I love ray tracing and path tracing when they’re done right. Ik fully ray traced scenes are hardly playable even on high end cards without upscaling but like if one has a powerful enough card, why not utilize its potential? Yet most people don’t seem to care about RT.
When it comes to upscaling though, I hate it, and I’m not even talking about frame gen. It makes things look blurry and causes annoying artifacts. I think playing on lowest settings with clear textures is more enjoyable long term than maxed out in 4k with a consistently blurry image. Also this new technology makes devs care less about optimization (which will backfire btw as we’re approaching the physical limit of transistor size).
i turn off upscaling and enable dedicated fullscreen immediately, and then i get mad if the game cant run well without it. it literally NEVER looks better. the edges are ugly, frame rate stutters, things look patchy cross hatched, weirdness, i hate it.
Clair Obscur (amazing) is the most recent offender. all the default settings it chose for my computer made it run like crap AND look ugly. disabled ai upscaling and enabled dedicated fullscreen, and the game looks beautiful and runs like butter on my aging 3070.
i have no idea why the industry started making these the default settings but i wish they would stop.
I don’t consider ray tracing to be in the same category as these other technologies, though. ray tracing can look fantastic as long as it doesn’t kill the frame rate.
Raytracing and path tracing can look pretty nice and raytracing especially is worth turning on when it’s a game where it’s properly optimized. Unfortunately in many games, it really isn’t, which means the performance impact is too large compared to the visual benefits. So in many games, I don’t turn it on as I prefer the much higher framerate.
Upscaling technologies are pretty great. Especially in their current iterations, the image quality they can achieve from low resolutions is impressive. That said, they should be used as a way to get graphically advanced games working on low to mid-spec GPUs. Using them as a crutch to get unoptimized games working on high-end cards is not acceptable. Neither is pretending that upscaled and frame-generated performance is directly equivalent to native-res performance (looking at you, nVidia).
I personally don’t see much of a difference between RT and the established lighting algorithms, so that’s that.
Super resolution / upscaling is something I love, given that I play on a 4k TV. DLSS is black magic wizardry.
