Dampf
Member
2 days ago, there was a patch released for an MMO shooter called Ring of Elysium. It is free to play and looks pretty decent for that in my opinion. But the game itself doesn't matter here.
That patch added what might be a glimpse into the future of Raytracing, specifically Raytraced GI. You might know from experience turning on Raytracing is very expensive. In Metro, you get a FPS loss of 25% on high and more on ultra (pretty reasonable for this kind of quality, I might say). In Fortnite you pay 60% or more of the framerate at medium settings just for the GI for little to no visual differences which is absolutely bonkers and cannot be recommended at all. Then you have all the other UE4 games similarly destroying framerate.
This little patch however, added Raytraced GI into the game, but properly. The game already has a pretty well built baked GI solution, like you're used to in most games. The Raytraced GI enhances that significantly.
The best part? It literally costs nothing if you have a Raytracing capable GPU and as I said, it enhances the visual quality massively. Take a look.
This is the game running at max settings with its prebaked GI at 1440p on a thin and light 2060 laptop. As you can see, the interior of that container looks brightly lit with your usual type of SSAO even though not much light should reach that area as its covered in shadow. Or look at that building in the background, it is clearly covered in sunlight yet the building appears to be shaded dark. This is your typical fake GI lighting in video games. Take a look at the framerate, it does 73 FPS.
Now, let's take a look at the Raytraced shot.
Now we are talking! The game is lit beautifully. The dark corners are actually dark and the building in the background finally has its bright sunlight. And what is this? Look at the frame counter. We have 74 FPS now. That is actually 1 FPS faster than without RTX! And yep, we are not using any reconstruction here, it is still native 1440p. The game doesn't support DLSS.
This is RTX set at medium, but it looks pretty similar to max RT settings. Max RT is obviously more demanding but performance hit is still much less than UE4s RT GI.
Let's take a look at another screenshot.
VS
The last screenshot is RTX on. Without RTX, the hangar is as always way too bright and not properly lit. With RTX on, you can notice the areas which are reached by sunlight are brighter than the others. In the RTX on screenshot, the blue container's underside where light cannot reach easily is darker like it should be. You might also notice pretty bounce lighting from the red container on the ground and on the players character, which is also top tier stuff. Then take a look at the framerate again, only 1 FPS less than without RTX!
So, why is this a glimpse into the future? Well, Nvidia recently updated their RTXGI SDK which brings UE5's Lumen like multi bounce Global Illumination into people's hands. Unlike Lumen however, RTXGI uses hardware accelerated Raytracing for light probe updating, that makes it super fast, so it makes use of the specialized hardware in Nvidia and AMD GPUs, as well as in the PS5 and Xbox Series. That is magnitudes more efficient than Lumen as it leaves not specalized hardware idle. And it looks just as great. Read more here: https://developer.nvidia.com/rtxgi
How much does it cost? Only 1ms on a Turing and 0.5ms on an Ampere GPU, approximately. Which means barely an impact to performance. Nvidia plans to integrate it into UE4 for all DXR capable GPUs, meaning even AMD can make use of RTXGI.
Of course, those Raytraced GI solutions run best on a card with DXR acceleration. However, they also run nicely on non-hardware accelerated RT cards which is a key argument, they are not locked to RTX or RDNA2 cards. So in the future, developers might want ditch baking rasterized lights completely as solutions like RTXGI still run fast enough on cards without dedicated hardware for RT, meaning they can still satisfy a huge playerbase while reducing development cost significantly. So yes, I believe this is the future.
If you have a Pascal GPU I would love to know how the software based approach runs for you in this game. Elysium is free to play on Steam for everyone to try out! Be aware however, this is likely not RTXGI but a custom made solution for this game.
Still, this might be the first game for a glimpse into the future of highly efficient Raytracing.
That patch added what might be a glimpse into the future of Raytracing, specifically Raytraced GI. You might know from experience turning on Raytracing is very expensive. In Metro, you get a FPS loss of 25% on high and more on ultra (pretty reasonable for this kind of quality, I might say). In Fortnite you pay 60% or more of the framerate at medium settings just for the GI for little to no visual differences which is absolutely bonkers and cannot be recommended at all. Then you have all the other UE4 games similarly destroying framerate.
This little patch however, added Raytraced GI into the game, but properly. The game already has a pretty well built baked GI solution, like you're used to in most games. The Raytraced GI enhances that significantly.
The best part? It literally costs nothing if you have a Raytracing capable GPU and as I said, it enhances the visual quality massively. Take a look.
This is the game running at max settings with its prebaked GI at 1440p on a thin and light 2060 laptop. As you can see, the interior of that container looks brightly lit with your usual type of SSAO even though not much light should reach that area as its covered in shadow. Or look at that building in the background, it is clearly covered in sunlight yet the building appears to be shaded dark. This is your typical fake GI lighting in video games. Take a look at the framerate, it does 73 FPS.
Now, let's take a look at the Raytraced shot.
Now we are talking! The game is lit beautifully. The dark corners are actually dark and the building in the background finally has its bright sunlight. And what is this? Look at the frame counter. We have 74 FPS now. That is actually 1 FPS faster than without RTX! And yep, we are not using any reconstruction here, it is still native 1440p. The game doesn't support DLSS.
This is RTX set at medium, but it looks pretty similar to max RT settings. Max RT is obviously more demanding but performance hit is still much less than UE4s RT GI.
Let's take a look at another screenshot.
VS
The last screenshot is RTX on. Without RTX, the hangar is as always way too bright and not properly lit. With RTX on, you can notice the areas which are reached by sunlight are brighter than the others. In the RTX on screenshot, the blue container's underside where light cannot reach easily is darker like it should be. You might also notice pretty bounce lighting from the red container on the ground and on the players character, which is also top tier stuff. Then take a look at the framerate again, only 1 FPS less than without RTX!
So, why is this a glimpse into the future? Well, Nvidia recently updated their RTXGI SDK which brings UE5's Lumen like multi bounce Global Illumination into people's hands. Unlike Lumen however, RTXGI uses hardware accelerated Raytracing for light probe updating, that makes it super fast, so it makes use of the specialized hardware in Nvidia and AMD GPUs, as well as in the PS5 and Xbox Series. That is magnitudes more efficient than Lumen as it leaves not specalized hardware idle. And it looks just as great. Read more here: https://developer.nvidia.com/rtxgi
How much does it cost? Only 1ms on a Turing and 0.5ms on an Ampere GPU, approximately. Which means barely an impact to performance. Nvidia plans to integrate it into UE4 for all DXR capable GPUs, meaning even AMD can make use of RTXGI.
Of course, those Raytraced GI solutions run best on a card with DXR acceleration. However, they also run nicely on non-hardware accelerated RT cards which is a key argument, they are not locked to RTX or RDNA2 cards. So in the future, developers might want ditch baking rasterized lights completely as solutions like RTXGI still run fast enough on cards without dedicated hardware for RT, meaning they can still satisfy a huge playerbase while reducing development cost significantly. So yes, I believe this is the future.
If you have a Pascal GPU I would love to know how the software based approach runs for you in this game. Elysium is free to play on Steam for everyone to try out! Be aware however, this is likely not RTXGI but a custom made solution for this game.
Still, this might be the first game for a glimpse into the future of highly efficient Raytracing.
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