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Indiana Jones and the Future of Ray Tracing

 


 

As many of you may already know, the recently released Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has mandated a hardware accelerated Ray Tracing capable GPU to be able to run the game, which has effectively taken out all the older NVIDIA's 10 series GTX Cards along with AMD's RX 5000 series of Graphics Cards from it's system requirements completely, leaving only the last 3 generations of GPU's from NVIDIA and 2 generations from AMD to actually play the game. While Ray Tracing has been shown to be a true generational leap in terms of visual realism in Videogames, there are several reasons why this move seems a bit too early for gaming in general. 


Firstly, while Ray Tracing is indeed a massive upgrade in terms of visual fidelity in games, I'd wager that we're still at least one generation away from the time where RT can become full mainstream for most PC gamers out there cause even as of now, the performance cost of RT is colossal and for the overwhelming majority of GPU's out there, the added visual realism of RT is simply not worth the massive performance drop. Like if you don't have the top 5 super high-end Graphics Cards available as of right now, it's not even feasible to turn on Ray Tracing in any game (especially the latest games) without using some sort of Upscaling techniques like DLSS or FSR. Running RT on native resolution is still extremely brutal in terms of performance and the ensuing realism in visuals doesn't even come close to justify it. 

 

While at this point, it does seem as an unnecessary move to make the gamers buy the newer lineup of Ray Tracing capable GPU's but there's another aspect to it which makes RT a much more favorable choice for the developers themselves as it makes their job considerably easier than using the earlier ways of adding Screen Space Reflections and Cubemaps for lighting. So from a developer standpoint, going full RT does seem more sensible and time-saving. 

 

But in order to actually arrive at a point where RT is the new norm for rendering, there still needs to be significant increases in GPU performance and capability where most cards that are available (especially in both the Mid-range and the Budget segments) can run RT without much decrease in FPS, only then can it seem truly feasible for both gamers and developers. And currently, we're far, far away from such a situation and unless the upcoming releases from both NVIDIA and AMD can increase the RT performances quite drastically, it will continue to be so for a long time. 


So even if the move towards the RT mandate is not completely unnecessary, it stills seems a bit early considering how expensive RT remains for even most high-end graphics cards available today. Let me know your thoughts on this in the comments below whether you agree with the RT mandate or not.

 

 




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