Is Ray Tracing Necessary? Neverness To Everness Testing Showed the Advantage of Simple Lighting
Ray tracing is once again at the center of controversy. According to Hardware Unboxed editors, the technology may be overrated, and NVIDIA's first line of RTX graphics cards was "built on lies."
Eight years after NVIDIA began promoting ray tracing as the "future of gaming," the technology still raises questions. Effects are often accompanied by noise, and performance noticeably drops.
Neverness To Everness, which is compared to "GTA in anime style," is cited as an example. On a PC with an RTX 4080 without hardware ray tracing, the game maintains about 120 fps (with Vsync enabled), but when RT is turned on, the indicator drops to about 70 fps in simplified mode and to 50 fps with full ray tracing.
The visual difference is not always worth such a loss of smoothness. In some scenes, reflections even look better without RT thanks to optimization and the Lumen lighting system used in Unreal Engine 5.
However, without ray tracing, reflections become less accurate and sometimes "fake" — for example, objects that are not in the scene may be reflected in windows. But for most players, this is not critical: more than 70% of users either do not enable RT at all or do so rarely.
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