Game devs are apathetic to ray tracing.
Traditional rasterization will never go away in our lifetime because ray tracing hardware will never advance broadly enough to replace it.
Ray tracing also doesn’t replace the work needed to achieve the desired atmosphere through lighting and fixing performance related issues - which is most of the work.
The games that do support it right now are primarily using it as a marketing tool, and developers are often paid by Nvidia or AMD to spend the time and resources to implement it.
The most broadly successful games are ones that run on the widest variety of hardware to gain the largest reachable audience. Given that Nvidia is pretty much the only competent ray tracing solution for hardware, that market is extremely small compared to the industry at large.
The technology in its current state is not an exciting prospect because it simply means devs have to spend more time implementing it on top of everything else that already needs to be done - purely because the publisher/studio took Nvidia’s money so they could slap the RTX label on the game.
yonder@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I think part of the push is just from Nvidia to try and get vendor lock-in, like they have with CUDA. Many games that use raytracing will only work on “RTX” cards which are only sold by Nvidia. Raytracing also has the benefit of increasing demand for upscaling, like DLSS, which further increases vendor lock-in.
Also, most devs are going to be using some sort of game engine where the hard parts of rasterization are already taken care of, like with Lumen in Unreal Engine 5.