mood, atmosphere and design. The "RTX On" almost feels like "Generic UE5 pseudo-realism On".

Based on other comments, I'm not the only one. Is "RTX On" the "bloom/motionblur/green filter" of this generation?

[Joker_vD]

Personally, the two most alluring things about RTX for me is a) better global illumination, none of that silly "you can see sunrise shining through the mountain/cave's ceiling" stuff; b) better local illumination: a glowing object should be an actual light source and make its surroundings brighter, dammit.

Everything else, including insanely accurate shadows and reflections, weird lenses/out-of-focus effects, etc. is much lower on my list.

[josteink]

While I think the ray-traced version looks better in a technical sense, it seems to me that they have completely forgotten to apply darkness and shadow appropriately in the scenes to create an immersive atmosphere.

Keep all the new tech and dial the ambient lighting down. That would look way better.

Make it feel dark, uncertain and risky again. You’re not supposed to know what’s in that corner or that room before it comes lounging at you.

In the RTX version you can see everything in every location, completely killing any sense of suspense.

[torginus]

I've always wondered that by gaining the ability to simulate light (or basically anything) in a more accurate manner, we reduce artists' ability to control the final result.

Back in 2D times, an artist could just set a pixel to a given color, and it would be that color, in early 3d, they had the ability to paint in shadows/highlights or control the texture colors directly.

With the physically based workflow, they had to author roughness/metalness and albedo maps, and were hoping for the best that the final result looked good in the game.

Nowadays with simulated light bounces, changing anyting in the scene could affect everything else, making controlling the final result that much harder.

Yes it does look better automatically, but at the cost of adding difficult of channeling the artists' vision.

[jl6]

Theater and movie set designers have to work with this constraint too. They seem to manage.

[torginus]

Yeah, but they get to rebuild the lighting shot by shot, and there's a crapton of CG.

[nottorp]

I'm not a fan of graphics mods, but there is a similar problem with fan made RPG mods that "bring a game up to date with the technology" (wide screen, qol etc). A lot of mod packs feel like they have to add content (characters, quests) that is not so likely to fit in with the original game just because they can.

At least in Gibberlings mod packs for the infinity engine games the extra content is non existing or optional...

[archagon]

It matters that the original lighting was carefully hand-crafted by (presumably) environment artists and level designers working with strict limitations. What couldn’t be rendered was faked.

But yeah, I tend to find RTX a massive waste of framerate for little practical gain.