jacobvandy wrote on Jun 29, 2021, 14:53:
Nah, having ray-traced reflections is like taking off the horse blinders you've been wearing your whole gaming life. Once you're used to that, it's painful to go back to looking at the smudgy placeholders so many games frequently employ. Even the nicest screen-space mirroring loses its sheen when its limitations are made to look so obvious by comparison.

Full-on ray-traced lighting would be nice, but it takes a lot of work next to flipping a switch for RT reflections. You have to strip out all the fake light sources and then make sure every level still looks the way you want with only the real lights, which isn't easy to do for any game designed with the old way of thinking about illumination.

Personally, I think applying RT reflections should take as much work as RT lighting. Why? Because so many of the surfaces shown in the video are too mirror-like, IMO. Just as RT lighting needs to have an environment artist re-work the level in order to make sure it looks right, good RT reflections also needs an environment artist to adjust the object materials to account for how RT will affect the reflections. Industrial-looking military installations, like the ones shown in Doom, should not be covered in mirrored surfaces. For many of the scenes in the video, I prefer the "smudgy placeholders" because they look more appropriate for the environment.