Many newer games are designed to show off raytracing effects. Cyberpunk 2077 has lots of neon lights, shiny things, rain puddles, etc for light to bounce around, and raytracing makes it look a lot nicer than when the shadows are approximated in traditional ways. Minecraft ... ye gods. The videos I've seen look amazing. The other nice thing these cards have is the DLSS 2.0 tech, which is supposed to let it render at higher resolutions by _making things up_ (?) based on ... something buzzword-laden. The effect, though, is that you get similar or better quality at much higher framerates, because lossy techniques are still nice to look at.
"Need" is a strong word, but I'm sure someone will make a game where the shadows _matter_ for telling the story, or solving puzzles, or even just making the game world look more realistic and believable.
DLSS renders the game at a lower resolution then upscales it to a higher resolution using AI to modify the final image. The models are trained from super-resolution renders and used to be trained per-game but are now generalized. They're designed to upscale textures, denoise, fix aliasing and overall increase quality based on that high-end source data so you get the same output without having to actually run at those settings.
> "Need" is a strong word, but I'm sure someone will make a game where the shadows _matter_ for telling the story, or solving puzzles, or even just making the game world look more realistic and believable.
"Need" is a strong word, but I'm sure someone will make a game where the shadows _matter_ for telling the story, or solving puzzles, or even just making the game world look more realistic and believable.