Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2022]

[chris1515]

What do you mean RT in movies? AFAIK movies have always been RT, taking ages to generate each frame.

No you don't know until end of 2000 not all movie were using RT. Do you know REYES renderer? The first movie to use RT was from Blue Sky studio in the middle of the 2000's. Final Fantasy the Spirit Within doesn't use RT for example.

A Brief History of Physically Based Rendering

www.pbr-book.org

During this time, Blue Sky Studios adopted a physically based pipeline early in their history (Ohmer 1997). The photorealism of an advertisement they made for a Braun shaver in 1992 caught the attention of many, and their short film, Bunny, shown in 1998, was an early example of Monte Carlo global illumination used in production. Its visual look was substantially different from those of films and shorts rendered with Reyes and was widely noted. Subsequent feature films from Blue Sky also followed this approach. Unfortunately, Blue Sky never published significant technical details of their approach, limiting their wider influence.

 

[pjbliverpool]

I wasn't referring to your screens in particular, just a general trend when looking at the breadth of RT games. Some of your screens show a largish difference in certain aspects but it doesn't necessarily transform the visual experience.

I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on that one. Several of those comparison screens show a completely transformative change IMO.

Also many of these are cherry picked cases to illustrate the largest difference possible.

I don't see why that matters. RT doesn't need to look transformative all of the time to be worthwhile. It's impact on the graphics can range from near nothing, to subtle, to striking. The same can be said of any graphical effect/technique so I'm not sure why we'd single RT out in this respect.

And several of those screens are quite representative of the differences at large, being simple views of the city that would show up regularly during gameplay.

If you go and watch long form videos on youtube the differences are much less flattering.

I don't agree. They may be more difficult to mentally note the individual changes between the two modes but that doesn't mean that the RT mode doesn't generally look better and more realistic. Which is what we all want from graphics, right?

I think what @davis.anthony said above was spot on in that RT, like many effects isn't something you necessarily point at while playing the game and go "wow look at that RT effect" (although RT reflections can be exactly that), but it's just a more general more realistic/less computer gamey image. I'd wager in a blind test if you asked someone to play CP2077 with max RT for a while, then turned it off without saying what you'd changed, and asked them to play again and say whether it looked better or worse, you'd get an overwhelming response that it looks worse without the users being able to pinpoint why. That's because we've reached the point in graphics where you can no longer point at one particular effect and say "that looks great", but rather it's the coming together of everything to create the impression of realism or offline rendering in your mind that counts. And RT has a significant impact on that overall blend of techniques.

Just as an example, UE5 even without HWRT offers a visual experience that is actually transformative while being less demanding than Cyberpunk with all of these RT effects. You don't need to go finding specific areas to show off the difference, it's in your face 100% of the time. You don't need to go back and compare on and off screens, the second you see it, it just floors you.

I really don't see how this is relevant. Firstly UE5, at least in the examples I assume you're referring to, uses Lumen. Which HWRT or not, is still a form of RT, just a less accurate one. You can be certain UE5 would look a lot less impressive with traditional lighting. And secondly, the base geometry on which many of those UE5 demos are based is much higher than what is shown in CB2077 thanks to Nanite, so you have a better starting point to begin with. We've also seen how switching to HWRT over SWRT improves the image further.

 

[chris1515]

After I don't say RT in all form is not useful. It is better first for production with much faster iteration for lighting artist and more accurate lighting is better. In Silent Hill 2 when you see the light leaking, you see it everytime you play the trailer. But I think everything count asset quality and material is very important.

I hope for example Spiderman 2 will go to some form of dynamic tracing for GI.

 

[Remij]

John takes a look at Sonic Frontiers across every platform (except Steam Deck which is only mentioned)

Great video by John. I'm loving the game so far. Yes, it's true it wont be for everyone, but I feel Sonic Team really has something with this template, and if they build off of it in the right way for future games, the future of 3D Sonic seems bright!

Also, I'll just say, yes, another game which has no stuttering of any kind. They did a great job here on the PC version as far as performance consistency goes... but unfortunately as John says, it's disappointing to see 60fps caps, and a lack of settings options to tweak the experience. On PC there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to push that draw distance out to the horizon. (also lol at Alex's optimized settings )

Edit: Oh, I guess I can chime in on the Steam Deck version myself, since I have one lol. The game is currently "unsupported", but runs just fine when launched. The game essentially needs to be locked to 30fps, because there's no hope in hell of getting anywhere close to 60. Even a locked 30fps requires Shadows to be set to low, and the "Local reflections" setting to be unchecked.

After doing that, a smooth 30fps lock is possible and it runs nicely and looks pretty darn good on the Deck screen.

 

[chris1515]

I finish with the subject but another annoying thing with Sillent Hill 2, sometimes it is visible the character are not contributing to GI. They need to add Capsule to software lumen. If it was HW-RT it would be better. It reminds me of the problem on the character of the Land of Nanite. But the games looks very good.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Prior to RT, lighting, reflections and shadows never looked accurate, they've only ever been a poor approximation. But so much about what is represented in 3D is a poor approximation, one more or less aspect really don't make that big of a difference. I've see natural lighting every day of my life, but I'm able to suspend believe on things like this.

Yes, consistency in presentation within a game is far more important, IMO, than anything else. For me, it's extremely jarring when RT lighting is mixed with non RT lighting. In which case the game, for me, ends up looking better with just purely non-RT lighting. Same goes when you have RT affecting some things but not other things.

You also know what 60fps looks like but go watch a 48/60fps movie and tell me it doesn't look weird.

OK, that's an easy one. It doesn't look weird. 24/30 FPS video and film has always looked weird/bad to me (even in the 70's) due to lack of motion information, judder, stutter during panning, etc. ... now it just looks even weirder and worse now that I can actually watch video at 60 FPS. So much so that I spend hours using interpolation programs to convert all of my video to at least 60 FPS prior to watching it if I can.

Doing that brings along other artifacts and issues, but it's a trade-off where the end result looks better than 24/30 FPS for me.

OTOH - other people still don't like high frame rate video despite being exposed to more of it. Again, not everyone is going to agree on what "looks" best because everyone perceives things differently. And everyone saying that X is how everything should be experienced by everyone is just wrong. It's not wrong when applied to themselves obviously, but there's always going to be someone out there that perceives things differently than they do.

Regards,
SB

 

[Cyan]

I don't see why that matters. RT doesn't need to look transformative all of the time to be worthwhile. It's impact on the graphics can range from near nothing, to subtle, to striking. The same can be said of any graphical effect/technique so I'm not sure why we'd single RT out in this respect.

this actually. The first thing you notice in typical non RT games even at Ultra settings, is that something is off with the shadows somewhere -i.e. SSAO, great idea, sometimes a bit exaggerated or some shadows casted look out of place-.

Shadow maps usually work convincingly well, even in day-night cycle games. However transparent or translucent shadows are a lot less accurate.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider (a superb good looker) is an example of this, since only shadows are fully raytraced. Tbh, I played Shadow of the Tomb Raider with RT off for a good part of the game. When I turn RT off shadow maps do their job quite well at ulltra settings, but be it during gameplay or ingame cinematics, there is something fakey about the scene one can't describe, while with RT on -ultra- the uncanny valley feeling is less pronounced, as if everything was well lit and your brain doesn't even think about it -except for the very occasional flickery shadows of the game, where that RT feeling breaks-

As you can see, the apparent differences with RT off and on are not that huge.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider - RT Shadows OFF vs RT Shadows ON - Imgsli

 

[Flappy Pannus]

Playing god of war -- really great looking game, but two things about the visual presentation really bother me:
1- Really obvious ssr issues. There are tons of reflectives (big lakes, puddles, polished floors) and all have the "white at the edges of the screen" artifact when you turn the camera. This normally isn't a huge issue in games but here its extremely eye catching and happens like, 80% of the runtime in effected areas.

Is this about Ragnarok? The original's use of SSR was extremely sporadic actually, most reflections relied on cubemaps.

2- Pet peeve of mine -- games where a large portion of the gameplay is climbing over ledges with temporal/checkerboard image reconstruction. You're constantly climbing up and over ledges in this game, and it's constantly causing a smeary wipe as it reveals low res un-reconstructed pixels.

Ok, so I'm assuming this is about the original then, as Raganarok does not use checkerboarding, just TAAU.

If this is about Ragnarok and it does use a lot more SSR - clear upgrade path for the PC version to employ RT then, whenever it arrives.

 

[Cyan]

John takes a look at Sonic Frontiers across every platform (except Steam Deck which is only mentioned)

Great video by John. I'm loving the game so far. Yes, it's true it wont be for everyone, but I feel Sonic Team really has something with this template, and if they build off of it in the right way for future games, the future of 3D Sonic seems bright!

Also, I'll just say, yes, another game which has no stuttering of any kind. They did a great job here on the PC version as far as performance consistency goes... but unfortunately as John says, it's disappointing to see 60fps caps, and a lack of settings options to tweak the experience. On PC there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to push that draw distance out to the horizon. (also lol at Alex's optimized settings )

Edit: Oh, I guess I can chime in on the Steam Deck version myself, since I have one lol. The game is currently "unsupported", but runs just fine when launched. The game essentially needs to be locked to 30fps, because there's no hope in hell of getting anywhere close to 60. Even a locked 30fps requires Shadows to be set to low, and the "Local reflections" setting to be unchecked.

After doing that, a smooth 30fps lock is possible and it runs nicely and looks pretty darn good on the Deck screen.

can't be happier to know that the game is really good. I had pre-purchased it but it felt like some people expected or wanted it to be bad.

Do you know if the game has some kind of reconstruction technique a la DLSS? I downloaded the game but I haven't played it yet, 'cos I usually play games 1 by 1, until I complete a game that I enjoy enough to complete, I won't start with another, and Sonic gotta wait for Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

I know 4K 60fps is easily doable, but I prefer DLSS and the likes. Just curious...

 

[Cyan]

Obviously RT and ML are the way forward, were not fully there yet, however i never expected we'd come this far since the 2018's initial debut of RT in the consumer gaming space.

I thought it could take decades. I read today that another example of RT showcase -striking differences-, Control, is going to have a sequel, Control 2. Kinda like how the woman reflects on the pupil of the girl -video below-, before the pupil gives way to the light. The author of the video has a very good eye for detail, one of my fav youtubers.

 

[pjbliverpool]

John takes a look at Sonic Frontiers across every platform (except Steam Deck which is only mentioned)

Great video by John. I'm loving the game so far. Yes, it's true it wont be for everyone, but I feel Sonic Team really has something with this template, and if they build off of it in the right way for future games, the future of 3D Sonic seems bright!

Also, I'll just say, yes, another game which has no stuttering of any kind. They did a great job here on the PC version as far as performance consistency goes... but unfortunately as John says, it's disappointing to see 60fps caps, and a lack of settings options to tweak the experience. On PC there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to push that draw distance out to the horizon. (also lol at Alex's optimized settings )

Edit: Oh, I guess I can chime in on the Steam Deck version myself, since I have one lol. The game is currently "unsupported", but runs just fine when launched. The game essentially needs to be locked to 30fps, because there's no hope in hell of getting anywhere close to 60. Even a locked 30fps requires Shadows to be set to low, and the "Local reflections" setting to be unchecked.

After doing that, a smooth 30fps lock is possible and it runs nicely and looks pretty darn good on the Deck screen.

Lack of ultra wide-screen support is a massive omission though for a PC game. It's great they've got the basics right, but outside of that this is a bare minimum effort.

As John says though that's likely to be resolved very quickly by modding community. Crazy that it has to be though.

And yes, Alex's interjection was brilliant!

 

[Remij]

can't be happier to know that the game is really good. I had pre-purchased it but it felt like some people expected or wanted it to be bad.

Do you know if the game has some kind of reconstruction technique a la DLSS? I downloaded the game but I haven't played it yet, 'cos I usually play games 1 by 1, until I complete a game that I enjoy enough to complete, I won't start with another, and Sonic gotta wait for Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

I know 4K 60fps is easily doable, but I prefer DLSS and the likes. Just curious...

The game has no reconstruction tech support. It has TAA and FXAA as anti-aliasing options.

Lack of ultra wide-screen support is a massive omission though for a PC game. It's great they've got the basics right, but outside of that this is a bare minimum effort.

As John says though that's likely to be resolved very quickly by modding community. Crazy that it has to be though.

And yes, Alex's interjection was brilliant!

Yes. I'm hoping against hope that they'll officially add it in... but not holding my breath.

It's really unfortunate. Currently, there's not much separating the PC and high end console versions of the game. Essentially a locked 60fps and suitably high resolution for 4K displays... but with PC, it could easily be the best version with official ultrawide and unlocked FPS support. When are they going to learn that they'd get a lot more purchases on this platform if they support those features and make it stand out from the rest.

 

[techuse]

I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on that one. Several of those comparison screens show a completely transformative change IMO.



I don't see why that matters. RT doesn't need to look transformative all of the time to be worthwhile. It's impact on the graphics can range from near nothing, to subtle, to striking. The same can be said of any graphical effect/technique so I'm not sure why we'd single RT out in this respect.

And several of those screens are quite representative of the differences at large, being simple views of the city that would show up regularly during gameplay.



I don't agree. They may be more difficult to mentally note the individual changes between the two modes but that doesn't mean that the RT mode doesn't generally look better and more realistic. Which is what we all want from graphics, right?

I think what @davis.anthony said above was spot on in that RT, like many effects isn't something you necessarily point at while playing the game and go "wow look at that RT effect" (although RT reflections can be exactly that), but it's just a more general more realistic/less computer gamey image. I'd wager in a blind test if you asked someone to play CP2077 with max RT for a while, then turned it off without saying what you'd changed, and asked them to play again and say whether it looked better or worse, you'd get an overwhelming response that it looks worse without the users being able to pinpoint why. That's because we've reached the point in graphics where you can no longer point at one particular effect and say "that looks great", but rather it's the coming together of everything to create the impression of realism or offline rendering in your mind that counts. And RT has a significant impact on that overall blend of techniques.



I really don't see how this is relevant. Firstly UE5, at least in the examples I assume you're referring to, uses Lumen. Which HWRT or not, is still a form of RT, just a less accurate one. You can be certain UE5 would look a lot less impressive with traditional lighting. And secondly, the base geometry on which many of those UE5 demos are based is much higher than what is shown in CB2077 thanks to Nanite, so you have a better starting point to begin with. We've also seen how switching to HWRT over SWRT improves the image further.

Ya we have different views on what constitutes a transformative improvement. I don't disagree that the RT mode looks better. Those of us who feel current RT implementations generally don't transform the visual experience are still aware of the improvements. We are aware of what is being changed in the rendering.

UE5 was just an example of a visual experience I find transformative compared to current software. Something that looks like a completely different rendering paradigm from what we have on current games. I don't feel RT implementations deliver that yet. Metro EE comes the closest however.

 

[cwjs]

Is this about Ragnarok? Ok, so I'm assuming this is about the original then, as Raganarok does not use checkerboarding, just TAAU.

If this is about Ragnarok and it does use a lot more SSR - clear upgrade path for the PC version to employ RT then, whenever it arrives.

Ragnarok — the taau is what I’m seeing, it’s all the same artifacts on any temporal upscaling.

 

[davis.anthony]

I'm refusing to get the new Sonic game until either the devs or PC community fix that horrid draw distance and popin.

 

[Jay]

I'm refusing to get the new Sonic game until either the devs or PC community fix that horrid draw distance and popin.

Yeah it's pretty bad, and surpring that the ssd's doesn't make a difference between systems.
So literally set in the engine.
Hate when I see something that seems to be due to 'parity'.

 

[Dictator]

Yeah it's pretty bad, and surpring that the ssd's doesn't make a difference between systems.
So literally set in the engine.
Hate when I see something that seems to be due to 'parity'.

LOD pop in has almost nothing to do with SSD stuff. It is a CPU consideration usually or a overdraw/geometry consideration.

 

[chris1515]

LOD pop in has almost nothing to do with SSD stuff. It is a CPU consideration usually or a overdraw/geometry consideration.

+1 SSD latency and bandwidth only help to solve texture pop in no LOD pop in or shadow pop in like in title using cascaded shadow maps. UE 5 help to make LOD and shadow pop in on environment nearly non existent because of Nanite + Virtual Shadow map.

 

[Karamazov]

i know it's a slow paced game, but i always considered RDR2 to handle LOD pop in awesomely

 

[JPT]

I think a part of the issue is that people on here are "experts", the average gamer will not be able to say when RT is on/off or quantifiably point out when/why RT is better in a picture.
And on here the discussion is on if the reflection in the eyeballs of a char is correct or not. Something you only see if you stop and zoom in.
As for the above picture, I instinctually gravitate toward the OFF picture, but when I see that is OFF and the other is ON and start to look closer, I think that RT is more correct, but at the same time, i feel it is a bland picture. I want artistic lightning as in my tv shows/movies it seems.