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[ScHlAuChi]

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.

Completely unsustainable to go back to the old ways for any modern games!
With baked lighting you had to rebuild the lights every single time you changed something in the scene and wait for ages to see the result - total insanity!
The giant win in productivity for art and design alone outweights any such disadvantages!

 

[P:axMagellanic]

All these billions of transistors, all this technology to effectively reintroduce a dithery, fucked image not too dissimilar to the 16bit colour days.

We used to laugh at the ridiculous AO implementations that halo'd like a motherfucker only to bring it back even worse than ever.

Decades of anti aliasing advancement to throw it out for temporal shit that smears several frames together.

Ohh yeah, pay through the nose for this crap as well. Well done handing leather jacket his 90 percent share.

 

[kikkis]

Completely unsustainable to go back to the old ways for any modern games!
With baked lighting you had to rebuild the lights every single time you changed something in the scene and wait for ages until the light was rebuilt to see the result - total insanity!
The giant win in productivity for art and design alone outweights any such disadvantages!

I don't think it needs to be that way. Devs could use rt ray tracing for development machines and bake for production. Cod does bakes quickly for large maps as well.

 

[The Cockatrice]

UE5 supports planar reflections as well.

Most engines do, the devs just choose not to use them because well Id rather not go there. In SH2 at the start of the game the mirror reflects your character nicely without the use of RT. In the middle of the game as well with the Angela on the floor scene.

 

[SF Kosmo]

AI denoising/ray reconstruction is definitely helping to bridge the gap, but it's important to recognize we are still in early days. Just as the transition from 2D to 3D didn't happen all at once, with 2D techniques and sprites continuing to be important in 3D games until the hardware was able to better handle it, we're still in a transitional era where most games are using a combination of methods.

Indiana Jones' path tracing mode has zero noise or IQ issues, though I also suspect it isn't really path tracing as much as a suite of RT lighting affects applied to the raster pipeline. That might be the compromise that makes the most sense for a lot of games right now.

In the long run, gains in AI and RT performance should bridge this gap before too long, and hopefully next gen consoles are in a better position to make pathtracing the baseline.

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

You're not remembering correctly, there's definite noise and IQ compromises with it, although they're still quite worth it overall imo.

 

[LordOcidax]

I still prefer “ancient” lighting but the industry has moved, some things feels like we moved backwards…

 

[mansoor1980]

 

[diffusionx]

AI denoising/ray reconstruction is definitely helping to bridge the gap, but it's important to recognize we are still in early days. Just as the transition from 2D to 3D didn't happen all at once, with 2D techniques and sprites continuing to be important in 3D games until the hardware was able to better handle it, we're still in a transitional era where most games are using a combination of methods.

Indiana Jones' path tracing mode has zero noise or IQ issues, though I also suspect it isn't really path tracing as much as a suite of RT lighting affects applied to the raster pipeline. That might be the compromise that makes the most sense for a lot of games right now.

I think one of the issues here is that all these devs are using this generic engine and using it badly.

Indiana Jones is using a different engine. I am playing Spiderman 2 which looks spectacular and it is using a different engine. Cyberpunk is using a different engine. The list goes on and on. Back when 3D got started, basically every game had its own engine, so devs learned the tech, learned it quickly, turned around games quickly, now everyone is shackling themselves to this shit Unreal engine.

 

[Darkness_Arises]

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.

HFW is the prettiest game I have ever played. If that is awful lighting, I will take it every single time over ugly ass PoS with realistic lighting like Metro Exodus.

 

[Gaiff]

HFW is the prettiest game I have ever played. If that is awful lighting, I will take it every single time over ugly ass PoS with realistic lighting like Metro Exodus.

It's still a very good looking game despite its lighting. Certainly isn't one of its strengths or the reason it looks good.

 

[Elog]

The problem is that it has been marketed as something that will make everything look amazing. Outside of glass/metal/water reflections there is basically nothing that the old technology could not do with the same great result. However, it is insanely more efficient on the developer side to utilize RT (i.e., it cuts development time and resource use quite dramatically). But as long as not all GPUs can do RT quite well, developers still need to do alot of the heavy lifting as before. We are stuck in the middle right now.

 

[SF Kosmo]

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.

Hard disagree on the lack of generational leaps, the last couple GPU gens have each doubled RT performance, and improvements to AI in performance and functionality have served as a generational multiplier beyond that.

A 4080 or 4090 running path tracing in Cyberpunk is clearly generationally ahead of the kind of limited RT that a top of the line card would have done in that game at launch, both in terms of the raw compute needed to do it and the resulting look of the game.

But we still probably have another two hens to go until we get to where the compromises disappear. I think it's still clearly where we're going, but we're in a transitional period.

 

[nemiroff]

 

[Senua]

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?

Yep. External views it looks decent but they have nerfed it in the cockpit, where it was going to make the biggest appreciable difference.

See here for comparisons

Forza Motorsport General Discussion Thread

What? I am saying that the barriers are higher in game than they are in real life, there's no need to stop cars from flipping over barriers in a video game where they can just place invisible walls. Then people would complain there's an invisible wall and that's not realistic. 🤷‍♂️

www.gtplanet.net

 

[simpatico]

Completely unsustainable to go back to the old ways for any modern games!
With baked lighting you had to rebuild the lights every single time you changed something in the scene and wait for ages to see the result - total insanity!
The giant win in productivity for art and design alone outweights any such disadvantages!

When will gamers see the fruits of these efficiencies?

 

[YeulEmeralda]

I think one of the issues here is that all these devs are using this generic engine and using it badly.

Indiana Jones is using a different engine. I am playing Spiderman 2 which looks spectacular and it is using a different engine. Cyberpunk is using a different engine. The list goes on and on. Back when 3D got started, basically every game had its own engine, so devs learned the tech, learned it quickly, turned around games quickly, now everyone is shackling themselves to this shit Unreal engine.

Nobody wants to learn a new engine if they are fired after 2 years.
Meanwhile with Unreal on your CV you can work anywhere.

 

[SF Kosmo]

The problem is that it has been marketed as something that will make everything look amazing. Outside of glass/metal/water reflections there is basically nothing that the old technology could not do with the same great result.

This isn't true, lighting is a massive paradigm shift. With RT you can light a scene naturally, entirely using a pretty much unlimited number of source lights.

The problem we have right now is that games still have to maintain compatibility with older, non-RT methods, which means they have to be arted in a way that works in the legacy renderer -- which means limitations to the amount of lights and usually the inclusion of non-source lights. So even if you switch to RT in these games they're still compromising, because they aren't being made in a way that really leverages the unique advantages of RT lighting.

Unreal is offering software solutions like megalights and lumen that deliver fallbacks that handle light more similarly to how RT does, so this could help. Even older solutions like SVOGI help. Or we might see more games just ditch legacy rendering and require some amount of RTGI as a baseline (as is the case with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle).

 

[ScHlAuChi]

When will gamers see the fruits of these efficiencies?

They already do!
Look at the insane graphical quality and amount of content of modern games!
You can now develop a game in 5 years that would have taken 10 years the old way.

 

[SF Kosmo]

I think one of the issues here is that all these devs are using this generic engine and using it badly.

Indiana Jones is using a different engine. I am playing Spiderman 2 which looks spectacular and it is using a different engine. Cyberpunk is using a different engine. The list goes on and on. Back when 3D got started, basically every game had its own engine, so devs learned the tech, learned it quickly, turned around games quickly, now everyone is shackling themselves to this shit Unreal engine.

I'm not sure how this relates to the conversation about RT gains and compromises. Unreal Engine doesn't really support full RT in its present form, I don't think. But it is doing things like Lumen and megalights that reproduce some of the key benefits of RT, or at least will when games start taking advantage of those features. And of course it supports hardware Lumen and RT reflections, but these aren't impacted by the kind of noise issues we're talking about.

For now the RT conversation is actually mostly these non-Unreal games like Alan Wake II and Cyberpunk. Unreal isn't there yet. In fact there are really only a very small handful of games that are really pushing full RT.

Like I said above, the real issue is that consoles still can't do path tracing, so games still have to be designed to look good with raster rendering, which can mean compromises to the way the game is arted.

It won't be until next gen when path tracing is even possible on console. Hopefully at a quality that rivals raster.

 

[Crayon]

Some of those artifacts are ugly but only the worst ones bugged me. Most of the examples are very subtle.

 

[The Cockatrice]

Completely unsustainable to go back to the old ways for any modern games!
With baked lighting you had to rebuild the lights every single time you changed something in the scene and wait for ages to see the result - total insanity!
The giant win in productivity for art and design alone outweights any such disadvantages!

Huh? It takes ages for games to get developed just as it did before. No, scratch that. Development times tripled. Raytracing in every single game has been an afterthought and will always be until console hardware supports games made from scratch with raytracing in mind and nothing else. Will we ever see that? Probably in 10 years.

 

[Reizo Ryuu]

Whenever you are tracing rays you will have noise because there's a finite amount of floating point precision to work with, even offline renders still have noise.

 

[ReBurn]

Those traced rays never shut up. Always making noise.

 

[simpatico]

They already do!
Look at the insane graphical quality and amount of content of modern games!
You can now develop a game in 5 years that would have taken 10 years the old way.

I know R4make has baked lighting, but the spirit of the RE4 comparison crowbcat video is a great example of what I'm seeing with real time lighting. It's either blunting the art aspect, or replacing it with realism. I think it's natural in a way. On the GameCube, Capcom had to be clever because of technical limitations. With UE5, there almost are no technical limitations, and it feels we're missing some of the artistry, mastery. Or, it just appears that way because it's closer to an IRL uncanny valley. You can't see the brushstrokes anymore.



(R4make was my GOTY and I still appreciate this video)

 

[Corporal.Hicks]

I noticed this denoiser noise but in most RT games that noise is acceptable and most of the time I dont even notice it. This problem is the most noticeable in full RT / PT games (especially older games like Qauake 2 RTX, Half Life 1 PT, or in some UE5 games that use lumen (especially silent hill 2).

Right now I'm playing Metro Exodus (standard edition, because enhanced edition has ugly lighting, they totally overdone RT) and I havent noticed RT noise at all while the lighting looks wayyyy better compared to raster.

 

[zeomax]

Here the first example of the noise. It's very ugly but i still prefer the ray traced overall image.
Another example. Ugh, see all the noise on the shiny surface? But i still prefer the ray traced overall image.
Third example. See all the noise? No? Let me zoom 300% in. See it now how ugly it is? But i still prefer the ray traced overall image.

 

[SF Kosmo]

Huh? It takes ages for games to get developed just as it did before. No, scratch that. Development times tripled. Raytracing in every single game has been an afterthought and will always be until console hardware supports games made from scratch with raytracing in mind and nothing else. Will we ever see that? Probably in 10 years.

Raytracing and baked lighting aren't the only two options, fortunately. More and more games are using some form of real-time global illumination that can produce the same results that used to be baked out.

This also offers somewhat better parity with RT in terms of how a scene is lit, which also helps. A game using Lumen and a game using hardware RT are going to be lit similarly on a broad basis, just without the same refinement in the details.

 

[RoboFu]

Shadows are still may favorite use of RT too bad the priority it seems . is reflections->lighting->shadows mine would be the reverse.

 

[The Cockatrice]

Raytracing and baked lighting aren't the only two options, fortunately. More and more games are using some form of real-time global illumination that can produce the same results that used to be baked out.

This also offers somewhat better parity with RT in terms of how a scene is lit, which also helps. A game using Lumen and a game using hardware RT are going to be lit similarly on a broad basis, just without the same refinement in the details.

Yeah software raytracing is fine and can be improved further.

 

[Crayon]

Raytracing and baked lighting aren't the only two options, fortunately. More and more games are using some form of real-time global illumination that can produce the same results that used to be baked out.

This also offers somewhat better parity with RT in terms of how a scene is lit, which also helps. A game using Lumen and a game using hardware RT are going to be lit similarly on a broad basis, just without the same refinement in the details.

Lumen is pretty good. The overall impression is closer to most rtgi than it is to most raster gi. Plus it can be boosted with a little ratytracing performance. Too bad it still seems a little too heavy for ps5.

 

[SlimySnake]

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

lmao. there is not a single UE5 game on this list.

 

[SlimySnake]

Lumen is pretty good. The overall impression is closer to most rtgi than it is to most raster gi. Plus it can be boosted with a little ratytracing performance. Too bad it still seems a little too heavy for ps5.

Lumen is fine. I dont see any noise that i see in other RT games mentioned here. the only time i saw noise in UE5 was in PSSR modes, but thats a pssr issue.

On PS5, most UE5 games run at 4k TSR quality at 30 fps. its only when you try to play 60 fps modes which drop to 720p where you might start getting a shimmering mess of an image, which may or may not be due to rt noise. but thats the price you pay for 60 fps on a $399 console. I wish devs had locked games to 30 fps so people could appreciate just how stunning ue5 games look.

 

[SlimySnake]

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.

aside from reflections, i am honestly not seeing a big issue with rt noise. DLSS cleans them up rather well and all the examples he gives are hard to notice. You HAVE to be looking for them. especially the indy and alan wake 2 examples he gave.

honestly, aside from reflections on moving bodies of water, i hardly ever notice these things. Path tracing with ray reconstruction in the beta phase had the noise and ghosting that was actually immediately noticeable but they fixed that by launch. The rest? meh. I never noticed any issues with star wars outlaws reflections, cyberpunk reflections or even with ratchet that hes pointing out here. Why would i ever look at reflections on the ground anyway.

the water shit does need to be fixed and is definitely annoying, but the ssr artifacts in dragon age broke me. I hated how they just added a giant fucking halo around my character. its way more immersion breaking than any annoying rt noise. again, its mostly limited to moving bodies of water like streams. i didnt see these rt noise issues in dragon age's ocean or window reflections in spiderman 2.

this is a good video, and im glad he made it, but it's not as bad as he's making it out to be. Rt effects in outlaws, avatar, dragons dogma 2, are exactly what separate them from last gen games.

 

[Crayon]

Lumen is fine. I dont see any noise that i see in other RT games mentioned here. the only time i saw noise in UE5 was in PSSR modes, but thats a pssr issue.

On PS5, most UE5 games run at 4k TSR quality at 30 fps. its only when you try to play 60 fps modes which drop to 720p where you might start getting a shimmering mess of an image, which may or may not be due to rt noise. but thats the price you pay for 60 fps on a $399 console. I wish devs had locked games to 30 fps so people could appreciate just how stunning ue5 games look.

Watching 60fps snobs appear out of the woodwork with the advent of performance modes on consoles has been a hoot. 30fps was fine for like 20 years but as of holiday 2020 it was no longer acceptable. jfc.

When I played RoboCop on pc, I slammed all the sliders to the right and left it on 30 to start. Reason being, me and Wife were checking it out on a whim and I didn't want to spend 10 minutes faffing around in the settings before we got the game rolling. I never ended up going back into the settings. I was using a controller, the game looked great, the frame opacing was perfect, and it plays slow as molasses. An ideal case for 30fps, actually.

A lot of these people are seeing the flip side of having graphics options: you want to have it all. Hardware has limits. When I tried the performance mode in rebirth on reg ps5, I saw that the system had to run it at really low res. I liked the quality mode compromise better, so I picked that and got on with the game. The system is only so capable and that's being laid bare by giving console players the choice.

 

[peish]

HUB seems to have hard on against RT.

What we are gettin now, is just as promised and as delivered by the Jensen. Things will continue to accelarate until PT in 120fps.

Rather we start noisy than never.

 

[SlimySnake]

Watching 60fps snobs appear out of the woodwork with the advent of performance modes on consoles has been a hoot. 30fps was fine for like 20 years but as of holiday 2020 it was no longer acceptable. jfc.

When I played RoboCop on pc, I slammed all the sliders to the right and left it on 30 to start. Reason being, me and Wife where checking it out on a whim and I didn't want to spend 10 minutes faffing around in the settings before we got the game rolling. I never ended up going back into the settings. I was using a controller, the game looked great, the frame opacing was perfect, and it plays slow as molasses. An ideal case for 30fps, actually.

A lot of these people are seeing the flip mode of having graphics options: you want to have it all. Hardware has limits. When I tried the performance mode in rebirth on reg ps5, I saw that the system had to run it at really low res. I liked the quality mode compromise better, so I picked that and got on with the game. The system is only so capable and that's being laid bare by going console players the choice.

yeah, i played outlaws and black myth at 30 fps on my pc recently, and was surprised at how smooth they felt even at 30 fps. its the switching back and forth that really showcases how much better 60 fps really is, but your brain gets used to 30 fps in like 10 minutes as long as its properly framepaced. in my experience, the ingame caps are straight up broken on PC. sometimes, even the nvidia control panel framecapping introduces framepacing issues. RTSS is literally the only thing that caps the 30 fps without causing frametime spikes and i dont think many PC gamers know this, and attribute frame pacing and frametime issues to 30 fps feeling choppy.

regardless, UE5's lumen GI and reflections do not produce the same level of rt noise i see in RTGI or path traced games. probably because there are fewer rays and the level of reflection quality is low so it inadvertently ends up with fewer rt noise.

or maybe im blind and cant notice them. maybe others can point it out in these reflection heavy gifs of ue5 titles.

 

[March Climber]

Watching 60fps snobs appear out of the woodwork with the advent of performance modes on consoles has been a hoot. 30fps was fine for like 20 years but as of holiday 2020 it was no longer acceptable. jfc.

Sony revealed the performance mode player percentage and it is staggeringly high.

We are not going back to a 30fps standard and the ones who don’t like this will have to cope for 1-2 more generations.

Just like the anti-Raytracing/Pathracing audience are currently coping while both continue to be improved over time.

 

[Crayon]

Sony revealed the performance mode player percentage and it is staggeringly high.

We are not going back to a 30fps standard and the ones who don’t like this will have to cope for 1-2 more generations.

Just like the anti-Raytracing/Pathracing audience are currently coping while both continue to be improved over time.

I think you're missing my point. I don't need standard, I have a choice. I'm saying exposing the option has opened eyes but also makes the limits of a system apparent in a new way.

 

[Elog]

This isn't true, lighting is a massive paradigm shift. With RT you can light a scene naturally, entirely using a pretty much unlimited number of source lights.

I really think this sentence is unfortunate. This might be true if you are a visual aficionado. However, for a majority of gamers a well made scene with the old-school toolbox can look equally stunning - it is just that the production cost to achieve that is so much higher compared to if you could utilize RT straight off the bat. The only real exception is reflective materials where the old toolbox simply cannot compete no matter what.

 

[Codeblew]

Nobody wants to learn a new engine if they are fired after 2 years.
Meanwhile with Unreal on your CV you can work anywhere.

It shouldn't take more than a month or two to learn a new engine depending on your overall experience.

 

[Dr.D00p]

What's this, Hardware Unboxed whining about RT again?

What a shocker.

 

[M1chl]

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

This is analogue to posting #Driveclub gifs

 

[Gaiff]

I would have liked for every dev to have added a way to increase ray count through a command line or something. That way, when we get faster GPUs, we could manually increase it to mitigate or almost eliminate the noise.

 

[Three]

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.

There are examples of noise problems and blur in that game in the video itself. Did you watch at all?

 

[Allandor]

There are examples of noise problems and blur in that game in the video itself. Did you watch at all?

Yes, I've seen that in the video, but so far I wasn't a problem while playing. I've played other games where I turn off rt effects because of constant noise problems while playing.
I can life with SSR in games, as SSR is better than no reflection and most of the time the scene is slow or fast enough to not really see the problems with it. Most times I only see those things when I watch out for those. But noise and artifacts are most of the time in all scenes. especially with dlss (had an rtx before my current 7900xt) it was clearly visible while moving. That why I usually also deactivate those upscaling features. IMHO most of the time an "unaltered" image (relating to upscaling techs) looks better in movement, even if it is lower res. Consistency is key for me.

 

[Clear]

Guys, every technique has trade-offs and limitations. There is no magic-bullet solution.

As developers, you pick your poison based on what you think will get you CLOSEST to the desired end result.

Its all very well pointing out technique x gives a more visually pleasing result than technique y... But takes much longer per iteration, when the team don't have the time to schedule for technique y.

 

[ResilientBanana]

I'd be curious to see them use Ray-Tracing cores for AI somehow. But overall, ray-tracing will always beat most other methods in motion. The fact that I am able to see my characters face in any reflection is great, but I think the greatest results are usually in lighting.

 

[YeulEmeralda]

Watching 60fps snobs appear out of the woodwork with the advent of performance modes on consoles has been a hoot. 30fps was fine for like 20 years but as of holiday 2020 it was no longer acceptable. jfc.

When I played RoboCop on pc, I slammed all the sliders to the right and left it on 30 to start. Reason being, me and Wife where checking it out on a whim and I didn't want to spend 10 minutes faffing around in the settings before we got the game rolling. I never ended up going back into the settings. I was using a controller, the game looked great, the frame opacing was perfect, and it plays slow as molasses. An ideal case for 30fps, actually.

A lot of these people are seeing the flip side of having graphics options: you want to have it all. Hardware has limits. When I tried the performance mode in rebirth on reg ps5, I saw that the system had to run it at really low res. I liked the quality mode compromise better, so I picked that and got on with the game. The system is only so capable and that's being laid bare by giving console players the choice.

I find it amusing that people notice the reflections in puddles and ray traced shadows or whatever but apparently don't seem to notice the frame rate.

 

[gatti-man]

RT image looks better in every single example and to prove his point you have to zoom in 300x or even 400x. Like yes RT can be improved and clearly the devs of some of these games slapped in low res RT vs doing it right but even then the image is still better.

In real time RT adds so much depth to me I love it. Like I wish so hard Space Marine 2 had RT.

 

[flying_sq]

The only time I've really ever noticed it on was in Control, but games are much better with it now. At least what I play