This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss generative AI in gaming, getting into sports events, and good laptops.
EMANUEL: I saw a good, highly specific meme yesterday that made me actually laugh out loud. It’s about ray tracing, a new way of simulating how light reflects and refracts in real time that Nvidia introduced a couple of GPU generations ago.
The joke is that despite all the hype about ray tracing being one of the most amazing developments in real time 3D graphics in years, ray tracing doesn’t really look much better than the “prebaked” lighting tricks video games used prior to ray tracing, which mostly achieve the same look without the highly demanding calculations required to realistically simulate how light bounces off reflective surfaces.
It’s been hugely optimized since and actually runs great now even with ray tracing on, but Cyberpunk 2077 at launch was a great example of this. You’d turn on ray tracing and watch your average frames per second drop from 120 to 40, and if you squint and look really closely you might notice that the puddles in the street are now accurately reflecting the neon signs in the city as opposed to “faking” the reflection with a 2D texture that sort of matches the environment but is not a “real” reflection. It’s just not a great trade off, even if you’re willing to spend thousands of dollars to run the latest video game on maxed out settings, which I am, and you sort of have to be to get the meme.