Will Lumen render Nvidia's RTX solution obsolete?

[64bitmodels]

I thought i'd make a thread here for a change.

I am a PC gamer primarily, not only this but i own an AMD card. AMD cards do not do well with raytracing, specifically NVIDIA raytracing. While Nvidia cards excel at that kind of stuff we're left in the dust. This doesn't bother me that much seeing as how i don't really care that much about RTX, but people say that it's the future and raytracing will be a requirement for every game.
I am prefacing with this because as you all know, Epic just updated Fortnite Chapter 4 to Unreal Engine 5.1 and the game now has really, really realistic lighting. it's damn impressive actually. Now, whether or not the game runs well on AMD cards i have no idea- and i'm not going to test it out because i dislike Fortnite and Epic's PC launcher. But seeing as how it's running extremely well on PS5 and Xbox Series X, both of which use AMD solutions for their hardware, it makes me wonder if Nvidia's RTX solution will hold up in the future when Epic's Lumen is working well and has better usability with consoles, as well as being less demanding as a whole. Frankly i hope it's the case, since if every game is going to be using a form of raytracing in the future, i'd rather it be the one that works the best with my setup. What do you think, though?

 

[Bryank75]

Lighting is the type of thing you usually have to slow down to appreciate fully, of course you might lose something of the feel of the environment if you strip realtime lighting at speed from the game also....

But I feel like Lumen is the smart solution to lighting right now, as just a fan on gaming....not a professional with any great insight.

Making a game efficiently allows you to use resources elsewhere and achieve more in the grand scheme, so avoiding RTX when a less hungry alternative is available seems wise.

 

[Deleted member 13]

Good question OP.

The answer is no. RTX is just a name they put on their cards that support hardware RT.

UE uses Lumen for their RT lighting implementation. Other companies with propritary game engines will use their own RT lighting (i.e. Cyberpunk for example) techniques.

 

[Satoru]

Good question OP.

The answer is no. RTX is just a name they put on their cards that support hardware RT.

UE uses Lumen for their RT lighting implementation. Other companies with propritary game engines will use their own RT lighting (i.e. Cyberpunk for example) techniques.

Though current RT implementations are heavily reliant on having the hardware that's capable for it because they consume resources like hell, while Lumen seems like a pretty powerful implementation of either software or hardware ray tracing that's not as heavy as others in the market.

Lumen Global Illumination and Reflections in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.0 Documentation

 

[ethomaz]

Lumen Epic uses RTX.
It is the only good Lumen btw and only works at 30fps.

RTX is the hardware acceleration for RT.
Lumen is just an algorithm that uses RT.