Bug Report or Downgrade - dynamic shadows

[Husker1982]

Hello,

my RTX graphics card won't arrive until Christmas.
So I play without raytracing with Ultra+ settings.
I noticed that the dynamic shadows are very weak.
Especially in the opening scene in the chambers with Yennefer it is really obvious. Compare the Pictures w3_nextgen_rton and w3_nextgen_rtoff and w3_nextgen_classic
In the Classic version, the shadows cast by the bonfire are very strong, in the Next Gen version without Raytracing they are very weak.
I hope this is a bug and not a downgrade to make the advantages of raytracing more obvious.

Greetings

 

[Ruvaldak]

The reason they're strong with ray tracing is because the RTAO darkens them significantly. In reality, they should be weak, like they are without RT, due to global illumination and such (which is properly "simulated" or faked when not using RT). Unfortunately, raytracing only knows of the sun/moon as a light source, and as such is not affected by any other light sources in the game whatsoever. This leads to very unnatural, overly darkened interior scenes, extremely harsh shadows from light sources other than the sky, and more. Not to mention that this means that light from candles/fire/magic/etc doesn't cast proper raytraced shadows, doesn't cause light to bounce around via global illumination, and doesn't affect ambient occlusion. Due to the decision to exclude all light sources besides the sky from raytracing, interiors are left looking very bizarre when using RT. It's a bummer, because they would have benefitted the most from it. All the candles and flames, casting their own shadows, their light bouncing around the scene.. it would have been beautiful. But nope. We don't get that.