• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart RDNA 2 Ray Tracing

shankly1985

shankly1985

shankly1985

Soldato
Joined
25 Nov 2011
Posts
20,663
Location
The KOP
So I am watching DF video on this game and like them are blown away by just how good this game looks truly looks next gen. But its the Ray tracing part why I am creating this thread to talk about it.

I remember a thread on here I tried looking for it to post but was unable. Within that thread was talk about this games pre-release and how bad it was doing Ray tracing "Low Quality" Missing Reflection etc RDNA 2 in the console was talked about it being not strong enough etc

Fast forward to the games release and.... Everything that was slated as been improved 10 fold link below jumps you right to the RT part but I recommend you watch it all tbh

https://youtu.be/7xtJYpwvHjY?t=784

So what some people on here can take from this is do not slate something from pre-release until its out and reviewed.

Edit

This video was recorded before the 60fps RT performance patch also. DF will be doing another video for that mode.
 
Last edited:
hyperseven said:
checkerboarded RT at not quite 4K and not always 30FPS, the power :cry:
Click to expand...

They is a RT 60fps mode that DF will be doing a video on soon.

Edit

Its not just RT though look at everything else that game is doing. Its a very good showcase for basically the consoles first true next gen title. Consoles improve even more over time.
 
Last edited:
shankly1985 said:
No I don't think that is the case. The slating was this forum, looking at YouTube comments from pre-release footage you do see people excited for the game no real complaint about RT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdPaUCgB14Q
Click to expand...

This forum wasn't the only place where people were critical of the low resolution reflections, etc.

IIRC they put out a post defending it as a trade off at the time.

EDIT: Struggling to find it now as all the Google hits come back to 2-3 day old stuff on the 1 day patch.
 
Rroff said:
This forum wasn't the only place where people were critical of the low resolution reflections, etc.

IIRC they put out a post defending it as a trade off at the time.
Click to expand...

I must admit I didn't go far to looking. I just remember in this forum the day that game was shown it got slated for the 30fps low frame rate and not so great RT reflections.
 
It is nice to see an improvement anyhow - I'd rather stuff showed off this technology so it gets wider adoption.
 
Rroff said:
Or the fact it got widely slated prompted the developer to put more effort in?
Click to expand...

Precisely. You can actually see the exact areas of improvement related to issues raised by Digital Foundry in their analysis of the announcement gameplay.

The industry and developers actually listen to what Digital Foundry says, those guys have the gaming industry's ear - what they say actually matters
 
And the release version isn't perfect, there are still many areas that could be nitpicked when it comes to ray tracing even though yes it looks better than the first demo.

here is a quick example I put together in 2 minutes, this is a scene from early in the game.

I've drawn circles around 4 areas to discuss:

Red: Reflection on metal floor lacks detail from the leafs, despite the reflection being very close to the screen and a very small distance between the leafs and floor, the reflection is just a green blur

Blue: This gold metalic circular objects are reflected back as a black object on the floor. This is a ray tracing flaw. The gold metal object also reflects, so if you allow it's surface to reflect off the floor, part of it will reflect back to the metal circular object. This would create an infinite ray tracing reflection loop that would kill performance. To avoid this problem, it's color is changed to black so that nothing reflects back.

Purple: The poster's reflection is reduced enough in quality that none of the writing on the poster can be seen in the reflection

Green: None of the flowers are reflected on the floor, even though the metal beams behind the flower are reflected. It implies there was a design choice made to exclude the flowers from the BVH table to save performance (i guess reflections of Foliage is very performance intensive). This gives the reflection on the floor a fake look, because the flowers should partially block the beams from being able to reflect yet its as if the flower bed simply doesn't exist

 
Last edited:
Either way it is nice to see the developers have improved on it.

Far too often these days feedback albeit not always framed the best way is just ignored or worse seen as toxicity by developers. Personally I like to do the best job I can and take onboard when and where I can improve.

Grim5 said:
And the release version isn't perfect, there are still many areas that could be nitpicked when it comes to ray tracing even though yes it looks better than the first demo.

here is a quick example I put together in 2 minutes, this is a scene from early in the game.

I've drawn circles around 4 areas to discuss:

Red: Reflection on metal floor lacks detail from the leaves, despite the reflection being very close to the screen and a very small distance between the leafs and floor, the reflection is just a green blur

Blue: This gold metalic circular objects are reflected back as a black object on the floor. This is a ray tracing flaw. The gold metal object also reflects, so if you allow it's surface to reflect off the floor, part of it will reflect back to the metal circular object. This would create an infinite ray tracing reflection loop that would kill performance. To avoid this problem, it's color is changed to black so that nothing reflects back.

Purple: The poster's reflection is reduced enough in quality that none of the writing on the poster can be seen in the reflection

Green: None of the flowers are reflected on the floor, even though the metal beams behind the flower are reflected. It implies there was a design choice made to exclude the flowers from the BVH table to save performance (i guess reflections of Foliage is very performance intensive)

Click to expand...

With the green circle the reflection (correctly) starts higher up and the flowers are off angle.

EDIT: Zooming in on that image the reflection is actually very low resolution with a lot missing - it was passable at first but the more you look at it the more is missing or just a blur. They've just used a few clever tricks so the edges are upscaled which stops you initially noticing the low resolution of it.
 
Last edited:
shankly1985 said:
So I am watching DF video on this game and like them are blown away by just how good this game looks truly looks next gen. But its the Ray tracing part why I am creating this thread to talk about it.

I remember a thread on here I tried looking for it to post but was unable. Within that thread was talk about this games pre-release and how bad it was doing Ray tracing "Low Quality" Missing Reflection etc RDNA 2 in the console was talked about it being not strong enough etc

Fast forward to the games release and.... Everything that was slated as been improved 10 fold link below jumps you right to the RT part but I recommend you watch it all tbh

https://youtu.be/7xtJYpwvHjY?t=784

So what some people on here can take from this is do not slate something from pre-release until its out and reviewed.

Edit

This video was recorded before the 60fps RT performance patch also. DF will be doing another video for that mode.
Click to expand...
This was bound to happen. We have started seeing good performance from RDNA2 even in Nvidia-sponsored games like Metro EE.
 
This is pretty typical for game development, especially for games that are dealing with new technology. There's an optimization curve they go through that improves performance and thus the quality of the final product can push. It's actually games like Ratchet and Clank that makes me want to get a PS5 despite primarily being a PC gamer.

It's a good example of one of the benefits of fixed hardware in the consoles, being that you can optimize games much more for that one tightly constrained configuration, rather than being stuck with a plethora of PC hardware and the various different settings you need to offer. Still many of these "optimizations" tend to be about low hanging fruit or artistic trade off. So maybe one scene is heavy on RT reflections but they can dial back on RT shadows or any kind of global illumination. And another level or area can use some nice shadows in a stylistic showcase of dynamic lights but have no reflective surfaces nearby. So you can spend your limit RT budget in different ways at different times to have the maximum visual impact. There's much more room for artistic flare.

Where as with a PC game you can just slap reflective surfaces on whatever you like, have dynamic shadows and GI and do all that stuff at once and do it everywhere and leave it up to the gamer to decide what they'll enable or disable in the settings to get the performance they want. Ideally you'd like it all if you've got the power to do it. It's why RT features are suspiciously missing in areas in that video, like the green swamp water using traditional screen space reflections. You spend your relatively minor RT budget on whatever has the maximum visual impact at the time.

There's a lot of the same tricks being used here however, the RT 60fps mode has a nice frame rate but the quality mode is at 30fps which suggests they're skimping on a lot of settings between the 2 modes, dynamic resolution is there which is unsurprisingly so you can just dump down the res in real time if the APU is struggling. But for basically budget gaming setup with very lite RT capability it's actually very impressive. And what's more impressive is DF's really deep dive on these kind of videos. If you're not subbed to them you ought to be.
 
Hedge said:
Its £450 for the console. Point me in the direction of a pc that comes close.
Click to expand...

Plus to the quality that is on offer from this game.
No pc game released at the moment comes close the the level of detail this game is offering.

The bit where they zoom into a fly and it offers that much detail is mind blown.

These are the areas you see mostly pop in etc with all this now gone I rate these upgrades over a lot of improvements for next gen.

Reason being its stuff you actually notice while playing.
 
Last edited:
Grim5 said:
And the release version isn't perfect, there are still many areas that could be nitpicked when it comes to ray tracing even though yes it looks better than the first demo.

here is a quick example I put together in 2 minutes, this is a scene from early in the game.

I've drawn circles around 4 areas to discuss:

Red: Reflection on metal floor lacks detail from the leafs, despite the reflection being very close to the screen and a very small distance between the leafs and floor, the reflection is just a green blur

Blue: This gold metalic circular objects are reflected back as a black object on the floor. This is a ray tracing flaw. The gold metal object also reflects, so if you allow it's surface to reflect off the floor, part of it will reflect back to the metal circular object. This would create an infinite ray tracing reflection loop that would kill performance. To avoid this problem, it's color is changed to black so that nothing reflects back.

Purple: The poster's reflection is reduced enough in quality that none of the writing on the poster can be seen in the reflection

Green: None of the flowers are reflected on the floor, even though the metal beams behind the flower are reflected. It implies there was a design choice made to exclude the flowers from the BVH table to save performance (i guess reflections of Foliage is very performance intensive). This gives the reflection on the floor a fake look, because the flowers should partially block the beams from being able to reflect yet its as if the flower bed simply doesn't exist

Click to expand...

Nit picked being the key word here.

You could do this with every game ever released tbh
What matters the most is in motion while sitting back and enjoying the game.
I am very suprised they managed to up the quality of Ray tracing while still adding in more detail.
 
hyperseven said:
checkerboarded RT at not quite 4K and not always 30FPS, the power :cry:
Click to expand...

Was that genuinely your take after watching that video? Game is absolutely gorgeous lol. Maybe some people like me simply enjoy gaming instead of pixel counting, also funny that not even a 3090 can 4k/RT at the same time on plenty of games but let's ignore that.
 
I wonder did the same nitpickers ask why there is no RT player reflections in CP2077 (among other issues). The fact it is the usual Nvidia Defence Force speaks volumes really.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom