Game developers, why do games no longer use the technique for reflections like MGS1 or SM64 did where on the other side of a mirror was just a copy/paste of the room you are in with a second player char model?

Question

Mirrors and reflective surfaces really seem to be a struggle in modern-day games unless you are using RT, and of course, that has a huge performance penalty so I am quite curious why these techniques that were used in the 90s have fallen out of favour for other techniques that produce significantly worse results visually.

In: Technology

Answer 1

It’s a lot more work than just defining a second camera and rendering that camera to a texture that is applied to the mirror. The technique for reflections you mention only works well for a perfectly flat mirror. Also, more modern techniques like ray-tracing have a much wider applicability.