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What do gamers actually think about Ray-Tracing?
- Thread starter Purgatory
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Is this you talking yourself into a 5090?
His silence to such posts speaks volumes
Get the popcorn ready for when it happens
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You only notice it now?
To be fair it was always there but like a lot of these new tech you have to accept compromises. Those compromises become bigger and more obvious the lower down the GPU stack you go.
FG
Upscaling
RT
All have a cost that some might not like. Especially on 4060 and lower.
To be fair it was always there but like a lot of these new tech you have to accept compromises. Those compromises become bigger and more obvious the lower down the GPU stack you go.
FG
Upscaling
RT
All have a cost that some might not like. Especially on 4060 and lower.
So, I just spent some time today in Indiana Jones and PT vs RT... My goodness, whoever said this game looks so good... must really go and check their eyes. Just in the forest area I have found issues with trees geometry having disconnected branches, as they use low-poly models just few m away from my chars, then one step forward and it's fine. I have seen awful 2000s level textures on trees and ground. I have found water stream with 0 reflections on them (RT or PT - same result). FPS on 4090 in UWQHD with PT on is 25. 
To get to 60 I have to go down to DLSS ultra performance... Which is 480p. Amazing performance! Then, FG doesn't work at all as it introduces horrible stutter - Steam forums seem to contains dozens of posts by people with sam FG issues, so not isolated case. Turning off PT makes image quality in forest considerably worse, but that is because of shadows casted by leaves being completely unnatural and moving in near flicker-like manner over surfaces, distracting from everything else on the screen - this wouldn't be left like that if game was properly optimised by an actual artist, as no artist would see it and consider it good for release. And the whole game looks so... fake-ish, unnatural, plasticky faces, horrible textures in places etc. Lighting with PT is good (sans ghosting, noise and other issues) but the whole graphics quality is 4/10 for me, at best. CP2077 with PT is 10/10 to compare. Absolutely not worth the performance hit in this case, total miss in that regard IMHO.
That said, game engine seems to be CPU bottlenecked, my 4090 sits at 55-65% GPU usage at most and in-game stats show PT is taking nearly twice as long per frame on the CPU as it takes on the GPU.
By the way there are mods out there available that apparently turn off RT and allow this game to run quite well on for example 3060, by just changing config files, not even modifying engine etc. If true, the "RT is a requirement" was a lie in this game. I might do it with mine just to compare visually if I am bored enough, but at the moment I've not seen it in person to judge.
To get to 60 I have to go down to DLSS ultra performance... Which is 480p. Amazing performance! Then, FG doesn't work at all as it introduces horrible stutter - Steam forums seem to contains dozens of posts by people with sam FG issues, so not isolated case. Turning off PT makes image quality in forest considerably worse, but that is because of shadows casted by leaves being completely unnatural and moving in near flicker-like manner over surfaces, distracting from everything else on the screen - this wouldn't be left like that if game was properly optimised by an actual artist, as no artist would see it and consider it good for release. And the whole game looks so... fake-ish, unnatural, plasticky faces, horrible textures in places etc. Lighting with PT is good (sans ghosting, noise and other issues) but the whole graphics quality is 4/10 for me, at best. CP2077 with PT is 10/10 to compare. Absolutely not worth the performance hit in this case, total miss in that regard IMHO.That said, game engine seems to be CPU bottlenecked, my 4090 sits at 55-65% GPU usage at most and in-game stats show PT is taking nearly twice as long per frame on the CPU as it takes on the GPU.
By the way there are mods out there available that apparently turn off RT and allow this game to run quite well on for example 3060, by just changing config files, not even modifying engine etc. If true, the "RT is a requirement" was a lie in this game. I might do it with mine just to compare visually if I am bored enough, but at the moment I've not seen it in person to judge.
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It's kinda like movies though, they seem a hell of a lot better if you've never been on a set before.I was thinking, I wonder if @mrk watched this and if so his thoughts? Then I remembered, it would be a non issue for him as he is all about the screenshots, not gif's
The magics gone when you know how it all works.
There's also a reason why Hollywood lies all the time by claiming their movies do not contain any CGI or special effects, when in reality they're loaded with both. People just want to believe it's all real/practical, makes them feel better.
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Welcome to my world
That said, mine predates HUB but these are things I can't unsee. I've seen all the issues already in Portal RTX and Quake 2 RTX and then in all PT games since.I never started noticing until the Nvidia app decided to enable ray reconstruction in CP2077. I was wondering why the walls were moving and objects were ghosting like crazy. Then watching the HUB video, I can see random surfaces have weird glittery effects and the local shadows can look awful if there's multiple light sources.Welcome to my world
But the reflections look so good
Soldato
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It's a take a bit... superficial on their side.
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Soldato
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Well.. if they had not spent the past 18 months recommending nvidia cards "for better ray tracing" even though they are now happy to share these findings, it makes you realise all these influencers are first and foremost about their channel and maybe the consumer after that.
I don't see it that way. These channels are usually run by enthusiasts and these are often blind initially to the problems with new tech because it's new and because it's blingy. Over time they realise it's not exactly what has been promised and issues haven't been fixed but got worse.
Fun fact for me is that Nvidia anyways knew this, hence they have a bunch of scientific papers offering solutions (AI based) to all these problems. And it's funny because they created a problem and they will offer solution likely requiring another upgrade.
Good business plan for sure.
Soldato
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Fair rebuttal. Far too long was spent parroting that phrase instead of holding RT to account for what it presently is and how the low stack is nowhere near ready for it. At least the six year video was highlighting it and now these enthusiasts who were blind should start there.
Mega Lights, 50% more performance with no downgrade in image quality, retains Hardware Lumen. now THAT is what it's all about.
www.dsogaming.com
Sadly no current or past UE5 games will ever get updated with 5.5 because no publisher cares about that sort of time spend.
Unreal Engine 5.5 MegaLights brings a massive performance boost
MegaLights can bring up to 50% better performance in games with Software or Hardware Lumen. This is one of the best features of UE5.5.
www.dsogaming.com
Sadly no current or past UE5 games will ever get updated with 5.5 because no publisher cares about that sort of time spend.
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Soldato
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They just seem to exaggerate matters and completely ignore when it works. Quick example, Hogwarts is bad at reflections, but another title on the same UE 4 (Cernobilyte), works very well on that end.
It also goes on to "too little rays, too little performance in current cards", although there's plenty if you don't go for 4k, is just that developers don't expose to the players to settings to easily increase ray count and number of bounces.
Anyway, a piece for the views...
Mega Lights, 50% more performance with no downgrade in image quality, retains Hardware Lumen. now THAT is what it's all about.
Unreal Engine 5.5 MegaLights brings a massive performance boost
MegaLights can bring up to 50% better performance in games with Software or Hardware Lumen. This is one of the best features of UE5.5.
Sadly no current or past UE5 games will ever get updated with 5.5 because no publisher cares about that sort of time spend.
Outside of CDPR and perhaps a few studios, not many see something useful updating to the latest version. I doubt even a big name like Stalker 2 would update, although it suffers greatly in its current form.
It's an (at least partially) experimental feature still, as per authors of that specific solution. From UE forums, devs see at thimes things like this:
"I am getting horribly pixelated ghosting when shadows are in motion and reflections are sparkling all the time. No such issues when MegaLights are turned off. Virtual Shadow Maps for Shadow Method make the shadows more accurate with my GPU, but doesn’t fix the ghosting.""
There's still work to do, it has limitations like it doesn't support directional lights for example, no transcalency support and other limitations. Not a panaceum for all situations, only for specific ones shown in demos so far. Ergo, I wouldn't get my high hopes it will change THAT much. If it looks too good to be true, it usually is. Though I am also quite confident this isn't the last version of it and it'll be improved over time with more functionality added.
Another thing worth noting is that, as authors of Mega Lights said, it's created for HW RT path in UE5.5, software one isn't really supported and they have no plans for it. It's because as of UE5.5+ the main push is just for hardware Lumen and software one is just an afterthought, so we shouldn't expect any new things added much to it, or improvements etc. Epic seems committed to the HW path from now on.
That's another thing - when devs start working on specific UE engine version they almost never upgrade to newest one during development, as it tends to break things they already made and then new version comes and breaks other things, etc. That way they would never be able to finish the project - sometimes you just have to make a cutover and settle on one version and not touch it afterwards. They're often not that compatible with each other. Hence, this is to be expected, as sad as it sounds.
And after project is done, it's way too much work to upgrade the engine in complex games, so it's almost never happening, as it would cost way too much to do it. There's no profit in that.
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This guy posts of a lot of UE detail
www.youtube.com
Threat Interactive
Official YouTube Channel of The New Indie Game Studio: Threat Interactive Website: https://threatinteractive.wordpress.com/ X.com : https://x.com/ThreatInteract Reddit: https://new.reddit.com/user/ThreatInteractive Official Threat Interactive Discord: https://discord.gg/7ZdvFxFTba Email...
www.youtube.com
Who (I assume you refer to the enthusiasts on youtube) and where ignores it when it works? Does RT need constant praise like DF does to be viable?
So, should Hogwarts not be criticised for bad reflections, or what is your point here? At least from my side the critique is always aimed at lazy devs, where I can often see very good results from indie studios and very bad ones from AAA studios. One would think it would be the opposite, but here we are.
Sure, if you go down to 480p on 4090, then it can handle it relatively well with PT.
And I wish I was over-exagerating, but I am not - that's what I see in Indiana Jones for example, on my 4090 with PT, as I have to go to DLSS Ultra Perf from 1440p resolution to get to 60FPS without FG. To be clear, FG is bugged horribly for me in that title, so not usable (horrible stutter making game unplayable, even on clean Windows and clean drivers etc. - as I tested) - seems to be relatively common judging by Steam's and other forums full of complaints about it on 4090, though it could be related to 16 cores CPU as well, hard to say in this specific game (I've seen people confirming both). I don't think that's what people actually want - to go back to 480p gaming. Even with best DLSS crutch it's a blurfest.That would result in a slideshow even on 4090 in 480p (or just horrible noise all over the screen) - you can see that in actual 3D rendering software (for example by moving camera live in the scene). They might be lazy (devs) but they're not that crazy.
As I wrote above, updating often breaks things, cost monies and there's no profit in it. If company gets funded by for example NVIDIA to do it to promote new functions in successful title - they'll do it. Otherwise, forget about it.
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He does and he clearly knows a lot about the engine and computer graphics. The thing is that he doesn't like full hardware Lumen and Nanite - they both cost a lot of performance, limiting gaming to only high-end hardware with proper look and he considers that a lazy approach. A lot of devs took calling them lazy as personal attack but instead of proper discussion they just call him names and people watching him stupid (and worse), so the whole thing turns into loads of personal attacks online and little actual discussion. :/This guy posts of a lot of UE detail
Threat Interactive
Official YouTube Channel of The New Indie Game Studio: Threat Interactive Website: https://threatinteractive.wordpress.com/ X.com : https://x.com/ThreatInteract Reddit: https://new.reddit.com/user/ThreatInteractive Official Threat Interactive Discord: https://discord.gg/7ZdvFxFTba Email...
Then again, article linked by mrk rants about gamers being stupid idiots as well - like what the hell? With that attitude they can just finish writing and go fishing to rethink their career, IMHO. Again, gamers don't need to know, don't want to know etc. how things are made - they just want good final product, as that's what they pay for. Sadly, often they get a poo these days, for a lot of monies - badly optimised, lazily done, buggy as hell and priced higher than ever before.
Edit: In the next post I quote MegaLights author pretty much fully agreeing with TI guy's one video (about MegaLights demo scene optimisation), saying same things as TI guy did. Devs ARE lazy and do stupid things, where ML author gently tell them not to do, as it creates loads of noise and kills performance for no reason.
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Interesting quote by the MegaLights main author:
"From the user perspective as lighting scenario gets harder (more lights having strong influence on a given pixel or large area lights casting shadows through complex geo) lighting quality decreases as denoiser need to do more work. At some point it will overwhelm the denoiser and you’ll see noise and similar artifacts. To keep it working well try not to place lights inside geo and narrow their bounds as much as possible (spot angle, rect light barn door, attenuation range). There’s a debug view which shows which lights affect a given pixel, which turned out to be quite useful in the demo to find huge lights on the other side of the level or just buried inside walls, which won’t ever affect anything but still need to be computed by MegaLights.". Then he added later "Overall, it does require careful setup and has edge cases, but also in practice it does work surprisingly well given a tiny console budget if you know what you’re doing.".
This above is exactly what TI guy was showing in one of the Mega Lights demos, as optimisation pass on UE5.5 that by itself increases performance a lot too. A lot of devs, even in a stupid demo, just slap lights horribly overlapping, not caring one bit how much noise it adds to the scene or how much it kills performance. Just decreasing bounds of lighting makes a huge difference to both, whilst keeping general look of the scene very similar. In response, many devs started accusing him he has no clue what he's talking about. And there we are, straight from the horses' mouth a big confirmation TI dude knows very well what he's talking about. It just shows that a lot of devs really are just junior inexperienced people that have no clue what they're really doing but have gigantic egos.
"From the user perspective as lighting scenario gets harder (more lights having strong influence on a given pixel or large area lights casting shadows through complex geo) lighting quality decreases as denoiser need to do more work. At some point it will overwhelm the denoiser and you’ll see noise and similar artifacts. To keep it working well try not to place lights inside geo and narrow their bounds as much as possible (spot angle, rect light barn door, attenuation range). There’s a debug view which shows which lights affect a given pixel, which turned out to be quite useful in the demo to find huge lights on the other side of the level or just buried inside walls, which won’t ever affect anything but still need to be computed by MegaLights.". Then he added later "Overall, it does require careful setup and has edge cases, but also in practice it does work surprisingly well given a tiny console budget if you know what you’re doing.".
This above is exactly what TI guy was showing in one of the Mega Lights demos, as optimisation pass on UE5.5 that by itself increases performance a lot too. A lot of devs, even in a stupid demo, just slap lights horribly overlapping, not caring one bit how much noise it adds to the scene or how much it kills performance. Just decreasing bounds of lighting makes a huge difference to both, whilst keeping general look of the scene very similar. In response, many devs started accusing him he has no clue what he's talking about. And there we are, straight from the horses' mouth a big confirmation TI dude knows very well what he's talking about.
It just shows that a lot of devs really are just junior inexperienced people that have no clue what they're really doing but have gigantic egos.
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