One of the main selling points of Nvidia's GeForce RTX series graphics cards is the prospect of real-time ray tracing. In games that support Microsoft's DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API, the RTX series enables more realistic reflections in ray-traced portions of a scene, but is it a noticeable improvement over having the feature turned off? That's what UFD Tech aimed to find out in a blind test.
The four guys responsible for the UFD Tech channel on YouTube each took turns playing Battlefield 5 with RTX enabled and disabled, but without seeing the setting (credit to HardOCP for the heads up). They then noted which experience they thought RTX was on, and which one it was off.
This test was repeated in the snow map, where it's a little more difficult to see reflections. There was also an added wrinkle—not only did they have guess if RTX was on or off, they also guessed if the RTX setting was on low or ultra.
For the most part, they did a pretty good job noting when RTX was on or off, and even if the setting was on low or ultra, though not with 100 percent accuracy. In addition, they seemed to be outright guessing a lot of the time.
This is far from a definitive conclusion, for a number of reasons. For one, it would have been better if they used two identical setups side-by-side, but they lacked the necessary hardware to duplicate the testbed. Secondly, real-time ray tracing in games is in its infancy. They could only test this with actual gameplay in Battlefield 5 because that's the only game that supports ray tracing at the moment.
Still, it's an interesting video if you have a coffee break to spare.
