I'd argue reflections are nowhere near as nice looking as RTGI. If anything, switch reflections off.

Also caustics and volumetrics, if your game has those.

Look at Tiny Glade, it's a great example of what raytracing can bring to a stylized game. (They did use their own raytracing pipeline different from the usual - in their own words, re-stir was overkill for what their game needed). Or like 95% of animated films. Including Arcane but excluding Stray.

Raytracing will be cool if hardware can catch it up. It's pretty pointless if you have to play upscaled to turn the graphics up. And as you say, upscaling has its uses and is great tech, but when a game needs it to not look like dogshit (looking at you Stalker 2) it worries me a lot.

No you've pretty much hit it on the head there. The higher ups want it shipped yesterday, if you can ship it without fixing those performance issues they're likely going to make you do that.

The joke is, LCD smear anyway on low framerates.

Optimization is usually possible, but it is easier said than done. Often sacrifices have to be made, but maybe it is still a better value per frame time. Sometimes there's more that can be done, sometimes it really is just that hard to light and render that scene.

It's hard to make any sweeping statements, but I will say that none of that potential optimization is going to happen without actually hiring graphics devs. Which costs money. And you know what corporations like to do when anything they don't consider important costs money. So that's probably a factor a lot of the time.

Unless you consider wireframe graphics. Idk when triangle rasterization first started being used, but it's more conceptually similar to wireframe graphics the ray tracing. Also, I don't really know what you mean by 'fake it with alpha'.

Yes, I'm sure every player spends the majority of their game time admiring the realistic material properties of Spider-Man's suit. So far I've never seen a game that was made better by forcing RT into it. A little prettier if you really focus on the details where it works, but overall it's a costly (in terms of power, computation, and price) gimmick.

Subsurface scattering is not one of the things you get automatically with ray tracing. If you just bounce the rays off objects as would be the usual first step in implementing ray tracing you don't get any light penetration into the object, so none of that depth.

Maybe you meant ambient occlusion?

raytracing still needs to do subsurface scattering. It can actually do it for real though. It also "wastes" a lot of bounces, so is usually approximated anyway

Games visuals are riddled with shortcuts and simplification.

You don't think the way the water moves when your characters steps on a puddle, the smoke rises from fires or the damage on the walls are Physics Simulations, do you?!

It's all a variation of a procedural noise such as Perkin Perlin Noise, particle effects, or at best (for example, ocean simulation) some formulas that turn out to look good enough.

(Want to see Physics Simulations in 3D generated worlds, look at Special Effects in Films).

Improving one element of game space visual fidelity - reflections - is nice but it's unclear that it's worth its downsides (more expensive hardware, slower performance) given how everything else is still one big pile of "good enough" shortcuts.

Even with raytracing there is still a lot of shortcuts and trickery under the hood. Ray tracing is the “cheating” form of path tracing.

But you can bake additive environment lighting as well.

You can even bake additive lighting in layers, at least for things like street lamps, like coming out of a window onto a street, mostly static objects that can be turned on/off or broken...

And then just only use truly dynamic lighting for... people with lamps, flashlights, cars, truly dynamic stuff.

But that takes time, attention to detail, good map/level design, a bit of extra logic to handle everything... and the AAA paradigm is crank out flashy bullshit that runs like ass... unless you check out our marketing partner's newest GPU!

Not everything, but most advanced dynamic lighting stuff that people associate with RT... can be done in an optimized way, leaving only a few elements to be truly fully, dynamically, brute force rendered every scene.

But, its about 95% easier for a game dev to (or management to tell them to) just let the game engine they paid for a liscense to (almost always UE) to handle it via assuming the end user has a GPU that costs as much as an entire PC 2 years ago.

Long, long gone are the days where game studios were largely defined by having their own engine, tailored to work optimally with the kinds of games they make.

Nearly no AAA game studios bother to make engines these days, nearly none of them have competent enough coders to actually make one... thats all subcontracted out now.

Practically impossible for this developer? Maybe. Technically impossible? No.

We do have realtime GI solutions which don't require raytracing (voxel cone tracing, sdfgi, screenspace, etc). None of which require any 'special' hardware.

Raytracing is just simpler and doesn't need as much manual work to handle cases where traditional rasterisation might fail (eg; light leaking). But there's not many things it can do which we can't already achieve with rasterisation tricks.
Raytracing is mostly useful for developers who don't have the time/budget/skillset to get the same visual quality with traditional rasterisation.

However, in an industry which seems to prioritise getting things released as cheaply and quickly as possible, we're starting to see developers rely heavily on raytracing, and not allocating many resources into making their non-rt pipeline look nice.
Some are even starting to release games which require raytracing to work at all, because they completely cut the non-rt pipeline out of their budget.

So I'd argue that you're incorrect in theory, but very correct in practise (and getting even more correct with time).

It's mostly developers that benefit from RT long-term. Not now while it's optional, but once it becomes a requirement, they can cut a couple of time-intensive steps from the development pipeline.

It's not just a time limitation either tho, it also opens up a lot of room for artistic direction and game design

I don't think you could possibly make something like Control's shiny black blocks world look decent without raytraced reflections.

Also anything with significantly large dynamic geometry usually either needs like half of the level file size to be duplicated for every possible state, or some form of raytracing, to work at all. (There's also things like voxel cone tracing that do their own optimized tracing but they also don't really work in 100% of situations and come with their own visual downsides)

To see how far rasterization has been stretched, and how that holds back development - Path of Exile 2 has a tech talk about their bare minimum settings. Artists weren't allowed to rely on anything that could be turned off. They begged the programmers for specific gimmicks, and turned that cheap nonsense into a million blades of grass, raymarched cracks in translucent ice, and soft shadows with no Peter Panning.

Or, picking one specific trick: ambient occlusion was half of why Crysis humbled $5,000 PCs. There's a slide deck for how a superior version of the same effect was achieved in Toy Story 3 on the Wii.

Real-time raytracing was unobtanium for decades because we kept moving the goalposts. The entire 3D games industry is built on cheating around simple parallel techniques being too expensive. By the time hardware catches up to where doing something the simple way is feasible, complex software has faked a wild variety of other effects. Meanwhile: games are designed to rely on what's available. All of the tells for proper path-traced lighting have either been faked or avoided. Games don't even do mirrors, anymore.

There's a reason RTX shows off games from the late 1900s.

It's like when the unity game engine came out, somehow IMO, instead of having to program the whole thing up to your specific game, now everyone could make a 3D platformer.

It does, again IMO, take the soul out of games.