Very important for achieving realistic lighting and reflections in visuals.
Very important for achieving realistic lighting and reflections in visuals.
It's actually around 50 years old, which explains why it doesn't seem that advanced. People often think Nvidia is promoting a full-fledged ray tracing experience, but the reality is more limited. The current setup isn't truly "full ray tracing" – it's just a partial implementation. What we call "ray tracing" today mainly covers reflections and shadows, not complete realism. We're still far from having powerful hardware to run high-resolution games with full ray tracing. So, this isn't a software problem; it's more about the hardware limitations.
I haven't tested ME. However, I've played CP2077, F1 22, Dirt 5, Hitman WoA, GRID Legends, Sniper Elite 5, Portal RTX and Quake II RTX. The main positive aspect I noticed is the ray-traced shadows in CP2077. It also enhances the look of large water reflections somewhat, though all other reflections seem inferior compared to the non-RT version. Particularly with HDR turned on, bright lights lose their color and depth. At Corpo Plaza, the game loses its realism and becomes overly stylized. Although it aims for a more polished appearance, it ends up feeling like every surface has a piano black finish. Eventually, so much light is cast that NPCs lose their shadows and appear almost floating on top of the textures. Overall, CP2077 looks better with HDR on an OLED screen than with RT on an LCD, and combining both creates a lot of issues on my Sony XR-77A95L.
Besides water bodies, I don't recall many reflective elements in ME EE. The environment remains largely unchanged post-apocalypse, and adding RT didn't significantly alter this. The game mainly relies on RT for global illumination, enhancing realism—like lighting small huts in bright areas. It stands out as a solid example of RT usage, though the engine feels somewhat outdated now. Timestamped clips demonstrating reflections are available.
RT adds a nice touch, though it's not the central feature. The implementation in WoW stands out, while in other games it may go unnoticed except for the slight performance impact.
21:18 serves as a clear illustration that RT isn't always superior. Without RT, the original game appears significantly improved, especially with the small spring in place. The sunlight on snow looks much more natural with the standard global lighting, and the water seems far more lifelike. Such opaque water would lack reflections and wouldn’t resemble a mirror at all. As I mentioned earlier, large bodies of water like the lake at 21:13 look better, but small ones don’t perform the same. In conclusion, subsurface scattering needs to be applied not just for human skin, but for water and other materials as well. I’m unsure what algorithms they use, but different water types show distinct reflection behaviors. Water with turbulent flow would reflect almost nothing, while clear water behaves more like a semi-transparent mirror when viewed from a shallow angle—almost like a clear resin. The murkier the water, the closer it gets to mimicking a mirror. That’s my concern about reflections; RT treats all water as uniform, which isn’t accurate. The same applies to wet surfaces. It might not be an issue with the tech itself, but rather with the game engine. It’s there where scattering, absorption, and reflection are precisely tuned. If the engine isn’t built with RT in mind and those details aren’t addressed upfront, RT falls short dramatically. Unless a game is fully optimized for RT, it will always look off compared to the non-RT version, where artists invested countless hours choosing the optimal lighting effects. I could experiment with ME, but based on what I’ve seen online, I’m 99% confident it would be similar to CP2077. I’d likely prefer HDR on my OLED TV over using Ray Tracing on an IPS monitor. I’m also almost certain that combining HDR with Ray Tracing will result in a washed-out appearance, just like in CP2077. P.S., I’m surprised by the poll results—I expected many more people to agree that RT is essential.