Topic on User talk:Macgovern

We see a lot of confusion with people about custom GI solutions like UE5's Lumen. They mistake it as an explicit hardware ray tracing feature, while in fact there are two modes of Lumen, that epic's devs unfortunately just call Lumen due to PR marketing reasons. This leads to people changing the ray tracing field again and again from "false" to "true", while it is not and depends on wether "hardware lumen" or only "software lumen" is implemented in the game.

Software Lumen in it's latest version is mainly a combo of conventional screen space and signed distance fields. Only Hardware Lumen makes use of polygonal ray tracing done per dedicated ray tracing hardware. So if the game only uses software lumen accordingly, then the field "ray tracing" should remain as "false" and not "true".

That confusion might become a pain in the ass with more upcoming UE5 titles. Unfortunately not many people read the guide lines, which explicitly require, that this field is reserved for hardware ray tracing only. So i suggest to change the field to a clearer definition namely "hardware ray tracing".

I concur. There is an internal PCGamingWiki discussion on whether the change is worth it, so hopefully something will come of that.

Thank you, As commonly known Hardware Ray Tracing means an essential increase in visual accuracy and quality. The RT feature is a quite important factor and selling point of modern gpus and comes with higher expectations. In this context it is somewhat concerning, that titles like "Lords of the Fallen 2023" and "The Talos Principle 2" already advertise high or ultra settings as ray tracing in a suggestive manner, while they are in fact only using software ray tracing. The latter comes with heavy drawbacks regarding the visual quality as shown here.: https://youtu.be/SxpSCr8wPbc

The confusion leads to gamers being disappointed about hw ray tracing, mistakenly thinking they would use it. The bad reputation of HW RT is already happening enough due to developers mixing RT with conventional rasterization techniques as in cross gen titles with all the drawbacks like "lights leakage", artifacts around objects, vanishing effects at the edges, rasterized shadows and other issues.

So in this context it might be quite important for gamers to know, if the hw rt capabilities of their pricey modern gpu can actually be used or not for a title. More clarity in that matter would be highly appreciated. Thank you for your time.

That's it. I flagged you. You simply are not capable to understand. Also the way how you talk to people is unacceptable!

This was discussed quite a lot among the staff members and we eventually landed on clarifying the mixed use of the ray tracing row in the editing guide, as well as add a section on the glossary page about software ray tracing.

There were various reasons why we opted to go this way, but the primary ones ended up being:

a) it is almost impossible for end users to easily tell whether ray tracing is hardware or "software" based,

b) it also does not necessarily matter since even "software" based ray tracing is often superior to classic rasterized lighting effects. Note that "software" is a bit of a misnomer since the effects are still rendered on the GPU, just not on dedicated discrete ray tracing hardware chips.

c) to differentiate between these sort of differences is the whole purpose of our limited state. Instead of only tracking hardware ray tracing (and losing out on the ability to track software ray tracing), the updated editing guide allows tracking both. true will be used for hardware ray tracing, while limited will be used for games which only supports software ray tracing, with an accompanied note.