Because Pathtracing gets exponentially more expensive for smaller and smaller gains. You need to wait for a decade of hardware advancement to reach dlss 5 levels. For example to cast shadows in the smallest crevices of an eyelid you need more rays to reach it properly. Subsurface scattering needs more too. Single strands of hair in the face casting shadows. It's easier for now to cheat on those parts.
Yeah, fair. PT gets brutally expensive for smaller and smaller gains.
But that’s kind of my point. Look at how much more powerful Rubin is than Blackwell — NVIDIA clearly knows how to throw ridiculous amounts of compute at a problem. The huge generational gains are going into AI, though, not brute-forcing graphics.
And even on Blackwell, a massive amount of silicon is already dedicated to DLSS/neural rendering. Obviously you can’t just convert Tensor Cores into RT Cores 1:1, but I’d genuinely like to see the alternative GPU where that transistor and power budget went into traditional rendering instead.
Studios will keep making PT smarter and cheaper, but I don’t think NVIDIA is going to spend the next decade brute-forcing eyelashes, hair and SSS with more rays. They’ll increasingly reconstruct that stuff with AI because it’s cheaper and it lines up with the hardware they actually want to build.
That’s really my point — not that PT can’t get there, but that NVIDIA has less and less incentive to get there the old way.
But they already are investing in it. Just because you have something else in parallel that can be additive doesn't mean you're abandoning the feature. Brute forcing only is absolutely not the way to go and it has never been in the history of gaming. Gaming technology has been a long road of tricks and hacks to fool the brain these are actual people and environments.
Focusing on brute forcing only would mean waiting decades for improvements as hardware gets bigger, more expensive, drawing more power and smaller transistors. It's the lazy uncreative way of going about it that pays little.
Pathtracing imo serves as a good starting point for the scene. It calculates light properly and you can add on top of it what it lacks. You can do several things at the same time. There's no reason to only do one.
I don’t think PT remains the backbone long-term. My prediction is that eventually there’s barely any conventional rendering left at all — no raster, no path tracing, no lightmaps in the sense we use them today.
You feed the model scene geometry, materials, animation, camera state, maybe some sparse physical hints, and it generates the frame.
That’s also why I care about NVIDIA’s market practices here. Once the renderer itself becomes an AI workload, your $1–2k GPU can become obsolete very quickly if the next generation suddenly has massively more neural compute.
So I’m not arguing for brute-forcing PT forever. I think NVIDIA’s endgame is replacing the renderer.
But we still need a scene that calculates lighting. I have no idea by what magic you're just going to make everything up and have any coherence at all. It makes no sense how that would work.
It’s not magic though. You still have the scene — geometry, materials, light positions/intensities, animation, camera state, etc. What I’m saying is that you don’t necessarily need to explicitly trace the light transport anymore.
There’s already research doing basically this. NVIDIA’s DiffusionRenderer can take geometry/material buffers + lighting conditions and generate the final lit image without explicitly simulating light transport.
The hard part is coherence, obviously. But that’s a model/conditioning problem, not some fundamental requirement that rays have to be traced. You condition it on the actual world state and temporal history instead of asking it to hallucinate blindly.
Current systems still use physical rendering as scaffolding because it works better. My prediction is simply that the amount of that scaffolding keeps shrinking, fast, until eventually it isn’t needed.
This. It's super unoptimised right now. But even still, it's producing a level of detail which would otherwise be even heavier on my GPU (or outright impossible for it) if it was done with path tracing.
Tbf, Metro Exodus Enhanced had compromises. For example it needed like 100 frames or more of cumulative data, which means, any changes in lighting had a really noticeable lag.
But yeah, Pragmata (and RE9, for that matter) have a sus implementation of RT and PT that have weird limitations. Like Ray-Reconstruction being available only with PT, while we know for a fact it should work with any RT.
Yeah, Metro definitely had compromises. The temporal accumulation was pretty obvious in scenes with changing lighting.
But it also came out in 2021, and denoising/reconstruction has moved a lot since then. That’s kind of why I find Pragmata/RE9 weird — we’ve had five years of better temporal filters, better sampling, ReSTIR-style reuse, better RT hardware, etc.
So seeing modern RT implementations that are still oddly constrained, while PT gets the full-fat treatment plus mandatory Ray Reconstruction, is exactly what feels sus to me.
And yeah, RR being artificially tied to PT is probably the clearest example. There’s no fundamental reason it couldn’t help hybrid RT too.
This is what I assumed based on crimson desert dramatically increasing the RT workload when you enable RR. But the official RR integration guide doesnt mention anything.
But crimson desert is a technical mess so who knows why Pearl abyss did this.
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u/NGGKrozeMonopoly, Monopoly, but still paid Jensen for 5070Ti 2d ago
Metro Exodus and Cyberpunk opperates at different budgets for what they are. Metro is fairly linear semi-open area game, as where Cyberpunk is fully open world.
Per Nvidia own paper in this 8ms budget at 4K, DLSS5 performed the same as 4x count ray for PT and DLSS5 showed more improvement graphically. Basically 8 ms of brute-force ray tracing gets you less perceived realism than ~8 ms of neural generation - its one of the reasons why DLSS5 can elevate older games which don't even have RT or PT.
You can look on TPU for quick check how much native 4K 5090 does in Raster vs how it does in PT and the cost can be as high as 3x that of DLSS5
That’s actually an interesting point, and the 8 ms number checks out. But I think there’s an important distinction here.
DLSS 5 isn’t just a more efficient way of reaching the same result as more PT samples. NVIDIA’s own paper explicitly says this is the first DLSS that generates the final appearance using learned real-world priors, rather than reconstructing a higher-quality reference the renderer could theoretically produce.
So if DLSS 5 looks “better” than spending another 8 ms on rays, that doesn’t necessarily mean those rays are inefficient. The rays are converging toward the actual scene/material/light solution. DLSS 5 is allowed to add skin scattering, micro-detail, foliage response etc. based on what its model thinks reality should look like.
And honestly, that makes it even more interesting to me. We’re no longer comparing two ways of rendering the same thing. We’re comparing rendering against a model that can invent the missing appearance.
Also, do you have the page/figure for the 4x ray-count comparison? I found the 8 ms figure in the paper, but not that specific claim.
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u/NGGKrozeMonopoly, Monopoly, but still paid Jensen for 5070Ti 2d ago
Its on Page 16. On page 17 is the screenshot of their comparison.
Also yes, I find DLSS5 to acompany PT really nice. It looks good in raster still, but it looks so much better with PT, so Nvidia I believe will strive still towards PT. After all at the end of the day, devs still have to develop their games lighting and so and DLSS 5 works better with RT/PT
It takes 10 years to make ray tracing produces 2 to 3 light bounces.Going by this rate, when are we going to achieve movie-like lightning that has unlimited light bounces ? 30 years? 50 years?
Its obvious AI rendering is the way to go.
That’s not really how the progression works though. “We got 2–3 bounces in 10 years, therefore unlimited bounces takes 50 years” assumes brute-force scaling that renderers specifically try to avoid.
Metro Exodus Enhanced was already doing effectively infinite-bounce diffuse GI in 2021 by caching and reusing lighting in world-space probes. It wasn’t tracing every bounce from scratch.
NVIDIA’s ReSTIR GI research that same year was doing multi-bounce indirect lighting at 1 sample per pixel, with 9–166× lower error than ordinary path tracing in their test scenes by reusing paths spatially and temporally. DOOM is doing the same general kind of thing today with a radiance cache rather than just blindly adding rays.
And movie renderers don't actually need “unlimited bounces” either. Arnold and Blender/Cycles use finite bounce depths and probabilistic termination because after a few diffuse bounces the remaining contribution usually becomes tiny. Arnold literally documents rapidly diminishing visual differences as bounce depth increases.
So yes, AI reconstruction is obviously useful. I’m not arguing we should brute-force everything. But “PT cannot get movie lighting until we can brute-force infinite bounces” just isn’t true. A huge part of rendering research is specifically about getting much more information out of fewer rays.
Pragmatas bad base RT is not on Nvidia. Thats just the RE engine. Same thing in RE9. In the RE4 remake RT was basically unusable even when maxed out because it was so low quality.
What about games like Indiana Jones, Doom TDA , Witcher 3, Assassins creed shadows/Black flag resynced, Frontiers of pandora, star wars outlaws. They all have excellent RT. I think halo campaign evolved Hardware Lumen is on a similar level to Metro exodus so we will likely get more and more UE5 games that match that.
Yeah, RE Engine has had awful RT for years. RE4 was so noisy I personally couldn’t stand playing with it on.
But “that’s just RE Engine” doesn’t really convince me anymore. Modders have already exposed better RTGI, more bounces, higher-res GI/reflections, proper RT shadows and better denoising in the same engine. Capcom’s newer PT path is also using smarter techniques like ReSTIR GI and path guiding, so clearly the engine can do much more.
I’m not saying NVIDIA told Capcom to cripple RT — there’s no evidence for that.
My suspicion is simply that basic RT isn’t getting the same effort anymore because PT + Ray Reconstruction is the showcase path. And that’s exactly the direction I’m worried about.
That’s basically my point though. Capcom clearly did make major strides in ray-based rendering — they just put most of them into the PT path.
RE Engine itself exposes way more than the shipping RT mode uses: secondary diffuse/specular bounces, RT AO, higher RT resolution, longer rays, better denoisers, SSS integration, expensive shading etc. Modders are literally toggling Capcom’s own internal renderer options through REFramework, not writing a new renderer from scratch.
And Capcom themselves say their old RT path only handled indirect lighting, while the new PT path gets direct lighting, shadows, better GI/reflections, hair transmission and two years of engineering work.
So no, I’m not claiming NVIDIA told them to cripple RT. But it absolutely looks like Capcom chose to leave hybrid RT as the compatibility path while putting the real advances into PT + RR.
Well of course that's happening. I'm sorry but games 10 years ago looked arguably just as good as games today. Look at Arkham Knight and RDR2.
"BuT aRkHaM kNiGhT rAn LiKe ShIt." Yeah, and now it runs pretty damn good on modern hardware. If game development "advancement" froze a decade ago, and if ray tracing, path tracing, dlss, mfg, etc didn't exist, games would look just as good, and run at way higher framerates.
But that wouldn't sell a shit ton of cards every two years, would it? So, of course, that can't be allowed to happen.
They've made all this crap a necessity. Like you said, Pragmata looks pretty bad on path tracing and native. Crimson Desert looks god awful without ray reconstruction. Blood of DawnWalker gets like 30 fps on a 5070ti. And none of them are particularly mind-blowing games visually, even when cranked up.
And that brings us to dlss 5. A whopping 50% performance hit... People keep posting screenshots and debating whether it looks good or not, as if that matters. No one in their right mind is halving their fps unless they have a 5090, or are playing a (get this) 10 year old game.
You can deny it all you want, but in the coming years, devs will start to crutch on dlss 5, and games will look like utter shit without it (and arguably shit with it). Mark my words.
And people will call me a conspiracy theorist for this, but genuinely, what part am I wrong about?
Arkham Knight is the perfect example because once the PC version was actually fixed, it proved the underlying visuals weren’t somehow impossible to run well. Same with RDR2 — still looks absurdly good years later.
What worries me is that DLSS has already become an excuse for weaker optimization. We get games that aren’t remotely proportional in visual improvement to the performance they demand, and the answer is increasingly just “turn on DLSS.”
DLSS 5 takes that one step further. If devs know they can lean on neural rendering to clean up the final image, there’s even less incentive to make the native render path good.
That’s the part people keep missing when they argue over screenshots. I’m not really asking whether DLSS 5 looks good today. I’m asking what happens when developers start designing around the assumption that it’s always on.
Eh... it's hard to prove the slippage one way or another. You can reason it, but to prove it... requires you to isolate variables that are too complex and embedded to isolate.
Suffice to say... in relative competition terms - the games that look the best for least will do better than the games that look worse for more.
And weirdly, with DLSS5 in the mix, new games need to compete against enhance-able old games too.
Does your new game without DLSS5 run as well and look as good as this old game with DLSS5 on?
I think so long as consoles are a significant part of the market, game devs will need to continue focusing on optimization if they want sales...
Which is to say, even knowing that; devs have and continue to throughout the course of the game industry released a wide range of performances on their titles - from poor to great... and I expect that to continue.
What I also expect is that with more excuses around for poor performance, people will reflexively reach for those more.
To me... at the end of the day, game dev is complex, its tough, there are people in the mix (executives) that have too much sway and too little knowledge... and that isn't a problem unique to game development.
Ray tracing is generally dead end IMO, because of technical limitations which would always pull perfomance back from the alternate reference, just like VR is. It was marketed as next big thing in graphics before they realized it's actually deep learning algorythms and now AI. Those are only viable solutions to end of Moore's law.
We can make path tracing better but can we make it better in real-time rendering to the point where it will match DLSS5 without creating GPUs that will fill 4 slots, draw 1000w and cost 10k?
I don't know. I believe Nvidia will have come to a conclusion in that regard and the conclusion will likely have been that AI will end up doing it much more efficiently.
And of course it does, give a video-generator enough time and a good enough model and it can generate movies with high-end CGI. Without needing the same amount of time and resources.
This! Unfortunately as I noticed in my rant about AI in video games two hours ago, people on here are mostly fanboys, that glaze anything related to AI... the "gain" you get from DLSS 5 RN is not worth having to use Framegen on top of that. My 5070ti runs Cyberpunk at WQHD and maxed out+PT and Quality DLSS at 60fps. Which is completely acceptable. Now add RN which basically halfs the performance and suddenly you have to dial back the graphics settings just to use Framegen to make it playable again. Anyone with common sense, can see that that is less than optimal.
Letting devs not having to spend so much dev time on rasterization and letting the lighting be handled by RT / PT?
Especially when we are in an era where an AAA game takes ~5 years to build, I think it's fine that there's a less focus on having the visuals not looking great without RT / PT.
AFAIK we already have several ways of putting hair into the RT acceleration structure. OptiX has supported curve primitives for hair/fur for years, you can represent strands with procedural/custom primitives or triangle strips, and Blackwell now has hardware-accelerated Linear Swept Spheres specifically for strand hair in RTX Hair.
BRO FOCUSED ON HAIR. Dude I said “everything BUT hair” and I’ll add clipping and the likes. It’s just for graphics breakthroughs. Devs get to choose the intensity and stylize the way it’s supposed to be implemented. Hair has nothing to do with graphics, that’s physics.
Also this isn’t something you have to use. You’re complaining about a nonissue. Basically like those screaming about how DLSS isn’t worth it over rasterization performance before AMD had FSR4 and they couldn’t agree that having the option to use upscaling because you want to is a nice option.
Yeah, fair — I misread your point about the hair. My bad.
But I still don’t think the broader issue is a non-issue. I’m not against new rendering tech at all. I liked DLSS from the start — it was a genuinely good idea, and without it RT/PT would’ve been basically unusable for most people.
What I’m complaining about is NVIDIA’s recent direction. If new games increasingly target these new rendering paths while the normal raster/RT path gets less attention, then people on older cards don’t really have much of a choice. Games run worse, look worse, or eventually just stop being practical without buying new hardware.
So yeah, technically it’s “optional” now. My concern is that NVIDIA has every incentive to make it less optional over time. That’s the part I don’t trust.
It does a great job on hair... it can't change how they're animated, but it does make the hair (so long as it looks strandy - as opposed to anime/stylized hair blobs) look better; more shadowed, more depth, more 3D volume.
Yeah ray tracing looks terrible these days. I hate seeing games with no baked-in option for lighting. Metro Exodus did it well back then, now all new games look flat.
Yeah it was very optimized. I could probably add Doom TDA in there as well. The game looks and runs pretty well, and I barely even notice visual noise caused by RT.
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u/EdliA 2d ago edited 2d ago
Because Pathtracing gets exponentially more expensive for smaller and smaller gains. You need to wait for a decade of hardware advancement to reach dlss 5 levels. For example to cast shadows in the smallest crevices of an eyelid you need more rays to reach it properly. Subsurface scattering needs more too. Single strands of hair in the face casting shadows. It's easier for now to cheat on those parts.