Ray Tracing is a Scam

General Discussion
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A loss of over 60 FPS when turned on, even with a Nvidia RTX card.

Nvidia has a history of reaching out to game developers and strong-arming them into including graphical features that are exclusive to Nvidia products as some kind of selling point for their latest cards.

I want WC3R to look astounding, but nobody has time for Nvidia’s RTX.

Why is blizzard including Ray Tracing?

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Is that really confirmed ?

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no they said they think about it.

But Blizzard has always been in the same boat with nvidia (they even had the nvidia logo in the vanilla WoW client)

so raytracing may come.

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Well if the game is running at 400 FPS, then a loss of 60 FPS is completely reasonable! This is why one mentioned reductions in percentage and not absolute, task dependant values…

Technically Raytracing is not NVidia exclusive. AMD was the first to offer real time raytracing APIs that were GPU accelerated using compute shaders, the only difference being NVidia’s hardware based implementation is a lot faster. Intel was also the first to run real time ray tracing over a decade ago using a dual socket Xenon system, and their general purpose GPU concept (which was scrapped) fully supported the feature. In any case D3D12 uses a generic raytracing API while Vulkan might get a generic Raytracing extension in the future, which AMD and Intel (who will become a big graphic player soon) might add support for.

Raytracing is such a new concept that one cannot even out right say it lowers performance. Since dedicated hardware is being used for raytracing, it is completely possible that any frame drops are occurring due to bottlenecks caused by that hardware, while most of the normal GPU remains underutilized. In such a case increasing frame rates would be about balancing legacy shader loads with raytracing core loads to maximize card throughput.

Finally real time raytracing currently does not target the 144Hz or faster gaming market. It is currently intended for the 60-30FPS market where pixels per second are sacrificed for more beautiful pixels. The only reason it was placed in a first person shooter which is FPS critical was as a technical test or for casuals, as you can be sure that all power players will have that feature turned off for more FPS even with the capable hardware.

That said it is such a new and niche technology that I cannot imagine Blizzard putting it into Warcraft III Reforged. Much less than 0.1% of players will have the hardware for real time raytracing in the near future so it does not really bring any value to the game. I could easily see Blizzard’s next big game supporting it down the road, even if just to experiment with it.

Since RTS games fall into the 60-30 FPS market (since frames per second does not really matter for them), Raytracing could be a good feature to use for them in the distant future.

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Thanks for this post. I’m putting together a new system with the Intel 8700 and an evga z390 ftw mobo. That’s the easy part. But I’ve been flummoxed by getting the best gpu to get for my new system. I don’t overclock (rig is for graphics and WOW), thus the 8700. The RTX just seemed unnecessary for my needs, so reading your post sealed the deal for me. Maybe down the road the RTX will be more appealing. Thanks again.

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Why is it bothering you???

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Buying a R9 3900X and a RTX 2070 Super if true

  • new SSDs and stuff
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I will just add i have been getting reports of people losing FPS drastically.

DSG’s mentioned 400 FPS shocks me because i didn’t know wc3 could even do that, and on top of that, the reports i got were people losing FPS when their FPS was like 60 or 130 at best. and with the latest patch it dropped for them.

EDIT: and on a personal note, i don’t care nor would i love to see soo many graphic enhancements. because in my opinion it would harm the custom maps visually. because newcomers are just going to NOT play them because they are using SD models.

and i’m sorry but the suggestion of “well make new models with the upcoming new blizzard tools… lol” is not an option for alot of us. because we’re map makers. not modelers. and the incredible amount of resources from icons to models and terrain templates at hiveworkshop can’t be just… REDONE in a year after Reforged is out. (not like map makers are willing to put their legs up the table and waste a whole year just for new models)

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So do I. I think on top of that, not everyone has the budget to obtain Nvidia’s RTX, if it were to be somewhat a recommended spec for WC3R. It would make the game inaccessible to a lot of people and it’d lose out on audience.

Is this a case of the vanilla WC3 with its latest patch or WC3R ? If the latter, what source do you have to~educate us on the situation?

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The post was made long before the latest patch. Someone necroed the topic.

Technically it is just their more upper range of graphic cards. There is the 1660 and 1650 for lower budget builds which drop the raytracing cores (but still do support hardware accelerated raytracing, nowhere near as fast).

The posts were made long before true details about raytracing, its applications and performance were common knowledge.

Full scene realtime raytracing is not viable at the moment. However one can use it for effects such as reflections and it has a minimal performance impact.

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I takeback the title of this thread. Nvidia is a scam. add raytracing or i wont buy your game

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I like that OP ordered Blizzard to implement it in an other thread he opened.

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Have you been possessed by a Banshee, or has a Dark Ranger recently used her Charm on you?

I’m actually kind of envious. You get to experience some exotic pleasure there.

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i think nvidia did a miscalculation on the amount of cores and speed ray tracing would require. it is thereby not a scam, just a miscalculation. that does not make it good but, it does make it unintentional.

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There is no such miscalculation. Just they had 2 intentions for the feature.

  • Use real time raytracing backed by some AI filtering for hard to simulate effects. For example realistic reflections or lighting effects. Performance work load depends on what is on screen. As long as area of reflective surface relative to screen is kept small then there is an acceptable performance impact.
  • Use raytracing cores to accelerate creative raytracing usage such as renderers or provide raytraced previews. This has the potential to revolutionize the productivity industry due to how many more rays per second per dollar NVidia RTX based GPUs can cast compared with traditional CPU or even GPU implementations.

Battlefield is a good example of raytracing being implemented as it has limited performance impact on frame rate and cards like the RTX 2060 Super will be able to run it at above 60fps with raytracing enabled and set to reasonable (not max) settings at 1080p. It is used for reflective surfaces like metal, glass and water. It is worth being aware that when raytracing support was first added to that game a serious bug resulted in all surfaces using raytracing instead of just reflected surfaces. This caused a massive frame rate reduction since the effective area being raytraced was 100% of the screen rather than the intended 10-20%. This has apparently been fixed now which is why no one uses the game to benchmark raytracing performance anymore.

Additionally their productivity application is still very much a work in progress since renders are extremely complex and take a lot of time to develop. Many renderers with RTX acceleration support are in alpha/beta stage but few if not any have reached production quality yet. This is very much a case of when rather than if.

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