"Most people aren't Anthony" Yeah, reality is often dissappointing.

"We encouraged them to play like normal gamers" *everyone proceeds to stand around closely analyzing shadows in static environments with no change or motion*

My take away was, that game devs got pretty good at faking light instead of ray tracing.

As a 3d Animator, I gotta say that whenever highly reflective surfaces are required, it becomes much more work to create a great looking image. Most scenes, in their default state, create very meh reflections, and in many cases are cluttered or confusing. You've got to put a huge amount of effort into setting up reflective objects off camera to make reflections pop, just like a photographer would. Therefore it's no surprise that when you turn on raytraced reflections in games, often the results are meh.

I love it how anthony is the "too smart for this crowd" dude and just aces it

"Most people aren't Anthony" And that's exactly why we arent a multiplanet species yet.

The biggest issue here is that RT effects range so widely from game to game, and then further, the detail of the ray tracing is wide ranging, too. If every game was using 1:1 resolution reflections, shadows, and lighting, the effect would be far more pronounced, beautiful, and lend to the accurate recreation of a scene, but when they use 1/4 resolution detail to keep the frames from falling through the floor, it results in an image that is debatably not "better" than the faked SSR effects in spite of being more accurate. One day, when we have the resources to properly calculate and display these scenes without having to cut corners and reduce quality, ray tracing will be far more pronounced and important to gaming.

I'd say it's more beneficial to developers than to consumers because less time is needed to simulate lighting angles for an area when you can just render it in real time.

Seriously, it's easy to notice when RTX is on - it's when your game keeps dropping frames to try and keep up.

Anthony the OG. Showing them how it's done.

Looking back at RTX now it's basically just Ultra Graphics preset with extra steps

RTX now feels like VR when it first came out. Novel and very much something to look forward to for the future, but not currently worth it for most consumers unless you’re an enthusiast.

"Linus scares me, because he wants a lot of energy." I didn't know Linus was a lich. That's good to know.

First thought was “If Anthony is being tested he’s gonna get all of them right.” Did not disappoint.

Well the thing about RTX is that it's 100% about automating the process of lighting and shading in games. It's not meant to make games look better, it's meant to make the development process easier. Problem is it's been marketed as this huge graphical feature, like physx, when it's not.

the funny thing, is that even when difference is clear, it really hard to decide which one I like more. Artistically, RT ON looks worse sometimes. And this reminds my time in 3d modelling - where sometimes you were going after realism, and other times you would be going after artistic vision and would even avoid "realistic" ray tracing on purpose, because it would butcher artistic "message" and vision. Like, "I want a person to see that particular corner, and I don`t care about real life!" :D I guess same thing applies to games - if the game developers successfully created their artistic eye-pleasing picture - it does not even mean that RT will be viewed as a superior version. In some games, where visuals are kind of bland and generic, RT gives some extra, and actually improves stuff. In other games it is opposite.

Anthony is all knowing. I remember when Linus said “Anthony is the tech guy for the tech guys.” Anthony is literally the goat.

When Anthony mentioned shadow maps and how he was able to see them. I knew he was the chosen one.

My first use of ray tracing was using 3d studio max back in 1999. Was running Pentium 2 350.

I can remember that some games advertised that their grfxengine calculates raytracing shadows, even before RTX. I didn't pay much attention to that, but when I see how important the visualization of shadows is when evaluating RTX on/off, then they were right.

David: * Asks Nicholas to do a second take so the editor can use the one with clearer audio * Editor: No. I don't think I will.

"Most people aren't Anthony" So True

I've experimented with screen space raytracing. I can't say it really changes the visual in a way that's glaringly obvious.

At the moment i feel like it really depends on the games too. Performance drops aside ofc, but as an exemple , ray tracing on doom eternal is really obvious to me, but on resident evil village, it's way more subtle. It probably also depends on what kind of environment you're focusing on. Obviously, on a very reflective metal structure, it will be very clear whether RTX is on or off, but in something like a dry muddy terrain at night , it might also be more subtle !

Godking Emperor Anthony has the ultimate eye. He cannot be fooled or bargained with. He sees all, even past the hardware into the soul of every gamer. He feels them, in full Raytracing.

I have been playing CS:GO for 7 years now and today was when I came to know the scope had reflection. You learn something new everyday afterall.

Would love to see an update to this video at some point to see how it's evolved over a year or two from the release of this.

the main thing to look for is more accurate shadows, shadows with colour (instead of just black) ambeint occlusion and bounce light sources, these are all things that are baked into how ray tracing works by default, whereas with rasterization you CAN do those as well but its much harder and takes much more time to complete and unless its a high graphics spec game most studios dont do most of them

We studied Ray Tracing in comp sci class in 1990 - its taken 30 years for it to come to reality. Amazing how long its been

Please don’t ever change the intro music. You can keep updating the graphics, but this intro music has been here for years. Please never change it. 😂

A year later and nothings changed, cut your fps by 75%, get fancy lights which look hardly different. Thanks Nvidia.

2:05, David is the only person i want to see in Linus Tech Tips vids cuz he is so funny and we don't know why :D

Hearing Linus say "Mathematically speaking, most people aren't Anthony" made my day. The only game I can ever tell the difference is on Minecraft, the rest of the time it's not worth it.

My Mother-in-law when my Father-in-law and I put in an HDTV at their house: "I can't tell a difference in the picture quality." My Mother-in-law when going to an SD channel after just 1 month of watching everything in HD: "Why is this so blurry?"

The transition to ray tracing is the same as the move to rasterization, that also initailly came with performance hits(I wasn't there but Tech Deals was so I'm inclined to believe him).

It would be interesting to see this revisited with some modern RTX implementations. Do an A+B test with Cyberpunk and Control (with the Director's Cut mod). I suspect people will start to have an easier time telling the difference. The tip of the iceberg is now above water.

Love that sponsor transition. "Just like you can tell the difference... Our sponsor, glasswire."

"Linus scares me becuase he always wants more energy" lol

This was one year ago when it was Beta, now RTX has been open to regular version so you just need the RTX MCPack files imported and then use those. So it works all the way to the most recent MC version. I'm still learning but Adobe photoshop or similar apps should be able to design our own textures and then use that for RTX MC

On one hand raytracing just makes the whole development of lighting so much easier, and on the other it will lead to new kinds of experiences that would not have been made before due to the sheer complexity of making them. Overall the content needs to catch up with the new possibilities.

“Just like can they tell the difference... our sponsor!” The segues get better and better every time, Linus!

Most people aint Anthony is one of the funniest things I have heard in a while. Also Anthony is a god damn ROCKSTAR

3:04 I noticed how you worded the ltt store deals…

The ray tracing in the Witcher 3 update is actually very noticeable especially in indoor areas. It's still a huge performance hit and I've always been the type to prefer framerate over pretty graphics, but it looks so good that I keep turning it back on

“Most people aren’t Anthony” that’s something I will have to live with but don’t know how I will.

Please PLEASE! Make a LTT shirt with that quote “Mathmatically speaking, most people are not Anthony.” PLEASE!

One of the few games where there is a stark difference in wether raytracing was actually on or not, was in Ghostrunner, where the water sources and metal definitively had better reflections from light sources, being that I could actually see the character's feet in the puddles when I couldn't without it.

If people simply got on with playing a game rather than stopping and pixel peeping, they'd be a lot happier.

Everyone's praising Anthony but nobody is talking about the Plouffe guy who also got the RTX enabled system right in all three games

I like the calm guy with the white mask. His voice is so smooth

it should be easy do detect if you know what you looking for, as dude said. it's just some games used rtx only in some places i have old 1070, but in some games i can enable stop motion rtx mode I've checked it in GhostWire and it's strange, I definitely see reflections, but shadows... i can't find any place when i can see any difference.

I allways had the same feeling when watching Raytracing benchmarks and so on. Even in Cyberpunk where Raytracing can make a noticable difference I wasn't really overwhelmed. If you have the power to run it and have high fps do it. But otherwise until now it is jsut marketing for me. Some titles might use it well. But I won't spend any money on a feature I mostly can't even spot if it's on or off.

Man Anthony is that guy in school. That everyone knows is hella smart and whatever he says nobody really questions cause we know he gonna do things with that brain

Something looking "better" is not the same as something looking "more realistic". I mean, art is (more often than not) specifically made to look good, while simple everyday photos can look very bland. So judging between rtx on or off is extra hard, if you go after what looks better.

I like how she thought the "glowier" thing was RTX, even though that was just bloom, whereas the RTX one even lights up the nearby blocks

Finally built a new PC after 10 years. Gotta say, when I flipped on RTX for Cyberpunk 2077, that was an eye-opener. Game looks WAY better with RTX on. Just be sure to kill the legacy shadow and lighting settings like SSAO and screen space reflections, shadow maps, etc. Using a RTX 3080, I can get pretty solid 60 fps at 1440p with RTX psycho settings, DLSS set to performance. I have a mod that makes the RTX parameters even more accurate, but is a 10 fps hit, hence the bump down from DLSS balanced to DLSS performance. I can run it capped at 30 fps in 4K, or uncapped at about 45-50 fps, but I'll take the unnoticeable hit from 4K to 1440 to get that 60 fps. I say unnoticeable, but I mean in the middle of intense combat, it's the frame rate you notice, not the resolution. Know what's really sick? Being able to see an enemy off screen around the corner in the reflection of a billboard/window, and ricochet-ing a bullet to kill him. I can see real time ray tracing being a massive graphical advantage in a competitive shooter, much like back in the day (I'm talking Battlefield 2 era and before), being able to render dynamic shadows was a huge advantage. Guy on his poato rig couldn't render dynamic shadows, but you could, and you could see his shadow coming around the corner before he did. Since he couldn't see dynamic shadows, he didn't realize he was telegraphing his position by approaching a corner with his back to the sun. Imagine being able to see players camping because of their reflection in a puddle or off a window.

Anthony is a national treasure and must be protected at all cost, even at the cost of your 3080.

Honestly DLSS has been far more impressive to me than ray tracing has in any title I've tried

I think RT is like all the advanced effects you have in audio engineering where you add an atmospheric touch, if you look for something to pop out you won’t hear it unless you are the engineer or a very audio technical guy. But it doesn’t sound as good without that effect. That’s why these engineers are chosen by artists to mix their songs. Same thing for Gaming now. This feature is great for developpers and it’s essential as a progress, as a technology. But regular users will just be more immersed, but won’t know why, until you point out the tech behind. And still they won’t grasp the actual tech behind.

Problem with so many new games is the shadows are too sharp and have no diffuseness to them. Get it in some flight sims, plane flies over at 8,000ft above crossing sun and the shadow on ground still so clear can see the wires and fine details of the planes outline where as it would be a blurry mess barely recognizable

Its really fascinating that something that took me 10 years ago whole night to render, can be rendered now 40-50 times per second...

I was doing ray tracing in the late '80's. However, back then it took the better part of a day to render ONE 480p frame. GPU technology today still blows my mind with it's shear processing power and capabilities.

rtx depends on the game, and what technic is used. Rtx on "Control" is quite impressive!

I kind of feel like Ray Tracing will save time in the future with new games once it becomes a standard.

bruh Anthony is just built differently, the fact he got all right is pretty crazy

Love for Nicole, the only one to miss all games.

Honestly some quick and dirty ways to tell if a game is RT or Not for an effect. RT Reflections: Well this should be the most obvious, if you can see the player in any reflective surface then it's RT as brute forcing that effect in Raster is more expensive than RTing. RT Shadows: Check for shadows becoming softer or harder depending on top-distance to the ground (EX: A Tree would cast far softer shadows than the player, and things smaller than the player would cast even sharper shadows), as that cascading of shadow sharpness relative to distance from the ground is characteristic of how shadows are handled in real life. Rasterized games usually just have one fixed shadow resolution for non-players or even for all shadows that are shadowmaps, so seeing different proper shadow resolutions for different objects in a scene can be a tell for if a game is using RT Shadows. RT Global Illumination: This is the more complicated one as baked GI can very accurately mimic it (IIRC some devs even do a RT pass to bake the lighting into the scene), but the best way to tell is if the game is dynamic yet the lighting stays consistent, also another key way to tell is general light sources, RTGI games usually have textures that would just emit bloom in Rasterized games (Emmisives), actually emit proper light based on the object/colordata of that texture.

I think the main problem is that everyone thinks of RTX as being made for gamers to improve their experience, but really RTX is being developed as a way to help streamline the development process, creating good looking lighting in video games through the traditional methods (all those "tricks" you mentioned that developers in rasterization used to simulate realistic lighting) takes a LOT of time and skill to get right, where as RTX literally just works. The performance may not be that great yet for GPUs but as time progresses that will change and I believe we will likely see a change in the standard from rasterization to path-traced lighting...

The relaxed quiet guy with the pleasant voice is awesomeee! :D

"You can't enable metrics" Alex: "can I run a benchmark? You know, that thing that's made to show metrics?"

I prefer Raster to RT when it's only one or the other you can use, as RT looks nice but can be a bit dark in some game locations. The mix of both Raster and RT looks better than both of them by themselves, as you get the benefit of RT lighting but brightened up a bit by the Raster so some game scenes aren't so dark. Cheers

Minecraft with a good raster shader pack with a physical based rendering texture pack looks better to me than RTX, and I have tried both first hand. Not to mention the frame rate. Easily over 110 for the raster shader and under 30 for the RTX (I have 6650 XT, not the best at Raytracing to begin with). I think part of the problem with Minecraft RTX is that the sun's position stays directly overhead during the day, resulting in top down shadows that can look "fake" (this can actually happen in real-life near the equator). The raster shader allows you to move the sun and moon to an angled position like they usually are in real-life, which allows for much prettier shadows and lighting.

0:45 Linus's smoothest sponsor transition ever

My first ray traced render was a 320x200 render on an Amiga 500 that took 24 hours to calculate. RTX boards are doing it in real-time, mind blown.

a big issue is, that many rtx capeable games are ment to also run on non rtx graphics cards. so if you compare metro exodus enhanced edition to the standard version with rtx disabled, or even to the standard edition with rtx the difference is night and day. a lot of modern games onlz ray trace certain things and light sources, as well as not utilizing different shapes of light sources. that is something thats very noticeable in wolfenstein youngblood or battlefield 5

Things i'm most interested in with RTX is the gameplay possibilities. Things like realtime nevmeshing over dynamic objects by casting rays, or really performant checks for whether a player is visible or not behind objects

I once, around 2007, read an interview with a graphics-designer/-programmer in an article from a popular games-magazine, here in germany. He has been asked, what makes him proud about his work. He answered: If people do not even notice, that a specific new graphical invention has been implemented, because they are used to the natural behavior from out in the real world, then a programmer has done an awsome job. So seeing how much rasterisation has improved from that day on, and seeing the result of this test here in comparison, makes these words from 2007 even more impressive and true.

3 years from now, Linus will look back at the graphics now and say: "wow, the image quality before was disgusting!”

Yesterday I sold my 2,5 years old Vega 56 for 500€( bought for 220€) and bought for 1299€ a RX6900XT Red Devil Ultimate with 16GB, selected Chips, dual BIOS and 2 games. For me are the 16 GB RAM importantly than RT with less frames for smooth images. I play with WQHD (27")and this is more than enough.

Coming back to this 1 year later and the implementation of RT in Elden Ring, and I got to say that there is a huge difference with RT on and off. I had taken a long break from the game, updated to the current patch from a fresh install so I just set all graphics to max including RT and pressed go. Realized after a bit of gaming that I had less FPS from what I remembered it, hovering around 40-50 most of the time, but in some scenes it could dip all the way to mid-30s, but couldn't figure out why because my rig could certainly support stable 60+ FPS in every portion of the game and my CPU sat at around 40-50% most of the time, so it couldn't be a CPU bottleneck either (at first I assumed it had something to do with CPU core lock speed even though that seemed ridiculous with an i9 12900k and all). After some troubleshooting, I realized it was because I had set RT to max, turned it off and the immediate effect was *huge* (I also got the 60+ FPS I was used to). With RT on, the game looked a lot smoother without losing detail and it was absolutely gorgeous (it was pretty before RT but the effect was massive). It was one of those situations where you struggle to retain crispness of your image quality when you smudge out background detail but without actually making it look genuinely blurry and all it causes is loss of image depth even though the purpose of that smudge was to make it look deeper. It looked blurry but without detail loss. That's how I'd describe it. I think Anthony put it well when he described the technical difference in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. So I'd say that yes, even to someone not very technical, you *do* notice a huge difference with RT set to max and then turn it off. When I turned it off everything just sort of just had this weird shimmer and the light looked way flatter. I think a problem with your test setup here is that you just didn't let the player get enough time to "feel" the difference with RT on and off. I had played quite a few hours with RT on before I set it off, so my mind had gotten used to the way the game looked with RT on, and I 100% assure you that if you had given the same amount of time to your play testers e.g. play at least an hour with RT on and then off or vice versa, you'd feel the difference immediately. In this situation you specifically asked them to point out how they could tell RT was on and off, and I think that's true that it won't describe your average less tech-savvy gamer. I can't immediately tell the difference of RT on and off when I check these tech demo vids either, because I don't think there's actually enough time for the mind to be able to fully register the differences while also make the viewer intentionally look for differences, taking away actual focus from that RT is more of a holistic experience of the totality of the image quality, rather than it being how the image looks at a detail-level. I'm definitely going to play ER in 1080p instead of 1440p and see if I can retain stable 60 FPS because the visual difference is so good it's actually worth it, assuming your rig can handle it.

"Mathematically speaking, most people aren't Anthony" That needs to be on a shirt. Up vote the hell out of this until it becomes a shirt, and spam super-chat tomorrow until it becomes a shirt.

This video further proves Anthony's awesomeness... We love you Anthony!

I prefer 4k gaming over ray tracing.

To be honest, I think many of those games look better without raytracing.

This was a dumb test to do before the metro exodus enhanced edition was released. The benefits of RTX will be more prevalent in games that are made from the ground up with RTX instead of being bolted onto games with rasterization

I like this new edited format. The cuts from Linus narrating to the team trying to figure out which pc is RTX on is great

There was / is a ray tracing program called POV-Ray. Back before Blender, you specified a scene using a text file describing cubes, spheres, and textures. A complex scene could take HOURS to complete. If an updated Povray (or Blender) could use the RTX card, artists could create work much faster.

for me rtx iis really visible when comes to colorfull spaces and that light reflected from surfaces has different colors depending what color surface has.

The biggest benefit I have noticed is thaat my blender render times were cut in almost half.

As someone with an RTX graphics card, I almost always turn it off because the increase in frame rate without it usually far outweighs the benefits of slightly more graphical fidelity. If it's 100 FPS with no ray tracing or 40 FPS with ray tracing I'm almost always going to prioritize frame rate.

I don't know about normal people, but as a 3D artist I almost always see it. All the tricks and cheats that simulate proper lighting fall away in favor of... proper lighting.

Honestly it's not very noticeable, but the major upside is that once even the lowliest card can do RT devs can really streamline production. Current tricks look great but take a lot of time to make, RT scenes you just drop in a light source and go. Means that once real time RT is in full swing top quality lighting will be accessible to even indie devs. It's great for remastering old games too!

Cyberpunk has an amazing RT implementation. Reflections and shadows with GI on medium and quality dlss on a 3080 at 4k is incredible

the most noticeable for me is on Cyberpunk really, the ambiance just levelled up a notch with RTX on, even just the medium one.

“Can you tell if RTX is on, or off?” Yes, it’s quite obvious when I’m getting 100 less, or worse, frames than usual.

I Believe all you need is 2 beams. like one giant beam to light and then those beams inside a place is masked and then the part that isn't mask jumps to every other object around it at a much weaker effect like 30% effect of the first incoming beam to the rest of the ambience inside4, rather than use hundreds of them. and reflection simply be a slightly blurred copy of the scene above it but in the way of constant camera just showing it from that angle of down to up and sideways, with simply the blur varieing based on the intensity of the light hitting that place of the scene.

I'm glad you mentioned ray-tracing's role in game development. It takes hundreds of man-hours for artists to create those realistic looking rasterized worlds. An indie dev can simply place some objects in their level, turn on RTX, and have AAA lighting, shadow, and reflections.

Its crazy that Nicole got them all wrong which means that she can tell the difference its just that she expects the raytracing to somehow look better/different than it is.

why wouldnt you cap the framerate so the only tell is the menu options?

You can always tell something is running screenspace reflections(non rtx shader feature) because it makes things in front of it distorted with the effect as well at the edges when it realistically shouldn't at all. It's just one of those mildly infuriating things that got me to write this because I would want more attention drawn to it. This artifact was happening when they were talking about minecraft water(5:27), and the corner of the block in hand was groovin with the motion. This happens because screenspace reflections are calculated using a 2d image, so there is no understanding that an object can be physically behind something, just pixels next to each other. RTX calculates(from what I understand) in a 3d environment, using that to know more about what should be affected and what should be left alone. The image clarity potential coming from the gpu having a better understanding of the 3d environment is something that may, and should be, highlighted more within the e-art and game development world.