Greentext

amd cards can handle raytracing too though.... soooooo.

I would expect that to be a normal rasterized shadow map unless you can find any sources explicitly saying otherwise. Because even 1 ray per pixel in complex triangulated geometry wasn't really practical in real time until probably at least 2018

Since you can achieve that effect with only a few rays traced instead of hundreds used for soft shadows. But honestly, the same effect could be achieved dynamically with maybe 10 rays and a blur filter.

That's actually one specific torch!

I haven't played the finals myself but as of the pre-release version when I watched a video about it lighting didn't update at all without raytracing enabled. It is pretty hard to get any sort of dynamic lighting without raytracing. If not impossible, depending on how you define raytracing. But basically if they have a dynamic lighting feature that works without 'raytracing' they have to create a whole other GI system using world-space probes and maybe even dynamically voxeliIng the entire scene. Neither of which are easy on performance, but usually not as bad as normal hardware RT and restir. Neither of those are good at reflections or fine detail, which is why games that want to look better than that usually switch to doing it the normal way.

To see how far rasterization has been stretched, and how that holds back development - Path of Exile 2 has a tech talk about their bare minimum settings. Artists weren't allowed to rely on anything that could be turned off. They begged the programmers for specific gimmicks, and turned that cheap nonsense into a million blades of grass, raymarched cracks in translucent ice, and soft shadows with no Peter Panning.

Or, picking one specific trick: ambient occlusion was half of why Crysis humbled $5,000 PCs. There's a slide deck for how a superior version of the same effect was achieved in Toy Story 3 on the Wii.

Real-time raytracing was unobtanium for decades because we kept moving the goalposts. The entire 3D games industry is built on cheating around simple parallel techniques being too expensive. By the time hardware catches up to where doing something the simple way is feasible, complex software has faked a wild variety of other effects. Meanwhile: games are designed to rely on what's available. All of the tells for proper path-traced lighting have either been faked or avoided. Games don't even do mirrors, anymore.

There's a reason RTX shows off games from the late 1900s.

It's not just a time limitation either tho, it also opens up a lot of room for artistic direction and game design

I don't think you could possibly make something like Control's shiny black blocks world look decent without raytraced reflections.

Also anything with significantly large dynamic geometry usually either needs like half of the level file size to be duplicated for every possible state, or some form of raytracing, to work at all. (There's also things like voxel cone tracing that do their own optimized tracing but they also don't really work in 100% of situations and come with their own visual downsides)

Don't forget that temporal smear. I like to apply vaseline directly onto my monitor instead.