Raytracing - Would you buy in to it now?

[keyser]

Replaying The Division 1 & 2 (basically the same graphics) they did a great job with creating the game world, including lighting and reflections, night/day cycle and weather effects without RTX. You can see approx player reflections when close to cars and walls, puddles in the street reflect realistically, at least far away buildings and sun etc. I felt the same about Dishonored 2, amazing game worlds. I wanna see what they can do in future games with RTX (and DLSS).

 

[Wrinkly]

It's not just CP2077, although that's an extreme example, but other RT games show mediocre non-RT reflections, it makes the screenshots look better for RT but it seems a flawed comparison.

Well, if nvidia says so it must be true the benchmarks don't show any generational improvement beyond just 'moar cores'.

I've got 1440p/165Hz screen, but not too fussed about it, I want 60fps min, not average, though ideally. You pick DLSS by preference? again only speaking through review videos and screenshots but it seems clearly noticeable even in video at 4k 'Quality' (1440p I believe?) so picking it as a preference seems weird?

As for 6800XT vs 3080, as a general rule, at 1440p, the 6800XT seems to have the edge. As mentioned I'm not sold on RT, and certainly not with the performance hit seen currently, and I don't want to use the 'crutch' of DLSS after spending a considerable chunk of money on a GPU. The 6800XT (by MSRP) is cheaper than the 3080, not that either MSRP really matters right now...

I found ray traced reflections in The Medium to be very good, though reflections aren't the main reason for wanting RT. RT illumination provides, at least for me, a solution to to cardboard cut out appearence that I experience in most 3D games. Digital Foundry covered the small nuances in CP2077 for example that helps make the scene appear more believable. I commented early on that I forgot CP2077 was running as I went off to do other things. My first thought comming back to the PC was that I had left the TV on.

Too tired to check, playing Valheim most of the night, but I think current titles containing RT are based on DXR 12, while Ampere's new features may very well be unlocked with DXR 12.1 (DirectX Ultimate).

DLSS on is now my preference as I also want the 60FPS min, while keeping the card as cool as possible (though I've still to check that DLSS does help keep the card cooler). I don't do well with heat and so I'm happy with V-Sync and 60FPS. DLSS 1.0 took a lot of flack, from myself included, but 2 is doing a lot better. I posted pics of CP2077 on here with the result that some people asked if it was DLSS on or off. CP2077 appears to have had the wrong setting from the start for textures leading to excessive blur. This can be corrected with sharpening through Nvidia's control panel.

Forgetting the other benifits of Nvidia and your not sold on RT, but then tomorrow the game you want to play does look better with RT, what do you do? I'm sold on it as it's the only reason I upgraded from a 1080Ti, skipping Turing as it didn't appear to offer the useable performance based on Quake 2 RTX. I don't care who makes the cards, I just want the best eye candy. I've not had an AMD card since the 290, so fingers crossed AMD's RDNA3 does better than Lovelace.

 

[SKILL]

I did watch bits of that DF video, I get the concept although (again from video only) I'm not sure I'd be quite so overawed as it as they seemed, but given their 3080/Doom shenanigans I'm not sure I trust them to be an impartial source That's not to say it's completely invalid but watched it very much with a pinch of salt...

I've yet to see any screenshots, including I believe some of yours, that show DLSS to be as good as native... As mentioned it seems DLSS Quality is very close, and that's mighty impressive, but it's not as good so I'd rather not use if it possible... Looking to spend £650 (lols, if I could) just to depend on a crutch like DLSS is crazy to me, I'd rather stick with my 1070 and older games...

CP2077 is literally the only game I'd really like to play but not even going to try on the 1070, saying that it's clearly not what was hyped and was/is a broken mess, so no rush as the game in 6 months time will be better than it is today, and I might be able to buy a suitable gpu for semi-sane money

The 3080 vs 6800XT is a bit moot I feel, as I said right now the 6800XT being ~$50 cheaper and quicker in most games at 1440p is appealing. But it's all just theoretical, can't buy either without more hassle than I can be bothered with, and not for RRP, by the time they become readily available I'm gonna be seriously considering just waiting till the next gen comes out, good chance I won't end up with either...

Neither card I see as being capable of proper RT at 1440p with good framerates, as shown by the likes of CP2077, The Medium, etc, again without the crutch of DLSS. If anything I would expect more RT implementations going forward to be a bit 'meh' and Dirt5-esque where the AMD cards do well, just because so many games are either console first or console being a big part of development.

 

[Twinz]

I prefered Nvidia this time because Ampere generally did better in the VR benchmarks I have seen, and VR is the only situation where I need a high-end card. (I'm otherwise on an ultrawide 1080p monitor)

Still, I bought a 3080 because it was the first one I was able to purchase. Had a 6800XT been available for me to purchase first, I would have bought that instead, because the 6800XT was still "close enough" to the 3080 in VR....and RT isn't a concern to me this gen. (Maybe in a few generations)

 

[Nexus18]

I am happy to use DLSS (set to quality) with ray tracing as IQ is better than with no ray tracing and no dlss.

Reflections are without a doubt hands down better but there are times where the lighting is stunning. Digital foundry video on cyberpunk was very much a PR piece for nvidia rtx but they weren't wrong in their points, however, a lot of their comparisons with ray tracing off look a lot worse, almost like they set some other things to low/off.... i.e. their thumbnail they used for that video, here are my screenshots.

 

[SKILL]

Yeah, I've seen similar analysis, their points may be valid but they almost certainly, and intentionally, showed RT/nvidia in the best possible light, but fine, whatever.

One thing that I find bizarre is if you look at just one game, CP2077, RT reflections look a million times better than the non-RT reflections, but that's not (just) because RT is great, but it's also because the non-RT reflections in that particular game are absolutely terrible... As if, again, it's been intentionally designed to show RT off in the best possible light...

 

[Nexus18]

Yeah, I've seen similar analysis, their points may be valid but they almost certainly, and intentionally, showed RT/nvidia in the best possible light, but fine, whatever.

One thing that I find bizarre is if you look at just one game, CP2077, RT reflections look a million times better than the non-RT reflections, but that's not (just) because RT is great, but it's also because the non-RT reflections in that particular game are absolutely terrible... As if, again, it's been intentionally designed to show RT off in the best possible light...

Yup completely agree.

The main thing I like about the ray traced reflections is that they don't disappear when you change camera angles, always was a pet peeve of mine that i.e. this is a worst case scenario:

 

[Twinz]

I remember one of the Need For Speed titles had overly-reflective roads. I found it quite annoying myself. And this was in like 2003 or something. I think it was NFS Underground:

 

[nvidiamd]

Most of the GI effects in CP 2077 could have been done without real time RT. That was really a stupid example from Digital Foundry. Many of static artificial lights effects on geometry can be done even better with offline RT, you can cast thousands of times more rays than you cast real time and bake the results.
For example a thing like this:


There is no reason for why the non RT image to look worse. I understand there should be a difference when dynamic lights are used in the scene.
Compare non RT GI effects from CP 2077 with non RT GI effects from a game like TLOU2. Yes i know TLOU 2 is a console game but they really worked hard to make it beautiful. And the graphics are stunning.

 

[Nexus18]

The thing I would love to know the most is just how much easier and quicker is it to implement ray tracing/rtx for developers as opposed to the traditional methods as the way some talk about it and I think even developers have stated this themselves, is that it removes an awful lot of work for them, which in return is good as it means they can focus on improving/working on other things.....




With metro getting basically a new engine and all these ray tracing effects, I hope other older games get the same treatment i.e. the batman games. Have heard that HL 2 is in the works????

 

[heartburnron]

I've been playing through Metro Exodus again and found some areas that really showed off the quality of ray tracing. However, I noticed a couple of times that it almost completely white-washed the background looking out of the train window, or another time when one of the NPCs was talking to me, their face was completely in shadow. Now I get this is closer to how it would look in real life in similar lighting conditions however for those two examples, I preferred how it looked without the ray-tracing. So I guess the question is, at what point does realism start to detract from the gaming experience? We don't want games to be too close to real life I don't think. Maybe in the future they will look out for when ray tracing detracts from the visuals in this way and overwrite what we're seeing with some from of correction?

 

[nvidiamd]

The thing I would love to know the most is just how much easier and quicker is it to implement ray tracing/rtx for developers as opposed to the traditional methods as the way some talk about it and I think even developers have stated this themselves, is that it removes an awful lot of work for them, which in return is good as it means they can focus on improving/working on other things.....




With metro getting basically a new engine and all these ray tracing effects, I hope other older games get the same treatment i.e. the batman games. Have heard that HL 2 is in the works????

Of course some things are easier for example think about the light from the sun during the day. You need to recreate the scene over and over or you can leave that task to real time RT. Or when you use a flashlight, it is easier to calculate the lighting effects with real time RT.

But right now there is a transition time that makes using RT more difficult since you also need to develop a non RT version if you want to make money with your game. And the fact that the new consoles don't have enough hardware for all the RT effects won't help developers in the next years.

The so called RT only games (in fact enhanced versions of older games ) are not made to make profits through sales. People interested in RT already bought the Metro Exodus and they will get the new version for free. They are used as marketing demos by a certain company i won't name right now and that company is probably paying a ton of money for each of these enhanced versions.
But for someone who wants to make money from selling a game, RT only versions are not a solution atm, and it won't be until the marketshare of RT capable cards will be at least 30%. Even adding RT to the games is extra work right now and that's why you don't see too many games doing it unless they get money from a certain video card manufacturer.

 

[Chuk_Chuk]

But for someone who wants to make money from selling a game, RT only versions are not a solution atm, and it won't be until the marketshare of RT capable cards will be at least 30%. Even adding RT to the games is extra work right now and that's why you don't see too many games doing it unless they get money from a certain video card manufacturer.

There was a software devloper who speculated that implementing RT shadows might be easier than the standard shadows they use. If it is true we may see most RT games, just having RT shadows. That would help save on baking time for artists, without destroying framerates for the end user

 

[Grim5]

There was a software devloper who speculated that implementing RT shadows might be easier than the standard shadows they use. If it is true we may see most RT games, just having RT shadows. That would help save on baking time for artists, without destroying framerates for the end user

You could say the same for lighting - just depends on the level of dynamic shadow/lights you put in the game with rasterization - take a game like kingdom come, it has amazing lighting and runs like absolutely dogs balls on high end hardware, its all rasterization - maybe with ray Tracing it would run better

Runs as low as the 30s on a 2080ti

 

[Nexus18]

Given that console games have ray tracing enabled, I expect to see the majority of games come with ray tracing now, obviously will be tacked on though...

 

[nvidiamd]

There was a software devloper who speculated that implementing RT shadows might be easier than the standard shadows they use. If it is true we may see most RT games, just having RT shadows. That would help save on baking time for artists, without destroying framerates for the end user

That will be pretty bad since the shadows are the worst example for what RT can do. It will still ruin the framerates compared with non RT shadows.

 

[nvidiamd]

Given that console games have ray tracing enabled, I expect to see the majority of games come with ray tracing now, obviously will be tacked on though...

Maybe but it will not be an easier work, it will be extra work to do RT. They also need to have non RT/performance version on consoles so that will be the basic version and then some RT effects on top of it. And for more/better RT effects on PC version they will still want someone to pay for it as long as the marketshare of RT cards is very small. Sadly it will be like this at least for the next 3-4 years.

 

[Chuk_Chuk]

That will be pretty bad since the shadows are the worst example for what RT can do. It will still ruin the framerates compared with non RT shadows.

Do you think the bean counters or the average consumer will care that it is "the worst example" of RT?
You can at least get over 60fps without cheats while using RT shadows .

 

[Nexus18]

I give control another shot last night and really getting into it now, didn't like it when it first came out, that and perf. was poor on my vega 56 back then. Ray tracing is stunning in this game, love your girls eyes reflections and of course dlss is epic, basically 80/90+ fps with everything on max.

 

[Wrinkly]

You could say the same for lighting - just depends on the level of dynamic shadow/lights you put in the game with rasterization - take a game like kingdom come, it has amazing lighting and runs like absolutely dogs balls on high end hardware, its all rasterization - maybe with ray Tracing it would run better

Runs as low as the 30s on a 2080ti

A game begging for ray tracing and DLSS support. I added extra lights and shadows via a mod when it first launched. At 1440p, my 1080Ti was dropping to single digit FPS at times, with an average ~18.