Yeah it's technically better (crisper, higher res, etc) but the visual language is totally different and IMO worse. That fire just doesn't look as hot, for example.
Lighting as an art form is highly coupled with the given tech. Something as small as just changing the shadow method can require artists relighting a whole game. My guess is they aren't doing this or maybe are pushing the stark lighting the same way depth of field, colored lights, lens flares etc got juiced in previous generations.
That's always wrong. The tech should service the art, not the other way around.
So this might be a stupid question considering how tied to Nvidia it seems to be, but... will run on the new AMD 90-series cards that can actually do ray-tracing?
Sure it will. It will probably run like a 2080 TI or 3070 though. The ray tracing performance of AMD isn't stellar. At least they got their shit together and got a AI rescaler that competes with DLSS.
So I've been reading up on it a little bit and it seems like raytracing is part of Vulkan and DirectX 12, so the APIs shouldn't be proprietary the way CUDA and PhysX are...right?
This looks great, I wonder if it's possible for all this DLSS and similar tech to get rid of severe input lag. No matter how good it looks, I wouldn't play a shooter with input lag.
Well as long as you don't turn on frame gen, the input lag shouldn't be much higher than normal. There's also NVidia reflex, which can shave a few milliseconds off input lag