this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
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A lot of that is just poor implementation on the developers end. They go “oh the engine we bought supports this? Well let’s do the bare minimum to enable the setting.” And you get games that don’t even look better, but run like ass.
Well, yeah, ray-tracing is actually a lot simpler to implement, because you just implement things the way physics works and then that works in most situations as you'd expect (i.e. how physics works).
All the lighting techniques we used in the past were just faking lighting in ever more intricate ways. Computationally much less intensive ways, which is why we bothered with them in the first place, but it's genuinely quite a bit of work.
There's some ways to optimize ray-tracing itself (e.g. pre-bake the lighting into scenes), but many times it's also a matter of mixing ray-tracing and more traditional lighting techniques, which brings in that additional work again.
Which is then why it'll be done less and less, the better hardware becomes. Because if publishers can sell to a wide audience without putting in that work, they absolutely will not put in that work.