How did you do ? Also do you usually play with RTX ON or OFF ?

The best way to spot if Ray Tracing is on is by looking at the frame rate LOL

Ray tracing doesn’t make a game look inherently better it just makes it look a little different and that’s only in games that fully utilize RT like Cyberpunk and Alan Wake 2

to me the non-RT looked better almost in all the games, meaning i guessed wrong mostly; thought the non-RT was RT. So it is a win win for me, i save money. have high fps and get the best looking picture. RT is at the moment not worth it, half the fps, high cost to get into it (highend RTX card needed) , fake framegen needed and non native Highres, but upscaling. Meh, i pass.

I'd say ray tracing (not RTX) is a very expensive solution looking for a problem that's not worth the computational cost......for now. Fidelity, resolution, frame rate and frame consistency all matter in a gaming experience and at this point I'd rather play at a higher native resolution or grab a few more FPS than turn on ray tracing. Maybe once we get 50% better than 4090 path tracing performance for 300-500 bucks, ray tracing can be baked in as a minimum requirement, but I also think by them lighting engines will also evolve with tech like Lumen and Nanite in UE5. For now, upscaling is the more exciting tech, in my opinion.

It's very easy to tell when you know what to look for and the implementation in the game. I got each one correct.

for me, RTX on W3 is a complete waste of resources. What makes the game genuinely better graphically is the foliage ultra +

It will be worth when normal GPUs will be powerful as rtx 4090 is now. Until then its nice to turn on here and there but for me is mostly off, on Nvidia or AMD.. We all have 144hz or faster screens these days and i found using high refresh fps is more fun for me than watching shadows and reflexions. Ofc there are slow games like Alan Wake but its not my cup of tea..

CP: It was the contrast between light vs dark spots and the way the blue neon lights lit up the front of the bar that gave me the answer W3: It was the water Finals: I was wrong. I was going off of the reflections in the floor but I guessed wrong Elden Ring: The shine when you walked over the loot. I guessed right because of the yellow reflections on the armor, otherwise I wouldn't know Hogwarts: I guessed wrong Warzone: I guessed wrong but I didn't notice the difference, unlike Hogwarts and Finals I just took a blind guess. ETA yeah I completely looked over the background, didn't pay any attention at all lol When you were showing Witcher on/off, I actually prefer off. If you look at the boards they're more vibrant with RTX off, and Geralt's armor looks better too. Don't know if that's due to the pics not being identical but Geralt's armor looks sharper and more crisp with RTX off

Ray Tracing is good when implemented right, like in Control, Metro Exodus, Alan Wake II and Cyberpunk 2077. Other games try to implement one solution or another and it is usually badly implemented. Some games you've shown are good examples of that. Elden Ring is not really noticeable, The Witcher 3 not noticeable, COD: Warzone is a "WTF" implementation... The problem with companies failing to add ray tracing is that the FPS will drop, no change will be seen and Ray Tracing will get a bad image among players.

When doing comparisons like this, you REALLY need to find a spot that you can replicate.

Lots of times I end up hating RT in certain areas like dark areas; it really make you regret cheaper display panels and black light bleed and then you are onto trying to figure out what to upgrade next; the bloom can be an issue if you dont have decent dimming zones as backlight bleed can make blacks really crushed and awkward for so many games that try to make more atmospheric visuals It becomes hard to see and i either get lost more easily since dark is really dark and areas just dont navigate as easily; I’m into a great thriller or horror game but everything looking wet and mirror like isn’t ideal; at that point just change the material composition of everything and get similar results to appearance Overall i believe at the very least it gives a variant of art direction, as developers can design one game and RT and raster can make up 2 totally different art styles which can accommodate not just playability but how one perceives surfaces to look or how environments are either lifelike due to their own subjective interpretation

Ray tracing reminds me of Dolby Atmos. Cool to have, but I wouldn't even notice, unless I was trying to look out for it. Foe me. It's still a bit of an expensive sales gimmick.

Quality vid👌

Shadows and reflections are the two things that pop for me when ray tracing is on.

4 years ago I would say: it's impossible to notice the difference. After 4 years, playing multiple RT games, I can definitely notice the difference and all my guesses in this video of whether it was rt on or off were right. I definitely prefer RT, mainly playing in an OLED screen, it seems they were made for each other. The shadows and ambient occlusion works much better with RT. And as to the reflections, RT is way superior in terms of being faithful to the image. Everytime i llay a full rasterized game nowadays I see how much better it could be if it was RT.

Got everything right, but doesnt really bother not having it

The answer.... maybe, depending on the game, but most of the time not worth it since enabling upscaling and fake frame tricks to get the games to a halfway decent framerate often have their own detrimental effects. Let's see if I'm right! Yup, only game I see as really worth it is CP2077 with path tracing (since RT isn't ALWAYS better in CP2077 than default lighting), but I don't want to shell out $1,600+ for a GPU and then also have to use DLSS2 and 3. I also wonder how many of these games actually call it the Nvidia branded term 'RTX' and how many use the actual 'Ray Tracing' in the menus. RTX is basically the new 'Band-Aid', where many people call bandages 'Band-Aids' due to marketing, like in this video.

it doesn't worth it due to the high FPS drop. In the other hand, what it does worth is DLSS 3 and frame generation.

jesus... well that just made me AMD from Nvidia..... RTX on not worth the extra £s or the loss in frames for me. thanks for the video

For Witcher 3, the RTX difference is generally indoors.

for god sakes stop saying RTX on & RTX off. RTX is NVIDIA BRANDING, its their branding for raytracing supported cards. Just call it raytracing not RTX.

RTX is an eyecandy for me, it's fun but at a cost, yet still it would be nice to have on a very powerful gpu..

id buy rtx if theyr at same price

No one would play the game frame by frame. Graphic details, scence design, resolution, effects, fluency is much more than ray tracing.

Toms Tech Table : RTX is simply too buggy to be justified and very subjectively better at best....in most of the cases is worse than rasterizing because it makes too much contrast in colors and causes shadows to be incorrectly drawn as well as texture tearing.

imma be honest, i couldn't tell the difference in almost all of these, the only one i could guess right was the one with the scope, because the non rt one didn't have anything reflecting but i'm pretty sure that if i hadn't seen this same video idea from linus tech tips just a couple minutes ago, i wouldn't even have looked out for that detail and wouldn't be able to tell the difference. as of now, this tech ain't all that, nvidia is just using this as marketing to scam goofy nerds into buying their inferior small pp vram gpus at ridiculously high prices.

disagree with witcher 3, the out of city areas look MUCH better with RTX on. The RTX shadows probably make the biggest difference on grass/foliage especially at a distance.

Far cry 1 has a raytracing. Land reflection. It is a demo level of ray tracing as always.

Futility. I don't even play games on ultra settings. Ray Tracing is just marketing and a loss of 30-50% of game performance.

RTX off was better in all the comparisons except for COD.

First of all difference or not, baking lighting takes time away from devs, with rt you can have better lighting faster, this shouldn't even be a question

In 4k resolation..4090 is even can not handle 60 fps when rtx on on most of the games..with dlss help it reaches but graphic look shitty when dlss is on..so for rtx gpus are not ready at 4k..other hand you lose -%50 fps when rtx is on..and it doesnt change so much..so its so lame..you sell gpu which cannot handle rtx..😂😅😅 nvidia = scam people

Next time in Witcher 3 move the camera up and down and SSR brakes… And my answer of course I can tell the difference I play games with RT on since I had my RTX 3090 and now my RTX 4080. Worth the frame rate cost. If I play competitive titles I don’t care because I want to push out hundreds of fps so I turn down graphics but in single player games, no brainer to turn on much higher fidelity.

Couldn't care less about RTX, just another gimmick from Nvidia to try and justify the absurd pricing of their underwhelming cards. Honestly, all I want is more VRAM and better clock speeds. Despite having a now outdated card, still able to play most games with everything on high/medium and all the RT garbage disabled (if temperatures stay in check that is), and honestly, looks fine to me. RT isn't worth the performance cost compared to the charging price, and besides, most games these days run like arse for everyone from their 4090s down to GTX cards. RT just amplifies that issue even more. If anything, I think even NVidia underestimated the amount of power that is required to run anything other than rasterization in real-time. Ray tracing made a lot of things worse, but if you think RT is bad, wait till you see what true Path-tracing can do to your rig. But RT made things looks worse, especially things like transparency, it used to render smooth, now it looks noisy, character hair is especially looks garbage in games these days. Only thing I hate more than RT is screen space reflections and Ambient occlusion.

Biggest difference can be seen in motion. Raytraced shadows don't shimmer and aren't blocky. Then you have no weird artifacts on reflections and halo effect with ambient occlusion. It's a big upgrade when you actually play with it. If gpu can run it at 60fps, i'll leave it on. Frame gen is amazing, you don't even notice you're playing at 30fps, completely usable with cyberpunk and pathtracing on 4070Ti.