What raytracing will change for indies
Over the past year, I’ve been watching the development of raytracing technology. With the latest graphics cards from Nvidia, AMD, and even Intel, it’s looking more and more likely that real-time raytracing could become the new standard in terms of graphics technology. I think this news has some people dishearted - there are several reasons why it’s frustrating.
First of all, these new graphics cards were developed at the same time as the pandemic, and at a time where Ethereum was still using PoW. Not only were the graphics cards expensive due to supply chain issues, but scalpers bought cards en-masse and crypto miners wanted a massive number of them too.
Secondly, even with the pandemic becoming less important over time, these graphics cards are still very expensive. An incomplete list can be found below:
| Graphics Card | Retail Price |
|---|---|
| RTX 3090 Ti | $1,100 |
| RTX 3090 | $950 |
| RTX 3080 | $730 |
| RTX 3070 | $520 |
| RTX 3060 | $369 |
| Radeon RX 6950 XT | $950 |
| Radeon RX 6900 XT | $700 |
| Radeon RX 6800 XT | $600 |
| Radeon RX 6700 XT | $420 |
Standard wisdom says that a graphics card should cost around 40% of your overall budget in a gaming PC. $1000 is a normal price for a gaming PC, so the average consumer can only afford a $400 graphics card. Almost all of these cards rise above that, and the next generation cards (RTX 40 series and RDNA 3) are even more expensive. According to the Steam Hardware & Software Survey (October 2022) the most popular video card is a GTX 1060, which is over 6 years old.
Thirdly, consumers have a number of false assumptions about game development. They think that when a game is graphically impressive, that the developer(s) could’ve spent more time on the game’s design or story, as if there was just a knob that you could turn to spend more time on one or the other. In reality, everything is interlinked, and it’s impossible to determine the value of any specific aspect of a game on it’s own. A classic example is that of “juice”, that is, special effects that help to liven a game up. Without things like sound effects, camera shake, particle effects, etc. it’s hard for the human brain to grasp the impact of an action. If you can’t grasp the impact of an action, it is very hard to determine if doing that action is fun or not, or if the overall game is fun.
As an example, imagine watching a Disney movie, but all of the music has been taken out. Would you know if the movie is good or not? You could still try to evaluate its plot or themes but if you are missing the music you are missing something essential to the movie. That’s why I think some of the discussion around “is the story more important than gameplay” or “how graphics isn’t important compared to gameplay” is just kind of silly. They’re all important to the overall experience.
Game designers struggle with some of the same assumptions about human cognition that the gamers do. A game designer might think that lighting isn’t that important to the gameplay, because you could theoretically replace all of that with the simplest rasterized rendering and the game would play the same. But as soon as you understand that the core emotional experience of playing a video game comes from the fusion of many different artistic fields, and that that experience is allowed to be much much more than “having fun”, then you can begin to understand why raytracing can be a transformative technology in the hands of game designers.
It’s likely clear to the reader at this point that while I can sympathize with the issues, ultimately I think raytracing will end up being very powerful. Being able to ignore the painful and slow process of shadow/reflection mapping, and allowing for fully dynamic environments will eventually allow for indies to make 3D games that match the level of quality that AAA studios can produce today. Furthermore, indies don’t have to follow the trend of using raytracing as just a tool to enhance photorealism - indies can embrace entirely new visual styles (PS1 era textures, for example) while using raytracing to create entirely new games.