It’s that time of the week again, you’re reading this because you’re either curious for some reason or you’re in need of something to play on an awful, awful rig. Here are some suggestions down below for ya, some of these titles are even free!
Digital Foundry : Serious Sam is a classic PC shooter that's celebrating its 20th birthday this year - and software engineer 'sultim-t' has delivered a fully path-traced mod, similar to Quake 2 RTX. So how does it look and how well does it run? Alex checks it out.
Again, sure there are scenes where path racing looks realistic, but I just don’t know if it really looks better. And most of all, is it worth it everything considered (performance hit, heat and power consumption increase, hyper realistic lighting in a cartoon game.)
"is it worth it everything considered ... hyper realistic lighting in a cartoon game."
Because path tracing for a game with more polygons, details, and effects will result a nearly unplayable state of that game using even an RTX 3090, tanking the performance greatly.
Path tracing is freaking expensive calculation. Nvidia's own Marbles demo ran at 1440p@30 with DLSS 2.0 enabled.
Hence the path tracing experimentation is carried out in less detailed games like Quake II and Serious Sam, to analyze the final result, appreciate the said technology and still able to play it at a reasonable framerate.
Thanks for the comment. I completely understand why path tracing is so expensive and used in these low end games to show it off. To me, it simply shows how far we still are from any reasonable implementation of RT in games. I think realistically we can talk about ray tracing for consoles when PS6 and XSX2 releases in 2026-2027, or for PC when RTX 5000 - RX 8000 series are out in 2025-2026. That's when it becomes somewhat realistic, because we have to remember the rasterization requirements go up, and the reflections required also go up in parallel.
Meanwhile, I think the best bang for buck for highend is 6800xt OC'd 10% with MPT. I've got a 6900xt, and I run it raster 4K60 all maxed out, and when it doesn't run a stable 60fps, I can scale resolution down 10-20% or use FSR ultra quality or quality and it looks very good still. Ray tracing..? Not a chance, it's just a gimmick, and am not interested in it. Sure, it looks more realistic, but my question is, does it really look better? I mean better in most gamers eyes, not better in technically savvy analysts eyes who know what a scene should look like. Because there's a massive difference between those subjective and objective views. I actually like often baked lighting and reflections better, because they seem to be what the original artists were going for.
I really like this new lighting and metalish looks. Hopefully it just gets better and better. Btw, 20 years of Serious Sam development, damn. That's huge for not that big developer team.
Because... America – f*ck yeah!
I don't remember if you save the world in that game but Urban Chaos: Riot Response was one of the most american games back in the day, I've never even been to the country and that game was still rad.
From Eurogamer: "Looking back on the real-time strategy boom of the late 90s, it's unsurprising that modern audiences tend to celebrate Age of Empires, Starcraft and Warcraft. Beyond being great games, these titles also told stories that feel unproblematic. They are set in either the distant past, the distant future or in the distant recesses of our minds. The Command & Conquer series, however, played with a parallel version of the real world heavily influenced by post-Cold War international relations.
In 1999 Westwood Studios took that plausible real-world setting further with Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun. Set in 2030, Tiberian Sun asks two difficult but important questions: are we better off if the "good guys" win? And, is this version of Earth, on the verge of ecological disaster, even worth fighting over? These questions, like the game's FMV sequences, could easily be laughed off by players in the halcyon days of the 1990s. Players in 2019, however, must wonder if Tiberian Sun represents a schlocky relic of a bygone era or a prescient prediction of an impending reality."
