If noone cared about the real-time reflections in videogames don't being real ray-traced rays and just a "hack" to simulate the effect in real-time
I'm not seeing how that's a valid analogy.
First, using "ray-traced rays" to refer to what's going on in high-quality SSR implementations isn't really inaccurate. It's just tracing rays in screen-space rather than world-space, which for the most part nobody is being dishonest about.
Second, we
do care. We discuss planar reflections versus SSR, the way each were implemented in a particular case, the benefits and drawbacks of each method, etc.
I don't see the point to discuss the volumetric effects in GT because aren't being rendered at the highest level to negate the validity of the effect.
The point isn't to say GT6's graphics suck.
The point is that the transparencies themselves aren't fundamentally being handled as volumetrics. That's not a knock on GT6; the volumetric methods in use right now don't really work for these kinds of billowing effects, and the options that
would work require substantial memory and processing overhead that the PS3 doesn't really have. PD used alpha billboards because they aren't idiots.
so at this time the techniques used would not make a difference per the discussion topic.
Yes they would. For example, sparse assortments of billboard sprites have instabilities (resulting from their extremely camera-dependent orientation) in how they pick up lighting that tend to be avoided by volumetric implementations. Regardless of what everyone else is doing, it makes a difference.
