Ray Tracing

After testing Forza Horizon 6 with the Extreme and Extreme+RT presets, and coming away somewhat disappointed by the impact of ray tracing in the game, I went back and used the built-in benchmark to do a direct visual comparison between the two modes. In the above video, taken using the RTX 5090 setup, every graphics setting is maxed out on both sides, but ray tracing is disabled on the left. Reflections are clearly more accurate when using RT, but while the global illumination is technically more correct, I actually prefer the non-RT look and feel. In fact, if you delve a little closer into ho

The Microsoft DXR API was designed years ago, before the level of geometric complexity that can be found in modern games. In DXR, geometry is represented using a Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH), which can become expensive to rebuild in dynamic scenes with dense geometry and countless complex animated objects. Fully ray tracing such geometry may require frequent BVH updates, placing significant strains on performance. As a result, developers often rely on lower-quality proxy meshes for ray-traced effects. These simplified representations contain only a fraction of the original detail, leading t

Nvidia DLSS, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS have all become very confusing, and it can be hard to make head or tail of all the various different technologies bundled into these suites. As a general rule, the purpose of DLSS, FSR, and XeSS is to improve performance in your games, particularly when you enable demanding graphical features such as ray tracing. All of them offer a way to upscale resolution, for example, where a game will keep all the text, menus, and HUD at your chosen resolution, but render all the 3D graphics at a lower resolution to speed up frame rates, then use some form of upscaling