After six years of hardware ray tracing, the best examples of it are modified old games, like Quake and Minecraft.
After six years of hardware ray tracing, the best examples of it are modified old games, like Quake and Minecraft.
There might be a good reason for this. Raster effects were already really good in newer games, and ray tracing could only improve on that high bar. It's filling in details that are barely noticeable, but creap ever so slightly closer to photorealism.
Old games start from a low bar, so ray tracing has dramatic improvement.
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Raytracing is still very computationally intensive, and doesn't have enough market penetration to make sense on most modern games. Devs need to implement two solutions: a raytraced path and a raster path. The game needs to be fully playable in both, across a wide range on hardware. The largest install base for most games is still console, where RT barely exists. So RT is generally relegated to eye candy for high-end PC. Which makes it a marketing feature, not a game feature.
It'll be interesting to see if that changes with the PS5 Pro. I expect we'll see more first-party titles support it, but not much else until the next real console generation.
I expect it to change with the next gen consoles at best ( ps6, xbox whatewer tf ). Beacuse with them we might finally be able to see the games that just straight up abandon traditional rasterization and go full ray tracing only ( also the last strugglers on pc will probably finally abandon gpus without raytracing support by that time, pepole tend to complain on consoles for 'slowing down progress' but dont see the absolutely ancient devices most or to be precise significant minority of gamers use ). For now even with ps5 pro they still need to create ps5 version.