There's conflicting information about whether or not raytracing made it to release. I can't say for certain, I just saw these settings and tested a bit.
If rt doesn't work, then skylighting must somehow affect interiors as well, because the first screen was not exterior.
It's funny seeing how upset people are about this. I looked through the ini dump for interesting settings, these were among them.
The value is literally bEnableRaytracing. You got a problem with it, blame Bethesda. I'm just the messenger here
This essentially just enables a subtle form of RTGI, which doesn't seem to have a downside. It's not much but in every area I've tested it doesn't seem worse. I think Bethesda left these features out for lack of a complete Raytracing solution. No raytraced shadows and cubemap reflections doesn't make for a very compelling raytracing experience. Perhaps they have plans for the future. This looks great alongside "Normalized LUTs" which just restores the black levels and leaves the vanilla colorgrading intact.
For a possibly cheaper alternative, I usually get very positive and raytracing-like results from the AmbientLight shader in Reshade's Legacy shader pack.
Its not real time raytracing guys, its ray tracing global illumination. Its completely different. See radiantgi or rtgi reshade "shaders"(not reallly a shader) for example.
With RT on they are not missing... they are just correctly not there. Those big lights hanging above would prevent the shadow of that wheeled cart thing on the left that you see with RT off. It's extremely subtle so maybe it's not a great implementation of the technology... you can see how good it looks when done right in the updated Cyberpunk 2077:
Considering difference and lack of performance tax, I would say that it probably was cut from the game, but they didn't remove settings. Like it does try to do something, but it is just global illumination of old. Not hardware accelerated raytracing. Likely this is what AMD preference too, since their cards often are generation behind, but in some games that get properly optimized, difference isn't that bad. Though now that we see nVidia trying to put all cards one tier up for higher pricing, they are closer for similar price tier than before. Also it is possible that Bethesda was doing something very light here, like with Far Cry 6, where difference is subtle, if any, but also performance tax is small. Nevertheless, those strings are likely leftovers from something they were trying to do. And it is not just one containing raytracing in it: [Display] bEnableRaytracing=0 bOutputRaytracingShaderStats=0 bUseMeshDecalsInRaytracing=1 But then again, Bethesda being Bethesda, god knows what they thought when they wrote raytracing. Like I have no doubt it was part of some conversation for sure, as is with all games. Also another possibility is that some of it ended in Creation Engine due to development and preparation for future games, like TES6. But no proper implementation yet, hence disabled by default.
All jokes aside, I wish games would stop with the artificial player lights and whatnot when its dark, ESPECIALLY when you've already added a flashlight. Why?
There was a couple Lines of Code in one of the Posts of the Frame Generation Mods, somebody disabled the artificial Lights for his Oled TV Setup I believe. Was one of the newer ones, I drop the Lines below when I find them again.
This is just a setting that is already in the game. Please don't get upset that you can't read. Just because it is named "raytracing" by Bethesda themself doesn't mean the mod author is wrong.
Guys this IS raytracing technically. Raytracing has been around forever.
Its NOT real time ray tracing. Which is an nvidia exclusive technology and completely different.
This is ray tracing global illumination and it's a very poor implementation of it, see my BG3 reshade for an example of a better implementation. Gonna release one for starfield soon as well.
Real-time ray tracing is not an Nvidia exclusive. DirectX 12 Ultimate has real-time ray-tracing, and it works on all AMD and Nvidia cards and games that support it.
Talking about poor implementation then saying i used reshade to make "ray tracing" doesn't make much sense.
Reshade is a post-processing tool that focus on what it sees on the screen, it doesn't do ray tracing of any form, neither of reflexions or GI are ray traced in reshade because it doesn't have informations about the surroundings. it just checks if some parts of the screen are bright enough to consider if GI should be high or low.
if implementing ray tracing was that easy it would already be in every new game that comes out.
Are you sure that the anisotropy setting denotes how many times anisotropy is applied rather than anisotropy mode? For an example: Anisotropy=1 gives 2x Anisotropy=2 gives 4x Anisotropy=3 gives 8x Anisotropy=4 gives 16x
*Looking at the fact that it says fMaxAnisotropy could indicate that 16.0 is indeed 16x.
Not only is real-time RT not Nvidia-exclusive, it's not even DX12 exclusive, as Vulkan also fully supports real-time RT. There is nothing exclusive about real-time RT capabilities to any hardware vendor or graphical API family.
62 comments
tested a bit.
If rt doesn't work, then skylighting must somehow affect interiors as well, because the first screen was not exterior.
It's funny seeing how upset people are about this. I looked through the ini dump for interesting settings, these were among them.
The value is literally bEnableRaytracing. You got a problem with it, blame Bethesda. I'm just the messenger here
For a possibly cheaper alternative, I usually get very positive and raytracing-like results from the AmbientLight shader in Reshade's Legacy shader pack.
On:
Off:
RT onRT off
whole images:
OFF
ON
I've tested Nvidia's latest ray tracing magic in Cyberpunk 2077 and it's a no-brainer: at worst it's just better-looking, at best it's that and a whole lot more performance | PC Gamer
[Display]
bEnableRaytracing=0
bOutputRaytracingShaderStats=0
bUseMeshDecalsInRaytracing=1
But then again, Bethesda being Bethesda, god knows what they thought when they wrote raytracing. Like I have no doubt it was part of some conversation for sure, as is with all games. Also another possibility is that some of it ended in Creation Engine due to development and preparation for future games, like TES6. But no proper implementation yet, hence disabled by default.
Obviously nobody at Bethesda has ever been outside at night.. but the lack of sun or moon reflection makes it DARK!
All jokes aside, I wish games would stop with the artificial player lights and whatnot when its dark, ESPECIALLY when you've already added a flashlight. Why?
Was one of the newer ones, I drop the Lines below when I find them again.
On what grounds?
Its NOT real time ray tracing. Which is an nvidia exclusive technology and completely different.
This is ray tracing global illumination and it's a very poor implementation of it, see my BG3 reshade for an example of a better implementation. Gonna release one for starfield soon as well.
Reshade is a post-processing tool that focus on what it sees on the screen, it doesn't do ray tracing of any form, neither of reflexions or GI are ray traced in reshade because it doesn't have informations about the surroundings. it just checks if some parts of the screen are bright enough to consider if GI should be high or low.
if implementing ray tracing was that easy it would already be in every new game that comes out.
And for people curious, the only thing this mod has are three lines for the StarfieldCustom.ini.
[Display]
bEnableRaytracing=1
bUseSkyLighting=1
fMaxAnisotropy=16.0
Just add them and see if you like the results. The Anisotropy is by default at 4, so you are using it, just not at this setting.
Anisotropy=1 gives 2x
Anisotropy=2 gives 4x
Anisotropy=3 gives 8x
Anisotropy=4 gives 16x
*Looking at the fact that it says fMaxAnisotropy could indicate that 16.0 is indeed 16x.