GPU Ray Tracing Performance Comparisons [2021-2022]

[JoeJ]

Metro Exodus does look low poly. I wonder about the details of that 20 million statement. That's also the typical amount of rendered triangles for the UE5 demos and the perceived polygon difference is huge.

Well, everything looks low poly in comparison to UE5.
Comparing by poly count makes little sense because only UE5 has adaptive detail. Other games likely have low detail for close ups, and unnecessarily high detail at the distance.
And only UE5 adds high contrast detailed shadows to those details. Exodus may use a lot of tessellation, but RT can't use that so no HF shadows to amplify that.

 

[OlegSH]

Exodus may use a lot of tessellation, but RT can't use that so no HF shadows to amplify that.

Screen space shadows should be sufficient for tiny tessellation details in most cases, that's so obvious that i can only scratch my head wondering why they didn't add them.

 

[JoeJ]

Screen space shadows should be sufficient for tiny tessellation details in most cases, that's so obvious that i can only scratch my head wondering why they didn't add them.

IIRC, they had them in first demo, but replaced lots of SS with using multi view SM. Though that's likely more about AO or skylight, not direct sunlight i guess.
First demo had very noticeable TA artifacts. This became much better.

 

[Rootax]

Well, everything looks low poly in comparison to UE5.
Comparing by poly count makes little sense because only UE5 has adaptive detail. Other games likely have low detail for close ups, and unnecessarily high detail at the distance.
And only UE5 adds high contrast detailed shadows to those details. Exodus may use a lot of tessellation, but RT can't use that so no HF shadows to amplify that.

I don't know, UE5 is pushing it to the extreme, but LoD is not new and some game / engine do a good work at having well detailed object from a short distance, and decent looking at a distance already, for years...

Honestly when I looked at the UE5 presentation, I said to myself "what the point ?" way to often.

 

[JoeJ]

I don't know, UE5 is pushing it to the extreme, but LoD is not new and some game / engine do a good work at having well detailed object from a short distance, and decent looking at a distance already, for years...

But mostly only for dynamic objects and foliage, and then causing popping. Rocks are low poly in all games i've seen.

Honestly when I looked at the UE5 presentation, I said to myself "what the point ?" way to often.

I also think insane detail is not necessary / practical in general, but i thought the same about anti aliasing, or 1080p, now 4K, etc. But people get used to it, expect it after some time, and then looking back we end up with agreement.
But the primary advantage is ability to scale down, which is independent from having insane detail or not.
Pixel accurate SM, or multi view rendering methods are also nice things to have.

 

[Rootax]

Are you not happy with Crysis rock or vegetation already, given 10-20% more poly ? (true question)

In the end, I agree that we will get used to this level of detail. My main "problem" is, at what cost. If you cut your fps in half, no thx. Nanite and Lumen look awesome yes, but the perf penalty is not small. So my basic mind tells me "that's no innovation if these tanks the perfs...". Same stuff with RT&co I guess...

Now, I'm waiting to see real game using them. Sometimes tech demo are not a very good representation of what is possible imo.

 

[Jawed]

Not agree, sometimes it's for certain assets, but sometimes it looks very high poly. As in all open world games, assets quality swings widely in this game. For some reason, such assets as rocks and mountains are quite low poly in the game and I guess they are to blame for the low poly look, but there are also quite a few very high poly assets.

I'm still playing Metro 2033 and haven't bought Exodus yet, so I'm not currently in a position to post screenies.

Even with 2033 lots of objects look nice because of tessellation (I'm playing Redux) - it's clearly a game where tessellation is an important part of the rendering.

So the remaining question: In Exodus, regarding assets that look "very high poly", do they look that way because of tessellation or do they look the same with tessellation off? I simply have no idea.

 

[JoeJ]

Are you not happy with Crysis rock or vegetation already, given 10-20% more poly ? (true question)

Not happy, no. It's fine at some distance, but close rocks always expose long edges. So my gun model shows geometric resolution of 1mm, while the rock right beside has 100mm. (Remembering the new Sniper game which has very nice terrain. Missed Crysis remake.)

In the end, I agree that we will get used to this level of detail. My main "problem" is, at what cost. If you cut your fps in half, no thx.

Yep, but only Lumen seems guilty. For Nanite they say it has the same 4ms cost to generate GBuffers we've had for prev gen. So 'insane detail' for free, basically. Nanite also scales to mobile, while Lumen does not. But idk to which of the two they add the SM rendering costs.
Having LOD tech has some base cost, but after that we should always see it's a net win because work and BW reduction. Notice Nanite also does culling and HSR during cluster hierarchy traversal for LOD selection, stuff we need in any case.
And it reduces streaming BW as much as it helps with rendering. I don't see any reason to not doing this, aside of DXR not being compatible yet.

 

[OlegSH]

Even with 2033 lots of objects look nice because of tessellation (I'm playing Redux) - it's clearly a game where tessellation is an important part of the rendering.

Yep, they nicely integrated phong tesselation with displacement maps back in 2010 and still continue using it. Metro is not the only series that uses tessellation extensively, I remember Activision has implemented subdivs via compute back in COD: Ghosts and from what I can tell they still use it today for nicely rounded pipes, guns, etc.

In Exodus, regarding assets that look "very high poly", do they look that way because of tessellation or do they look the same with tessellation off?

There are both cases, as you can see here:

Some objects look rough without tesselation.
Characters models on the other hand look great even without tesselation since they have high poly base mesh. It is hard to spot tessellation on characters suits, but it is here on many models in close up shots. Tessellation also improves the look of monsters, not to the same extend as in Redux though because the base mesh detalization is quite a bit higher in the Exodus.

 

[HLJ]

Observation:
Seems like the new Pixar movie "Luca" has less raytracing than some real time games :/

Clouds are missing in the reflection in the water of the pool...find it a bit funny, since people have been comparing DXR games to rendered movies...

 

[CarstenS]

My feeling is, the clouds not showing in the pool's reflection of the characters is correct and a matter of angle.

 

[DavidGraham]

The 3080Ti is 70% faster than 6900XT in Lego Builder Journey @4K, and 60% faster @2K, using max ray tracing settings.

https://www.hardwareluxx.de/index.p...-journey-mit-raytracing-und-dlss-im-test.html

 

[DegustatoR]

https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Lego...5/Specials/Benchmarks-DLSS-Vergleich-1374104/
More on that with 2060 nuking it out against 6900XT + DLSS quality comparison.

 

[pjbliverpool]

The game looks gorgeous but I'm struggling to understand why it's so demanding. Even at 1080p without RT the 6700XT is averaging only 35.5fps. Isn't this game also on the Switch???

 

[Dictator]

The game looks gorgeous but I'm struggling to understand why it's so demanding. Even at 1080p without RT the 6700XT is averaging only 35.5fps. Isn't this game also on the Switch???

Switch rendered is really different. The game ships with a dx11 Version with SSGI, SSR, etc. A DX12 Version with a whole bunch of RT, then a mobile Version rendered which is forward rendered and missing many graphicsl effects. Switch is that Version.

 

[DegustatoR]

PC release should have the original renderer too judging by this info from system requirements:

Additional Notes: PCs with lower than minimum specs can run the game on "Classic" mode via launch options.

 

[Remij]

Like... I'm looking at that LEGO game... and it's just freaking beautiful.

But PLEASE... tell me they were smart enough to add a mode where you can just build things?

Because holy crap, I'd spend ages playing around in that mode!

 

[pjbliverpool]

Switch rendered is really different. The game ships with a dx11 Version with SSGI, SSR, etc. A DX12 Version with a whole bunch of RT, then a mobile Version rendered which is forward rendered and missing many graphicsl effects. Switch is that Version.

PC release should have the original renderer too judging by this info from system requirements:

Should make for some really interesting benchmarks.

And could we be looking at the most scalable game ever? Its hard to argue that its not making good use of all that power it requires when maxed out. I'd argue it definitely deserves a place on the "best graphics to date" podium alongside a few other games with different (and IMO) incomparable art styles.

 

[CarstenS]

Finally a LEGO game, where you actually play with LEGO bricks, not a successful-franchise-platformer-turned-bricky.

 

[DavidGraham]

The 3080 is 30% faster than 6900XT @4K in Doom Eternal Ray Tracing, the 3090 is ~50% faster.

https://gamegpu.com/action-/-fps-/-tps/doom-eternal-test-rtx