Let me get this 100% straight, rendering light the exact same way reality itself does it is a gimmick?
In any case, RT isn't just about getting pretty graphics. It massively lowers the artists' workload since there's no need to painstakingly go through each in-game area and add fake lights to make everything look good.
No gaming studio will pass up on the opportunity to get better graphics and better productivity. It really is just a matter of waiting a few years for the hardware to get good enough.
> Let me get this 100% straight, rendering light the exact same way reality itself does it is a gimmick?
Yes, because "Rendering light the exact same way reality itself does it" was never the assignment, outside of nvidia desperately trying to find excuses to sell more GPUs.
Maybe some games would benefit from it in some cases... but you have to weigh that marginal improvement against the increased costs, both economic and ecological.
> It massively lowers the artists' workload since there's no need to painstakingly go through each in-game area and add fake lights to make everything look good.
This is a laughable claim, as long as you're going for anything more than fixed ambient lighting you're going to need to massage and QA that the lighting works for what you're trying to show.
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In short, yes. Ray tracing as a headline feature is a gimmick, made to appeal to the same clueless HNers who think AI will eliminate our need to understand anything or express ourselves.
Apple wishes ray tracing was AI acceleration, because then they could at least ride the Nvidia valuation pump. But the truth is even less glamorous than that - this is a feature for the future, something for posterity. It's a well-researched field of fixed-function acceleration with multiple competitive implementations, unlike AI architectures. What's else, in 3-5 years you can bet your bottom dollar Apple will announce their CUDA alternative alongside a new Mac Pro. You can't even confidently say I'm joking since they've already done this (and subsequently depreciated it) once before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL#OpenCL_1.0
I guess I can't blame HN for courting pedestrian takes, but man you're going to be disappointed by Apple's roadmap going forward if this is your opinion. And I say this, defending Apple, as someone that treats Tim Cook and Steve Jobs as the living and buried devil respectively. Having hardware-accelerated ray tracing is no more of a "gamer" feature than the high-impedance headphone jack is an "audiophile" feature. It is intelligent design motivated by a desire to accommodate a user's potential use-case. Removing either would be a net-negative at this point.
As long as traditional lighting is enough (and given that it has for the last 2 decades or so), RT remains a gimmick.