Is RTX a Total Waste of Money?? - Can we even tell when it's on? 

Anthony is all knowing. I remember when Linus said “Anthony is the tech guy for the tech guys.” Anthony is literally the goat.

"We encouraged them to play like normal gamers" *everyone proceeds to stand around closely analyzing shadows in static environments with no change or motion*

David: * Asks Nicholas to do a second take so the editor can use the one with clearer audio * Editor: No. I don't think I will.

My take away was, that game devs got pretty good at faking light instead of ray tracing.

We studied Ray Tracing in comp sci class in 1990 - its taken 30 years for it to come to reality. Amazing how long its been

Seriously, it's easy to notice when RTX is on - it's when your game keeps dropping frames to try and keep up.

I love it how anthony is the "too smart for this crowd" dude and just aces it

The biggest issue here is that RT effects range so widely from game to game, and then further, the detail of the ray tracing is wide ranging, too. If every game was using 1:1 resolution reflections, shadows, and lighting, the effect would be far more pronounced, beautiful, and lend to the accurate recreation of a scene, but when they use 1/4 resolution detail to keep the frames from falling through the floor, it results in an image that is debatably not "better" than the faked SSR effects in spite of being more accurate. One day, when we have the resources to properly calculate and display these scenes without having to cut corners and reduce quality, ray tracing will be far more pronounced and important to gaming.

Anthony the OG. Showing them how it's done.

"Most people aren't Anthony" And that's exactly why we arent a multiplanet species yet.

"Most people aren't Anthony" Yeah, reality is often dissappointing.

Everyone: Complaining about RTX Me: Happily enjoying 1080p 60fps gaming with a GTX graphics card

"Linus scares me, because he wants a lot of energy." I didn't know Linus was a lich. That's good to know.

When Anthony mentioned shadow maps and how he was able to see them. I knew he was the chosen one.

First thought was “If Anthony is being tested he’s gonna get all of them right.” Did not disappoint.

I'd say it's more beneficial to developers than to consumers because less time is needed to simulate lighting angles for an area when you can just render it in real time.

"Most people aren't Anthony" So True

Hearing Linus say "Mathematically speaking, most people aren't Anthony" made my day. The only game I can ever tell the difference is on Minecraft, the rest of the time it's not worth it.

I have been playing CS:GO for 7 years now and today was when I came to know the scope had reflection. You learn something new everyday afterall.

RTX now feels like VR when it first came out. Novel and very much something to look forward to for the future, but not currently worth it for most consumers unless you’re an enthusiast.

Godking Emperor Anthony has the ultimate eye. He cannot be fooled or bargained with. He sees all, even past the hardware into the soul of every gamer. He feels them, in full Raytracing.

"Linus scares me becuase he always wants more energy" lol

“Just like can they tell the difference... our sponsor!” The segues get better and better every time, Linus!

Looking back at RTX now it's basically just Ultra Graphics preset with extra steps

Please don’t ever change the intro music. You can keep updating the graphics, but this intro music has been here for years. Please never change it. 😂

Love that sponsor transition. "Just like you can tell the difference... Our sponsor, glasswire."

My Mother-in-law when my Father-in-law and I put in an HDTV at their house: "I can't tell a difference in the picture quality." My Mother-in-law when going to an SD channel after just 1 month of watching everything in HD: "Why is this so blurry?"

Well the thing about RTX is that it's 100% about automating the process of lighting and shading in games. It's not meant to make games look better, it's meant to make the development process easier. Problem is it's been marketed as this huge graphical feature, like physx, when it's not.

0:45 Linus's smoothest sponsor transition ever

I once, around 2007, read an interview with a graphics-designer/-programmer in an article from a popular games-magazine, here in germany. He has been asked, what makes him proud about his work. He answered: If people do not even notice, that a specific new graphical invention has been implemented, because they are used to the natural behavior from out in the real world, then a programmer has done an awsome job. So seeing how much rasterisation has improved from that day on, and seeing the result of this test here in comparison, makes these words from 2007 even more impressive and true.

“Most people aren’t Anthony” that’s something I will have to live with but don’t know how I will.

A year later and nothings changed, cut your fps by 75%, get fancy lights which look hardly different. Thanks Nvidia.

Most people aint Anthony is one of the funniest things I have heard in a while. Also Anthony is a god damn ROCKSTAR

Honestly DLSS has been far more impressive to me than ray tracing has in any title I've tried

Man Anthony is that guy in school. That everyone knows is hella smart and whatever he says nobody really questions cause we know he gonna do things with that brain

I like how she thought the "glowier" thing was RTX, even though that was just bloom, whereas the RTX one even lights up the nearby blocks

Everyone's praising Anthony but nobody is talking about the Plouffe guy who also got the RTX enabled system right in all three games

"You can't enable metrics" Alex: "can I run a benchmark? You know, that thing that's made to show metrics?"

I kind of feel like Ray Tracing will save time in the future with new games once it becomes a standard.

I like the calm guy with the white mask. His voice is so smooth

Please PLEASE! Make a LTT shirt with that quote “Mathmatically speaking, most people are not Anthony.” PLEASE!

"Mathematically speaking, most people aren't Anthony" That needs to be on a shirt. Up vote the hell out of this until it becomes a shirt, and spam super-chat tomorrow until it becomes a shirt.

If people simply got on with playing a game rather than stopping and pixel peeping, they'd be a lot happier.

bruh Anthony is just built differently, the fact he got all right is pretty crazy

As a 3d Animator, I gotta say that whenever highly reflective surfaces are required, it becomes much more work to create a great looking image. Most scenes, in their default state, create very meh reflections, and in many cases are cluttered or confusing. You've got to put a huge amount of effort into setting up reflective objects off camera to make reflections pop, just like a photographer would. Therefore it's no surprise that when you turn on raytraced reflections in games, often the results are meh.

Something looking "better" is not the same as something looking "more realistic". I mean, art is (more often than not) specifically made to look good, while simple everyday photos can look very bland. So judging between rtx on or off is extra hard, if you go after what looks better.

2:05, David is the only person i want to see in Linus Tech Tips vids cuz he is so funny and we don't know why :D

Its really fascinating that something that took me 10 years ago whole night to render, can be rendered now 40-50 times per second...

I was doing ray tracing in the late '80's. However, back then it took the better part of a day to render ONE 480p frame. GPU technology today still blows my mind with it's shear processing power and capabilities.

I like this new edited format. The cuts from Linus narrating to the team trying to figure out which pc is RTX on is great

rtx depends on the game, and what technic is used. Rtx on "Control" is quite impressive!

The biggest benefit I have noticed is thaat my blender render times were cut in almost half.

Love for Nicole, the only one to miss all games.

The relaxed quiet guy with the pleasant voice is awesomeee! :D

For me I notice when it's NOT on. Screen space reflections are something that are immersion breaking for me. Looking out at a nice scene over water, then you turn your head the wrong way and the beautiful reflection just becomes a mess. This may have been gimmicky and stupid when it first started, but it's going to be the future.

As someone with an RTX graphics card, I almost always turn it off because the increase in frame rate without it usually far outweighs the benefits of slightly more graphical fidelity. If it's 100 FPS with no ray tracing or 40 FPS with ray tracing I'm almost always going to prioritize frame rate.

"Mom, can we get Anthony?" "No, we have Anthony at home." Cut to me modding Stalker for the hundredth time on a PC that would've been outdated in 2010.

Would love to see an update to this video at some point to see how it's evolved over a year or two from the release of this.

This video further proves Anthony's awesomeness... We love you Anthony!

the metro exodus pc upgrade is a true raytracing showcase

My first ray traced render was a 320x200 render on an Amiga 500 that took 24 hours to calculate. RTX boards are doing it in real-time, mind blown.

One of the few games where there is a stark difference in wether raytracing was actually on or not, was in Ghostrunner, where the water sources and metal definitively had better reflections from light sources, being that I could actually see the character's feet in the puddles when I couldn't without it.

Its crazy that Nicole got them all wrong which means that she can tell the difference its just that she expects the raytracing to somehow look better/different than it is.

Would've like to see games like Control and Cyberpunk in the test with the huge difference ray tracing make in reflections. There were scenes in Cyberpunk where turning ray tracing on made the entire room look completely different.

Linus: Doesn't even try to slide the sponsor into the sentence *Somehow still gets away with it*

The ray tracing in the Witcher 3 update is actually very noticeable especially in indoor areas. It's still a huge performance hit and I've always been the type to prefer framerate over pretty graphics, but it looks so good that I keep turning it back on

RTX in Control is 100% a different experience than without. 100% worth it. Seeing my reflection in all the windows spooked me repeatedly.

"Look closelier!!" - Linus, May 5, 2021

"Is RTX a Total Waste of Money??" No, it's a total waste of kidneys. Edit: Holy shit! I never thought I could get this many likes. Thank you so much, LMAO.

Finally built a new PC after 10 years. Gotta say, when I flipped on RTX for Cyberpunk 2077, that was an eye-opener. Game looks WAY better with RTX on. Just be sure to kill the legacy shadow and lighting settings like SSAO and screen space reflections, shadow maps, etc. Using a RTX 3080, I can get pretty solid 60 fps at 1440p with RTX psycho settings, DLSS set to performance. I have a mod that makes the RTX parameters even more accurate, but is a 10 fps hit, hence the bump down from DLSS balanced to DLSS performance. I can run it capped at 30 fps in 4K, or uncapped at about 45-50 fps, but I'll take the unnoticeable hit from 4K to 1440 to get that 60 fps. I say unnoticeable, but I mean in the middle of intense combat, it's the frame rate you notice, not the resolution. Know what's really sick? Being able to see an enemy off screen around the corner in the reflection of a billboard/window, and ricochet-ing a bullet to kill him. I can see real time ray tracing being a massive graphical advantage in a competitive shooter, much like back in the day (I'm talking Battlefield 2 era and before), being able to render dynamic shadows was a huge advantage. Guy on his poato rig couldn't render dynamic shadows, but you could, and you could see his shadow coming around the corner before he did. Since he couldn't see dynamic shadows, he didn't realize he was telegraphing his position by approaching a corner with his back to the sun. Imagine being able to see players camping because of their reflection in a puddle or off a window.

the most noticeable for me is on Cyberpunk really, the ambiance just levelled up a notch with RTX on, even just the medium one.

"Are they both off?" Shrodinger's Raytracing

I'm glad you mentioned ray-tracing's role in game development. It takes hundreds of man-hours for artists to create those realistic looking rasterized worlds. An indie dev can simply place some objects in their level, turn on RTX, and have AAA lighting, shadow, and reflections.

Honestly some quick and dirty ways to tell if a game is RT or Not for an effect. RT Reflections: Well this should be the most obvious, if you can see the player in any reflective surface then it's RT as brute forcing that effect in Raster is more expensive than RTing. RT Shadows: Check for shadows becoming softer or harder depending on top-distance to the ground (EX: A Tree would cast far softer shadows than the player, and things smaller than the player would cast even sharper shadows), as that cascading of shadow sharpness relative to distance from the ground is characteristic of how shadows are handled in real life. Rasterized games usually just have one fixed shadow resolution for non-players or even for all shadows that are shadowmaps, so seeing different proper shadow resolutions for different objects in a scene can be a tell for if a game is using RT Shadows. RT Global Illumination: This is the more complicated one as baked GI can very accurately mimic it (IIRC some devs even do a RT pass to bake the lighting into the scene), but the best way to tell is if the game is dynamic yet the lighting stays consistent, also another key way to tell is general light sources, RTGI games usually have textures that would just emit bloom in Rasterized games (Emmisives), actually emit proper light based on the object/colordata of that texture.

This video should've waited for the Metro Exodus update, but now LTT gets to release 2 videos! MORE VIEWS!

"Linus always scares me because he wants more energy" is what I always imagined happening behind the scenes on shoots but to hear it out loud is hilarious.

Cyberpunk has an amazing RT implementation. Reflections and shadows with GI on medium and quality dlss on a 3080 at 4k is incredible

My first use of ray tracing was using 3d studio max back in 1999. Was running Pentium 2 350.

I like Mr Quiet being quieter than everyone else 😂

"Even when we prompted people to look closelier..." -LS

"Just like can they tell the difference...our sponsor, Glasswire!" LMAO

I can remember that some games advertised that their grfxengine calculates raytracing shadows, even before RTX. I didn't pay much attention to that, but when I see how important the visualization of shadows is when evaluating RTX on/off, then they were right.

"Linus scares me because he wants more energy" Me too man... me too 🤣

0:49 I'm 90% sure linus genuinely forgot about the sponsor and had to be reminded off camera

I’m so early that Linus hasn’t even dropped anything yet

To be honest, I think many of those games look better without raytracing.

Day before yesterday got my RTX 2060 & Ryzen 7 3700X

You can easily tell in some titles (e.g. Control) by looking at reflections - not their quality, but whether or not objects off-screen are reflected (RTX or cubemap) or not (screen space reflections). Thanks DigitalFoundry! :D

Anthony is unique and we have to keep it that way

if you pause for a moment and stand still, zoom in that shadow and look hard enough eventually you will find that it's worth getting robbed blind by nvidia with its gpus LMAO

"But mathematically speaking, most people aren't Anthony", 9:43. Then grid of black boxes with a solitary red one bottom right to demonstrate this great phenomenon.

I really liked this video format where Linus is kind of like the narrator to a story rather than just the host

It is important to bear in mind the "ray tracing" employed by most of these RTX-supported titles extends only to reflections and direct shadows. Global illumination is still being implemented via ambient occlusion with reprojection rasterization for the computed shadows and reflections, which means that camera rays are not being traced. Were these titles to make use of a fully ray traced pipeline, the improvements would be absolutely unmistakable. Unfortunately, that would also result in performance measured in frames per minute on current hardware. TL;DR: RTX in its current form is not remotely representative what fully ray traced titles would look like.

I think the main problem is that everyone thinks of RTX as being made for gamers to improve their experience, but really RTX is being developed as a way to help streamline the development process, creating good looking lighting in video games through the traditional methods (all those "tricks" you mentioned that developers in rasterization used to simulate realistic lighting) takes a LOT of time and skill to get right, where as RTX literally just works. The performance may not be that great yet for GPUs but as time progresses that will change and I believe we will likely see a change in the standard from rasterization to path-traced lighting...

Battlefield 5 has always impressed me with RTX. There are times where I am looking at a puddle and just stop for a minute and admire the reflections.

you need to revisit this with metro exodus update because with the update you can truly compare a game that was using both rasterization vs a game that is fully ray traced.

“Can you tell if RTX is on, or off?” Yes, it’s quite obvious when I’m getting 100 less, or worse, frames than usual.

Damn, Nicholas has the best quiet voice and tone

"Ray tracing in animation for well over a decade" - yeah I think it's a little bit longer than that.

Another delightful episode of Anthony's Tech Tips!