NVIDIA 4000 Series

[Harlequin]

AMD are perfectly capable of catching up from a hardware POV, intel have taken the same approach as nvidia and been able to match their nvidia counterpart, I suspect once more and more titles end up like CP 2077, chernboylite, DL 2, metro EE levels of RT is when we will see amd put the real focus on RT though but they need to be careful not to leave it too long as nvidia are putting all their eggs in one basket with RT now (imo the right move given developers comments on RT as well as every industry and brand getting on board with it), not just hardware but software and also partnerships with game studios and game engines.

We still have yet to see any RT games where nvidias SER is being utilised as well, which iirc supposedly provides up to a 43/48% boost in RT performance on 40xx hardware, I believe cp RT overdrive mode will have this as well as portal rtx.

Cp2077 at 4k with rt needs upscaling on an rtx 4080 to get close to 60fps. That is the problem right there

 

[Nexus18]

Cp2077 at 4k with rt needs upscaling on an rtx 4080 to get close to 60fps. That is the problem right there

Whilst RT in cp looks great, it's not a good showcase for what can RT is really capable of as shown with metro EE and 4a enhanced comments:

Spoiler

IN-DEPTH TECHNICAL DIVE INTO METRO EXODUS PC ENHANCED EDITION — 4A Games

OUT NOW! We’re happy to let you know that the Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition is now released, bringing on board incredible improvements for Ray Tracing-capable GPUs, including Field of View options, DLSS 2.0, and much more. It is also a free entitlement to current owners – as it is so extensive

www.4a-games.com.mt

EVERYTHING TECHNICAL ABOUT METRO EXODUS UPGRADE FOR PLAYSTATION 5 AND XBOX SERIES X|S — 4A Games

IT’S OUT! We’re thrilled to let you know that the Metro Exodus next gen upgrade for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S is OUT NOW . This is a perfect chance to dive into Metro Exodus since this upgrade includes generational advancements you will read about further in this blog. On top of that

www.4a-games.com.mt

We saw many strides in performance during this phase of console optimization, many of which gave us a cause to rethink our approaches to certain solutions. We’ve remained very conscious of the fact that we were aiming to have the consoles providing a consistent 60FPS experience for this title, and, with that in the back of our minds, the gradual performance improvements allowed us to also include more and more features. Despite superficial differences in the actual layout and approach of the platform-specific Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), all platforms are now running remarkably similar CPU and GPU code, and have managed to maintain a very consistent feature set.

The groundwork has been laid though and we have successfully brought a product to the 9th generation consoles complete with essentially our entire Ray Tracing feature set. This sets a baseline for this generation’s future projects. We mentioned that we had initially thought of some features as potential fallbacks solution to be maintained alongside superior and steadily evolving equivalents on PC. This wasn’t the case, but it could have been, if the consoles weren’t as good as they are. If it had been the case, then so many members of the team would have been hit by the massive increase in workload that comes with working with two separate and distinct systems in parallel. Instead, we now have a new set of standards to base our work on that are consistent across all target platforms.

As it stands then, we can say for sure that projects of this generation, across all targeted platforms, will be based off of this raytraced feature set. That is great news for the end result: it is allowing us to produce scenes with the highest level of graphical fidelity we have ever achieved and that is what the public gets to see, though these features are just as important behind the scenes.

There is a reason why we have always been so vocally critical of the idea of baking assets (pre-generating the results of things like lighting calculations) and shipping them as immutable monoliths of data in the games package files, rather than generating as much as possible on the fly: everything that you pre-calculate is something that you are stuck with. Not “stuck with” in the sense that if it is wrong it can’t be fixed (everyone loves a 50GB patch after all) but “stuck” in a much more limiting sense – that any part of your game, any object in the scene that relies on baked assets will be static and unchanging. You won’t be able to change the way it is lit so you have to be overly cautious with decisions about how the player can affect dynamic lights (you won’t be able to move it, so you disable physics on as much as possible), and the player can’t interact with it in interesting ways, so you pass that problem onto UX design.

The more you have to rely on baked assets for your scenes, the more you restrict your game design options, and the more you take the risk that your environments will feel rigid and lifeless. Perhaps, the biggest advantage that Ray Tracing brings is that it gives game developers a huge boost in the direction of worlds that are truly, fully dynamic, with no dependencies on pre-computed assets whatsoever. There are still similar examples where such problems need to be solved, but lighting was one of the biggest and most all-encompassing examples of the lot and Ray Tracing solves it.

It doesn’t just come down to what you end up shipping either. Game development is by its very nature an iterative process. You need to have some plan for where you want to take a project from the start, or course, but once you begin working on assets and developing features you always test them as part of the larger context of the game, and more often than not this leads to tweaks, refinements, and balancing. Even that might not be the end of it, other features can come along changing the experience and myriad different ways leading to yet more alterations and adjustments. For this process to work developers need an environment to work in that is intuitive, responsive, and as close a representation of the main game as possible. Our editor has always run basically the same simulation as the final game, but technological advancements seen in this generation streamlined the process significantly. Testing environments are quicker to set up with fewer dependencies on assets or on the work of other departments. Changes in visual design are visible (in their final form) immediately. The physical simulation on the whole feels more like a sandbox in which ideas can be tested and iterated upon. This makes for a more comfortable and fluent development experience, more conducive to creativity and experimentation.

The true effects of all this will take longer to be realized. The boundaries of what you can (and can’t) do in a video game have been shifted and design practices will take a while to feel them out and to fill them. But ultimately, what we see is the promise of more dynamic and engaging game worlds, with fewer limitations, which can be developed in faster and more intuitive ways. On the player side, all that translates to hopefully more content without the usual associated spiraling development cost, and to richer, more believable game experiences.

Also, that's why I said I am interested in seeing what this new RT overdrive mode will provide in CP when released this month, RT has been dialled up substantially but according to nvidia, performance should also improve:

Supporting the new Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode are several new NVIDIA technologies that greatly accelerate and improve the quality of advanced ray tracing workloads, for even faster performance when playing on GeForce RTX 40 Series graphics cards:

• Shader Execution Reordering (SER) reorders and parallelizes the execution of threads that trace rays, without compromising image quality.
• Opacity Micromaps accelerate ray tracing workloads by encoding the surface opacity directly onto the geometry, drastically reducing expensive opacity evaluation during ray traversal, and enabling higher quality acceleration structures to be constructed. This technique is especially beneficial when applied to irregularly-shaped or translucent objects, like foliage and fences. On GeForce RTX 40 Series graphics cards, the Opacity Micromap format is directly decodable by ray tracing hardware, improving performance even further.
• NVIDIA Real Time Denoisers (NRD) is a spatio-temporal ray tracing denoising library that assists in denoising low ray-per-pixel signals with real-time performance. Compared to previous-gen denoisers, NRD improves quality and ensures the computationally intensive ray-traced output is noise-free, without performance tradeoffs.

GPU architecture is highly parallelized and at its most efficient when executing similar workloads at the same time. However, advanced ray tracing requires computing the impact of millions of rays striking numerous different material types throughout a scene, creating a sequence of divergent, inefficient workloads for shaders (shaders calculate the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene, and are used in every modern game).

Our new Shader Execution Reordering (SER) technology dynamically reorganizes these previously-inefficient workloads into considerably more efficient ones, improving shader performance by up to 2X, and in-game frame rates by up to 25%!

 

[zebsmattz]

Don't hate it. It is definitely the future, but right now it's niche, kills performance way too much and isn't in many games I play so I don't really care about it just now.

I wouldn't be surprised to see RT go the way of 3D. These benchmarks full of contrived shiny surfaces. Do we really need everything to be so shiny you can't see where one object stops and the other one starts?

 

[arknor]

Yep, particularly those spending time in AMD threads trashing the features like FSR. It gets worse when they want competition to reduce overall prices (or complain about prices) yet seem to do absolutely everything possible to avoid AMD.

AMD wouldn't reduce prices anyway, why don't they reduce CPU prices?

 

[Nexus18]

I wouldn't be surprised to see RT go the way of 3D. These benchmarks full of contrived shiny surfaces. Do we really need everything to be so shiny you can't see where one object stops and the other one starts?

Might be worthwhile reading up on RT and what it does, what the benefits are over rasterization for both developers and gamers and see why every industry plus vendor are backing it. Essentially it's nothing like the 3d scene....

 

[zebsmattz]

Might be worthwhile reading up on RT and what it does, what the benefits are over rasterization for both developers and gamers and see why every industry plus vendor are backing it. Essentially it's nothing like the 3d scene....

For the gamer: shiny reflective surfaces, lower framerates and higher GPU prices. Not great IMHO.
Edit: Didn't every TV manufacturer back 3D a few years ago? It doesn't mean much really.

 

[JediFragger]

AMD wouldn't reduce prices anyway, why don't they reduce CPU prices?

Because they're greedy ***** who no longer see themselves as a 'budget brand'?

 

[Nexus18]

For the gamer: shiny reflective surfaces, lower framerates and higher GPU prices. Not great IMHO.

Except there is far more to it than "shiny reflective surfaces"....

Isn't that generally what happens when you increase graphical settings, your fps drops?

Regardless of RT, GPU prices would have gone up anyway, see amd GPUs price increases even though their chiplet design is a much more cheaper and efficient process and not RT focused.

 

[Sargatanas2511]

Except there is far more to it than "shiny reflective surfaces"....

Isn't that generally what happens when you increase graphical settings, your fps drops?

Regardless of RT, GPU prices would have gone up anyway, see amd GPUs price increases even though their chiplet design is a much more cheaper and efficient process and not RT focused.

They would have gone up, but I am not convinced they would have gone up as far, as fast. Turing made basically zero perf/$ improvement over Pascal but die sizes were massive because of the extra space taken up by the tensor and RT cores. That was the justification for the huge price increase in that generation.

 

[zebsmattz]

Except there is far more to it than "shiny reflective surfaces"....

What do you think it gives us as gamers then?
The only thing I noticed during gameplay was reduced framerate, so I switched it off.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Don't worry Nvidia will have your back for Atomic Heart. Launch a £700+ AD103 based RTX4070 Super to officially replace the RTX3080,then make sure Ampere doesn't run it well relative to Ada Lovelace,and everyone will fall over themselves saying how great value it is. OFC,lets ignore they just sold you an RTX3070 replacement for over £700.

Then they can jack up the new 104 series based dGPUs(really a 106 series replacement),and that can go up significantly too. AD104 based RTX4060TI or RTX4070 for £500!

Then sell you the GA107 replacement(RTX3050) which is the AD106 as the RTX4060 for £400! So all those jokes a 50 series dGPU would be £400,will probably happen. They already are close to £300.

Also TSMC has too much 5NM capacity,so I don't think the 5NM prices will be as high as people think either. GDDR6X/GDDR6 prices are probably not as high as few years ago.

 

[Nexus18]

What do you think it gives us as gamers then?
The only thing I noticed during gameplay was reduced framerate, so I switched it off.

Read 4a enhanced articles on what RT does from a developer perspective and what it means for gamers:

NVIDIA 4000 Series

AMD are perfectly capable of catching up from a hardware POV, intel have taken the same approach as nvidia and been able to match their nvidia counterpart, I suspect once more and more titles end up like CP 2077, chernboylite, DL 2, metro EE levels of RT is when we will see amd put the real...

forums.overclockers.co.uk

And there are plenty of videos that show what it does outside of "shiny surfaces":

https://www.youtube.com/c/RayTracingRevolution

If you choose not to use it because it kills performance too much, that's perfectly valid but statements such as "all it does is make surfaces shiny" is simply not true.

They would have gone up, but I am not convinced they would have gone up as far, as fast. Turing made basically zero perf/$ improvement over Pascal but die sizes were massive because of the extra space taken up by the tensor and RT cores. That was the justification for the huge price increase in that generation.

I didn't follow turing too much so can't comment, although I got the impression it was very much about paying for the "RTX" feature set/brand...... Ampere/3080 was able to come in at £650 where as amds 6800xt came in at £50 cheaper, similar story for 3070 so I don't think the cost of "RT" hardware is really as expensive as people make out. Also look at intels gpu price and RT performance.

 

[Shaz12]

RT is a lot like HDR. You don’t realise what you are missing until you see it in action on proper hardware. Then gaming without it is pretty much unusable. You see the flaws in rasterisation easily and are less impressed. Personally there is absolutely no way I can go back to traditional raster now that I have seen RT and HDR on an OLED monitor.

 

[Sargatanas2511]

RT is a lot like HDR. You don’t realise what you are missing until you see it in action on proper hardware. Then gaming without it is pretty much unusable. You see the flaws in rasterisation easily and are less impressed. Personally there is absolutely no way I can go back to traditional raster now that I have seen RT and HDR on an OLED monitor.

So you play literally no games that don't have Ray Tracing now?

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

So you play literally no games that don't have Ray Tracing now?

Cyberpunk 2077 had rubbish looking Sea with RT off. But suddenly it looked better with RT on. It was obviously done on purpose to make the difference look much bigger than it should. Reminds me of the PhysX on and off comparisons,a bit like dodgy Dave at Curry's trying to sell you that £100 HDMI cable,by using that totally not fiddled with set of TVs!

 

[Harlequin]

WhilstRay Tracing might have a place in some genres, it doesnt mean forcing it (and by forcing it - nvidia funding the developement) of any game that might use it - RTS games using Ray Tracing? Why??

 

[Twinz]

Cyberpunk 2077 had rubbish looking Sea with RT off. But suddenly it looked better with RT on. It was obviously done on purpose to make the difference look much bigger than it should. Reminds me off the PhysX on and off comparison,a bit like dodgy Dave at Curry's trying to sell you that £100 HDMI cable,by using that totally not fiddled with set of TVs!

Control is like this. The game looks like **** with RT off.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Control is like this. The game looks like **** with RT off.

This is an old trick used for so many years in PC gaming. Advertise some effects you have,make sure the base game lacks in certain ways and the effects look over emphasised.

Reviewers will just compare like for like,instead of questioning whether the effects actually are any good on their own.

 

[zebsmattz]

Thanks for the articles and links, I will have a full read of them.
Seems that RT gives better lighting and shadows, as well as the reflections?
I know I am being flippant, but when you see most ray tracing comparisons it does highlight the reflections. Look at Port Royal, it's full of shiny surfaces.

The before/after versions of the games are interesting on that link you gave.
I'd rather have the 'before' version (no ray tracing) of the game at a reasonable price and framerate, rather than the (to me) marginally better visuals of the 'after' version of the game.
I tried Control in RT on a 3080, and the significant loss of framerate was far more noticeable to me than the slightly better visuals.

 

[XeNoNF50]

If I buy a 4080 I'm not sure I'll admit to it in any forum list, It'll be a dirty secret.

About the right level of embarrassment for such an act!