That’s true. Ray tracing libraries and engines like UE5 are a lot easier to develop on than older engines.
But I’m not sure it’s such a simple comparison. 3d acceleration made games look better, and the weakest gpus didn’t make your fps tank afaik. Your average gpu these days will tank your FPS in ray tracing and cause awful visual artifacts, either from bad denoising algorithms, or from the upscalers used to hide the bad FPS and bad denoising.
This move reduces development costs, but given that the consumer doesn’t get any benefits from it, it’s hard not to have the cynical view that this is just greedy cost cutting on Microsoft’s part.
To be fair, ray tracing is far less of a workload for developers. Though it sucks it isn’t too far off games requiring 3D acceleration cards
That’s true. Ray tracing libraries and engines like UE5 are a lot easier to develop on than older engines.
But I’m not sure it’s such a simple comparison. 3d acceleration made games look better, and the weakest gpus didn’t make your fps tank afaik. Your average gpu these days will tank your FPS in ray tracing and cause awful visual artifacts, either from bad denoising algorithms, or from the upscalers used to hide the bad FPS and bad denoising.
This move reduces development costs, but given that the consumer doesn’t get any benefits from it, it’s hard not to have the cynical view that this is just greedy cost cutting on Microsoft’s part.
I would have to agree. And I don’t think it’s a good idea to have ray tracing as a mandatory feature.
I think some basic level of support for ray-tracing will be mandatory for dGPUs in the coming years.