Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2023]

[trinibwoy]

Like I don't want every roundtable discussion to be necessarily composed of just industry insiders either, but I'm bewildered by what it was expected he'd be bringing to the table.

I think it was a great idea to invite a community representative as ultimately that’s the target audience for everything being discussed. The guy’s vibe was off though and out of sync with everyone else on the call. If he asked better questions and was more chill it would’ve been fine.

 

[GhostofWar]

How is RTX and all the things nvidia working on going to play with UE5? From my limited viewpoint, it seem that Epic wants everything done within their environment they're presenting. So is there a collision course coming and what does it mean for developers?

Nvidia have their seperate ue5 dev branch which normally has all their stuff in it, I've got no idea how acceptable it is to ship something using that branch or how much it takes to bring things from that into the mainline branch but looking at that desordre game that dev seems to be using lumen and all the nvidia stuff in their game and you can switch between it all fine. It seems there are options there, Epic seems to give them enough leeway that they can still do things the way they want.

 

[pharma]

How is RTX and all the things nvidia working on going to play with UE5? From my limited viewpoint, it seem that Epic wants everything done within their environment they're presenting. So is there a collision course coming and what does it mean for developers?

Developers can create their own separate UE5 branch and add whatever tech what is best suited for their game.

 

[DavidGraham]

How is RTX and all the things nvidia working on going to play with UE5?

Devs can integrate RTXDI and Path Tracing into their UE5 game, a game called Desordre already did this by a single dev.

Devs can also do a combination between RTXDI with Hardware Lumen or RTXDI and RTXGI.

DLSS3 is already supported with UE5, no idea if DLSS3.5 is supported or not.

 

[Lurkmass]

How is RTX and all the things nvidia working on going to play with UE5? From my limited viewpoint, it seem that Epic wants everything done within their environment they're presenting. So is there a collision course coming and what does it mean for developers?

Epic Games will often refuse technical support for custom branches of their engine and the only possible way to get them to think otherwise would be to apply for a more premium license. Developers can use those custom engine builds at their own risk ...

 

[Flappy Pannus]

At 13:54 Rich wades into the issue of DLSS quality vs FSR.

Extremely fair overall, and goes into the areas that we expect from DF that other reviews sites barely touch.

 

[davis.anthony]

At 13:54 Rich wades into the issue of DLSS quality vs FSR.

Extremely fair overall, and goes into the areas that we expect from DF that other reviews sites barely touch.

I did testing testing on this myself.

In Dying Light at 4k target DLSS and FSR 2 are with 3-4 frames of each other when the quality settings are matched like for like.

But FSR2 ghosts like a mofo on the swaying grass where as DLSS doesn't.

I turned DLSS down to performance mode and still got a better looking image (to my eyes) than FSR2 in quality mode.

If the frame rates are matched DLSS will give you superior image quality.

If image quality is matched DLSS will give you superior performance.

 

[DavidGraham]

If the frame rates are matched DLSS will give you superior image quality.

If image quality is matched DLSS will give you superior performance.

The situation is going to be even worse for FSR in titles with DLSS3.5, you get vastly better image quality, as ray traced effects are all sharper, more defined and react quickly to dynamic changes, while also having a small performance boost coming from replacing multiple compute denoisers with a single ML denoiser. FSR lacks all of that on top delivering substantially worse upscaling quality. In other words it's not a fair fight anymore.

 

[trinibwoy]

The situation is going to be even worse for FSR in titles with DLSS3.5, you get vastly better image quality, as ray traced effects are all sharper, more defined and react quickly to dynamic changes, while also having a small performance boost coming from replacing multiple compute denoisers with a single ML denoiser. FSR lacks all of that on top delivering substantially worse upscaling quality. In other words it's not a fair fight anymore.

The list of proprietary Nvidia raytracing technologies is rapidly growing. I doubt many developers will be as enthusiastic as CDPR in embracing all of it. 4A might do it but I can’t think of anyone else.

RTXDI (not proprietary but likely Nvidia optimized)
RestirGI (same as above)
OMM and DMM
Shader Execution Reordering
Ray Reconstruction

 

[davis.anthony]

The list of proprietary Nvidia raytracing technologies is rapidly growing. I doubt many developers will be as enthusiastic as CDPR in embracing all of it. 4A might do it but I can’t think of anyone else.

RTXDI (not proprietary but likely Nvidia optimized)
RestirGI (same as above)
OMM and DMM
Shader Execution Reordering
Ray Reconstruction

If those 3 get regular adoption I'll be happy.

 

[techuse]

Outside of DLSS, there doesn’t seem to be much interest by most devs in Nvidia’s tech. Unfortunate market realities when it comes to PC development.

 

[pharma]

The list of proprietary Nvidia raytracing technologies is rapidly growing. I doubt many developers will be as enthusiastic as CDPR in embracing all of it. 4A might do it but I can’t think of anyone else.

RTXDI (not proprietary but likely Nvidia optimized)
RestirGI (same as above)
OMM and DMM
Shader Execution Reordering
Ray Reconstruction

I think ACE (AI tech for game speech/animations) will catch on as it can significantly reduce development time. It will be interesting to see if CDPR will use this in any ongoing project.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

Outside of DLSS, there doesn’t seem to be much interest by most devs in Nvidia’s tech. Unfortunate market realities when it comes to PC development.

Ray reconstruction is DLSS though. I have no idea on the work required to implement it, but even in games without the extensive RT that CP 2077 has, it can provide a significant benefit. Even if it's not transformative in quality, the ability to reconstruct from fewer rays implies it could also provide a further performance boost by utilizing lower RT quality levels but the final presentation may not be affected, or even be superior than the game's own denoising previously.

Certainly there will be no version of Alan Wake 2 that will approach what it will look like under DLSS 3.5. If it's truly as transformative as the hype indicates, then I expect it will become expected with any game that has RT.

 

[techuse]

Ray reconstruction is DLSS though. I have no idea on the work required to implement it, but even in games without the extensive RT that CP 2077 has, it can provide a significant benefit. Even if it's not transformative in quality, the ability to reconstruct from fewer rays implies it could also provide a further performance boost by utilizing lower RT quality levels but the final presentation may not be affected, or even be superior than the game's own denoising previously.

Certainly there will be no version of Alan Wake 2 that will approach what it will look like under DLSS 3.5. If it's truly as transformative as the hype indicates, then I expect it will become expected with any game that has RT.

The interview Alex conducted seems to imply that it's a more complex integration and may not see use in games that aren't full RT.

 

[DavidGraham]

I doubt many developers will be as enthusiastic as CDPR in embracing all of it.

Well, Remedy seems to be doing it as well (they are going to release Alan Wake 2, Control 2, Max Payne 1 and 2 Remakes).

Also Crytek (whenever they will release Crysis 4).

Then there is the indie devs (who heavily incorporated Ray Tracing and DLSS). There is also the RTX Remix titles, which NVIDIA is investing quite a lot into. Not to forget NVIDIA's own Lightspeed studio which sometimes help with Remixes (Quake 2 RTX, Portal RTX) or collaborates with the dev directly (Minecraft RTX).

In addition to 4A and CDPR there are also some Chinese/Korean devs I don't remember.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Do we think the potential inclusion of at least some of these technologies as standard features in the switch versions of games might help drive their inclusion in the PC space?

 

[Below2D]

The list of proprietary Nvidia raytracing technologies is rapidly growing. I doubt many developers will be as enthusiastic as CDPR in embracing all of it. 4A might do it but I can’t think of anyone else.

Which is a shame because no one really has anything better.

 

[trinibwoy]

Well, Remedy seems to be doing it as well (they are going to release Alan Wake 2, Control 2, Max Payne 1 and 2 Remakes).

Oh yeah forgot Remedy.

In the DF interview Jakub from CDPR pointed out that path tracing wasn’t a slam dunk for higher ups in the company. It was competing for scarce time and resources and the IQ benefits weren’t obvious to everyone. It sounds like developers were pushing it and not the money men. That sorta thing is easier to pull off at smaller, more independent studios.

 

[Dictator]

Also Crytek (whenever they will release Crysis 4).

I definitely expect Crysis 4 to have a path traced renderer in it.

@trinibwoy where do you think Jakub said that the higher ups were not excited about path tracing?

 

[DavidGraham]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1704876971610505633