GPU Ray Tracing Performance Comparisons [2021-2022]

[DavidGraham]

Most cases of RT take a game that looks anywhere from solid/decent to bad and make it look a little bit better for a massive performance cost.

I don't agree with DSO regarding the game visuals, you really can't play the game without RT as the visuals become severely lacking, lighting is flat because of the lack of proper AO and specular light (from reflections), reflective surfaces are not reflecting properly because of the lack of cubemaps (it's an indie title from a very small team), and shadows are low in count.

RT changes that in a BIG way, playing without it makes the game look an outdated flat mess. You really have to try it and see for yourself.

 

[Davros]

Why wouldn't they? They were just overtessellation

Was hoping amd caught up with nvidia in the area of tesselation

 

[CarstenS]

Was hoping amd caught up with nvidia in the area of tesselation

Not quite. At least not with very high tessellation factors. From 32 on, RTX 3090 is roughly twice as fast still.
IMHO it's not a decisive factor up to a factor of 16-ish. There are other things in real games that would limit before.

I trust i can trust you with a log-scale diagram? Drivers are not up to date for RTX 3090 and 6900 XT, i scraped this from my spreadsheet which I mostly update on or near launch day, so they might have tweaked a thing or two since. Unfortunately, I couldn't buy an RX 6000 card yet from AMDs store, so I don't have updated benchmarks.



I think, tessellation has become a non-issue in normal gaming usage by now, so I wouldn't expect major revamps of these blocks.

 

[techuse]

Just a few pages ago we were debating whether or not completely missing transparent reflections in Control were a significant IQ issue.

No we weren't. The opinion was given that RT reflections in Control don't enhance the end visual experience to a large degree.

 

[troyan]

Digitalfoundry did a small comparision between a 5700 and 2060 super in Crysis 2 and 3 remasters:

Crysis 2 is playable with RT on a 2060S while performance tanks on a 5700. After Metro Exodus EE another game which a RDNA1 buyer cant fully enjoy.

 

[DegustatoR]

Why wouldn't they? They were just overtessellation

Why would they? The remastered version is very likely to have a higher degree of tessellation usage than the "overtessellated" original. (Which wasn't "overtessellated" btw.)

 

[Jawed]

https://www.dsogaming.com/pc-performance-analyses/industria-pc-performance-analysis/

Someone, please start a new thread: "Lazy fucking devs are so fucking lazy now they're using DLSS instead of bothering to optimise".

I think, tessellation has become a non-issue in normal gaming usage by now, so I wouldn't expect major revamps of these blocks.

I'm really hoping that ray tracing doesn't go the way of tessellation.

Sadly many current "AAA" games still don't use tessellation well. Rocks still have miles and miles of perfectly straight edges. Parallax occlusion mapping everywhere. It all looks fucking terrible.

I don't know why tessellation is such a massive fail. It will be a disaster if in 10 years' time ray tracing is in the same shitty state as tessellation is.

Right, that's my Sunday morning rant over.

 

[techuse]

I don't agree with DSO regarding the game visuals, you really can't play the game without RT as the visuals become severely lacking, lighting is flat because of the lack of proper AO and specular light (from reflections), reflective surfaces are not reflecting properly because of the lack of cubemaps (it's an indie title from a very small team), and shadows are low in count.

RT changes that in a BIG way, playing without it makes the game look an outdated flat mess. You really have to try it and see for yourself.

It looks awful with RT too, just slightly less so.

 

[OlegSH]

Someone, please start a new thread: "Lazy fucking devs are so fucking lazy now they're using DLSS instead of bothering to optimise".

Cutting off resolution is not a new practice. Far Cry 6 reflections are already cut to death, so they don't need something like DLSS, unfotunately, there are no options to deal the quality of those reflections back to a good level.
Thanks to "lazy devs" there are options in Crysis Remastered games that allow you to select between cutting RT reflections (which would be a standard "optimization" on a console) and adding in DLSS.

 

[CarstenS]

Someone, please start a new thread: "Lazy fucking devs are so fucking lazy now they're using DLSS instead of bothering to optimise".


I'm really hoping that ray tracing doesn't go the way of tessellation.

Sadly many current "AAA" games still don't use tessellation well. Rocks still have miles and miles of perfectly straight edges. Parallax occlusion mapping everywhere. It all looks fucking terrible.

I don't know why tessellation is such a massive fail. It will be a disaster if in 10 years' time ray tracing is in the same shitty state as tessellation is.

Right, that's my Sunday morning rant over.

Agreed, I was merely alluding to the performance aspect of tessellation during normal use.

And if all else fails, there's still the tessellation limiter in AMDs drivers. Haven't tried it in a while though, hope it works under DX12.

 

[OlegSH]

I don't know why tessellation is such a massive fail

Because last gen consoles were particularly bad at it and anything that requires content authoring pipeline changes (in comparison to what is here on consoles) is a no go for devs since authoring additional content increases expenses.
Luckily the situation is very different this time with RT and it's in best devs interests to move quickly to RT.

 

[PSman1700]

You're not forced to be thrilled. But there are objective IQ improvements that people go out of their way to poo poo for some reason. And yes Industria is not a great example of RT or anything else for that matter.

Maybe some are more thrilled by a higher resolution texture or a second faster loading. All individual i suppose.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Just a few pages ago we were debating whether or not completely missing transparent reflections in Control were a significant IQ issue.

For everything I wrote and read within the last few pages, this is a completely wrong interpretation of what has been said here.

 

[Jawed]

Cutting off resolution is not a new practice. Far Cry 6 reflections are already cut to death, so they don't need something like DLSS, unfotunately, there are no options to deal the quality of those reflections back to a good level.

What I find interesting is that people who think "ray tracing is the only thing that matters" don't appreciate that it's not just RT effects that are "low resolution" in games. Everything is low resolution in games. Textures, shadows, LOD, AO and reflections. Then there's the low draw-distances for these effects.

Far Cry 6's ray-traced sun shadows at least don't have the huge nasty shadow-mapping artefacts that are commonly seen when shadows are cast over long distances.

Thanks to "lazy devs" there are options in Crysis Remastered games that allow you to select between cutting RT reflections (which would be a standard "optimization" on a console) and adding in DLSS.

First Crysis Remastered is a shit show of laziness. CPU bottlenecks galore, made worse by turning on ray tracing.

Agreed, I was merely alluding to the performance aspect of tessellation during normal use.

Yes, I realised that you were referring to performance.

And if all else fails, there's still the tessellation limiter in AMDs drivers. Haven't tried it in a while though, hope it works under DX12.

I was under the impression that the limiter defaults to on. I can't see how D3D12 would prevent the limiter's functionality.

I think we're past the point where anyone cares about actual image quality problems, so no one bothers to investigate the IQ problems caused by the limiter. Hence, no one seems to even know whether the limiter is operational!

Because last gen consoles were particularly bad at it and anything that requires content authoring pipeline changes (in comparison to what is here on consoles) is a no go for devs since authoring additional content increases expenses.
Luckily the situation is very different this time with RT and it's in best devs interests to move quickly to RT.

I'm not so optimistic.

It would be great if Metro Exodus:Enhanced Edition's "comprehensive" approach to ray tracing inspired devs to do ground-up ray tracing and work out how to scale it down to the consoles.

I agree that the simplification of lighting that this approach allows for should be a boon for game studios. But materials is the other side of the coin and sophisticated materials hurt ray traced performance a ton more. Sliders for each category of material that control thresholds for ray tracing (like the glossiness in Doom Eternal ray tracing) might be required.

Maybe the next console generation (and not the "~2023 pro" refresh) will put us on track.

 

[Kaotik]

I was under the impression that the limiter defaults to on. I can't see how D3D12 would prevent the limiter's functionality.

I think we're past the point where anyone cares about actual image quality problems, so no one bothers to investigate the IQ problems caused by the limiter. Hence, no one seems to even know whether the limiter is operational!

It defaults to "AMD optimized", which means it'll limit the tessellation factor if AMD has included a profile saying to do so for that specific game. If there isn't, it doesn't do anything.
It was tested when it was new at least with Witcher 3, haven't seen tests lately.

 

[trinibwoy]

No we weren't. The opinion was given that RT reflections in Control don't enhance the end visual experience to a large degree.

What's the difference between "large degree" and "significant"? This is silly.

What I find interesting is that people who think "ray tracing is the only thing that matters" don't appreciate that it's not just RT effects that are "low resolution" in games. Everything is low resolution in games. Textures, shadows, LOD, AO and reflections. Then there's the low draw-distances for these effects.

Exactly. RT cannot fix everything like a magic wand. If the art design and texture work is shitty it will still be shitty with "RTX ON". There's a weird school of thought that raytraced effects aren't good enough unless they "fix everything".

 

[Kaotik]

There's a weird school of thought that raytraced effects aren't good enough unless they "fix everything".

Where? Most who "downplay" RT here seem to be in the "it costs too much for what it gives" which is completely different. Even if it "fixed everything" it could still fit "it costs too much for what it gives"

 

[trinibwoy]

Where? Most who "downplay" RT here seem to be in the "it costs too much for what it gives" which is completely different. Even if it "fixed everything" it could still fit "it costs too much for what it gives"

Performance is an important factor of course but then I would expect to see more reasonable conversation about “all” the settings that waste performance for no perceivable IQ gain. There have also been opinions expressed in this thread about the IQ impact of RT on its own merits so the performance angle doesn’t apply there.

 

[DavidGraham]

It looks awful with RT too, just slightly less so.

If your top concern is performance per quality, then again disable Ultra settings, gain a big fps boost, then enable RT, otherwise this is no longer a concern, most RT games have DLSS, which you can use to gain a considerable fps boost on top of the going down from Ultra.

I would expect to see more reasonable conversation about “all” the settings that waste performance for no perceivable IQ gain

You won't see this, because as much as I hate to say this, AMD doesn't perform horrendously bad in those "all wasteful settings".

Far Cry 6's ray-traced sun shadows at least don't have the huge nasty shadow-mapping artefacts that are commonly seen when shadows are cast over long distances.

Yeah and they are definitely a sizeable bonus for the games visuals, however the argument here is the lack of scalability for those effects, they are seemingly running on the lower side of quality, with absent Medium and High settings.

 

[neckthrough]

Performance is an important factor of course but then I would expect to see more reasonable conversation about “all” the settings that waste performance for no perceivable IQ gain. There have also been opinions expressed in this thread about the IQ impact of RT on its own merits so the performance angle doesn’t apply there.

Forget it. There's no point in continuing this conversation. Qualifiers like "large degree", "significant", "too much" and "enough" leave too much wiggle room for subjective argumentation.