Yes, it was cubemaps and with mirrors it was exact same rooms with npc copying your moves, but it looked really good, and no need for rt hardware when we got same picture, remember half life 2 reflections and light, nowadays when AAA game dev make game with such graphics it requires ray tracing and dlss to run properly
While true for straight up reflection and glass the raytracing doesn’t do much despite being much more expensive, it is just jaw dropping to see refraction and indirect lighting. Before to have indirect lighting be vaguely credible it had to be all fixed and baked into the textures. Now we can do that with destructible stuff and moving light sources.
And today we need ray tracing to mimic fraction of that power
I’m sure there was some trickery going on behind the scenes, and it wasn’t a true reflection.
Yes, it was cubemaps and with mirrors it was exact same rooms with npc copying your moves, but it looked really good, and no need for rt hardware when we got same picture, remember half life 2 reflections and light, nowadays when AAA game dev make game with such graphics it requires ray tracing and dlss to run properly
While true for straight up reflection and glass the raytracing doesn’t do much despite being much more expensive, it is just jaw dropping to see refraction and indirect lighting. Before to have indirect lighting be vaguely credible it had to be all fixed and baked into the textures. Now we can do that with destructible stuff and moving light sources.
You’re absolutely right, but nobody would use ray tracing with destructible stuff because nobody makes destructible stuff like in red faction nowadays
Nvidia, GDC 2015: “If you’re not cheating, you’re just not trying.”