fearpoint
They are incredibly lazy and make bad games. The video shows it. They can't implement anything correctly in their games from Mantle to ray tracing. 
 
Keep defending the indefensible though. That's working out great. 

The problem is you're ignorant on the topic, have no arguments, but you somehow find it relevant to post your opinion insulting and bashing the company.  That's... baffling. Guess it's the entitled to everything attitude of kids today. 
 
I mean, I have no stakes in the fight, but that's plain wrong to do. Frostbite is technically fantastic product, the amount of bugs is minimal (expected for the complexity), performance is amazing and yet you find it somehow lacking. Layman critique of the technology makes no sense.
 
You might not like their design decisions, which you have every right to, but the approach you took shows you're far from qualified to comment on tech.

Brad_Hawthorne
What sort of rocket surgeon thought it was smart to raytrace a FPS shooter game?

Why not? You can ray-trace whatever you want. It's no small feat what they did with very limited hw.

Brad_Hawthorne
 
You do know the history of raytracing right? Conceptually, this is the last genre that should be embracing raytracing. Then again, it takes all kinds of people to argue just to argue. Not a fan of apologists that would rather have circular arguments than address the issue of applying a rendering method that is least receptive to FPS habits would be embraced by people that would probably even buy Battlefield or Nvidia toilet paper just because...well it's Battlefield or Nvidia.

To a point, it might have sense (coming from you and without silly claims as the previous one), but you'd rather talk about scene complexity. Unluckily, most modern games would behave mostly the same. The most impressive effect is in 1st person games.
 
The sad (for early users) fact is: it doesn't really matter in the end.  Attacking some tech out of pure fun is simply wrong. You can't do more with the existing hardware and it has nothing to do with skills of Frostbite programmers. It's about hardware and the fact of its inner workings and the hybrid pipeline.
It's not that the implementation doesn't work or is poorly implemented, but it's simply the fact that hardware N offers is at the start of its evolution. You have a lot of work to do and it's only so much available. What is most taxing to RT are reflective, refractive and scattering surfaces, and it's less about geometry than you'd think. It's a huge amount of work to shift data and use it with RT, the impact is quite high.
 
Not only Frostbite is one of the best tech solutions out there, but they're also one of the pioneers when it comes to RTX. The performance we see will repeat in Tomb Raider and Redux. And other games. Without RTX as a highly performance-killing technology, Frostbite is capable of running at 5K on a single 2080Ti. That's fantastic given the poly count, resx size and post-processing they do. As a rendering engineer and researcher, I really can't find many points at which you could improve much or at all. Frostbite is highly optimized for both paths, AMD and NVIDIA.
 
Not for one second Nvidia or DICE or anyone else, left room for speculations; since day one we all knew that RTX will be of limited performance and application. How could anyone miss that?
 
Personally, I wouldn't even release RTX to consumers yet. Not below 2080Ti and Titan Turing. But then again, many people still play at FullHD. Eye-candy is cool.
Also, I'd rather go with shadows and replace SSAO instead of reflections. I guess the performance or wow-effect was less visible.
 
I sincerely hope we'll soon be running 7nm chips and double the RTX hardware, which would make 1440 a viable resolution. Also, ray-tracing is begging to scale to SLI... 

It's viable now. When Atomic Heart releases next year and it's the new Crysis we can look back at how DICE once again failed.

Brad_Hawthorne
What sort of rocket surgeon thought it was smart to raytrace a FPS shooter game?

Really it's a great game to show off Ray trace since it's a popular game. They can go to an event and show off the game levels gamers know with the feature on and people realize the difference. If you do a game that people might not have played people are not really sure how it's supposed to look. I remember Tribes being one of the games used to show off 3dfx FSAA and it really wasn't something you would have on back then while playing a multiplayer game but now people are running systems powerful enough to have it on even in multiplayer because it made a meaningful improvement to the visual quality.

MSim
 
What's the first thing the topical hardcore multiplayer FPS gamer does in a new game. They crank the eye candy down to get above 100FPS to have smoother gameplay. That's why it doesn't make sense to add RT to multiplayer first person shooters. It's a waste of game development time to add it to games like that, when over 95% of your customers can't use it or won't use it due to huge performance hit you take. Maybe in 6 years it would make sense to spend game development time on adding it to multiplayer first person shooters.

True. Competitive. But, not all have faster than 60 monitors and being able to lock down to 60 is all you need. And sometimes you just enjoy the scenery.
I play on 144 at 144Hz because I like the refresh, but it wasn't that less enjoyable to do it at 60 in 5K. Trade-offs.
 
Haven't tried RTX yet. 1080 is a bit useless to me, so I understand the pointlessness some see in it. :)