ronsis

While I agree with the second paragraph, the first paragraph undermines any thought that they might actually do so because we've seen games get dumbed down for consoles and in turn also dumbing down the pc version. Now I understand its the easy way to simply do that and that there's a trend to do so, but i think its rather naive to say that's how it'll always play out regardless of dev team, publisher, hardware, etc, etc. Crytek has always tried to push graphics in a smart way since Crysis 2, and that's when EA was putting a flame under their pants. Even their new releases like HUNT shows they still can make great looking games, but do it efficiently. Assumptions and cynicism won't advance anything, only hold you back.

Raytracing isn't just shadows, its much more. It can replace ENTIRE lighting systems, not just shadows. Look at Minecraft RTX, the games lighting behaves completely different from the normal version, it simulates bounce lighting, colored lighting, water caustics, and reflections across varying surface materials. That's coming from a "big" studio too. Seems to me you're too focused on the rather small aspects of raytracing to actually understand what it means for graphics. A game being hard to run ≠ graphically impressive, if anything, a game that looks graphically impressive while being good with resources is more of a game-changer than just having it looking pretty with no regard to performance, and targeting consoles means they'll have to go that direction. "Oh but how dare they make a good looking game on all platforms with decent performance!" This isn't like Obsidian having to cut a FONV's scale down magnitudes due to consoles, this is a developer taking on a challenge with regards to performance and visual fidelity. Work smart, not hard.

Then blame the implementation. I get games like Quake 2 RTX and Minecraft mainly use it for reflections but other games use much better implementations, like Metro Exodus using it for GI (Global Illumination), Tomb Raider for shadows, and Control uses it for multiple features besides reflections. Don't write off raytracing just because some completely different dev decides to do a half baked implementation if it.

To reiterate a point made earlier, Crysis remastered will most likely run better outta the box because current Cryengine is much more scalable than its predecessors. Hopefully (and most likely) it will have good multi threaded support, which was the main problem that plagues the original release to this day. Crysis 1 was built when high clocks mattered more than good IPC and multi threading, that trend is thankfully dead. I'm sure we'll actually be GPU bottlenecked here and not because of the clunk and inefficiency of the software itself.

Raytracing is a lot more than than reflections. Its an actual stimulation of light through casting rays. Besides it being computationally expensive, its more "drag and drop" than current lighting systems, thats what makes raytracing so appealing. Instead of having to spend time and money trying to create your own lighting systems you can essentially use raytracing in lieu of it and get accurate lighting. If raytracing wasn't so expensive to do with current consumer hardware in real-time, you'd be seeing it a lot more often than you think