There have been further difficulties with ray tracing
Unlike Battlefield V, Metro Exodus does not use beam tracking to improve reflections, but global illumination.
The exclusive feature of Turing-based graphics cards has thoroughly moved players ’imaginations, as Jen-Hsun Huang illustrated the skills of the technique with a rather lavish presentation. While we can't say that radius tracking games have been coming at a stormy pace since then, the second title, Metro Exodus, has just been released. According to the news, the developers only use the technique for outdoor lighting, not for static lights - this is obviously due to the high system requirements of the process. Well, the first problem pops up here, as it makes sense to limit the possibilities of raytracing a bit, because the game will only look better where sunlight has a serious role to play. For the former reason, then, by no means should we be surprised if we don’t really see a change in the underground scenes, it was simply a developer decision.
The next problem we feel is more serious, as it points out that really good integration of raytracing into a given game is a rather difficult task; some scenes became too dark after activating beam tracking! This can occur at times when the external light source is obscured by an object, in which case the correct / realistic display is when the scene is shrouded in darkness - two examples are shown below. The process itself therefore works properly, “only” developers need to consider such situations when creating a given virtual environment. This is not the case with raster rendering, although the lifelike graphics are detrimental. So 4A Games would now have to rework the light sources in the form of a patch to guarantee the right quality for beam tracking in addition to traditional technology.
The perfect use of raytracing obviously involves extra work / resources, but it is quite painful to do this by only showing a product to users that is capable of running the technique.
It will probably come as no surprise to most of our readers that Metro Exodus doesn’t specifically run fast with ray tracing. An RTX 2060 is just right (strictly at 1080p resolution), but it's really a minimal requirement for a product that currently has approx. They ask for 120 thousand forints. By implication, deployment of the RTX 1440 in 2080p is highly recommended, and 4K is strictly the Ti terrain of the RTX 2080. In a more shaky situation, a slower pace may occur, as exemplified by the video above.
In conclusion, we want to point out here that, apart from the above problems, ray tracing can present truly “false” results in some places, at which point we can really feel for a moment that a new generation of PC graphics is unfolding before us.
