To be fair, the fact that I worked in game development for a while makes the typical rasterization inaccuracies stick out like a sore thumb to me. Kind of like once you see it, you can't unsee it.

And there's also a bit of knowing where to look at, what kind of scenes and weather types benefit the most, and so on. If you have someone point out the differences, on specific scenes, even the most casual observer will notice the huge improvements[1]. However if you boot up a random scene, it may look very similar.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-ORt8313Og

Screen space reflections that are clipped depending on what is directly visible are at the top of my "hard to unsee" list.

I wonder why there's no option to render a bit outside the screen just to make these artifacts disappear. Cheaper than RT, and would provide for me the most noticeable improvement of RT

Works for this one specific case of when screen space reflections fall short. IMO fishing rods / planes make for much more distracting visual issues.

> IMO fishing rods / planes make for much more distracting visual issues.

What exactly are you referring to? I searched for it and all I got was stuff about actual fishing rods and some Minecraft and WoW guides...

Sorry, just seeing this now

Try to picture you flying a plane in a game. You're over a lake and your plane is occluding a mountain in the distance.

With SSR, those bits of the mountain your plane is blocking won't be rendered in the reflection.

Same with a fishing rod. They're tall and block a lot of things in the distance, thus breaking SSR.

Pay attention to the reflection in the water here when Sonic casts the rod (time-stamped): https://youtube.com/watch?v=IaPMkpDOFng&t=42s

Since it doesn't make sense to have a hole in a reflection when there's not actually a hole in the object, the reflection just stops when something occludes the object being reflected.

I guess if you do that you're not too far from planar reflections in terms of cost, which would be better as well since they don't suffer from occlusion artifacts.

Please tell me Cyberpunk lets you disable or at least turn down the bloom.

In some scenes, the bloom just removes all detail and makes parts of the scene look like a blurry mess.

Yes, bloom and motion blur are disablable in settings.

Motion blur is fine when done right.

Fortnite, for example, does it right. I remember watching a character dance and thinking "This is so god damn smooth, why does it look so smooth?" and then I noticed the motion blur. When done right, it's subtle and you don't even notice it unless you're looking for it.

Motion blur is an accurate rendition of how humans see things. Your eyes are not fast enough to take instantaneous pictures of fast moving objects. Instead when an object moves fast on an interval too fast for us to perceive we see everything that object did on that interval in the form of a "motion blur"

Games that render frames don't actually replicate this because the object is rendered on discreet instances. Thus your eye is not able to properly capture the "motion blur" from a set of stop motion images.

To fix this, games must use artificial motion blur to replicate what the eyes see. Disabling motion blur is a mistake it is required for fidelity.

The problem with motion blur is if it's done for objects moving too slowly. Then it becomes noticeable because if your eyes are fast enough to capture the object without blur then adding blur becomes noticeable.

I think it's three things:

1. Blur on slow objects, as you mentioned. Something moving 5 pixels per frame probably shouldn't have any blur applied.

2. Blur exceeding the distance moved per frame. If an object moves 20 pixels between frames, the blur should be less than 20 pixels wide. Ideally, I'd even argue that the blur width should be half the movement between frames. The example above of something moving only 5 pixels per frame probably shouldn't have any blur applied.

3. Blur on objects that are not moving relative to the camera. In a racing game being played with the camera above and behind the car, yes, the scenery should be blurred, but your car and the car right next to you that is driving the same speed as you should not be blurred. Though I suppose this is really just a special/specific case of problem 2 mentioned above.

Of course, there's one problem with all of this: the video game camera is supposed to represent your eyes staring strictly in one direction. When your eyes follow an object, the object does not blur, but everything else you see does. This means that if you're tracking an object on your screen with your eyes, that object should not be blurred. Unfortunately, this is not possible for games to do, because they don't know where your gaze is actually directed.

Finally, I can't close out this comment without mentioning the greatest offender when it comes to doing motion blur wrong: simply blending each frame with the previous one. There was an N64 game that did this, and my god it's horrible.

At minimum, everything becomes significantly darker. Without a total redesign of set lighting with ray tracing in mind, it looks like a lot of areas would be barely playable.

I couldn't disagree more. I agree that ray traced cyberpunk doesn't really look better, except for surface reflections. But path tracing is an incredible leap. It makes everything pop so much. No longer does the game have this "fullbright" quality to it. With that I mean textures that look like they are fully illuminated,

Sometimes things pop too much with path tracing! I like some of the better ambient lighting within shadows, and I agree about your "fullbright" thing. I always felt they could have just fixed the materials there though. But bright neon lights (which are everywhere) give off too much bloom with path tracing. The lights themselves feel too hazy and unrealistic, despite them being more technically real. I think lights that you're looking at directly need to be tuned for path tracing purposes better. I felt there's areas at night where path tracing was ruining the atmosphere created by artists without path tracing in mind.

> When watching direct comparison videos

Watch the digital foundry videos. If you watched the GamersNexus ones they are notorious raytracing haters and picked worst case scenes to demo path tracing for most of their videos (where the faked lighting looked as close to PT as possible).

We also have to consider that the art and visual design for this game would have been done with primarily Rasterization and traditional RT in mind. Adding the path tracing may or may not generate the most aesthetic look as it was not optimized for that in the first place.

Real benefit is streamlining production. Sure, some scenes benefit from path tracing more than others, when it matters, it's very noticable. But IMO consistently noticable image quality improvements occures when light bounces start stacking up, more than the 1-2 bounces real time currently runs on, which is preproduction tier quality for ray/path traced visualization. Artists/traditional rendering methods can fake the feel of 1-2 bounces pretty close, but once you crank up the rays and materials, the difference gets staggering.

I think you've hit on the key relevance of path tracing (and similar advances). It's not that it necessarily brings a huge improvement over the current state of the art when comparing a hand-tweaked "Hero Scene." Skilled game artists can already tune such a scene to look amazing anyway. The difference is things like path tracing can offer similar fidelity without specific artist labor.

I think you've hit on the key relevance of path tracing (and similar advances). It's not that it necessarily brings a huge improvement over the current state of the art when comparing a hand-tweaked "Hero Scene." Skilled game artists can already tune such a scene to look amazing anyway. The difference is things like path tracing can offer similar fidelity without specific artist labor at the level of texture maps.