Battlefield V reflection tech *spawn

[DavidGraham]

A nice video detailing the various extensive reflections that occur in Battlefield V even when the scene has seemingly nothing to reflect. The video is timestamped when the showcase begin.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It also reveals quite some limitations. On the top end 2080 Ti, there is clearly a lot of visual fakery going on. The reflections aren't updating in real-time necssarily and you can see the temporal reconstruction (scene from 5 minutes). To get beyond that is going to need an order of magnitude more rays, not accounting for those used with lighting and shadowing. There are also some funky artefacts like at 4:05 - why is the gun barrel being reflected (looks like screen space reflections) and what's all that sporadic distortion going on around it and the hand?

These are a result of us not having enough power for 1 ray per pixel per frame. I'm curious as to the difference in quality with the 2070 and its significantly lower ray counts. I'm also guessing the rays are concentrated in important areas or when there's less reflectivity, so as more reflections are present, the quality of those reflections decrease.

If this is representative, I can't see reflections ever working well with lighting on the current RTX cards. There just isn't the power, seeing as reflections only are already taking considerable shortcuts. I guess a lot of that depends on where the bottlenecks lie. If its surface shading, lighting and shadows may not have a huge impact in addition to reflections such that the quality drop won't be significantly different from the current top attainable.

 

[iroboto]

It also reveals quite some limitations. On the top end 2080 Ti, there is clearly a lot of visual fakery going on. The reflections aren't updating in real-time necssarily and you can see the temporal reconstruction (scene from 5 minutes). To get beyond that is going to need an order of magnitude more rays, not accounting for those used with lighting and shadowing. There are also some funky artefacts like at 4:05 - why is the gun barrel being reflected (looks like screen space reflections) and what's all that sporadic distortion going on around it and the hand?

These are a result of us not having enough power for 1 ray per pixel per frame. I'm curious as to the difference in quality with the 2070 and its significantly lower ray counts. I'm also guessing the rays are concentrated in important areas or when there's less reflectivity, so as more reflections are present, the quality of those reflections decrease.

If this is representative, I can't see reflections ever working well with lighting on the current RTX cards. There just isn't the power, seeing as reflections only are already taking considerable shortcuts. I guess a lot of that depends on where the bottlenecks lie. If its surface shading, lighting and shadows may not have a huge impact in addition to reflections such that the quality drop won't be significantly different from the current top attainable.

Still pretty early imo, you're comparing bolt-on RT vs a game designed for RT first with a rasterization fallback. I imagine if you optimize your renderer for one, it will likely be less optimal for the other. It's unlikely they'll commit to 2 separated render paths so it could be a while before we see RT take a lead role.

Reminds me quite a bit of when a new console launches and launch games are having a hard time extracting good performance from the hardwire. On PC you don't necessarily have this problem, but here with RTX you do, makes for an interesting case, without some serious support, DXR is going to face an uphill battle.

 

[DavidGraham]

The reflections aren't updating in real-time

They are updating in real time, what made you say otherwise?

you can see the temporal reconstruction

Battlefield uses TAA.

why is the gun barrel being reflected

reflected where?

 

[vipa899]

Still pretty early imo, you're comparing bolt-on RT vs a game designed for RT first with a rasterization fallback. I imagine if you optimize your renderer for one, it will likely be less optimal for the other. It's unlikely they'll commit to 2 separated render paths so it could be a while before we see RT take a lead role.

Reminds me quite a bit of when a new console launches and launch games are having a hard time extracting good performance from the hardwire. On PC you don't necessarily have this problem, but here with RTX you do, makes for an interesting case, without some serious support, DXR is going to face an uphill battle.

BF5 is the first big title using a form of RT, and its already mighty impressive there, in special after the latest patch, which gives 2080Ti performance to the midrange 2070.
Digital Foundry was very impressed by the RT implementation and now the performance is on level too, DXR on Ultra, normal rasterization settings to ultra, this att 1440p/4k 60fps.
Ive played the game myself (not my pc), it feels next gen.

Theres future RT supported titles coming, which perhaps will have a different implementation. PC gaming has never been this big and forward with tech.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

They are updating in real time, what made you say otherwise?

You can see the reflections updating every few frames very clearly.

reflected where?

On the floor. Though it's not the barrel being reflected but the magazine sticing out the side. Traced rays wouldn't hit the gun, so it's either screenspace or something funky. May just be a rendering bug though.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Theres future RT supported titles coming, which perhaps will have a different implementation. PC gaming has never been this big and forward with tech.

What was the invention of the 3D GPU then?

 

[DavidGraham]

You can see the reflections updating every few frames very clearly.

I don't truly see that at all.

On the floor. Though it's not the barrel being reflected but the magazine sticing out the side.

The magazine doesn't get reflected, but there is an anomaly related to it that occurs in select partial frames, it intersect with the clothes of the soldier to the side, so it's probably just a rendering bug.

 

[Scott_Arm]

reflected where?

I think he meant isn't. You can see the left hand reflected and the gun's clip reflected, but not the barrel for some reason.

 

[w0lfram]

Guru3D tested the patch on a 2080Ti @Ultra RTX.
@1440p the gains are 60%! The game jumped from 40fps to 64fps!
Also 4K @40fps is now possible.



Also the 2070 can now do Medium RTX at 1440p with 60fps.

https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/d...-performance-patch-released-(benchmarks).html

I don't think any of THAT^ is thee issue...!


The issue is, that no gamer gives a "rat's ass" how good reflection look in a fast-paced moving environment, when the actual graphics (& gpu engine) can not handle the increased polygons & 4k landscapes/meshes/etc. The "wasted" space on Nvidia's RTX line is not what the Customer wanted, needed, ordered or really wants to pay for. Tensor cores for gaming really isn't on their menu of performance wants/needs.

Period.


That said^ I own a RTX 2080, after my 980ti started on the fritz. The RTX's ports and async-compute was enough (over the 1080ti) to pay the RTX tax. But the chip is not what I need, or wanted, but my hands were tied, due to my $1,400 G-sync panel. So my upgrade options were quite limited.

 

[Entropy]

I don't think any of THAT^ is thee issue...!


The issue is, that no gamer gives a "rat's ass" how good reflection look in a fast-paced moving environment, when the actual graphics (& gpu engine) can not handle the increased polygons & 4k landscapes/meshes/etc. The "wasted" space on Nvidia's RTX line is not what the Customer wanted, needed, ordered or really wants to pay for. Tensor cores for gaming really isn't on their menu of performance wants/needs.

Period.

That’s even more true for shadows. We are wired to care about objects, not their shadows (which aren’t constant but change with light quality anyway). Shadows do not help us as we scan our surroundings in search of predators or prey, they are visual noise that the brain discards. Which is why painters had to spend effort to see them well enough to render them.
Very few people are painters.
For example, if you see an attractive person, do you look at them, or the shadow they cast on the ground? If you are planning to buy a car, do you look at the car or its shadow?

Our minds are prepared to accept a lot in terms of shadow rendering, because shadows of objects change anyway in real life, and at the end of the day, they just aren’t important.

 

[chris1515]

That’s even more true for shadows. We are wired to care about objects, not their shadows (which aren’t constant but change with light quality anyway). Shadows do not help us as we scan our surroundings in search of predators or prey, they are visual noise that the brain discards. Which is why painters had to spend effort to see them well enough to render them.
Very few people are painters.
For example, if you see an attractive person, do you look at them, or the shadow they cast on the ground? If you are planning to buy a car, do you look at the car or its shadow?

Our minds are prepared to accept a lot in terms of shadow rendering, because shadows of objects change anyway in real life, and at the end of the day, they just aren’t important.

I disagree each time I see a bad shadow maps, it hurts my eye and it happens all time.

I hope many next gen games will have raytraced shadows using compute if no RT hardware in next gen console.

 

[dogen]

yeah i hate crappy shadows, but especially really noticeable shadow cascades. worst modern graphical artifact

 

[JoeJ]

I hope many next gen games will have raytraced shadows usingccompueu if no RT hardware in next gen console.

There is the idea to store a list of occluding triangles in each shadow map texel instead just depth, then in pixel / compute shader check all those triangles for exact shadows independent of shadow map resolution. No flickering or peter panning.
Can be accelerated to skip triangle tests by min distance per texel, and also soft shadows could be done by blending with traditional methods.
IIRC NV made it a GameWorks affect and The Division used it. I never saw it in action or a video.
Maybe this would be still interesting even with RTX GPUs? It's simple to implement so worth to try i would say.

For RTX shadows i expect proper area light shadows may be more interesting than 'just' to fix flickering and peter panning.
But as long as we have non RTX GPUs out there, games will be still designed mainly for point lights i guess.

The magazine doesn't get reflected, but there is an anomaly related to it that occurs in select partial frames, it intersect with the clothes of the soldier to the side, so it's probably just a rendering bug.

I saw something different in the video: There is a moment where the first person gun is in front of reflecting puddle or floor in the background, and around the gun appears a silhouette of blurry darkening.
Likely that's caused by motion and missing data for denoising. So even with RTX we still have typical screenspace artifacts, mostly a problem for 3rd person characters an 1st person guns.
I always expected this to happen, but first time i saw it - very interesting! In general i mostly wonder how good denoising works.

I see a lag in reflections too, but it might be a amplified by video compression - hard to say but i have no problem with that.
Rarely people complain about it, which is good because i think it is the main artifact of the future (thinking of texture space shading again, which would fix the more problematic screenspace artifacts).

 

[Voxilla]

The issue is, that no gamer gives a "rat's ass" how good reflection look in a fast-paced moving environment, when the actual graphics (& gpu engine) can not handle the increased polygons & 4k landscapes/meshes/etc. The "wasted" space on Nvidia's RTX line is not what the Customer wanted, needed, ordered or really wants to pay for. Tensor cores for gaming really isn't on their menu of performance wants/needs.

I agree, while better reflections are nice to have, they currently are not worth the performance hit.

That said^ I own a RTX 2080, after my 980ti started on the fritz. The RTX's ports and async-compute was enough (over the 1080ti) to pay the RTX tax. But the chip is not what I need, or wanted, but my hands were tied, due to my $1,400 G-sync panel. So my upgrade options were quite limited.

I didn't plan to, but as a graphics tech enthusiast couldn't resist the urge and went for a RTX 2070, for my secondary PC. (Only cost me 200 bucks after selling my old Titan-X Maxwell)
Tried raytraced BFV, and have to say it's very underwhelming, there are several artifacts with the reflections, like random white pixels, strange streaks.
Reflections in water and floor are hard to tell apart from SSR. Reflections on cars and windows are better, in the sense these otherwise are done with cube maps.
Do I play BFV with raytracing on ? NO
Prefer 4K rendering / high frame rate on my main PC with a Titan Pascal.
BTW I'm done with Titans, ML killed the Titan

 

[Jay]

but my hands were tied, due to my $1,400 G-sync panel. So my upgrade options were quite limited.

I'm curious, what would your options be if you never had that display?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I don't truly see that at all.

The magazine doesn't get reflected, but there is an anomaly related to it that occurs in select partial frames, it intersect with the clothes of the soldier to the side, so it's probably just a rendering bug.

Magazine reflecting in floor and weird artefacts. I'm suspicious the wrong model is being tested for left hand as a pistol keeps appearing. There's hard-line clipping going on too.

http://webmshare.com/play/VPQBa

Clipped reflection of mine thing in doorway.

http://webmshare.com/play/mwLMe

You see the soldiers reflection as he runs in front of the truck, but as he runs past a reflection of the distant trees, it changes to blue sky.

http://webmshare.com/play/36nBa

The reflection under the truck jumps from clear sky to dark. This is what appeared at full speed like non-realtime sampling to me, although it may be something else now I see it in slow motion.

http://webmshare.com/play/oQ5g6

As I say, it'd be interesting to compare 2070 quality to see how much artefacts are a product of sampling rate. You'd expect more errors/glitches on 2070 if they are caused by low sampling frequency. There are other issues such as one reflection appearing to flatten. To me, these are all very jarring. I guess it's an uncanny valley for scene reality. If you were walking down the street in a real looking world and suddenly the reflections in a puddle glitched, it'd likely grab your attention - is that an animal darting across that's about to eat you, or a rip in the space-time continuum about to plunge you into a time-loop, or evidence it's all just a video game powering a giant AI?

 

[Entropy]

I disagree each time I see a bad shadow maos, it hurts my eye and it happens all time.

That seems like an uncomfortable affliction! Must have been painful the last couple of decades.
Fortunately, it would seem to be a rare condition.
Seriously though, shadows really are mostly visual noise to our perception, (and reflection/refraction a rarity in nature at all. There was a reason mirrors and lenses were invented - not very frequent in our natural surroundings).

 

[DavidGraham]

To me, these are all very jarring. I guess it's an uncanny valley for scene reality. If you were walking down the street in a real looking world and suddenly the reflections in a puddle glitched,

These issues are exacerbated 10 folds with the old methods (SSR and cubemaps), no body said we achieved 100% perfect reflections, but we are getting there.

The reflection under the truck jumps from clear sky to dark. This is what appeared at full speed like non-realtime sampling to me, although it may be something else now I see it in slow motion.

Obviously you need to see the reflections in action with actual hands on to properly judge it, seeing it from the eyes of a compressed playback is not ideal at all.

Seriously though, shadows really are mostly visual noise to our perception,

Seriously, try to play a game with no or little shadows and see how distracting and visually wrong that is, your depth perception will be completely disrupted.

 

[vipa899]

Digital Foundry was impressed by what they achieved, the patch made things only better. Other implementations will follow, Exodus GI takes another route

RTX series has impressive tech, RT but mesh shading impresses atleast as much. If MSs aaa games utilize those and other new tech were in for some impressive gfx.