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[winjer]

TLDR.
Ray-tracing implementation in most current games, have significant issues with image quality, due to the need to accumulate data across several frames.
This can lead to a noisy image, even when using a denoiser.
Using Ray-Reconstruction has issues with image quality lag, because the reconstruction has to wait for data to accumulate. And to make things worse, texture detail can only be rendered after RR has completed.
Even when the image is still, issues with noisy surfaces can be noticed. But in motion, the effect is more pronounced.
Ray-reconstruction lag can be very noticeable with in movement.
Denoisers and RR can also cause blurry reflections, that make a game's textures to look lower resolution.
Between TAA, frame generation, upscalers, Ray-tracing, denoisers and ray reconstruction, image quality and clarity can suffer a lot in modern games. Especially in motion.
At lower resolutions, these problems become even worse and more noticeable.

For more information and a ton of examples, watch the full analysis.

 

[Gonzito]

Yep. I hate it. And Unreal Engine 5 is the king of this shit

 

[mansoor1980]

watched the whole thing..........................so many caveats for this tech

 

[The_Observer]

It’s terrible. I wish devs went with the “fake” solutions that they used before ray-tracing. We would have an obvious generational leap in visuals and better performance. Now we have worse graphics in some ways than before and worse performance. It was too early for RT.

 

[amigastar]

Strange, with Pathtracing in Cyberpunk2077 i haven't noticed any noise problems if i recall correctly.
But i haven't watched the video yet.

 

[Senua]

Strange, with Pathtracing in Cyberpunk2077 i haven't noticed any noise problems if i recall correctly.
But i haven't watched the video yet.

Ray reconstruction!!!!1111

 

[omegasc]

It’s terrible. I wish devs went with the “fake” solutions that they used before ray-tracing. We would have an obvious generational leap in visuals and better performance. Now we have worse graphics in some ways than before and worse performance. It was too early for RT.

Problem is nvidia has been marketing it as the 2nd, 3rd and 4th coming of the Messiah, just to market new expensive power hungry graphics cards, and people are falling for it and trash talk anything that doesn't include it in any way, even if most of the time the result isn't that noticeable without pausing and analysing the frame side by side.
The rest of the industry is just reacting, as it always happens. Business FOMO.

 

[Gaiff]

It’s terrible. I wish devs went with the “fake” solutions that they used before ray-tracing. We would have an obvious generational leap in visuals and better performance.

I mean, would we? Open worlds are some of the most popular games right now, and baking light maps and probes for games that are that big would be prohibitively long. Planar reflections are far too demanding to be used like in the past. They're even more punishing than ray-traced reflections. Techniques such as cubemaps and SSR have glaring issues.

At the moment, the games with the best lighting all use a form of ray tracing. Old rasterized techniques just aren't up to par and if they are, it's only from studios with virtually unlimited budgets, enormous staffs, and a lot of dev time (Naughty Dog). Not exactly viable for most studios.

Traditional solutions aren't viable to create generational leaps in visuals anymore.

Now we have worse graphics in some ways than before and worse performance. It was too early for RT.

We really don't have worse graphics in any way. Some IQ problems, but AAA games now are a cut above the ones from last-gen.

 

[winjer]

Ray tracing is an innovative technology bro! It's totally worth it losing half your fps for it bro!

 

[Denton]

Ray tracing is an innovative technology bro! It's totally worth it losing half your fps for it bro!

Doesn't HL2 use planar reflections that basically render the scene twice? Yes it looks fantastic, but I think it would eat lot more framerate than RT (let alone screenspace ref) does, considering today's polycounts.

It is true that today's tech is not fast enough to handle artifact-free path tracing yet, but so what? You gotta start somewhere and GPU companies are working on both techniques to eliminate the artifacts (RayRecon) and on faster hardware that can process bigger ray counts.

 

[Mister Wolf]

Playing Stalker 2 right now. I'd rather have the RT lighting and deal with the noise. Felt the same way when I played Control back in 2019.

 

[winjer]

Doesn't HL2 use planar reflections that basically render the scene twice? Yes it looks fantastic, but I think it would eat lot more framerate than RT (let alone screenspace ref) does, considering today's polycounts.

It is true that today's tech is not fast enough to handle artifact-free path tracing yet, but so what? You gotta start somewhere and GPU companies are working on both techniques to eliminate the artifacts (RayRecon) and on faster hardware that can process more ray counts.

It does, but it's not as heavy as RT.
Even GPUs from 2 decades ago could handle HL2 reflections.

 

[Denton]

It does, but it's not as heavy as RT.
Even GPUs from 2 decades ago could handle HL2 reflections.

Are you sure about that? Are rendering programmers just dumb not to use it, then?

GPUs from 2 decades ago could handle it relative to the polycount of that game. But that is not necessarily comparable apples to apples to today's polycounts and GPU speeds.

 

[amigastar]

Doesn't HL2 use planar reflections that basically render the scene twice? Yes it looks fantastic, but I think it would eat lot more framerate than RT (let alone screenspace ref) does, considering today's polycounts.

It is true that today's tech is not fast enough to handle artifact-free path tracing yet, but so what? You gotta start somewhere and GPU companies are working on both techniques to eliminate the artifacts (RayRecon) and on faster hardware that can process bigger ray counts.

So true, it has to start somewhere and honestly it's only getting better.

 

[Gaiff]

It does, but it's not as heavy as RT.
Even GPUs from 2 decades ago could handle HL2 reflections.

Planar reflections would murder GPU worse than RT reflections today.

 

[GymWolf]

Ray tracing is an innovative technology bro! It's totally worth it losing half your fps for it bro!

But if you stop and move the camera for 30 sec instead of playing you can see how the reflection break, unforgivable.

Better lose 60% of your performance to never see that.

 

[winjer]

Are you sure about that? Are rendering programmers just dumb not to use it, then?

GPUs from 2 decades ago could handle it relative to the polycount of that game. But that is not necessarily comparable apples to apples to today's polycounts and GPU speeds.

Planar reflections performance don't depend on polygon count.
It's more similar to cube maps with perspective correction.
The problem is that is labour intensive. So most studios prefer to do it cheaply by using SR or RT reflections.

 

[Skifi28]

RT can be great in the hands of big studios that know what they're doing, but now that we're moving down the ladder and even the low-tier studios start using it as a cruch to save time without really knowing what they're doing, issues keep pilling up.

 

[SolidQ]

Even GPUs from 2 decades ago could handle HL2 reflections.

except FX series which can't

 

[winjer]

except FX series which can't

That was not because of reflections.
The FX series sucked on all games, especially with DX9.

 

[SolidQ]

The FX series sucked on all games, especially with DX9.

I know, FX literally worst cards ever made. I'm showing 9700 which run fine HL2

 

[Denton]

Planar reflections performance don't depend on polygon count.
It's more similar to cube maps with perspective correction.

Are you sure about that?

 

[The Cockatrice]

Doesn't HL2 use planar reflections that basically render the scene twice? Yes it looks fantastic, but I think it would eat lot more framerate than RT (let alone screenspace ref) does, considering today's polycounts.

Lets say HL2 is an old so it can handle planar. Hitman the modern one also uses planar reflections and it runs absolutely perfect. I think the DragonEngine also used planar reflections and again, runs nice as well.

 

[mansoor1980]

4x MSAA tanked performance in Half life 2 , not reflections , back in the day

 

[Gaiff]

Planar reflections performance don't depend on polygon count.

???

• The cost to render the Planar Reflection Actor comes directly from what is currently being rendered in the level. Scenes that are triangle and draw call heavy will suffer the most performance issues when this feature is enabled because those costs don't scale with Screen Percentage.

It says right here that scenes that are triangle heavy will suffer the most.

 

[Denton]

Hitman the modern one also uses planar reflections and it runs absolutely perfect.

Are you sure it uses it for anything else except mirrors?

 

[raul3d]

Yea, Planar Reflections render the scene multiple times basically multiplying the rendering cost. They show correct reflections and even reflect off-screen stuff. However, they are extensive in complex scenes, you can only use them on flat surfaces (HL2 water) and they only work with forward rendering.

 

[Three]

Very nice video with good examples shown. Thanks for sharing winjer

One thing I don't understand is Overdrive mode in CP
Does overdrive still use SSR as a fallback somehow? I see the guns incorrect reflection on the ceiling occasionally. Timestampped:

 

[The Cockatrice]

Are you sure it uses it for anything else except mirrors?

Its used on certain surfaces as well such as in the Dubai one, but yeah mostly for mirrors, but to be fair there are a ton of mirrors. Still, UE5 games cant even do mirrors properly anymore without RT.

 

[Gaiff]

Its used on certain surfaces as well such as in the Dubai one, but yeah mostly for mirrors, but to be fair there are a ton of mirrors. Still, UE5 games cant even do mirrors properly anymore without RT.

UE5 supports planar reflections as well.

 

[ChoosableOne]

These guys enjoy making AMD executives happy. First, they made me hate my Nvidia card with 8gb vram, and now they're basically saying ray tracing is not worth it. I'm not saying they're wrong, but it feels like they have an extra agenda.

The only game I played with RT on was Portal, and even that was a very different experience. I didn't noticed any artifacts while playing it, it was gorgeous. If I buy a new card, I'll prioritize ray tracing performance. Of course this technology still needs to evolve further.

 

[Skifi28]

These guys enjoy making AMD executives happy. First, they made me hate my Nvidia card with 8gb vram, and now they're basically saying ray tracing is not worth it. I'm not saying they're wrong, but it feels like they have an extra agenda.

The only game I played with RT on was Portal, and even that was a very different experience. I didn't noticed any artifacts while playing it, it was gorgeous. If I buy a new card, I'll prioritize ray tracing performance. Of course this technology still needs to evolve further.

Making you hate 8GB cards in 2024 and soon 2025 is not having an agenda.

 

[winjer]

???

• The cost to render the Planar Reflection Actor comes directly from what is currently being rendered in the level. Scenes that are triangle and draw call heavy will suffer the most performance issues when this feature is enabled because those costs don't scale with Screen Percentage.

It says right here that scenes that are triangle heavy will suffer the most.

Are you sure about that?

You are right, I was mistaking planar reflections with cubemaps.

Still, there are ways to optimize planar reflections. Some are similar to what is done in RT, such as using lower LODs, for the proxy world. Culling of hidden surfaces and things out of the FoV. Etc.

On the other hand, it would not have the same issues with noise and render lag that RT has.

 

[MikeM]

RT is cool and all but rarely have I played a game and noticed bad raster lighting. Games like Metro show that you can have some RT and still be performant, but obviously pathtracing like on CP2077 is different entirely.

My problem with today’s cards are that solutions have massive costs. RT cost is still a huge impact to FPS. Frame generation has fairly high latency impacts. The only real tech that i’ve been impressed by thus far is upscalers.

 

[Allandor]

Yeah, the noise started with reconstruction techs and get much worse with RT. Rt is just not ready to be used in such ways and I don't know if it ever will. You always have the noise problem especially when heavily used.

Currently I'm playing Indiana Jones and the rt in that game doesn't seem to have those side effects (played it on Xbox and PC (AMD GPU)). Instead the game has a really good look, everything looks like it belongs to the game and just like quake 2 engine back than, it has a more organic look to it.

 

[MALpractice311]

I'm glad to see many others finally realizing we were sold a bill of goods with ray tracing, at least as far as using it on plug and play consoles that don't have the horsepower to do it properly, without severe tradeoffs. However, I'm sorry to see it took so many examples for others to finally figure this out.

 

[funking giblet]

With a planar reflection you do the following

Place a camera in the world and render everything below the waterline to a texture at whatever resolution you wish, the higher, the better for quality. You can choose to populate this "scene" with whatever you want, either exactly the same models, lesser quality ones, or just skip. And you can skip effects too if you wish.

Then do the same at the player position, but below the waterline the same distance as the player is above waterline, pointing up. Render to texture, again you can populate the scene how you wish, and at whatever resolution.

I used to use a third texture, of an animated normal map to simulate waves perturbing the surface, so apply that via a shader, and also blend in a Fresnel term which you can blend a colour of the underwater more if your surface normal is pointing towards the camera, or from the sky the higher the angle of incidence of the normal, and also a colour with more/less transparency reacting to same. Then in your main render, apply the texture to the surface, usually a giant plane quad.

There, multiple scene renders to do a simple reflection.

 

[Rickyiez]

I mean, would we? Open worlds are some of the most popular games right now, and baking light maps and probes for games that are that big would be prohibitively long. Planar reflections are far too demanding to be used like in the past. They're even more punishing than ray-traced reflections. Techniques such as cubemaps and SSR have glaring issues.

At the moment, the games with the best lighting all use a form of ray tracing. Old rasterized techniques just aren't up to par and if they are, it's only from studios with virtually unlimited budgets, enormous staffs, and a lot of dev time (Naughty Dog). Not exactly viable for most studios.

Traditional solutions aren't viable to create generational leaps in visuals anymore.



We really don't have worse graphics in any way. Some IQ problems, but AAA games now are a cut above the ones from last-gen.

Thank you for clarifying this out loud. If this is Reddit , this post should be the at the top of the thread

Other than this post , there are so much nonsense here like bb…bbut my baked lighting lmao

We need to take a leap and it’s not going to get perfected in a single night

PS1 texture wrapping garbage looking 3D had people complaining 3D was a mistake and it should stay with sprites, same shit now

 

[GHG]

RT global illumination is where the real game changer is. Shadows and reflections tend to have mixed outcomes.

 

[TrebleShot]

A tipping point for upscalers.
They dont really have a lot more headroom to improve based on the algorithm and how it's used.

In fact AI across the board is reaching critical mass.

In terms of beating this the answer is simple either disable RT or play at lower native res and ignore upscaling which in thisnday and age is practically impossible.

Call me a basic bitch but I prefer intentional baked lighting techniques. Just take a look at something like Uncharted 4 or TLOU2 not a ray traced in sight. Same with Horizon FW.

 

[Senua]

RT global illumination is where the real game changer is. Shadows and reflections tend to have mixed outcomes.

This this this. Forza Motorsport finally released their RTGI patch and it's completely booked and downgraded from the previous unlocked developer settings RTGI. We can't have nice things

 

[Thief1987]

watched the whole thing..........................so many caveats for this tech

Yeah, this thing looks like a classic vicious circle

 

[diffusionx]

Traditional solutions aren't viable to create generational leaps in visuals anymore.

Except we've had GPUs with ray tracing since 2018 and "generational leaps" are pretty thin on the ground. This stuff just isn't what it was cracked up to be. You do get improvements for sure but we are fully in the diminished return stage.

 

[efyu_lemonardo]

Algorithm that is too costly to run in real time on available hardware suffers from implementations that aren't ready for prime time.
News at 11:00

 

[GHG]

This this this. Forza Motorsport finally released their RTGI patch and it's completely booked and downgraded from the previous unlocked developer settings RTGI. We can't have nice things

I haven't been keeping up with the latest Forza Motorsport, but they finally released the RTGI patch and somehow managed to fuck it up?

 

[Elios83]

The performance cost is still too high for current hardware, so the effects are implemented in low resolutions and are noisy.

 

[Gaiff]

A tipping point for upscalers.
They dont really have a lot more headroom to improve based on the algorithm and how it's used.

In fact AI across the board is reaching critical mass.

In terms of beating this the answer is simple either disable RT or play at lower native res and ignore upscaling which in thisnday and age is practically impossible.

Call me a basic bitch but I prefer intentional baked lighting techniques. Just take a look at something like Uncharted 4 or TLOU2 not a ray traced in sight. Same with Horizon FW.

HFW has awful lighting. TLOU2 and Uncharted 4 don’t look amazing there either.

If anything, those games demonstrate how far lighting has come when they were the pinnacle on consoles just a few years ago.

Edit: Also, Tim isn’t advocating the removal of RT. He highlights problems that need addressing, but he still prefers ray tracing to raster and says so multiple times in the video. This isn’t a victory for baked lighting like many seem to think it is.

 

[Denton]

Still, there are ways to optimize planar reflections. Some are similar to what is done in RT, such as using lower LODs, for the proxy world. Culling of hidden surfaces and things out of the FoV. Etc.

Even if it was possible to optimize planar reflections to be "only" as performance hitting as RT, there are big limitations they impose that RT doesn't, e.g.

• Planar reflections only work for planar surfaces; this rasterization approach will not allow for glossy surfaces.
• By contrast, ray tracing with denoising does not lose geometry, is dynamic, and works on a wide range of surfaces, including glossy ones.

RTX Coffee Break: Ray Traced Reflections and Denoising (9:52 minutes) | NVIDIA Technical Blog

Reproducing accurate reflections has always been a big challenge in game development. Artists and engineers traditionally needed to apply a complex set of connected solutions – and even then…

developer.nvidia.com

 

[Agent_4Seven]

And Unreal Engine 5 is the king of this shit

Basically any engine with software RT as well as BS Micosoft's DXR.

 

[StereoVsn]

Part of the issue has to be caused by Unreal. Something is off in Unreal 5 with RT performance results if Devs aren’t very skilled in Unreal and most just aren’t.

Or maybe it’s time constraints. But seriously I really hate this trend of going to Unreal and having shit performance and stutters. Super disappointed by CDPR going away from their very performant (after fixes) and scalable engine in Cyberpunk.