F1 25 Path Tracing update early access

Gaiff

Gaiff

SBI’s Resident Gaslighter
Haven't seen a thread about it, but they spoke about it on DF Direct and a couple of channels also made comparisons.

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What's the catch you may ask? Well, the performance.

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1/3rd slower than full RT, which isn't too bad, but it's also on a 5090. You need DLSS Balanced to always remain above 60fps. A 4090 probably gets you by with DLSS Performance, and everything below probably can't run it at 4K DLSS unless you go with Ultra Performance.


 
This game looks stunning with path tracing. some tweaks here and there, and it can almost look photorealstic on PC with mods.
 
I dabbled with path tracing in this game with a 4090 and while it made for good screenshots it's not worth the performance hit for a high speed game like this.
 
I dont think its THAT good.
The bridge scene...underside of bridge is like pitch black with RT, and pretty similar between rasterized and path traced. Car is ofc lit differently and brighter compared to environment, but id argue that surroundings in shadow are just too dark.
I mean, its jusy a shadow during midday, not a tunnel. Its not suppose to be so dark (even if its technicly more correct). And certainly not worth to cut half the framerate.
Also in that comparation with the Pro....its worth mentioning that they simply downgraded RT in F1 25. TPP view shows almost no occlusion under the car on Pro. But F1 24 was occluded similar to PT.
It just shows that they just made regular RT worse just to make PT look better in comparation.
 
The pathtracing mode looks great but damn if they didn't nerf the standard rt mode to shit. It should not look like that, I get they wanted to highlight the pt mode but sabotaging the other modes isn't the way.
 
Path tracing looks good, ray tracing looks bad. Let pause ray tracing until we get path tracing working at a steady frame rate. I would say rasterized and path tracing have a similar effect on the viewer, and ray tracing is the odd emo option.
 
Magik85 said:
I dont think its THAT good.
The bridge scene...underside of bridge is like pitch black with RT, and pretty similar between rasterized and path traced. Car is ofc lit differently and brighter compared to environment, but id argue that surroundings in shadow are just too dark.
I mean, its jusy a shadow during midday, not a tunnel. Its not suppose to be so dark (even if its technicly more correct). And certainly not worth to cut half the framerate.
Also in that comparation with the Pro....its worth mentioning that they simply downgraded RT in F1 25. TPP view shows almost no occlusion under the car on Pro. But F1 24 was occluded similar to PT.
It just shows that they just made regular RT worse just to make PT look better in comparation.
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Yeah, I'm not really seeing anything here that would be worth halving your FPS.
 
Closing down Codemasters (if the rumors are true) is one of the most retarded things EA could do. Codemasters deliver solid to good games in a regular interval, something which many other EA Studios (DICE, BioWare, EA Motive, Ghost Games, Criterion Games) have had trouble with for more than a decade now.
 
As in most cases, I don't see anything that in a limited scenario and with static lighting, that can't be adjusted without path/ray tracing.

It's a logical advancement, but the cost in performance is not worth it, it only serves to make PC enthusiasts comment " it's absolutely amazing!!!! " when 99% of gamers just see a brighter game....
 
Magik85 said:
I dont think its THAT good.
The bridge scene...underside of bridge is like pitch black with RT, and pretty similar between rasterized and path traced. Car is ofc lit differently and brighter compared to environment, but id argue that surroundings in shadow are just too dark.
I mean, its jusy a shadow during midday, not a tunnel. Its not suppose to be so dark (even if its technicly more correct). And certainly not worth to cut half the framerate.
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I think this has been an issues in most RTGI and PT games I've seen and it's probably related to light bouncing. Each light bounce adds a cost so most games have a hard limit of like 3 or 4 which is too low and leads in very dark scenes. We're still far away from photo realism, even PT is just a rough approximation in its current state. Certainly not worth the cost for most users.
 
Skifi28 said:
I think this has been an issues in most RTGI and PT games I've seen and it's probably related to light bouncing. Each light bounce adds a cost so most games have a hard limit of like 3 or 4 which is too low and leads in very dark scenes. We're still far away from photo realism, even PT is just a rough approximation in its current state. Certainly not worth the cost for most users.
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Yeah, pretty much. And when there is no fall back to baked lighting, especially in dark games, you are getting crushed blacks everywhere.
 
Thief1987 said:
Looks like absolutely worthless power hog


PCMR with 5k $ videocard paid for the brightness slider, amazing
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*looks at posing history*

*a troll that has slipped under the banhammer*

SABRE220 said:
The pathtracing mode looks great but damn if they didn't nerf the standard rt mode to shit. It should not look like that, I get they wanted to highlight the pt mode but sabotaging the other modes isn't the way.
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It's not nerfed, it's just very light and runs on a wide variety of hardware, including RDNA2. RT is only about 25% slower than raster, which is a small difference as it's usually closer to 50% with games with the full suite.
 
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dgrdsv said:
PS6 won't be anywhere close to that - unless it will be delayed well into the late 2030s.
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We are going to have midrange gpus before the end of this decade that will be able to do that. While I don't think the ps6 will be able to do this, but late 2030s? Come on man, we'll have cheap handheld PCs able to do this kind of ray tracing by then.
 
Huge difference.

Insane power needed for it to be pulled off but no way anyone can tell me that isn't significantly different.

That looks insane.
 
Fancy looking but basically useless.

You want 100fps all time when playing racing games.
And when you'll be able to play PT at 100 fps you'll already be playing F1 28-30.

Still, it's good looking.
 
dgrdsv said:
PS6 won't be anywhere close to that - unless it will be delayed well into the late 2030s.
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No offence but aren't you the same person who predicted the PSSR was sort of bilinear upscaling or something in line of such approach, very rudimentary, because sony hasn't the same access to the new tech as Nvidia? Why you should be right this time? I don't say it will be like per like the Nvidia quality but still very close.
 
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Karim said:
No offence but aren't you the same person who predicted the PSSR was sort of bilinear upscaling or something in line of such approach, very rudimentary, because sony hasn't the same access to the new tech as Nvidia? Why you should be right this time? I don't say it will be like per like the Nvidia quality but still very close.
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Depends on what he means, if he means the PS6 won't be 4080 level (as per the second vid) then I'm pretty sure that's wrong, very good chance the PS6 will exceed or be at that performance target. If he means 5090 level (as per DF testing) then that is correct, no feasible PS6 would be at that level of power.
 
This "for and against" stuff is such a waste of time. People have made the same arguments against every possible new graphical feature since forever (including parallax scrolling using too much memory, 3D compared to "crisp 2D sprites", bump mapping, hardware T&L, etc. etc.) - Until of course it becomes a completely trivial argument once you can run them at "1 000 fps".
 
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Zathalus said:
Depends on what he means, if he means the PS6 won't be 4080 level (as per the second vid) then I'm pretty sure that's wrong, very good chance the PS6 will exceed or be at that performance target. If he means 5090 level (as per DF testing) then that is correct, no feasible PS6 would be at that level of power.
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My wild guess is merely referring to the path tracing tech. He already said similar stuff in the past for pssr as won't use any advanced AI tech because sony being Sony and not Nvidia.
 
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For those, like me, who are wondering what the difference between ray tracing and path tracing is, path tracing is basically a more advanced form of ray tracing. An AI summary:

Ray tracing and path tracing are both techniques used in computer graphics to simulate how light interacts with objects, but they differ in their methods. Ray tracing typically traces rays from the camera to the light source, while path tracing sends out multiple rays from the light source, allowing for more complex light interactions and realistic images.
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And yet with all that takning FPS cars are still detached from the track visually. EGO is an aging engine an PT solves nothing with it's core crude PBR pipeline.

So far the best-looking RT tech in racing games is GT7 on a pro, but not because of tech, but because of how autistic PD is with their tech art (paint reflections are emulatred with 3 layers in mind IIRC) and HDR calibration. I guess same will be with PT tech and we will see true benefits for racing titles in GT8 on PS6.
 
I've been playing F1 25 with pathtracing for a week now and think the game plays well and looks very good on my i5-13600KF, 32 GB, RTX 4080 FE, Windows 11 Pro 24H2 PC at 1440p with DLSS Quality and frame gen enabled. Runs perfectly smoothly, no stuttering, in the 7 hours I've played so far across 16+ tracks and weather/lighting conditions.

The thing is though... having also gone back and forth between this game and last year's F1 24 to see how it compares with the newer games... I'll be honest here and say that I personally don't think that path-tracing adds that much to the presenation. Sure, there ARE absolutely differences as can be seen in the Digital Foundry video clip but my point is that these differences are really not that apparent when I am playing it. I mean I'm driving at 100+ mph for most of the race so the path-tracing improvements are not that obvious. Even when I watch the replays or check out the photo mode, the differences versus RT are not that huge. It's not like it transforms the game from a cartoon to realism. It is not a night and day difference in my humble opinion, plus the game still has a look that makes it not look as photo-realistic as I was expecting it to. Some lighting can look a bit odd - also mentioned by DF - and wet races actually look underwhelming because the track itself doesn't look wet and shiny with lots of puddles and reflections like in earlier games. Having shadows not draw in on the road and trees while racing is definitely nice to have but you get that with normal RT anyway.

I think the F1 games need a new engine to really push for more realistic looking visuals and lighting. It looks really good and the pre-race cinematics showing the tracks can look really nice and almost, almost, realistic (again, they do with RT too) but ultimately path-tracing here just feels like an iterative update to the previous RT features that have pushed the current engine as far as it will go.
 
Doctor Hades said:
I've been playing F1 25 with pathtracing for a week now and think the game plays well and looks very good on my i5-13600KF, 32 GB, RTX 4080 FE, Windows 11 Pro 24H2 PC at 1440p with DLSS Quality and frame gen enabled. Runs perfectly smoothly, no stuttering, in the 7 hours I've played so far across 16+ tracks and weather/lighting conditions.

The thing is though... having also gone back and forth between this game and last year's F1 24 to see how it compares with the newer games... I'll be honest here and say that I personally don't think that path-tracing adds that much to the presenation. Sure, there ARE absolutely differences as can be seen in the Digital Foundry video clip but my point is that these differences are really not that apparent when I am playing it. I mean I'm driving at 100+ mph for most of the race so the path-tracing improvements are not that obvious. Even when I watch the replays or check out the photo mode, the differences versus RT are not that huge. It's not like it transforms the game from a cartoon to realism. It is not a night and day difference in my humble opinion, plus the game still has a look that makes it not look as photo-realistic as I was expecting it to. Some lighting can look a bit odd - also mentioned by DF - and wet races actually look underwhelming because the track itself doesn't look wet and shiny with lots of puddles and reflections like in earlier games. Having shadows not draw in on the road and trees while racing is definitely nice to have but you get that with normal RT anyway.

I think the F1 games need a new engine to really push for more realistic looking visuals and lighting. It looks really good and the pre-race cinematics showing the tracks can look really nice and almost, almost, realistic (again, they do with RT too) but ultimately path-tracing here just feels like an iterative update to the previous RT features that have pushed the current engine as far as it will go.
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Yeah, it's a racing game. The lighting, reflections, and shadows change so often that you can't actually see the difference unless you pause or it's something continuous like the reflections on the tarmac or on the sides of the track. Otherwise, whatever the car reflects shifts too fast and too often to really appreciate the upgrades.

ShaiKhulud1989 said:
And yet with all that takning FPS cars are still detached from the track visually. EGO is an aging engine an PT solves nothing with it's core crude PBR pipeline.

So far the best-looking RT tech in racing games is GT7 on a pro, but not because of tech, but because of how autistic PD is with their tech art (paint reflections are emulatred with 3 layers in mind IIRC) and HDR calibration. I guess same will be with PT tech and we will see true benefits for racing titles in GT8 on PS6.
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I think you mean that GT7 is the best-looking racing game that has RT, not that it has the best-looking RT tech because it most definitely does not.
 
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Gaiff said:
Yeah, it's a racing game. The lighting, reflections, and shadows change so often that you can't actually see the difference unless you pause or it's something continuous like the reflections on the tarmac or on the sides of the track. Otherwise, whatever the car reflects shifts too fast and too often to really appreciate the upgrades.


I think you mean that GT7 is the best-looking racing game that has RT, not that it has the best-looking RT tech because it most definitely does not.
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That what I've meant, yes.
 
ShaiKhulud1989 said:
That what I've meant, yes.
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Yeah, this makes sense. GT7 probably has several times the budget of F1 25, plus F1 is a yearly release. They make what, one or two GT per generation now?

Ray tracing as we use it now isn't used to make more realistic or better materials like paint or metal (although it can), so besides the lighting quality and shadows, not much Codemasters can do to reach GT levels of quality.

Would be really cool to see GT7 ported to PC with path tracing, but they'd never do that.
 
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I wonder if ps5 version can increase the scene exposure and fake it better

It just looks too dark besides the path traced 4080
 
dgrdsv said:
PS6 won't be anywhere close to that - unless it will be delayed well into the late 2030s.
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Close to what? You're crazy if you think the PS6 won't be able to do path tracing. The only way it won't is if it comes out in 2027.
 
I'm actually disappointed in the PS5 Pro version. It does not look good at all and the brightness is way too high. Currently the only way to fix it is turning off HDR and adjusting Gamma. Hope they release a fix.
 
Von Hugh said:
Yeah, I'm not really seeing anything here that would be worth halving your FPS.
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Watching ""4k"" YouTube videos will never look as good as playing it yourself. For instance Cyberpunk looks wayyyy better when you're actually playing it with PT but watching videos the difference is negligible.

And I get why they are getting DLAA footage because it's going to look the absolute it can but it would be dumb to play it like that on any current setup.
 
SABRE220 said:
The pathtracing mode looks great but damn if they didn't nerf the standard rt mode to shit. It should not look like that, I get they wanted to highlight the pt mode but sabotaging the other modes isn't the way.
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TrebleShot said:
Same on Indiana Jones
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And tell me guys, what is that those two games have in common?

Gaiff said:
It's not nerfed, it's just very light and runs on a wide variety of hardware, including RDNA2. RT is only about 25% slower than raster, which is a small difference as it's usually closer to 50% with games with the full suite.
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It's actually technically nerfed. Game uses Nvidia's DDGI for its RT presentation. DDGI needs additional AO, be it SS or RT, for contact shadows and additional tuning for self shadows. As we can see, the RTAO implementation ends up leaving a lot of stuff out of the BVH, and the SSAO they use can't even make up for that because they are featuring CACAO, which, although I have never used it, it has always looked like crap and almost non-existant in any game it got featured in.

Devs here had literally one job: pair DDGI with a good AO implemetation. For some, let's say inexplicable, reason, they didn't do that. If they would have done DDGI plus GTAO, the result would have been very good, better than the current Raster and RT presentations, and closer to the PT one, especially in the scene under the bridge. I know that for a fact because I have used GTAO plenty of times.

That, and the hilarious fact that a lot of what Battaglia says in the segment is actually wrong lmao. Bro says DDGI suffers from light leaks: wrong. Radius in AO has to do with scene coverage: wrong again. And the sheer display of confidence while conveying these copious amounts of BS, incredible stuff. The day some well respected and recognized dev will publicly call this poser out, I will open a bottle of Dom.
 
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There's a difference between rasterization and ray tracing, but I feel like there's a massive difference between ray tracing and path tracing. The way every light source is accounted for and bounces light more realistically to lit up the place.
If we ever get to a point where PT is the standard and everything is actually designed around it, that's when things start looking crazy.
 
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