Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2022]

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But what if all surfaces are perfectly reflective?

Then you would have a black room. If the light source itself were visible, then you would see a hall-of-mirrors effect where there's a grid of repeating light sources that shrink away into infinity, and everything else would be black. If the room were all portals you would see the same thing.

[edit: I should add the caveat here that I'm assuming the reflective surfaces are perfectly specular. A perfect reflector could also be diffuse, in which case I'd say the room ought to be fully lit and ought to perpetually accumulate. If the surfaces are specular (mirror) then you'd be dealing with reflections that shrink away at an inverse square rate. I'm not sure if that fall-off will reach some effective asymptote-like threshold or if the emitters will just get too small to contribute any meaningful energy. It's possible that every view vector (pixel coordinate in the camera) would end up corresponding to one of the infinite reflections, in which case the entire view should be lit to some degree. It's good to remind oneself that RT/PT is not physically modeling the camera itself; it's a passive element that does not absorb energy even though it should be in these thought-experiments. I was curious to see how Cycles or Octane would represent this infinite reflection example, but once you get into thousands of bounces it doesn't behave very well. They may also being contending with precision/epsilon-related problems when asking them to scale that high.]

In terms of path-tracing and the rendering equation, I don't think there's any concept of photons being in-flight, but rather it's just a model of how light energy intersects materials and where it gets transmitted and reflected. That's where the energy conservation occurs. My point of contention is that twitter post saying that portals somehow break the PBR premise, when I really don't think portals are any different to mirrors in the context of path-tracing.
 
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@Dictator

Lowest settings, RTGI on, DLSS Ultra Performance at 1080p

lowestdlssultraperfrtgi.png

RTGI off

rtgioffdlssultraperflowestr.png

On my system, the CPU does not seem the problem in what's holding me back from getting a stable 30 FPS even at lowest settings with the lowest DLSS setting. Are you sure the CPU is the only culprit in RT performance? I would definately disagree, as the GPU usage when using RT is always over 95% here.

I also tried disabling turbo boost to confirm it's not a CPU issue and yes the performnace does not change. If it would be heavily CPU bound, the performance should get even lower at 2.5 GHz vs 4 GHz.

Something is wrong here, not only from the CPU but also from the GPU side as well.
 
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@Dictator

Lowest settings, RTGI on, DLSS Ultra Performance at 1080p

View attachment 7944

RTGI off

View attachment 7945

On my system, the CPU does not seem the problem in what's holding me back from getting a stable 30 FPS even at lowest settings with the lowest DLSS setting. Are you sure the CPU is the only culprit in RT performance? I would definately disagree, as the GPU usage when using RT is always over 95% here.

I also tried disabling turbo boost to confirm it's not a CPU issue and yes the performnace does not change. If it would be heavily CPU bound, the performance should get even lower at 2.5 GHz vs 4 GHz.

Something is wrong here, not only from the CPU but also from the GPU side as well.
which GPU do you have if that's not asking much?
 

Didn't have time to watch it yet but can anyone confirm if it's the latest patch? I'm assuming it's not the hotfixed version because it dropped like 1-2 days ago.

Thank you

Great video but one point I might have missed but didn't see covered was the reference to console settings which Alex mentioned in the DF direct go below the PC settings. There were some grumblings in the DF Direct about that but personally I'm a lot more annoyed than that. I think it's absolutely bonkers that the PC version ships with unscalable and crippling RT performance that makes it unplayable on many average RT capable rigs while the consoles get along just fine at lower settings that aren't exposed on the PC. Conspiracy theories aside I honestly can't think of a single logical reason for that outside of stealth forcing people to upgrade their GPUs. And that's extremely bad for PC gaming because it simply gives the impression of PC gaming being slow and inefficient vs console gaming.
 
Great video but one point I might have missed but didn't see covered was the reference to console settings which Alex mentioned in the DF direct go below the PC settings. There were some grumblings in the DF Direct about that but personally I'm a lot more annoyed than that. I think it's absolutely bonkers that the PC version ships with unscalable and crippling RT performance that makes it unplayable on many average RT capable rigs while the consoles get along just fine at lower settings that aren't exposed on the PC. Conspiracy theories aside I honestly can't think of a single logical reason for that outside of stealth forcing people to upgrade their GPUs. And that's extremely bad for PC gaming because it simply gives the impression of PC gaming being slow and inefficient vs console gaming.
I very much agree with that, I think that is even worse than stutter struggle and I seriously hope this won't become the norm and gets called out by Alex if its not a bug.

I mean, I can't even enjoy the game with RT at all. While in other games like Control, I am running RT medium and DLSS performance at 1440p, so I actually have a 60 fps experience with RT the consoles cannot get which is IMO the better experience comared to 30 FPS with RT at 1440p to 4K. This is what's so great about PC gaming IMO, that you have a choice.

In Witcher 3 the consoles definately offer a much better experience with RT on thanks to the lighter RTGI. The RTGI still looks great and I wish I could have it and run at 1440p30 with DLSS performance on my system. That would be reasonable performance to expect from my system. But this? This ain't it chief. If that is truly intentional and not a bug, I'd be pretty shocked to be honest.
 
On my system, the CPU does not seem the problem in what's holding me back from getting a stable 30 FPS even at lowest settings with the lowest DLSS setting. Are you sure the CPU is the only culprit in RT performance? I would definately disagree, as the GPU usage when using RT is always over 95% here.

You have a 2060 laptop, it stands to reason your GPU will be a bottleneck even if the game is extremely CPU demanding. Alex is largely testing with a 4090, the game of course is very GPU heavy with RT too, but for the type of cards that most people will actually be expecting to run RT on, their CPU will indeed by the limiting factor.

It's one thing to have to decrease the resolution to a level you maybe shouldn't have to in order to get a stable 60fps, but at least that's an option if the game is solely GPU limited. If you're CPU limited, you have little recourse. That's a bigger problem.

Look at your GPU usage with RT off, you're only getting 38% usage - you're massively CPU limited without RT too.
 
You have a 2060 laptop, it stands to reason your GPU will be a bottleneck even if the game is extremely CPU demanding. Alex is largely testing with a 4090, the game of course is very GPU heavy with RT too, but for the type of cards that most people will actually be expecting to run RT on, their CPU will indeed by the limiting factor.

It's one thing to have to decrease the resolution to a level you maybe shouldn't have to in order to get a stable 60fps, but at least that's an option if the game is solely GPU limited. If you're CPU limited, you have little recourse. That's a bigger problem.

Look at your GPU usage with RT off, you're only getting 38% usage - you're massively CPU limited without RT too.
Even at DLSS Ultra Performance and lowest settings? Remember, this is running at 360p or something internally and the CPU usage regardless of core is far from being at over 90% and GPU usage is very high so this is indeed a GPU bottleneck. Portal RTX which is path traced runs at over 60 FPS in DLSS Ultra Performance mode. I can't even get a stable 30 FPS here.

It's not just my system either, RT performance on higher end systems is terrible too. DLSS Performance at 1440p (720p) is also just shy of 35 fps and the 3070 in this video is also fully used.


The RTGI puts way too much strain on the GPU as well, not only on the CPU.

BTW I am aware that I am CPU bottlenecked without RT. That doesn't matter here though.
 
Great video but one point I might have missed but didn't see covered was the reference to console settings which Alex mentioned in the DF direct go below the PC settings. There were some grumblings in the DF Direct about that but personally I'm a lot more annoyed than that. I think it's absolutely bonkers that the PC version ships with unscalable and crippling RT performance that makes it unplayable on many average RT capable rigs while the consoles get along just fine at lower settings that aren't exposed on the PC. Conspiracy theories aside I honestly can't think of a single logical reason for that outside of stealth forcing people to upgrade their GPUs. And that's extremely bad for PC gaming because it simply gives the impression of PC gaming being slow and inefficient vs console gaming.
Yeah I hope we can get them console settings.
 
Even at DLSS Ultra Performance and lowest settings? Remember, this is running at 360p or something internally and the CPU usage regardless of core is far from being at over 90% and GPU usage is very high so this is indeed a GPU bottleneck. Portal RTX which is path traced runs at over 60 FPS in DLSS Ultra Performance mode. I can't even get a stable 30 FPS here.

Ok granted then, considering how incredibly GPU heavy Portal RTX is that does speak to something sorely amiss here on the GPU front as well if you can manage to get decent performance in P3.

We are looking at a long, long series of patches I think if this is going to get into a decent state - if it's possible. This rush to xmas (though hardly the only reason) has made some truly horrific ports recently.

And come on man, shader stutter!? CDPR should really know better.
 
I've made the game really CPU limited and with all RT settings on and Ultra+ I'm 47-54fps in towns with NPC's on screen.

Outside of these I'm easy 60+fps.
 
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