Ray tracing was added to Elden Ring today in patch 1.09. I'm not noticing a
huge difference, but the character models do look better when you turn on
your lamp. It always bumped me slightly that without the ray tracing you just
sort of glowed all over. Now it looks like the light is possibly coming from
somewhere around where it hangs on your belt. It does look to make
shadows look a lot sharper in general too. I'm not sure that's good lore wise
as the world is supposedly lit by the giant glowing erd tree when outside
though.

I think things look a bit clearer too? It's not a huge difference in any case
other than the lamp. It's hard to say as I just bumped my resolution back up
to 1080p after my new CPU.

Speaking of that, all the general slowdowns and bad connections I had with
co-op completely disappeared (still have lag sometimes, but it's not the
same, my video doesn't stutter or stop.) I didn't expect that CPU would
affect multiplayer, but I'm guessing that code's all CPU now. People have
been complaining about

I did have one CTD on ER so far with the new CPU, so it's not everything fixed
by it.

The state of ER for PvP is looking a lot better, they just got rid of perhaps the
next to last and one of the easier remaining glitch/exploits with it in this
patch. There's one left, but it looks to be really hard to execute at least
without using a macro, which it seems is going too far for most exploiters.

- Justisaur

On 24/03/2023 02:02, Justisaur wrote:
> Ray tracing was added to Elden Ring today in patch 1.09. I'm not noticing a
> huge difference, but the character models do look better when you turn on
> your lamp. It always bumped me slightly that without the ray tracing you just
> sort of glowed all over. Now it looks like the light is possibly coming from
> somewhere around where it hangs on your belt. It does look to make
> shadows look a lot sharper in general too. I'm not sure that's good lore wise
> as the world is supposedly lit by the giant glowing erd tree when outside
> though.
>
> I think things look a bit clearer too? It's not a huge difference in any case
> other than the lamp. It's hard to say as I just bumped my resolution back up
> to 1080p after my new CPU.
>

I have seen a blind test comparing RTX vs not-RTX and the conclusion
pretty much was the only person who could reliably tell which was which
was which was someone who understood the technology, beyond just a name,
so knew what difference to look for. I believe the sharpness of shadows
was one of the tell-tell signs.

The other point made was that as ray tracing was just 'expensive' dev's
had introduced some really good techniques to simulate ray tracing
without the need for more expensive hardware so using it does have the
impact you might expect.

Personally I can't say it's something that overly interests me as I just
don't find graphics fidelity beyond doesn't make my eyes bleed makes any
real difference to how much I enjoy a game. Saying that, if it was
available twenty years ago it would have been a take my money moment.

>Speaking of that, all the general slowdowns and bad connections I had with
>co-op completely disappeared

Well this is very welcome news! I'm still going to avoid getting into ER
again until the DLC is released, and haven't looked at the RTX updates
myself, but that's good to hear too: RTX did heighten my enjoyment in
Witcher 3, as I spent so much time admiring the environment.

rms