Alan Wake 2 [XBSX|S, PC, PS5] 17th october 2023

[trinibwoy]

In Cyberpunk and Alan Wake it seems like the definition is more loose and it's whether rays are traced recursively or not, so it's closer to Ray Tracing and Recursive Ray Tracing, but I digress.

Yeah Nvidia marketing has muddied the waters on an already confusing topic.

“Alan Wake 2’s fully ray-traced, path-traced visuals take the game’s ray-traced lighting, reflections and shadows to the next level, unifying them in a single solution that produces incredible results.”

“Fully ray-traced” makes sense in terms of having a unified lighting pipeline that calculates direct and indirect light, shadow and reflections. This is in contrast to earlier games where shadows, reflections, GI and AO were tacked on as separate effects over base rasterized direct illumination.

However, they’re tossing path-tracing around to also mean a unified lighting pipeline without making a clear distinction between path-tracing and full raytracing.

As far as I can tell path tracing in this context just means “reverse, recursive multi-bounce raytracing with light importance sampling”.

 

[sinTheta]

However, they’re tossing path-tracing around to also mean a unified lighting pipeline without making a clear distinction between path-tracing and full ray tracing.

If you read Cyberpunk Overdrive integration tech talk closely it's neither fully ray traced nor an unified lighting pipeline. It's raster based pipeline augmented by ray traced shadows and ray traced indirect. Primary rays and refraction is rasterized. Translucency lighting and volumetric lighting is using shadow maps. There's also a clear distinction between direct lighting and indirect, with separate solutions to them. Which isn't dimishinig, as Cyberpunk Overdrive or Alan Wake 2 PT mode look gorgeous.

It feels like they needed something to show that their new tech is better than other ray tracing techniques, so just calling it ray tracing wasn't enough. The byproduct of this is that when someone will ship a full real-time movie-like path tracer everyone will be confused why it's such a big deal.

 

[Frenetic Pony]

Alan Wake 2 looks excellent but Cyberpunk 2077 impresses me even more. There, the lighting is more consistent and more objects/subjects look grounded. In addition, there was much more dynamism in Cyberpunk 2077. I haven't been to the big city in Alan Wake 2 yet, though.

Alan Wake 2 also runs worse but it is not surprising that the forest scenes are much more demanding than city landscpaes in Cyberpunk 2077. In Cyberpunk, the performance also dropped when you were in jungle-like places. Rendering many alpha textures is computationally intensive with pathtracing.

Both Alan Wake 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 currently are by far graphically the best titles that I have seen. After that comes Control, then Callisto Protocol or The Last of Us 2. However. the developers of Alan Wake 2 could have invested more in the animations when characters are talking or doing some stuff.

It's not alpha cutout these days, that's whatever, you can throw as much of that as you want at a GPU. In RT scenes with foliage tank due to BVH rebuilding. You need to refit/rebuild the bvh constantly or the actual RT performance will tank, but this means the BVH rebuilding is itself expensive.

 

[orangpelupa]

If you read Cyberpunk Overdrive integration tech talk closely it's neither fully ray traced nor an unified lighting pipeline. It's raster based pipeline augmented by ray traced shadows and ray traced indirect. Primary rays and refraction is rasterized. Translucency lighting and volumetric lighting is using shadow maps. There's also a clear distinction between direct lighting and indirect, with separate solutions to them. Which isn't dimishinig, as Cyberpunk Overdrive or Alan Wake 2 PT mode look gorgeous.

It feels like they needed something to show that their new tech is better than other ray tracing techniques, so just calling it ray tracing wasn't enough. The byproduct of this is that when someone will ship a full real-time movie-like path tracer everyone will be confused why it's such a big deal.

This also can be seen in game by visiting night-only mission-exclusive area at day. For example the sniper mission in PL.

Visit at day, and the fake stuff sticks out like sore thumbs

 

[Jupiter]

Reconciliation Park in CP has alot of trees/foliage and it does cause a perf hit, someone could work out the performance delta if they wanted but it still probably wouldn't really help work out what's more performant in regards to path tracing. The video is linked where it starts going right into the heavy nature area.

No love for plague tale requiem? Going through the forest down the cliff along the beach in the start of chapter 7 was a visual treat, although I wouldn't put it above your first 2 choices.

With around 10 hours of playtime I'm much further now in Alan Wake 2 and the game ran much faster in the city.

I'll have to take a look at that. This is one of the few games that are often praised graphically that I haven't seen directly.

The most impressive thing about this game is the amount of curves on everything.

No doubt the result of the mesh shaders but even little buttons on background assets have perfectly round edges.

The newspaper in the ground in NYC is also actual geometry which is super cool to see.

I noticed that, too. There is probably no game with so much geometry per object. Having said that I wouldn't call it the most impressive thing about the game.

 

[Scott_Arm]

I think what Cyberpunk and Alan Wake 2 are doing is basically path tracing. They do some primary visibility and then augment it with path tracing. I think that's fair. They're not doing whitted style ray tracing. They bounce to accumulate light from other surfaces. It's just rasterization plus path tracing, not pure path tracing. I think it's still a fair description.

 

[hughJ]

The only reason the term is being used here is because it carries marketing cachet due to PT's use in offline renderers, not because it's the best description of the algorithm being used. A handful of years ago if you were to explain the mixture of algorithms being used in this game no one would be saying, "Wow, the game is doing path-tracing?!" My understanding of path-tracing is that it's sampling a markov chain representation of the Rendering Equation in order to generate a comprehensive, energy-conserving model of light propagation. To do that you need a plurality of samples to represent the probability distribution. I don't think you can whittle that down to a single sample multiple bounces trace and still retain the utility of the term. The fact that a game saying it's using "path-tracing" is now leaving people confused about what it is or isn't doing is an admission that it's not being used correctly.

 

[mr magoo]

https://x.com/CaffeineViking/status/1693219636815212943?s=20

Hmm there is no twitter preview anymore
Senior gfx dev from Remedy:

"It turns out that rolling your own per-triangle culling in a mesh shader can be a good idea... There's usually spare ALU (even on the consoles) and the cost of export is so long in comparison that it can be a big win. Reminds me of the golden days of doing software rasterization!"

Interesting

 

[sinTheta]

I think what Cyberpunk and Alan Wake 2 are doing is basically path tracing. They do some primary visibility and then augment it with path tracing. I think that's fair. They're not doing whitted style ray tracing. They bounce to accumulate light from other surfaces. It's just rasterization plus path tracing, not pure path tracing. I think it's still a fair description.

Yes, it's not Whitted-style ray tracing. In Pixar's Road To Path Tracing they describe such approach as distribution ray tracing. It was their final GI technique before they switched to path tracing:

Cook et al. [24] introduced distribution ray tracing for stochastic sampling in rendering. Examples are random sampling of shutter time, lens position, and area light sources to render motion blur, depth of field, and soft shadows. Figure 4.2(a) shows a classic distribution ray tracing image of moving pool balls with motion blur and soft shadows.

Distribution ray tracing has also been widely used to compute indirect diffuse (global) illumination. This allowed a drastic reduction in the number of light sources since the indirect illumination no longer had to be faked with manually-placed bounce lights. However, getting results with low noise requires tracing of many rays.

At the end of the day if we loosen our definitions then bouncing rays to accumulate lighting is what any ray traced GI does. Tracing rays to the light is what any ray traced shadows do. So we could make an argument that Metro has path traced GI and Tomb Raider has path traced direct illumination. Which is maybe a silly thing to argue about, but it pains me that it will steal thunder from a real-time movie-like path tracer.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Yes, it's not Whitted-style ray tracing. In Pixar's Road To Path Tracing they describe such approach as distribution ray tracing. It was their final GI technique before they switched to path tracing:



At the end of the day if we loosen our definitions then bouncing rays to accumulate lighting is what any ray traced GI does. Tracing rays to the light is what any ray traced shadows do. So we could make an argument that Metro has path traced GI and Tomb Raider has path traced direct illumination. Which is maybe a silly thing to argue about, but it pains me that it will steal thunder from a real-time movie-like path tracer.

Page 111’s description of simple path tracing seems like a very good match to what cyberpunk and Alan wake 2 would be doing. Sure, the ray counts are low but the algorithm is correct.

 

[Shortbread]

Page 111’s description of simple path tracing seems like a very good match to what cyberpunk and Alan wake 2 would be doing. Sure, the ray counts are low but the algorithm is correct.

You can actually adjust CP2077 path-tracing rays and bounces with such mods. https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/9294?tab=description

 

[Scott_Arm]

I hope people realize that Alan Wake 2 is a $50 USD game (maybe $60 on console?) and not a standard $70 USD game. It's basically top notch in every way, but priced as a "AA" game instead of a "AAA" one. It should sell like crazy.

 

[Malo]

I hope people realize that Alan Wake 2 is a $50 USD game (maybe $60 on console?) and not a standard $70 USD game. It's basically top notch in every way, but priced as a "AA" game instead of a "AAA" one. It should sell like crazy.

It would probably sell a lot better if it was available on Steam.

 

[Scott_Arm]

It would probably sell a lot better if it was available on Steam.

Epic is the publisher, so they at least in part payed for the development. Understandable arrangement, but Steam is definitely the place to be for sales. I do think the "if it's not on steam I'm not buying it" mentality is dumb.

 

[mr magoo]

Epic is the publisher, so they at least in part payed for the development. Understandable arrangement, but Steam is definitely the place to be for sales. I do think the "if it's not on steam I'm not buying it" mentality is dumb.

They deserve huge sales, more money for next project

 

[Shortbread]

Epic is the publisher, so they at least in part payed for the development. Understandable arrangement, but Steam is definitely the place to be for sales. I do think the "if it's not on steam I'm not buying it" mentality is dumb.

Speaking of that...

https://twitter.com/x/status/1717537549923618949

 

[pharma]

AMD 7800X3D
RTX4080
64GB RAM
W11

 

[mr magoo]

damn! this looks incredible!

 

[Scott_Arm]

Just gave me the idea to try my custom 21:9 resolution with this game. Looks like you get a wider fov and should give me some performance. Only thing that sucks is some of the cut scenes you get pillarboxing, but I guess that's understandable.

 

[Davros]

ps: the original game is £2.84 on steam

Save 75% on Alan Wake on Steam

A Dark Presence stalks the small town of Bright Falls, pushing Alan Wake to the brink of sanity in his fight to unravel the mystery and save his love.

store.steampowered.com