Four years have passed since the launch of the first NVIDIA RTX and the arrival of the Laser trace in games it was promised as a sort of parousia for 3D graphics. After all this time, it’s still an optional graphics option for many games and enabling it comes at a pretty high cost in terms of resolution and frame rate. Is ray tracing a bummer on PC and next-gen consoles?
There is no doubt that Ray Tracing in games is a visual supplement that stands out and serves to improve the image quality in games. However, not all mounts are oregano and many players have decided to go without them in their games due to the performance sacrifices involved. Did Ray Tracing arrive too soon on consoles and PC? Well, this question has a simple answer to answer and it is completely affirmative. Which leads us to wonder how long it will take to see a system that can perfectly combine resolution, images and ray tracing without mortgaging the first two.
Why is Ray Tracing not performing as expected?
The easiest way to understand the problem of Ray Tracing in graphics cards is to make the analogy with a donut factory, which has always made them in the conventional way, but one day they happen to make them with chocolate . This change means adding new sections in the factory and fully optimizing the resources already available, but suddenly the workers have to work overtime and control two different production lines, but they share the resources. We must start from the fact that these have a limited working capacity and, therefore, this will affect production.
Well, that’s what’s happening with Ray Tracing today. The ideal would have been to create a fully optimized architecture to generate graphics with said algorithm. However, what has been done is to take the already standardized technology and adapt it so that it can do very limited ray tracing and totally blend in with traditional techniques. In other words, as powerful as graphics cards seem to us today, they are not so powerful when it comes to ray tracing.
Let’s not forget that Pixar movies are rendered using very powerful servers. Therefore, to generate its visual appearance, hardware hundreds of times more expensive is needed. And even with such power, they are not able to generate each of the frames at the speed of the games. Since there are cases where it can take minutes or even hours to create a single image. So asking a single PC is a lot to ask. Reality? Ray Tracing is currently in its infancy and it will take many years for its final standardization in games.
