I barely play video games but I definitely do
Really, these are the only 2 situations where ray tracing makes much of a difference. We already have simulated shadowing in many games and it works pretty well, actually.
Silent Hill 2 Remake and Black Myth: Wukong both have a meaningful amount of water in them and are improved visually with raytracing for those exact reasons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyn2NeA6hI0
Can you please point at the mentioned effects here? Immersion in what? Looks like PS4-gen Tomb Raider to me, honestly. All these water reflections existed long before RTX, it didn't introduce reflective surfaces. What it did introduce is dynamic reflections/ambience, which are a very specific thing to be found in the videos above.
does improve immersion and feels nice to look at
I bet that this is purely synthetic because RTX gets pushed down the players throat by not implementing any RTX-off graphics at all.
I still play traditional roguelikes from the 80s (and their modern counterparts) and I'm a passionate gamer. I don't need a fancy GPU to enjoy the masterpieces. Because at the end of the day nowhere in the definition of "game" is there a requirement for realistic graphics -- and what passes off as realistic changes from decade to decade anyway. A game is about gameplay, and you can have great gameplay with barely any graphics at all.
I'd leave raytracing to those who like messing with GLSL on shadertoy; now people like me have 0 options if they want a good budget card that just has good raster performance and no AI/RTX bullshit.
And ON TOP OF THAT, every game engine has turned to utter shit in the last 5-10 years. Awful performance, awful graphics, forced sub-100% resolution... And in order to get anything that doesn't look like shit and runs at a passable framerate, you need to enable DLSS. Great
