Did you notice the difference? Do you think Ray or Path Tracing are a must for this game?

Gotta give huge props to the devs for making the game look good without RT

The thing with Raytracing is that more often than not, it seems to mostly just make the scene DIFFERENT rather than inherently BETTER, Pathtracing always LOOK better, one of the problems other than performance tho, is that it also often is darker, which should require more/different lights or maybe a flashlight or something, some areas atleast are too dark for comfort

What I noticed is, that the rasterized lighting in the phantom liberty areas is really close to path traced lighting. The difference in lighting in the basegame areas is much more noticable. They probably modeled the rasterized lighting in phantom liberty after the path traced lighting to match it more closely

One thing Path Tracing has made me want desperately, is a flashlight. Some scenes are so dark that I can't see wtf is going on.

we dont need rt and pt, we need damn gameplay tf....

The thing that many people are unaware of is that making a scene with ray/path tracing is many times faster for the devs compared to rasterized version where they often have to manually put hundreds of light sources to emulate light behaviour. With the path tracing it's basically a one click solution and that in itself saves a lot of time on a development cycle. That is best explained in a Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition video from Digital Foundry

Cyberpunk is a tricky one to use to compare rasterization versus Ray tracing because they did such an amazing job on the base lighting and shadows. I think in a lot of other games the Ray tracing is a more noticeable improvement.

Fkn ray tracing is like buying a Bugatti to drive it in the freeway with the handbrake engaged.

I think the question is not whether you can see a difference - in most cases here I could (especially when you pointed it out); but the fundamental issue for me is: is it worth the $ to get those differences. Is it producing a fundamental improvement to the game or increase in enjoyment for the significant $ investment, and/or the drop in performance. To me it's not worth it. But if you can afford a 4k monitor and a 4090...go for it. Particularly with AMD/NVIDEA not pushing the envelope each generation - except for halo products.

I always prefer the rasterization ones, the shimmering and softer shadows of raytracing/path tracing makes the game looking less clear to me. I hate that this is the technology we are trying to push where the focus is on shadows and reflections. I have been more impressed however by Plague Tale Requiem this year, with the texture detail and quality and how beautiful the overall environment is, rather than focusing on shadows, lighting and reflections.

One thing of note is rasterisation, due to devs having to often manually position light probes within a given scene, can often be inaccurate. Not in terms of shadow realism, but in terms of cases like light literally seeping through walls or as such due to probe misalignment. As ray/path tracing is formulated from real time calculations, it doesnt have this issue.

I think the most reason for ray tracing is reflections. You can get quite well results with cubemaps or screen-space reflections but in the end it's way more complicated to achieve similar results with that than with ray tracing. The other big thing is indirect lighting but I think there are other approaches which can be good enough to most users. So I would be totally fine if ray tracing was only used for reflections.

Yeah I have a 4080 and I'm still mostly playing rasterized. Just using medium RT lightning and RT reflections. The reflections are the most noticeable thing from RT imo. Even on high-end hardware the performance hit isn't really worth it and it even makes some scenes look wrong.

i've always hated raytracing. it barely ever looks any better than raster for a heft cost increase. path tracing is another ball game entirely. it can and will look orders of magnitude better in certain scenarios, and is also orders of magnitude more demanding. but if you can run it, it is worth its cost. maybe. The thing is, these things are worth it not when they "look good", but when raster looks shit. that doesn't happen very often in games with strong art direction

You know what I got from this video? Realism is technologically cool and all, but when you're playing a game, it might not necessarily be what you need, because deeper shadows make things more difficult to see, lights blending into each other are distracting, etc. In almost all scenarios, I genuinely preferred the rasterized visuals.

Ahh, yes. Technology that turn dry old asphalt into a reflective surface I'd honestly stick with raster from examples you shown, "normal" RT looks like a joke, atleast PT looks sonewhat interesting, but when i tried it, i saw transparent glass cup turn into white texture in a scene where you meet Evelyn for the first time and visual noise on some textures on the streets

For some reason I like the raster better. I know path tracing is more realistic, but my brain likes raster appearance. I just like sharp shadows for some reason. Good video.

With the actual path tracing - yes the difference is amazing to me and I love using it. Have to use a little DLSS on my 3080ti but the light is just so much more realistic.

Totally agree with your summary - it's either rasterisation, or path tracing. I'm still hoping that Deep Rock Galactic will get Path Tracing (best title for this technology ever)

I'll def start paying more attention to path tracing once they can fix the blur and ghosting. Because it does make some of the scenes look really nice, but in motion and on characters faces it can look very strange

Difference between ray tracing and path tracing is more noticable in some other locations. For example the gym spot (next to the boxing ring) near V's 1st appartment. There is a complete switch of shadows, color and light. Path tracing makes the biggest difference in areas where there are different types and colours of light mixing together.

Games are all about balance between performance and visual quality. There is no doubt Path tracing looks great, however I think the biggest benefit of the tech is actually not for live gameplay ,but for game development . You touched on the subject when you said how CS2 was developed using ray tracing and then baked in the result. This is the best use case for both RT and Path tracing in my opinion. As for use in live gameplay, the performance hit is simply not worth it ,even on Nvidia side, I would much rather play at 4k 120fps than anything less and path tracing. It will only be worth enabling once enabling path tracing has a less than 20% performance cost from native. Further improvements in GPUs and the software will be required for that to happen but we are still many years away.

TLDR Path tracing is mostly noticeable when it comes to shadows and low light envirnments Ray tracing is only noticeable if you stare at how much glow is being generated from a light source or how clear the reflections are. Global illumination and Screen Space reflections are perfectly acceptable and can even be enhanced with reshade to give near ray traced results at a fraction of the cost. Lesson: If you want to optimize your game, design it with path tracing enabled and model your global illumination and screen space reflections to mimic its effects so the players don't need to turn path tracing or even RT on. Well done CDPR.

Ray tracing lightning vs rasterisation is often a matter of preference as far as what looks better. RT is definitely more accurate but how much that matters is debatable. RT reflections are much more obvious and in cyberpunk I’d say they are 100% worth the performance cost as long as the frame rate remains reasonably high. Path tracing is obviously in a league of its own, but there’s a reason why it’s a technology preview. I’m ok with it being a thing though, I actually wish more developers put in experimental features aimed at future/top tier hardware as long as the the base feature set is optimised well.

Personally - this video confirms what I always thought. RT/PT doesn’t look noticeably better, often just “different”. Sure, once in a while it definitely can look better, but overall it’s marginal. And it is absolutely not worth the insane performance hit.

Im one of those who prefer any settings, as long as the game is running flawless and no ghosting, plus im more of a game player then focusing on graphics much 😁😅

RT or PT : it's a new lighting technology in game! Raster : just search on white floor in garage... RT or PT : where is it?

I just built my first pc and I started playing with the graphical settings the biggest one I’ve seen so far is in cyberpunk 2077 in the afterlife bar I believe it’s called. With no ray tracing, the floor near the bar looks like a puddle with a light shining on it. With ray tracing turned on, the floor reflects the images from the ceiling.

very interested in the mod you talked about towards the end of the video, would like it if you made a video on it that'd be really interesting if more games/mods used RT to make them into raster

Ray Tracing does make a way better job at handling water and glossy reflections, though. There's a certain place in Downtown, where you can clearly see the reflection of a sign in a nearby puddle with RT, but it's non-existent without it.

tbh what this does is convince me that it's only a minimal visual gain and mostly gives aesthetic differences which could be achieved by just tweaking the artistic approach of the rasterised lighting. In fact, that could be a good approach, using Path Tracing as a dev tool which shows you how the lighting should look, to help you tweak the rasterised lighting to look as good as possible, e.g. by softening shadows, darkening them, etc.

Hey man! The language you use is very concise, and easy to understand. Thank you for the content you produce. It's super helpful. Love the channel, and will subscribe now!

Huge difference I saw with Path Tracing in CP2077 is in over the ground pedestrian overpass during the night time, now this thing is the real deal, the regular RT and Raster pretty much on par, while PT delivers completely new level of visual... it's a shame I cannot attach screenshots I was making to compare same place with different settings, I chose really complicated locations to showoff the tech.

I immediately noticed a big difference when I got a 165Hz monitor. I can easily notice the difference between 500Hz and 1000Hz polling rates. I'm very sensitive to input lag. Fortunately, I don't really notice much of a difference between different graphics settings unless the changes in graphics are substantial and/or they are presented side by side for comparison.

I just wanna have raytraced reflections alongside rasterized lighting / ambient occlusion etc. for the rest of the scene. Imo the reflections are the biggest visual improvement, path tracing is of course the best but so perfrmance costly.

What i meant in my other comment is that, since RT and PT handle the total amount of tracing rays and their path and how they these interactions actually interact with themselves in more ways and as a result in more complex one, it's the reasons we see different results, let alone the different noising techniques applies to make them work properly since nothing is fully 100% RT/PT simply because, in such big scenes, we lack the hardware to be able to do that in real time.

I have been saying this for years. I care less for the tracing gimmick. The reason why I chose the rx 7900XTX. I'm just the gamer. Not a content creator nor a streamer. The R9 7950x and RX 7900XTX runs everything I throw at it perfectly fine in 1440p Ultra Wide at 144hz. Some people need it. I'd rather run ultra/max, native and happy.

I think that the reason that some, actually or a lot, of people noticing the Path/Ray-traced stuff is NOT because they are NOT looking for it, but rather (and partly) because the human brain is literally trained from birth, it's used to see things in a Path/Ray-traced manner from the real world, which automatically means that, the closer we get to realistic global illumination, shadows, and reflections, the less people will notice them for that reason alone + how far rasterized games have come in that regard, they are very close to their Path/Ray traced stuff which is also the reason why a lot of people don't actually notice. Another extra reasons (as if we didn't have enough xD) is the way rasterized light is being placed in games by 3D artists with artificial light sources, some times they are tweaked so well, that the only reason you notice something is off is when a flaw of rasterization which hasn't addressed with some other tech (like ambient occlusion techniques, or whatever other indirect light technique either alone or as a combination) is clearly visible, like "light bleed" in a lot of rasterized titles for example. I got an RX 7600 and move to it from a Vega 64 JUST to see how much difference there is compared with a rasterized image in movement and i the latest Path/Ray-traced Metro Exodus the latest version at 1080p maxed out. I wanted to do this because still pictures are not good enough and make the difference extremely obvious and YT compression doesn't really do enough justice on videos because of its compression so that wouldn't satisfy my curiosity enough. What i found is something that, while notable, at times it seems like it's just that the light source is in a different place this time (with RT on i mean) rather than an actual advantage, like, no need for ambient occlusion since the shadows are now Rt'ed same for reflections and generally global illumination. As far as i am concerned the most important details i need from RT are GI and Shadows because these are what define mostly how light "grounds" objects to be perceived as they would look irl, not reflections + reflections can be very easily calculated in rasterized way in order to be closer to real ones meaning they are easy to emulate their RT version without not a significant impact on performance compared to RT'ed ones, so i'd rather see a hybrid implementation for them instead, and yes i know that SSRelfection are nearly impossible to be made to work fully properly. On a last note, generally, i can't justify the computational cost vs what you get back in return in most cases. Edit: A significant thing think i forgot to mentioned about the first effect i said about people. The Path/Ray traced stuff we see in games, increases the effect i mentioned, despite the fact that it's still just a closer to irl approximation, we all know it's still denoised and that, compared to reality, there light irl doesn't have ray bounce limitations, expect when physical properties of a hit by a ray object, is change because of that material's refraction, reflection and refraction degree which also happens to affect indirect light as well of course. What i am saying basically is that, even Path/Ray traced in games are still not 1:1 with reality, just a lot closer simply because of technological limits, but are they good enough? Yes, yes they are, mostly.

The reason I like ray tracing and especially path tracing is because they trick my brain into thinking I'm *not* looking at a video game from time to time. This is especially true with outdoor scenes. For indoor scenes with only artificial lighting I find the differences usually much more subtle. I think that's one of the reasons I'm not as impressed with Cyberpunk as many others are (I'm still impressed though).

The rasterized lighting is very well done in this game, but RT is still noticeably better, particularly with regards to things like bounce-light and realistic ambient occlusion. And PT is on another level altogether, taking all of RT's advantages and dialing them up even more.

I've been gaming for 20 years now, had a 144HZ monitor for 5 years now and the difference from switching from a 60HZ to 144HZ is quite substantial, however I cannot perceive any difference above 90 FPS, at 60 FPS it looks like motion blur is on. As for Ray Tracing, the only thing that I like about it are the reflections, I don't really care about the shadows as I hardly notice them anyway. The performance hit is definitely not worth it currently, but yeah another good vid, Fabs👍

One important thing to think about with RT is that its much easier for the developer. With rasterization if you want your game to look pretty you need make a lot of cubemaps for reflections, place fake lights to simulate light bounce, etc. With raytracing it does all the work for you. RT will especially help smaller developers (indie and AA) put out beautiful games with a fraction of the time/effort.

From my experience of choosing between Rasterization and Path Tracing on Cyberpunk, I swear i prefer the look of using Rasterization rendering and using ReShade mods. Cyberpunk in native 4k in ultra high quality and using ReShade mods such as PXX Bloom mods is absolutely beautiful and there is zero frame lag and perfect crisp image with crisp textures. Nvidia try to push Path Ray tracing but for me its just not that great compared against other methods of rendering, particularly with the performance hit and the requirement of needing to use heavy DLSS to upscale, breaks the crisp image you get from native resolution images in Rasterization.

I won't deny that it looks different... yes.. "different" but is the difference "better"? What metric should we use to measure the "goodness" of graphics? I've spent a lot of time trying to find the answer for myself. Eventually I concluded that I DO think that in SOME scenes (mostly static, under direct comparison), the RT is significantly more appealing - to me. But it kind of all disappears once I start moving, panning the camera, or driving. My eyes see the whole screen but my mind is primarily focused on the 30% in the center. Ultimately I realized that if I'm having trouble deciding if I even think RT is better or not then it simply can't be worth the performance loss. I don't feel I've missed out on anything really playing without RT. Give it another decade so we all have 200 RA Cores in our cards and everyone wins eventually.

May hurt to say but most people really don't have very good connection from eyes to brain to say that RT doesn't make a huge difference, in a way they are half blind. I remember when I played Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition which is completely based on RT lighting primarily in a form of RT Global Illumination, through the whole game I was absolutely stunned at how incredible the lighting was thanks to RTGI, the amazement at incredible lighting wasn't for just an hour but through the whole game. Such heavy implementations of RT like RTGI in Metro Exodus or Path Tracing in Cyberpunk and Alan Wake II is absolutely stunning and worth every single dollar you have to spend to run those games.

Path Tracing on an oled screen looks beyond incredible. It's gorgeous and brings a higher level of Fidelity and visual realism. You gotta see it in live action to appreciate it. It is a performance hog, but that's always the case with new graphic tech. If you're able to play with Path Tracing, run it. If not, don't.

Nice comparison video, very informative

I love the pixel perfect shadow gradients with path tracing, instead of perfectly black or grey shadows of raster...

I can definately see the difference in the comparisons - but I'm not sure I actually LIKE RT and PT better than the rasterized images. Runaway thoughts: - Most of the time, it looks like the shadows are just darker and smoother - but on the whole, the areas *with* lights are unaffected, and that's where my eyes are most drawn to anyway. - In the jail scene, PT may look more "realistic", but also you can't even see the guy's face anymore. Is that much of an improvement? - In the garage scene, RT makes the edges of the car's shadow shimmer in a really weird way. The only way you'd see that with a real light is maybe if the light source was a fire? :D - In the garage scene, PT washes out the shadow of the car and it looks perhaps even less realistic than before. I do like the lighting up near the skylight (roof window) though. - In the garage scene, both RT and PT work in making the tool trolley look more grounded instead of floating on the ground, however for PT the opposite is true for the car. It now looks less grounded. Losing the detail on the floor seems super odd. Why would more realistic light remove the paint and/or material differences on the ground? - In all the scenes, the colour temperature looks better with PT though. - I do like how the headlights work in RT and PT. Enough to care? I don't think so. - The performance hit seems absolutely massive, considering I can't even say if I like RT/PT better than rasterisation or not. Bubbling under: If darker darks were what you were looking for, would a simple Reshade job get you closer? Bubbling under 2: I wonder, given all the above, even if I had an RTX card in CP2077, would I just keep RT/PT off, put a framerate cap on, and enjoy lower power consumption and temps :D

the intro was so funny i rewinded once or twice ngl 😂

One thing i think about RT is it's one of those technologies noone has really mastered The moment some team masters what it means to optimize for ray tracing the whole industry will move in that direction So far everyone is still designing games as if RT is a background feature rather than the house they'll build their future on

If you are going to make a case for raster vs raytracing vs path tracing you might as well be making a case for high vs very high vs ultra settings. In some games there really is no visual difference.

Honestly... raytracing is mostly a gimmick to me. It cuts your frame rate in half and slightly improve the graphics. I prefere to use Reshade for a visual improvment and it costs like 2-10% of your frames (depends on your resolution and and amount of shaders.

Thanks for all your hard work looking at these tiny differences in the shiny pixels!

Great video! Very well presented.

What mods are u talking about that makes SSR better in cyberpunk without ray tracing? Please tell me! I have an RX 6600 but even just ray traced reflections has too much performance hit for me. I couldnt find anything on nexusmods

Personally, I play video games to enjoy the story that game is trying to tell. Or rather, focusing on the target that i'm about to interact with (competitively). Rarely I just stop and just look at the view, but just to enjoy the view rather looking for something that is right or wrong. After all, It's video games not an actual documentary movie. So in all, RT or PT are just not must features to me. Especially I have to sacrifice FPS or good story just to enjoy the games that studios just trying to show off their tech.

You should do a video on VSR, I think it’s underrated especially at 1080p where details at distance improve a lot

you missed the most important scenes for PT, which is dialogues in clubs with little light and lots of shadow. also the gig they play as a band looks insane with PT

I just upgraded from 2060 super to 4070 ti, gotta say, playing CP without RT and DLSS on native ultra is just amazing, no needs for RT OR PT.

Is it noticeable? of course it is, is it worth the performance hit (most hardware will get) for what you get visually? IMO no; at least in Cyberpunk 2077 a gorgeous game.

At 7:00 the "floor patterns" are actually improperly implemented shadows (same with the white line), the issue is resolved when raytracing and pathtracing is turned on. I had to check for myself, but the material is consistently textured, and is different in lighting only. 👍

I can really see the difference, I’m just not sure if I’m going to upgrade in order to have it. The frame drop seems a bit much but probably in the future there will be better technology that will stop this problem. Great video, this has given me much to think about :)

I play Cyberpunk always with Path tracing+Ray reconstruction. My Average is 100 fps. The worst fps I get is 80+ , even in Dogtown during heavy fights with lots of enemies. The visual enhancement is huge vs the "simple" RT psycho. It's definitely worth it Path Tracing.😊 Asus Tuf 4070ti / Asus Tuf 1440p 32" 170 hz VRR monitor.

5 years in and I still don't care about ray tracing - thanks.

Love this video, absolutely ray tracing/path tracing is something I wanna try to use if the performance allows it, and with a 4080 super on 1440p, it surely does in most titles, with DLSS Q active, if needed

As other have said, the difference is there but it's not always about it lookin better as much as it just looking different. The atmosphere of "feel" of a scene sometimes suffers with the more accurate lighting. A scene that was dark and moody might loose that vibe with more accurate brighter lighting in some cases. So it's a mixed bag. Still more so cool for screenshots than worth the performance hit when actually playing unless one has a really high end system.

I think that the visual, lightning and effects are essential for game immersion and Path tracing does an incredible job at it, even if at a huge performance hit. Overall I am not sure that Path tracing is actually superior ( whatever this means ), it just feels different: sometimes folks don't realize that more realistic doesn't equal better. Developers may trade realism for playability and for good reasons: for example you may introduce too much darkness in a scene or the opposite. I think that rasterization is perfectly balanced because it is appropriately fine tuned to provide a beautiful and playable scene. Also Path Tracing removes a lot of hassle that the developers need to deal with, making things much easier for them, which I think makes for their interest into pushing this technology.

Compare some reshade presets to raster, ray, path. I feel like you can really enhance a scene with basic reshade presets vs using ray tracing or path tracing even.

In the garage the shadow of the car was not great during RT. Even raster performed better there, but the way PT handles shadows is beautiful. So natural and makes the scene really tie in together. To me it's very noticable difference. It brings the scenes to life and I'd much prefer PT over raster if the hardware was strong enough. That said, currently it doesn't seem possible to use with anything besides the highest end cards, and even then it's not optimal. Give it a few generations and it should begin to trickle down to become a more natively implemented feature.

7:33 I believe path tracing appears brighter because it effectively captures the illumination caused by light bouncing off yellow or bright surfaces, such as that metal objects. When these surfaces are dark or black, the bouncing light is reduced, resulting in a darker room. This difference enhances the performance of path tracing in accurately rendering the interactions with surrounding objects.

Pathtracing just seems to add a lot of visual depth to a scene. Switching from Raytracing to Pathtracing really makes the scene pop.

You should do a comparison video of the different rendering modes with the Nexus Mod path-tracing mod that allows for increased rays/bounces. I've gone all the way up to 16/16 with my 4090 and got 1-2 fps, but it did look really good, lol!

I remember when people had the exact debate wayback when the meme "But can it run Crysis" was still the benchmark we all need to chase for our PCs whether it was necessary to chase such features or just focus on the gameplay more than visuals. To me its always going to be "why not both" answer if its achievable. I cannot wait for the future when Path Tracing becomes the norm and in that time we'll be debating whether it was necessary to make all NPCs in video games "aware" instead. Or even the day when all future Video Games do not require a CPU anymore (at least Tom Petersen said that is the future).

I am currently playing red dead redemption 2 for the first time, and the visuals in that game just keeps blowing me away. Such realistic graphics on top of realistic physics, an unbelievably good story etc. But what truly shocks me is the lighting in the game. The moonlight, the sunlight seeping throw the tree canopy, the indoor lighting due to lamps, lighting in caves when you're holding a lantern, and so on. My point is, if devs focused more the how they presented rasterization, with red dead redemption 2 being used as the standard, stuff like Ray tracing wouldn't even be required. Not to mention, while playing cyberpunk 2077, I was hard pressed to find difference between rt and non rt, with path tracing causing the most significant change, and even that is noticeable only when you take screenshots and compare side by side and keep doing so for a lot of different scenes. Now it's upto the player and the gpu that they have if the performance hit is worth the minute visual uplift. A game which absolutely does cause an easily noticeable change in visuals when switching on ray tracing is the witcher 3 next gen, but that feels more like using Ray tracing to mask the shortcomings of lazy rasterization implementation, which is why I said red dead 2 should be used as the standard on how to implement rasterization.

But, but, what about the AMD preview drivers they have AFMF for Cyberpunk 2077. 😁 Seriously, I have tried RT in every game I have purchased that supports it. But it never seemed worth the frame rate loss. Also I am a little weary of CP2077 PT since the Crysis tessellation incident. Maybe once a title releases with it that isn't a thinly veiled tech demo for Nvidia or AMD(FC6, I'm talking about you). Until then I'll skeptically turn on rasterization alternatives. Just so you know that I am not just being anti-RT. If I can turn on RT and the lost in performance does not make my gaming experience unenjoyable, I am prone to leaving it on. But that also goes for any tech

The thing about rasterization vs ray/path tracing is that you can't really see a clear difference without side-by-side comparison, but you can definitely feel the difference while playing.

People who can't tell the difference between rasterized lighting and shadow vs RT with Path Tracing are honestly either oblivious or blind. Properly utilized RT in games is VERY noticeable.

Looking forward to seeing which mods can improve the rasterized look/shadows/reflections. I've seen quite a few on Nexus but most of the shadow tweaks just bump cascade distances a bit or don't seem to drastically improve the accuracy of rasterized shadows. For reflections I don't think there's really anything that can improve the SSR atleast I've yet to find anything that makes it comparable to RT Reflections. I think the best one can do is basically download a HD texture pack, a LUT alteration mod or increase the ingame gamma to 1.10/1.15 and increase the cascade draw distance to have less shadow pop-in but I'd still prefer the RT/Pathtraced image.

that intro ahahhaha

It depends on game. Most games dont use proper global illumination or other non ray tracing shaders enough. Like you can get interiors to be dark without a weird eye adapt or color correction stuff. You see it in Skyrim SE enb, Cryisis games, Rust.... Cyberpunk 2077 is missing proper shadow lights often which makes lighting look bad. Interiors also dont darken correctly like in some other games unless you enable path tracing. Its not fair to compare it in same game because devs just didnt do normal rendering as well as they could. Ray/Path tracing is mostly a excuse for developers to be lazy just like frame gen and upscaling. All this tech barely benefits the gamer. Only time ray tracing impressed me was Marvels Spiderman ray traced reflections on buildings. While Cyberpunk Pathtracing looks good its semi non functional due to bad implementation and lag. The normal graphics could be made better than current path tracing in cyberpunk with way better performance. People saying DLAA, DLSS and FSR look better then native are idiots/shills or trolls I enabled it in CP2077 and literally see lights flickering and shimmering on quality DLSS and DLAA. Then DLSS often looks like a oil painting its a complete farce. Im not a AMD shill either I have only had Nvidia cards since like a 1g amd gpu in a prebuilt.

In path tracing you should look at how amazing light transmission through the skyscraper windows is 🤤 When using path tracing you need to look at all 3 of lights behaviors: reflection, transmition, and scattering. Below street lights, look at how correctly light scatters through fog

In Cyberpunk, when you leave the Dog Town Stadium bazaar and look out onto the streets, path tracing gives you a lot more depth of field. I compared Ray Tracing Overdrive with Path Tracing (highest preset) and a low preset without Ray Tracing. The “image” without ray tracing was still very good, but kind of flat. With Path Tracing you get a much more 3D-like impression. You have a better sense of how far away everything is. Therefore, I think that Path Tracing is also helpful for driving in the game, as you can estimate distances and speed much better. But to be honest: Cyberpunk 2077 looks so good even without RT that you don't necessarily need an expensive RT-capable graphics card - I just see it as a nice bonus.

Ray tracing can look better but definetly different, path tracing always looks better in any scene, some less some a lot, the feeling of looking at something dynamic, physically correct and responsive to light changes is something that rasterization and ray tracing cannot give you

I think that Pathtracing looks substantially softer, often too soft, and has a tendency to totally blow out highlights. There aren't many scenes where I actually think it looks objectively better, not from an artistic point at least. And since it totally changes the atmosphere sometimes even CDPR didn't make use of it everywhere and intentionally left it mostly out of scenes like the Japantown parade. When it comes to atmosphere Pathtracing never really "floored" me, I already found nVidia/CDPR's showcases rather 50/50, like that club scene with the way to bright ceiling. When it comes to Raytracing, shadows and even reflections never did too much to me, sometimes the reflections, while clearly being the most visible change, were a bit too much for me even though being more realistic, the largest impact to atmosphere actually comes from rather subtile changes using the highest lighting settings. Playing Phantom Liberty now though I didn't find the change being worth the huge performance impact. All that said, I still love all of it from a tech/graphics nerd perspective and Cyberpunk is still that one FOMO game that makes me wish I had a high end nVidia card to play around with these goodies.

The reason the raytracing doesn't often look dramatically different in terms of lighting is due to it still using the manually placed lights in CP77. They don't always adhere to the shape of the lightsource & therefore look just as inaccurate as rasterisation does.

Different? Yes More realistic? Yes Better? Meh I'm usually too focused on game play to notice differences in video quality. What I do notice is the screaming CPU and GPU fans when switching.

This just proves that raster is just better than ray tracing and path tracing the huge performance hit is just not worth the slightly and i mean SLIGHTY different result, Unless the game is very simple looking. edit: About the softer and "better" shadows in RT, its because RT introduces alot of noise and the noise reduction algorithm makes it look softer its also the reason for disappearing lines and cables. I don't think its supposed to look softer especially at the distance the light source is.

WOooooahhhh

The biggest difference between rasterization and path tracing (I'll skip raytracing since it's a half measure) is in the amount of work required by the devs to "fake" things using rasterization. When I like a scene using path tracing, I literally just add my lights and let the rendering engine take care of all the rest. With rasterization I have to add all sorts of fake lights, baked shadows, AO maps, screen space reflections etc just to try to simulate the path traced look. It's a horrendous workflow that I've glad to see disappear.

For the most part I do agree that the difference between raytracing and rasterization are indeed barely noticable with the exception of something like Reflection raytracing. Outside of reflections you have to actually look very closely in order to notice any difference when it comes to shadows which is supposed to be the features biggest selling point. It does other things too such changing the way colors bounce off objects, but again it's such a subtle effect that you will never really see it if you are in a high action environment. You would have to pause and look take in the scenery and then know what what to look for. Pathtracing is a much more noticeable feature and it's effects are more pronounced, but again you would have to know what to look for to see it's effects. Then you step into performance costs. You could have a graphics card that can run a game at 1080 natively at 60FPS but then when you turn on Raytracing you could all of the sudden drop to 30 to 45fps. Turn on Pathtracing and now you are at 15FPS. DLSS is or equivalent is a requirement if you want to maintain a proper framerate with it turned on. The most famous example i've seen with this is the quake 2 RTX mod. With RT turned off the game runs around 600FPS or greater. With RT turned on the game drops immediately to 60FPS and the only thing you really get out of it is effects that can be done by any current gen shaders without RT. Finally you have the argument that it makes development easier when it comes to lighting and shadow casting. While seemingly true at least from what I've read from comments from developers, it's never implemented the same in any game. For example with Cyberpunk you get reflections without pathtracing, while in Alan Wake 2 you have to turn on pathtracing in order to get reflections. Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't even have your character show up in any reflection, it treats the player character like a vampire. The people behind Atomic Heart came out and said they didn't use raytracing because it would take too much time to implement. RE4 flat out removed raytracing for shadows and kept reflections even though the engine was capable of both. PS5 spiderman only does reflections and not shadows and Ghostwire: Tokyo doesn't even fully implement it's reflection raytracing features because there are still certain areas where it's using baked in reflection maps like certain puddles and any given sink mirror. you don't get raytraced reflections with those even though you would think it's the obvious choice. I guess the point i'm trying make with the final section is this. The technology has been around for a great while at this point but has clearly failed to see widespread consistent adoption even though it's supposed to be the easier thing to implement than rasterization. Can you honestly say that raytracing is the future if even developers that do use it don't even use it to it's fullest and actually use less features or drop it entirely on newer games?

Path tracing is what we needed in the first place and it's the future of gaming 😊

First

Good vid. Reminds me why I don't need ray gimmick. A setting that said drop 40fps would at least be more honest.

From my experience, 2 things really worth the RT performance : Ambient occlusion and reflections. Until GPUs can perfectly manage or brute force RT render, the rest is optional as long as devs keep delivering respectable rasterization

I think people sometimes forget that in really, genuinely good level/environment design? Every aspect of the lighting is decided and deliberate. Because in a really good game with a really good art direction, it's not trying to be a simulation of reality; it's more like cinematography. In genuinely great level design, the lighting - at all times - serves the specific purposes of drawing the eye to certain things, making good use of negative space, making sure the gameplay is visually clear, emphasising things of dramatic significance or meaning... and this holds true even in open world titles, if they're done well. The point is, the moment you're sacrificing a load of performance for a lighting technique that is about generating "more realistic" lighting... you're potentially deviating hard from the intended artistic direction of the scene; it's like asking some great artist to paint you a beautiful picture, and then deciding that it would "look better" if you shone a coloured light on it at a weird angle, or stuck a snapchat filter on it. I've seen some people arguing that it speeds up development - that you can effectively tell the game how the world should be illuminated, and let it do its thing. Except again, where's the art in that? Since when has doing the quicker, easier thing actually benefited the end product in terms of its quality? And that's rather leaving aside the fact that when developers get into the habit of pushing a button for automated lighting systems, they open the door to sloppier final visuals at times - and the need for hacky workarounds. For example, sometimes it may be realistic that a character is in shadow in a given scene, but the particulars of the interaction/cutscene/whatever require that the eye be drawn to that character. So either the game ships with the character bathed in realistic - but unfortunate - shadow, or they stick in some of the older lighting techniques specifically to highlight them, leading to potential visual inconsistency. I suppose in the long-run, if realistic fully-simulated lighting behaviour becomes the baseline, what we'll actually see is developers having to make use of traditional cinema techniques just to recreate the kind of artificial, deliberate lighting that you see in film - such as positioning reflective surfaces near characters to ensure they're illuminated properly in otherwise darkened scenes etc...

Excellent showcase and good points! 👍

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For my taste, Rasterization looks much better. 4:43 the Rasterization left side looks much better, the light is more clear, more visible, the vegetation also looks better. To my eye, the Pathtracing or Raytracing just shows less light, and makes everything darker, which is definitely NOT what i want. Thank you for the video, it definitely helped me make the decision between the 7900 XTX and RTX 4080