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However, ultimately, your experience with the game is what matters, and if your computer or console is grinding to keep up with the demands ray tracing puts on it, you probably won’t notice if it’s off. Control in particular is a game that not only looks great with ray tracing on but was designed to showcase how much better games built around ray tracing can look. Personally, I like turning ray tracing on when it’s available, even for a little while, just to look around and take in all the little details of a scene. Ultimately, ray tracing is the holy grail for realistic lighting, and if you want to see the games you play in the best visual quality you can, hit the ray tracing switch. So Should You Bother Turning Ray Tracing On? Cyberpunk 2077, for example, has separate toggles for ray-traced reflections and shadows, so you can choose what aspect of your game’s graphics get improved. However, it can still be limited to only certain tasks. Modern consoles and graphics cards finally have enough processing power to handle the brute force of ray tracing. The real breakthrough for video games is real-time ray tracing. The only downside is that ray tracing usually takes so much processing power that film studios have to spend days rendering highly detailed scenes.
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The result is a scene that looks more realistic with less work. This lets computers accurately render things like shadows, reflections, highlights, and bounced light. It simply refers to the process of tracing the path of light rays as they bounce around a scene.
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Why Ray Tracing Is a Big Deal (Even If It Hurts Performance)Īlthough ray tracing is a relatively new buzzword in the gaming world, the feature has been a mainstay of computer graphics in film and TV for years.
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