Poll: Do you care about ray tracing / upscaling?

DAPUNISHER · Apr 27, 2025

@psolord

I've asked you before to use spoiler tags for your vids and screenshots or the post would be deleted. I did not want to rob you of all the work you put into your posts so I added the tags for you. But next time they get wished away to the cornfield. Again; Please use spoiler tags moving forward.

@marees

Those Oblivion mods are comical. Lumen be gone 🤣 There are some funny memes for it too

psolord · Apr 28, 2025

DAPUNISHER said:
I've asked you before to use spoiler tags for your vids and screenshots or the post would be deleted. I did not want to rob you of all the work you put into your posts so I added the tags for you. But next time they get wished away to the cornfield. Again; Please use spoiler tags moving forward.

Sorry bro, I forgot.

Thanks.

DAPUNISHER · May 1, 2025

Watch the graphical corruption on the clothing of the NPCs using the 4070 with 2x FG on the far right side. It'll happen within seconds of starting from the time stamp so you may need to replay a couple of times to catch both of the NPCs it happens to within the span of a few seconds. Drivers are not doing the older cards any favors it seems.

TurtleCrusher · May 7, 2025

FSR enables me to play games on old as heck hardware. I built a PC with the specs as followed.

Xeon E5-2680 V4 14-core 2.4-3.3Ghz 120W
16GB DDR4 2400Mhz
Radeon Pro WX 5100 8GB (think RX 470 w/ 75w TDP)
1TB Crucial P2 NVMe
Intel X200 Wifi-6
Add-in TPM Module (left of USB 3.0 connector on bottom) which makes it natively W11 compatible

Newer games that have FSR are playable. Even NBA 2K25 which is a next-gen title ran great with FSR and settings dropped. The Finals was A+. Cyberpunk had the most compromises to get playable frames.

Ranulf · May 14, 2025

Amusing part of a steam review of DoomDarkAges:

Look, I just want to enjoy a video game. I shouldn’t have to run tech support for an hour just to squeeze out a stuttery 45fps. I have good hardware. Like, stupidly good hardware. Most people would assume a 4090 and a 7900X would tear through a DOOM title considering that it's the original universal game that runs on everything. But nope. What used to be "plug and play" is now "tweak and pray." Owning high-end hardware doesn’t mean much when every new release tries to turn your rig into a sacrificial offering.

That said, if you've ever wanted to watch your GPU burst into flames while rendering a torch-lit corridor at 17fps, DOOM: The Dark Ages has you covered. Forget demons, your real enemy is the graphics settings menu, which might as well be the final boss. Every AAA game now needs DLSS and Frame Gen just to hit a desired framerate that's even close to what my monitor supports. It’s absurd—especially when the last two DOOM games were optimized so well. So who at id thought baking ray tracing into the engine permanently was a good idea? Whoever it was, they deserve to be trapped in a mirrored lava room where every surface reflects their mistakes.

Do people really care about Ray tracing? Not when it kills performance, needs an 8core cpu minimum (good argument against mid range i5/ryzen5 now) and gpu power/ram for frame gen and upscaling.

(whole review is good: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561199794253594/recommended/3017860/ )

DrMrLordX · May 15, 2025

Gotta sell those 5090s somehow.

DAPUNISHER · May 18, 2025

Steve and Roman talking about Nvidia's manipulation and strong arm tactics. No surprise to anyone paying attention. Trying to blackmail Steve to push MFG is the first story.

marees · May 19, 2025

GamersNexus: use code 'IDGAF'

Paratus said:
GN was informed they will start including more 4 frame gen DLSS in their charts if they want to keep interviewing NV engineers.

Ranulf · May 19, 2025

GN long video on the drama, the ending with Gordon was a nice touch. Guns out with references to GPP vs HOCP and HUB over rtx in 2020.

coercitiv · May 19, 2025

Ranulf said:
GN long video on the drama, the ending with Gordon was a nice touch. Guns out with references to GPP vs HOCP and HUB over rtx in 2020.

"just don't F it up for the rest of us on your way out the door"
GN Steve's message to Nvidia

DAPUNISHER · May 19, 2025

With Nvidia demanding MFG be in the charts, perhaps the best solution for reviewers is to use lossless scaling with older RTX and other brands. That way they can show 4x scaling on every card. Any visual and performance differences between the implementations can be highlighted. Might even make Nvidia's tech look better without the dirty deception of showing a much bigger bar better over older cards lacking MFG.

igor_kavinski · May 21, 2025

RDNA4 gamers rejoice!

https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-announces-fsr-redstone-for-rdna4-neural-radiance-caching-ml-ray-regeneration-and-frame-generation

Shmee · May 21, 2025

marees said:
GamersNexus: use code 'IDGAF'

IDKFA and IDDQD

SnooSnoo · May 22, 2025

Shmee said:
IDKFA and IDDQD

IDSPISPOPD

DAPUNISHER · Jun 3, 2025

Hell is Us is yet another upscaling is basically obligatory game. Fortunately, the implementation of DLSS looks great. Frame generation doesn't always work; developer has wood to chop.

Sgraffite · Jun 3, 2025

Framegen is like "I want a faster framerate even if it ends up looking like JPEGs"

DamZe · Friday at 10:10 AM

After upgrading recently to a 9700 XT I still don't care about RT, and the only thing I want to avoid is to have to use upscaling in 1440p.

ondma · 2025-06-16T13:56:38-0400

DamZe said:
After upgrading recently to a 9700 XT I still don't care about RT, and the only thing I want to avoid is to have to use upscaling in 1440p.

I have a RX 7600 and an older 8700K. Ray tracing really kills my performance. Unfortunately, some games are starting to use it by default, and you cannot disable it. Upscaling is basically worthless on this AMD card as well; the games look simply terrible (very blurry) at any setting of frame gen. And of course, the 7600 has only 8 gb of vram, which is limiting as well. And this card is only one gen old. Worst of all, I bought this card only a few months ago, (I know "8gb is not enough", but I game at 1080p, so I thought it would be OK) because I thought the tariffs would make the current gen cards unavailable or at least horribly expensive. Turns out availability is better now than when I bought the 7600.

marees · 2025-06-16T14:04:22-0400

ondma said:
I have a RX 7600 and an older 8700K. Ray tracing really kills my performance. Unfortunately, some games are starting to use it by default, and you cannot disable it. Upscaling is basically worthless on this AMD card as well; the games look simply terrible (very blurry) at any setting of frame gen. And of course, the 7600 has only 8 gb of vram, which is limiting as well. And this card is only one gen old. Worst of all, I bought this card only a few months ago, (I know "8gb is not enough", but I game at 1080p, so I thought it would be OK) because I thought the tariffs would make the current gen cards unavailable or at least horribly expensive. Turns out availability is better now than when I bought the 7600.

Buy the 16gb 9060xt & dispose off the 7600

DAPUNISHER · 2025-06-16T14:47:49-0400

ondma said:
(I know "8gb is not enough", but I game at 1080p, so I thought it would be OK)

We have been posting that 1080 is not okay for years. But, what's done is done. Some tips to make the gaming experience as smooth as possible.

First tip is to use XeSS instead of FSR in any game that has it. Even the DP4a version that runs on AMD looks better vs FSR.

Next is reduce textures in the settings manually until they stop overflowing the framebuffer.

In games with mandatory ray tracing like Avatar, Indy Jones, Doom DA, you are going to need to experiment with lowering settings if you don't want to just use the low/lowest presets and or upscaling.

Use a frame cap, as it helps when frame pacing is poor.

The only other choice is eat the loss between what you paid and what you can get from selling it after fees. Then buy a more capable card with more VRAM.

marees · 2025-06-16T14:54:00-0400

Witcher 4 has hardware lumen on base ps5 & targets 60 fps

Why target 60fps with hardware Lumen when the software path exists and runs faster?

Kevin Örtegren: The software path has a lot of limitations, things that we simply cannot get away from, no matter how hard we try. The distance field approximation is effectively static, right, and the more dynamic worlds we build, we want that to also be part of the ray tracing scene. So using hardware RT is much better quality-wise, we can get much better repesentation with RT than with distance fields. Generally, it is also kind of the future, so we're focusing on hardware Lumen and we consider software Lumen to hopefully be a thing of the past.

Jakub Knapik: Looking at it from a Witcher point of view, this game will have a dynamic day/night cycle, so you need to secure the environments lighting-wise for all light angles, and it's an open world game, so you need to make sure the way you make content will work and it will not light leak in all those situations. Hardware Lumen is much better for securing this. And like Kevin said, you can actually move trees and have proper occlusion.

For us, going with software Lumen would have a lot of limitations that would kill us from a production point of view; otherwise we'd have to change the design of the game.

Kevin Örtegren: It's a good point. If you do software Lumen on one platform, but you want to scale up to hardware Lumen on another platform, working with both is problematic. You want to have the one representation, it's much better.

Inside The Witcher 4 tech demo: the CD Projekt Red and Epic interview

Alex Battaglia interviews tech leaders at CDPR and Epic about the Witcher 4 Unreal Engine 5 demo. How can it run at 60fps on PS5 and how was it developed?

www.eurogamer.net

marees · 2025-06-16T14:56:18-0400

Witcher 4 uses voxel cone tracing (implemented in the well optimized kingdom come deliverance 2)

Do you see this approach also working on other areas of rendering?

Kevin Örtegren: It's possible, we've discussed it. The voxel idea isn't actually all that new, Brian Karis who came up with nanite, had an HPG talk with a section on voxels a few years ago... at the time, it wasn't a perfect fit, but it turns out it was actually a very good fit for foliage. So anything that looks like foliage might be a contender to use this tech.

How does this voxel-based approach to foliage fit into the classic lighting pipeline? How is everything lit and shaded?

Kevin Örtegren: They actually fit in every nicely - part of the standard Nanite pipeline is replaced by the voxel path, and that same path runs for VSMs. That's why it's kind of cheap to render into shadows in the distance, because they're just voxels - that just works out of the box. Lighting-wise, it's regular directional light, with improvements to the foliage shading model, on the indirect side, we have a simplified representation which is static for performance reasons, so it scales up.

marees said:
Witcher 4 has hardware lumen on base ps5 & targets 60 fps

Why target 60fps with hardware Lumen when the software path exists and runs faster?

Kevin Örtegren: The software path has a lot of limitations, things that we simply cannot get away from, no matter how hard we try. The distance field approximation is effectively static, right, and the more dynamic worlds we build, we want that to also be part of the ray tracing scene. So using hardware RT is much better quality-wise, we can get much better repesentation with RT than with distance fields. Generally, it is also kind of the future, so we're focusing on hardware Lumen and we consider software Lumen to hopefully be a thing of the past.

Jakub Knapik: Looking at it from a Witcher point of view, this game will have a dynamic day/night cycle, so you need to secure the environments lighting-wise for all light angles, and it's an open world game, so you need to make sure the way you make content will work and it will not light leak in all those situations. Hardware Lumen is much better for securing this. And like Kevin said, you can actually move trees and have proper occlusion.

For us, going with software Lumen would have a lot of limitations that would kill us from a production point of view; otherwise we'd have to change the design of the game.

Kevin Örtegren: It's a good point. If you do software Lumen on one platform, but you want to scale up to hardware Lumen on another platform, working with both is problematic. You want to have the one representation, it's much better.

Inside The Witcher 4 tech demo: the CD Projekt Red and Epic interview

Alex Battaglia interviews tech leaders at CDPR and Epic about the Witcher 4 Unreal Engine 5 demo. How can it run at 60fps on PS5 and how was it developed?

www.eurogamer.net

ondma · 2025-06-16T19:25:04-0400

DAPUNISHER said:
We have been posting that 1080 is not okay for years. But, what's done is done. Some tips to make the gaming experience as smooth as possible.

First tip is to use XeSS instead of FSR in any game that has it. Even the DP4a version that runs on AMD looks better vs FSR.

Next is reduce textures in the settings manually until they stop overflowing the framebuffer.

In games with mandatory ray tracing like Avatar, Indy Jones, Doom DA, you are going to need to experiment with lowering settings if you don't want to just use the low/lowest presets and or upscaling.

Use a frame cap, as it helps when frame pacing is poor.

The only other choice is eat the loss between what you paid and what you can get from selling it after fees. Then buy a more capable card with more VRAM.

When I bought the 7600, the only 16GB card that would fit my case and run on my PSU was the 4060 Ti 16GB. Way overpriced, and availability was sketchy at best. I bought in a rush because I thought the tariffs were going to absolutely destroy the hardware market. Little did I know that most electronics would be excluded. Had I known that, I would have waited for the 9060 and 5060Ti. The RX 9060 16GB was actually available for near MSRP for a while at Microcenter, but is either OOS or expensive now.

Anyway, I am able to run Indiana Jones at medium, it looks pretty good actually. Doom ran fine, but not my kind of game. Avowed ran fine, looked nice. BG3 looks great, performance is good, except I am CPU limited in the third act. The only game that I an not satisfied with so far is Dragon Age Veilguard. Performance is terrible and the visuals are ugly, ugly, ugly, even on high settings. TBH, the game sucks too, but being a Dragon Age fan I paid full price a few days after it launched. So yea, live and learn. I am on Game Pass now, so I can test out a lot of games without paying directly for them. If a great game comes out that wont run on the 7600, I might upgrade and eat the cost, but for now I am going to stay with it.

Shmee · 2025-06-16T22:27:48-0400

DAPUNISHER said:
We have been posting that 1080 is not okay for years. But, what's done is done. Some tips to make the gaming experience as smooth as possible.

First tip is to use XeSS instead of FSR in any game that has it. Even the DP4a version that runs on AMD looks better vs FSR.

Next is reduce textures in the settings manually until they stop overflowing the framebuffer.

In games with mandatory ray tracing like Avatar, Indy Jones, Doom DA, you are going to need to experiment with lowering settings if you don't want to just use the low/lowest presets and or upscaling.

Use a frame cap, as it helps when frame pacing is poor.

The only other choice is eat the loss between what you paid and what you can get from selling it after fees. Then buy a more capable card with more VRAM.

I am curious as to what you think about XeSS vs. FSR. I recently started playing the Dune Awakening game, and I know there are options there for both FSR and XeSS for me. I am currently using FSR, I think balanced or performance, but I am curious if you think XeSS is better overall. While quality does matter, my main goal is smooth gameplay and optimization, with high FPS ideal. So do you think one should use XeSS in all cases, or does it depend?

ondma · 2025-06-17T01:10:52-0400

Shmee said:
I am curious as to what you think about XeSS vs. FSR. I recently started playing the Dune Awakening game, and I know there are options there for both FSR and XeSS for me. I am currently using FSR, I think balanced or performance, but I am curious if you think XeSS is better overall. While quality does matter, my main goal is smooth gameplay and optimization, with high FPS ideal. So do you think one should use XeSS in all cases, or does it depend?

I haven't tried XeSS. I didnt know it worked on AMD cards, I thought it was for Intel only. TBH, I think FSR on the 7600 is worthless: Very little increase in performance and horrible image quality, no matter what the setting. From what I understand it is much better on the current AMD architecture.

Poll: Do you care about ray tracing / upscaling?

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