Over the last years higher end scene is freaking out about PT, and how it should be the next step in game graphics, how its "physically accurate" and shit. Now, after playing a couple of games, both the ones with or without that technology. Ive been also passionate about basics of rendering pipelines, and how it all works on technical side, and came to the conclusion that doesnt align with mainstream movement.
Lets take a "flagship" PT title, Cyberpunk 2077. It is a title that benefits from the technology the most, as number of reflections and indirect lighting combined with sheer amount of dynamic light sources + night and day cycle makes it very difficult for rasterised lighting to capture how the scene would behave convincingly. But even this game has very visible seams to accomodate the fully raytraced pipeline. Because the lighting is calculated solely by boucing light off geometry in the scene X number of times, the game cannot and doesnt use Paralax Occlusion mapping. Therefore all surfaces that should be rough (ground, asphalt, trash, gravel, planks, there is more of them that you would think) are unrealistically flat, and immedially give away that this is a game. Additionally the game's LOD are very restricted and cause noticeable pop in to save performance, and trying to replace default 1024p enviromental textures on PT ends with running out of VRAM even on my high end machine, solely because of how PT is eating it for BVH tree. Volumetric fog also doesnt affect the lighting (it can only be illuminated, it cant for example occlude objects in reflection or carry the light and convincingly diffuse it) because again, its not included i BVH. All of those seams + upscaling, denoiser and dissoclusion artifacts are signs of shortcuts taken to accomodate the lighting model, which immedially throws out of the immersion and destroys "wow this looks like real life" impression.
On the other hand we have RDR2. A title that today finishes 8 years (happy birthday!) and relies on the best that rastered lighting has to offer. And this is a game that truly immerses, and causes "wow this looks like real life" feeling. The game has amazing shadowmaps with very good proprietary Rockstar's distance softening solution to mimic numbras and prenumbras, baked in large scale ambient occlusion combined with dynamic SSAO, reflections reliant on SSR + Enviromental cubemaps generated for every frame, probe based GI and top tier volumetric system used not only for dense fog and clouds, but for general light diffuse in wet air/haze too. Its a good, competent lighting model - not physically accurate one tho.
This lighting model however is very light to run compared to PT. It does not clog the VRAM and doesnt cost 10ms to calculate all by itself. It allowed me to double the game's geometry and grass LODs, contributing to pop - in free experience. The game easily swallowed 2k textures with 1024 POMs, making surfaces very realistic and bumpy, the volumetrics are able to affect SSR, heck, they can diffuse shadowmaps, or cast shadows themselves. It has much better image quality, due to allowing me to use DLSS Q in 4k or DLAA at 1440p (instead of 960p/1080p needed in cyberpunk), with far less artifacts. This contributes to the game looking convincing in all circumstances, not just when looking at puddles and being stationary.
I think the general direction of game graphics should be to improve in all areas, not just the lighting at the cost of everything else. Anybody else agree?