lol I'm looking at it as exactly an old phenomenon that was sought after but was never achieveable in the form that it is today, which makes it brand new.
When you say "in the form that it is today", what specific changes to the technique are you referring to? There's Nvidia's RTX API, which accelerates the process through a node-based traversal algorithm for geometric objects, yes, but the BVH algorithm itself has existed for a while and is widely used in non-real-time ray-trace applications.
What's the difference between the ray-tracing that has been going on in non-real-time applications and a real-time one such as Metro Exodus? In both cases, it's still a series of raycasts that intersect with geometry and return information.
Moreover, ray-traced reflections in real-time applications have also existed in the form of SSR. These are 2D ray-traces, but a similar method is used to approximate vectors. There is no reninvention of the wheel going on here lol.
An individual artist can probably spend months rendering the most realistic and visually appealing scene ever made but in a wide variety of gameplay applications it will be worthless.
Why would it be worthless? Both linear and open world games today have their fair share of lighting baked into scenery. There's also real-time lighting to go with it. Even if/when the real-time elements are replaced with ray-traced lighting, there will still be baked light probes and area lights. Now, the thing I'm not sure of is whether ray-traced and baked lighting can co-exist without things looking odd, but I'm sure a workaround will be found even if this presents itself as an issue.
Speaking of Unity, how many AAA studios/games exist that are even using it? Lol
Does it really matter? Smaller, AA games (or tech savy indie projects with a moderate budget) have also been doing some great things with lighting, for example The Tomorrow Children (not a Unity game, but for the sake of giving an example). I mean, it's quite telling that Nvidia is very eager to help Unity Technologies incorporate it in their engine (and in its eagerness, even
spoiled the announcement beforehand lol).
Its a much more common problem than you think. This isn't even complex geometry and its CoD, not some obscure indie game.
That looks more like a collision bug in that particular region. How about the bridge up ahead? That's more complex geometry, and if bullets are unable to pass through the gaps, then I'd definitely agree.
Metro Exodus has bigger collision issues, where invisible walls are often blocking your way as you run past corridors. And no, I'm not talking about just moving through grass slowing you down.
Both 4A Games and Nvidia have done a tremendous job pushing the boundaries of real-time rendering.
Metro Exodus just happens to be the first released game to implement ray-traced lighting. Not much different from the first game out that implemented PhysX.
Nvidia's efforts are commendable, but just as their other initiatives like GameWorks and G-Sync, RTX won't really take off and a non-proprietary solution will take precedence once the next consoles are out, and studios won't have to work with two different pipelines. The inclusion of VRR as an HDMI 2.1 standard has pretty much killed G-Sync for all intents and purposes.
The results speak for themselves both on a technical and artistic level.
For me, on an artistic level, there's not much to distinguish between them, hence the lack of visual appeal over existing GI methods.
I do expect console studios to start researching cheaper ray-tracing alternatives. All naysayers (not you specifically) will be singing a very different tune once studios will dedicate their resources on that lol
You mean like Guerrilla Games which already did that in 2013 for ray-traced reflections (albeit using less accurate 2.5D ray-trace)? But even then, they also used cube maps for reflections in other areas. Baked solutions aren't going anywhere, because a) they're cheaper b) they offer more artistic control in specific use cases.
I don't have anything against the use of cheaper ray-traced alternatives on consoles, because the keyword here is cheaper (what I was getting at with the use of the word "trivial" compared to existing GI solutions). However, if it eats up resources that could've been spent on physics, interactivity, AI, I'm not interested and hopefully developers of games I enjoy on consoles will prioritize the resource budget in that manner.