Rasterization has mad it such a long way that it is cheaper to produce similar results compared to RT nowadays.
And yeah, TLOU2 might have a lot of stuff baked but if you had the same exact game but made with real RT and not baking, it would run like shit and not even look as good because the bake quality is very high in games like tlou2.
If you don't have dynamic time of day and such, You don't need real time RT.
And if you do there are still other ways to do it like baking 18 times of day in decima engine.
Raster still has a way to go and it's not peaking. I bet your ass if they made tlou3 with the same tech used in tlou2, but using ps5 power by the end of this gen, it would look gen ahead of tlou2.
I disagree. TLOU2 looks like it does because they could hand place everything that's related to the lighting of the game.
as soon as you can't do that anymore you will lose a lot of fidelity with rasterization.
the only way we will see more detailed games on this generation is if those are also completely static with meticulously hand placed lights, baked shadows, GI and AO.
and sure if you do that you don't need raytracing at all. but if we want more ambitious games with bigger and/or more dynamic environments, the results will be equivalent to PS4 graphics with specific improvements to object density and drawdistance.
Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC and Horizon Forbidden West on PS5 is basically the pinnacle of what a more open game can look like using rasterization only.
but with all of that being said. I personally would want mid gen refreshes simply due to the fact that those could offer what's currently the 30fps graphics modes, running at performance mode framerates.
meaning no longer would we have to either turn off raytracing or use a 1080p mode with reduced settings to get 60fps and raytracing.
it would also mean that games might not need to turn off the majority of RT features on console in order to run at all (see Control, Witcher, Cyberpunk etc)
).
