Doom: The Dark Ages requires ray tracing

2 aamederen 1 5/16/2025, 10:58:16 AM rockpapershotgun.com ↗

Comments (1)

sylware · 9h ago
Like the latest assassin's creed (in order to run at reasonable speed since they ship RT emulation).

Had a look at some streams: look the same than those before. And many games look more beautifull without RT.

I think we have a case of 101 planned obsolescence.

Additionnally, I _SKIMMED_ thru the chips and cheese article (filthy good, sad their home page is hostile to noscript/basic (x)html browsers, or their cloud is dg s...) about AMD RDNA 4 RT, and if you want proper RT support, the "BVH" is hardware specific, namely you must have the 3D artists manually design the "BVH" for each hardware the game will support. This is significant additionnal technical work for 3D artists, with a stellar hardware cost, for, let's be honnest, not that much of a difference in perceptive rendering quality.

There is probably a "generic" and "low performance" BVH. I wonder how they do that in vulkan3D, I do disable RT in my AMD driver since mesa implementation is literally hrse sh... (pulling that c++ abomination of glslang instead of fine tuned optimized GPU assembly compute shaders).

That said, if the hardware is able to compute 100%, and I mean 100%, of the lighting of a modern and nice looking game at _MINIMUM_ 80+ fps... well, that's another story as the work for the 3D artists related to baked lighting (required for a nice looking game) would be fully replaced with BVH design and that would be a clear win. If even a "1kW GPU" would be unable to do that with the latest silicon process... I am afraid but this really look like more of a planned obsolescence gimmick than anything else.