HDR vs. ray tracing

Which do you usually find more impressive in games?

  • HDR

    Votes: 9 50.0%

  • Ray tracing

    Votes: 9 50.0%
  • Total voters
    18
Quiz

Quiz

Gawd
Joined
Aug 25, 2010
Messages
647
If you had to pick one over the other, which do you usually find more impressive in games: HDR or ray tracing?
 
I like RT and it wows me but I'm more disappointed when a game isn't in HDR. It kinda doesn't matter so much except eye candy with either. Both is good lol.
 
Is there a performance hit when using HDR like there is with ray tracing?
 
Not really that I've noticed but I had a 3090 and now a 4090. I think I've read 1 or 2 fps so even if there is it's nowhere near as bad as RT.
 
The two visual effects are really dependent on a lot of factors and don't do the same things. A lot of games implement HDR badly as they lack the tuning options to make it viable in some games. How HDR looks also greatly depends on the design and implementation of the monitor. As far as ray tracing, some games implement it well or only implement one or two ray tracing features. Some games have implementations that take huge performance hits and don't deliver much in terms of visuals for the performance cost. Other games implement ray tracing but don't do much with the feature set creating a slight improvement in fidelity but don't cost much performance wise. Other games look incredible with ray tracing enabled but you pay for it in terms of frame rates.

I use ray tracing and or HDR whenever possible. However, there are games out there where HDR doesn't work properly and games where ray tracing doesn't do much for you visually but tanks performance. In those cases, I don't use either.
Quiz said:
Is there a performance hit when using HDR like there is with ray tracing?
Click to expand...
No.
 
HDR has more pop or eye candy which the end user will notice much more than ray-tracing
 
HDR literally punches your eyes in the face not a fair comparison
 
These are apples and oranges. HDR is more of a display feature than a graphical feature. How you feel about it may depend entirely on what displays you've seen it used on, and which content you've seen. Some people prefer the brighter "pop" from the high nits on LED displays, meanwhile others might prefer having the perfect contrast ratio that OLED offers.
RT on the other hand shows a promising future but is currently inefficient compared to rasterization, and thus is marketed to us in a gimmicky manner (usually we get partial implementation with high performance cost for a marginal IQ benefit). I think RT will be more interesting in the near future.
 
HDR is also more dependent upon a great monitor. LG C2, good implementation of HDR -> A very noticeable impact and Wow! Experience. Ray tracing, has had some wow moments as well but for me HDR so far has won out overall for shear visual pleasure. Still HDR and RT together can be even better.
 
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