 So, one of the big new features, or at least one of the most touted features for the Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S and the PlayStation 5, as well as all the new GPUs from the 2000 Series GPUs to the 3000 Series GPUs to the 6000 Series Radeon GPUs is ray tracing. Forget the 4K, forget the 120 FPS, all those other claims, one consistent claim across all of these cards from the 2060 all the way through the 3090 and obviously into the 6000 Series, you know, the 6080, all that jazz cards that are out there or going to be out there soon is ray tracing and how ray tracing is the key feature for next year and giving you real time reflections and shadows that make it feel like just like in the real world. The idea is that it gives you a realistic feel to the way that light bounces and the way that shadows are portrayed in regards to multiple different light sources and all that jazz. What we have seen with some of the ray tracing demos out there is rather impressive for some people. Well, for others, it's just kind of there, it exists, it's not really something to write home about. But what if I was to tell you that ray tracing is not only not new, which it's not, it existed before the 2000 series GPUs, but the ray tracing was actually around back on the Nintendo 64. So this footage you're about to see comes from a show, the European computer tray showed to be specific in 1998, there was a presentation put out there by Rare. Yes, that Rare LTD that used to make all those Nintendo games for Donkey Kong through Perfect Dark, really amazing company at the peak at its height at this time. And during this clip, they show off something that appears to say, hey, we have real time ray tracing, also some acoustic thing, acoustic shadows or whatever the case might be. Now, there wasn't a lot of explanation here. The footage supposedly shows real time ray tracing in works. And this is back on the Nintendo 64. There's actually been other tests with ray tracing on N64 hardware. Here are some ray traced spheres on the N64. Now granted, they're moving at like really, really slow, less than one FPS. But again, this is probably hardware ray tracing. Rare was probably using software ray tracing, which by the way, software ray tracing has been almost indistinguishable for many people versus hardware ray tracing. Hardware ray tracing is supposed to be superior and better, hence the RT cores and all that. But it's not, at least as far as I can tell, that much better than having it just dynamically done with software. Maybe it's just easier on the hardware since obviously the hardware is still doing it. It's just doing it through a different method than having dedicated cores to it. Anyways, it's probably more efficient the way that it's done now. But I do think that ray tracing is one of those features that most people aren't going to enjoy. Most people aren't going to care about. Most people, if the option is there to turn it off, will turn it off so they can have more stable frame rates. Because I always felt the best use of RT cores on GeForce GPUs and whatever the alternative ends up being on AMD GPUs is that they use some form of DLSS 2.0 and use that to increase frame rate and get higher resolutions while being able to push visuals at a lower resolution but have it being indistinguishable. I feel like this is what those cores should be used for more than ray tracing. I don't think ray tracing is that much more impressive than already existing shadow and lighting systems in modern engines anyways. Just my personal opinion. I realize when we see ray tracing pop up in Minecraft, yeah, it looks hella impressive. But Minecraft isn't exactly a graphic intensive game anyways that needs realistic lighting. Does it look cool? Of course it looks cool. But naturally the engine under which Minecraft is built is not going to be focused on massively amazing lighting systems. So yeah, ray tracing makes a difference there. But on other engines where the lighting system is already super advanced, is ray tracing really going to make that big of a difference? As an example, here is some supposed fan-modded ray tracing for Breath of the Wild in comparison to just regular Breath of the Wild. It looks okay. It doesn't look bad, but it doesn't look necessary either or that big of an improvement over the standard lighting system. In fact, some people have told me when they've seen this footage they actually prefer the way that the original game was handled lighting and shadows. So this is a situation that I find to be wholly interesting as it's one of the primary reasons to get these next gen systems. And it was being done back in the N64 days. The video didn't necessarily originate it, obviously it looks like Rare did, but still. This is just a weird look at the history of ray tracing. And coming to this conclusion that maybe it's not as necessary or as impressive as people think it is, it's been around for a long time. There have been others out there saying oh HDR is more important, HDR seems to be hit or miss. HDR is a feature that really depends on the monitor or the TV because there's good HDR and bad HDR and it really depends on the monitor or the manufacturer or the model. As an example, I don't think the HDR looks that great on my monitor and I have a $1,000 Samsung monitor, ultra wide 1080p curve. You would figure HDR should look great on this, but HDR has some unintended effects outside of gaming that I don't like. I could in theory just turn HDR on when I game, but it's kind of a hassle. You have to go through a menu to do it. Maybe there's a way software-wise that I can have auto-enabilization or something, but I know on my TV I wasn't using HDR, but then I hooked up an Apple TV to it because it's the only way to get 4K television from my television provider and I wanted to see what HDR did there because obviously the Apple TV supports HDR and yeah, it looks good. It looks good on the Apple TV. I tried auto-HDR and stuff for other things that didn't go so well, but the Apple TV supports HDR natively. That also makes a difference as well versus trying to force some pseudo-HDR like happens on the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 where on some PlayStation 4 and Xbox One games they're going to be doing like a fake HDR effect. I don't like the fake effects. Either do real HDR or just leave it alone. I don't think games need to have HDR, but it certainly is nice. I think that these new technologies though, as we head into this next week when we get the console launches, is just that. I mean we're one week away from an Xbox Series X, at least an Xbox Series S being in my house. X, I got to wait. I don't know when Target's shipping it. Hoping to have it here by launch, but Target, I've looked up Launch Day hardware shipping estimates from Target in the past and they're all over the place. Some people get them early, some people get them day and date, some people get them a week later, so I have no idea when I'm actually going to have the Xbox Series X in-house. I know the S, I pre-ordered in person, so I can go pick that up in person and have it that on launch day. But honestly, folks, I am looking at you guys and asking myself, does this matter? Does ray tracing matter? Now we obviously have a bias at our channel. A lot of you guys watch my channel for Nintendo content. Nintendo content is not going to be ray traced anytime soon. Nintendo has a weaker platform and we tend to always use the argument that visuals don't make a game. Gameplay makes a game. Story can make a game. The visuals don't matter as much and that's just the way it's been with Nintendo games because Nintendo hasn't always aimed for the top tier of visual presentation, at least in the realistic art style space. They obviously have some very good art directions as to, I mean I love what they do with Splatoon 2, I like the direction they took with Breath of the Wild, Mario Odyssey is great, so yeah, their art directions are fantastic and look beautiful, but they don't always go for that hyper realism like a ray tracing could benefit. So to me, I end up not caring as much about this feature, but I'm not going to say it's not cool. Like, it's like saying, oh who cares about 4K? But let's be honest, we're not going to complain if Nintendo games were in 4K. We're not going to complain if Nintendo games were 120 FPS. We're not going to complain if they actually had anti-aliasing and all that, although that makes the games look better. There's no reason to hate unnext-gen systems providing this because it's not a bad thing. It's not a negative to have high resolutions, higher frame rate, HDR and ray tracing. These are not negatives. It's just maybe not as necessary as a lot of people think about to be. Frame rate aside. Frame rate is very necessary for a lot of different things. I mean, one of the complaints with Age of Calamity coming out here is we're getting frame rates that hit the 20s, maybe even the high teens. That's people want 60 FPS, not that. So there is some concern there, but honestly, most of us are going to put up with it anyways and enjoy it. So I am just excited for next-gen. I mean, this week, I can already tell you, we're on Tuesday news is really slow this week, right? I did some Age of Calamity impressions yesterday, did some talk defending Xbox Game Pass as people seem to be attacking Game Pass and Microsoft more and more as we get closer to the launch because console wars and fanboys trying to tout why their system is better and why what the competition is doing is so horrible for the industry. And here we are again, kind of talking about Nintendo, next-gen, N64, all that jazz ray tracing because again, we don't have a lot of big news. Like news is going to be slow. However, we do are getting an investor's meeting this week, so we're going to get official sales numbers for Animal Crossing and all of Nintendo's property, a switch sales update before the holidays as well. So we're going to have some nice numbers to talk about later this week. That's going to be exciting. Look forward to that on Thursday or so. That's going to be good. And yeah, outside of that, I think we honestly are in the comb before the storm. I don't think we're going to get a lot of news this week. Nothing much at all. I mean, Capcom did their recent financial report. Other companies are as well. I think Activision today reported $1.2 billion made in microtransactions. They have a different name for it. They don't call it microtransactions. But that's a combination of Candy Crush plus Call of Duty games and pretty much everything at the company that has microtransactions. But yeah, it's whatever. It's a big revenue stream for them and it makes sense for their free-to-play games. The Warzone stuff, obviously Candy Crush and others, they're going to make a lot of money off microtransactions. I'm not really mad about it. But that's the kind of news we have and that kind of news to me isn't that interesting. Yes, I have a bias towards Nintendo, which makes Nintendo sales data and revenue more interesting to me than other companies. But I know if we had revenue or sales updates for PlayStation 4 or launch sales for Xbox or PlayStation 5, you know we'll be talking about that if and when those numbers come in. Anyways, I'm just going to kind of let this go for now. And you guys let me know what you think about it down in the comments below. Is this something you care about? Is this something you just think so relevant? I don't know. I thought it was a fucking conversation started at the start of the day. I'll catch you guys in the next video.