GPU Ray Tracing Performance Comparisons [2021-2022]

[troyan]

No, that is a false argument. RTXGI works perfectly fine with UE4 and game developers have had the chance to implement it. But no game that matters is using RTXGI, despite it being available for so long.

Why should that be different with UE5 and RTXGI?

Cyberpunk Overdrive mode is just built to strain the 4090 for questionable increases in graphics fidelity and leave every other card in the dust. It just runs at 22 FPS on it, so that is definately not an option most gamers are going to use, regardless if they use a 4090 or an AMD GPU. Not everyone wants to use upscaling and frame generation, especially when buying such an expensive card for native 4K gaming.

Cyberpunk Overdrive replaces a huge part of the lightning system and uses much better reflections. It will be above everything released as a game.
Has UE5 even support for direct lightning raytracing? How are these Lumen reflections? Still low quality? With every day passing UE5 loses it edge.

 

[davis.anthony]

Every time I get in to a debate with someone on Twitter telling me ray tracing not being worth the hit and is nothing but a useless feature they always have an AMD GPU, funny that

 

[Dampf]

Every time I get in to a debate with someone on Twitter telling me ray tracing not being worth the hit and is nothing but a useless feature they always have an AMD GPU, funny that

Yeah I have noticed that as well. But there's also a lot of RTX 2000 and RTX 3000 users telling me the same. So it's not like that is a mindset that is exclusively to AMD owners, it's just that its an opinion AMD users are more likely to have.

 

[DavidGraham]

But please see we are just a tiny fraction of the market.

UE5 is constantly improving and adding new ray tracing things.. here is some new high res RT reflections in UE5.1.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1588442636775739392

That's why I urge you to wait and see UE5 games when they are released, I am sure many developers will implement higher ray tracing modes for PCs. Spider-Man Remastered and Spider-Man Miles Morales added higher resolution and higher distance RT reflections on PC despite being a console port, Miles Morales is adding RT shadows, which never existed on PS5, so developers are pushing the limits, it doesn't cost them too much to pile on RT effects, if the engine has already integrated RT at the core level, which is what UE5 is doing.

 

[Lurkmass]

Spider-Man, Spider-Man Miles Morales, Sackboy, Death Stranding, Returnal, .. these are the new PS5 games that are/ will be adding ray tracing .. more to come.

I don't think many review outlets will go out of their way to include Sackboy in their benchmarks or Returnal as well. Death Stranding currently doesn't feature any ray tracing ...

Horizon Forbidden West is definitely going to be used as a benchmark by many review outlets and I imagine we'll see a fair amount of outlets including God of War Ragnarok and possibly The Last of Us Part I as well when they release on PC. We're not going to be seeing any new titles from Insomniac Games on PC until 2024 where there will be new hardware releases regardless ...

I wonder what EA are going to do soon with their next set of upcoming Frostbite engine titles like Need for Speed or Dead Space. If they don't ship HW RT in either of them industry confidence for the feature would be undermined ...

 

[Jawed]

I don't think many review outlets will go out of their way to include Sackboy in their benchmarks or Returnal as well. Death Stranding currently doesn't feature any ray tracing ...

Horizon Forbidden West is definitely going to be used as a benchmark by many review outlets and I imagine we'll see a fair amount of outlets including God of War Ragnarok and possibly The Last of Us Part I as well when they release on PC. We're not going to be seeing any new titles from Insomniac Games on PC until 2024 where there will be new hardware releases regardless ...

I wonder what EA are going to do soon with their next set of upcoming Frostbite engine titles like Need for Speed or Dead Space. If they don't ship HW RT in either of them industry confidence for the feature would be undermined ...

Industry confidence may well start to be a real question after CoD MW2.

Anyone that says that simply dropping in shadows is easy, because the game already has reflections is really quite deluded. Each ray tracing technique is a major R&D project, especially when game engines were not originated with ray tracing as a core design goal.

Look at how much effort Activision put into ray traced shadows here:

https://www.activision.com/cdn/research/Raytraced_Shadows_in_Call_of_Duty_Modern_Warfare.pdf

they are fantastic, but that's not a weekend project.

 

[DavidGraham]

Indsutry confidence is high enough ..

https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/wy15sm

 

[Lurkmass]

Industry confidence may well start to be a real question after CoD MW2.

Anyone that says that simply dropping in shadows is easy, because the game already has reflections is really quite deluded. Each ray tracing technique is a major R&D project, especially when game engines were not originated with ray tracing as a core design goal.

Look at how much effort Activision put into ray traced shadows here:

https://www.activision.com/cdn/research/Raytraced_Shadows_in_Call_of_Duty_Modern_Warfare.pdf

they are fantastic, but that's not a weekend project.

Yeah, I can definitely see how implementing HW RT can require some pretty invasive changes to the graphics code. I can imagine how shipping the feature on consoles will help in being able to pay for the maintenance of the said feature ...

BFV RT reflection implementation for an example was a massive game specific hack that didn't carry over ...

 

[troyan]

Yeah, I can definitely see how implementing HW RT can require some pretty invasive changes to the graphics code. I can imagine how shipping the feature on consoles will help in being able to pay for the maintenance of the said feature ...

BFV RT reflection implementation for an example was a massive game specific hack that didn't carry over ...

Yeah, a hack which was implemented within a few months. Yes the next one is downgraded because the next gen consoles are outdated from the start.
At the same time the UE4 is evolving ultra fast and allows indie developer to use Raytracing in different kind of games: Ego shooter, sidescroller, iso perspective, racing games.

 

[Lurkmass]

Yeah, a hack which was implemented within a few months. Yes the next one is downgraded because the next gen consoles are outdated from the start.
At the same time the UE4 is evolving ultra fast and allows indie developer to use Raytracing in different kind of games: Ego shooter, sidescroller, iso perspective, racing games.

You can decry about consoles as much as you want but without them shipping the feature another external force like Nvidia would be forced to take up their resources and spend it on hacking tons of games just to include it to be able to show off their advantage. If they prefer that future then hats off to them ...

 

[troyan]

You can decry about consoles as much as you want but without them shipping the feature another external force like Nvidia would be forced to take up their resources and spend it on hacking tons of games just to include it to be able to show off their advantage. If they prefer that future then hats off to them ...

These consoles are holding advancement back because they are outdated. Control is 3 1/2 years old and looks much better than Modern Warfare 2. There is basically no real advancements in lightning and reflections with these consoles. God of War 2022 looks like the PS4 version from four years.

Have you seen Portal RTX? Doesnt look worse than Modern Warfare 2. Says all about AAA development right know.

 

[Dampf]

UE5 is constantly improving and adding new ray tracing things.. here is some new high res RT reflections in UE5.1.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1588442636775739392

That's why I urge you to wait and see UE5 games when they are released, I am sure many developers will implement higher ray tracing modes for PCs. Spider-Man Remastered and Spider-Man Miles Morales added higher resolution and higher distance RT reflections on PC despite being a console port, Miles Morales is adding RT shadows, which never existed on PS5, so developers are pushing the limits, it doesn't cost them too much to pile on RT effects, if the engine has already integrated RT at the core level, which is what UE5 is doing.

Well, Transparency Reflections are not a hardware RT feature, it works with software RT as well.



Obviously, HW-RT transparency reflections look better especially when objects are out of screen space (but unlike SSR without cube map fallback, there's still simplified geometry reflecting) but honestly, it gets the job done nicely in most cases. It's a huge win compared to SSR and people might find the differences between RT on and off (HW-Lumen vs SW-Lumen) even more negligible when Lumen gets used compared to games today where the comparisons are made to screen space reflections.

I was pretty disappointed to find out they work in SW-Lumen as well, I thought it was a HW-RT exclusive feature.

 

[davis.anthony]

Well, Transparency Reflections are not a hardware RT feature, it works with software RT as well.



Obviously, HW-RT transparency reflections look better especially when objects are out of screen space (but unlike SSR without cube map fallback, there's still simplified geometry reflecting) but honestly, it gets the job done nicely in most cases. It's a huge win compared to SSR and people might find the differences between RT on and off (HW-Lumen vs SW-Lumen) even more negligible when Lumen gets used compared to games today where the comparisons are made to screen space reflections.

I was pretty disappointed to find out they work in SW-Lumen as well, I thought it was a HW-RT exclusive feature.

That's a very simple scene, in an actual game scene are they still performant enough in SW to still use at a good frame rate?

The issue is not if the effect is possible via SW but if the SW route will be fast enough to have all the effects running at the same time with a good level of performance.

We know the HW version of it will be.

 

[Lurkmass]

These consoles are holding advancement back because they are outdated. Control is 3 1/2 years old and looks much better than Modern Warfare 2. There is basically no real advancements in lightning and reflections with these consoles. God of War 2022 looks like the PS4 version from four years.

Have you seen Portal RTX? Doesnt look worse than Modern Warfare 2. Says all about AAA development right know.

Well too bad since AAA games are going to be the standard for years to come in terms of graphical benchmarking so I suggest you deal with it!

The few engines left that heavily championed HW RT like Northlight or REDEngine are going to die off in a dead end and internally deprecated by their own developers ...

 

[Dampf]

That's a very simple scene, in an actual game scene are they still performant enough in SW to still use at a good frame rate?

The issue is not if the effect is possible via SW but if the SW route will be fast enough to have all the effects running at the same time with a good level of performance.

We know the HW version of it will be.

It's actually the opposite. Remember, SW-Lumen does not use triangle based raytracing that would be accelerated by RT hardware, it's using signed distance fields, a different methode. In a complex scene with a ton of overlapping meshes, it would get slower than SW-Lumen. Epic states this is one of the limitations of HW-Lumen.

 

[davis.anthony]

It's actually the opposite. Remember, SW-Lumen does not use triangle based raytracing that would be accelerated by RT hardware, it's using signed distance fields, a different methode. In a complex scene with a ton of overlapping meshes, it would get slower than SW-Lumen. Epic states this is one of the limitations of HW-Lumen.

But RT-HW keeps on getting faster and there will become a point where the performance drop (In percentage terms) will be the same as or lower than SW while also offering better quality.

SW will be good for really old GPU's but give it another two years or so will it really be worth it for the average GPU if they have a good amount of HW-RT performance?

 

[troyan]

Well too bad since AAA games are going to be the standard for years to come in terms of graphical benchmarking so I suggest you deal with it!

The few engines left that heavily championed HW RT like Northlight or REDEngine are going to die off in a dead end and internally deprecated by their own developers ...

They shouldnt be the standard. A game with SSR is outdated, like using Linpack to determinate the performance of HPC accelerators.

 

[DavidGraham]

BFV RT reflection implementation for an example was a massive game specific hack that didn't carry over ...

Because BFV had a different frostbite branch than the rest of EA branches, it's always a mess with frostbite.

Anyways BF2042 uses RT AO. So the main engine branch got ray tracing again.

The few engines left that heavily championed HW RT like Northlight or REDEngine are going to die off in a dead end and internally deprecated by their own developers ...

No, Northlight is powering Max Payne Remake and the next Alan Wake.

All engines have championed hardware ray tracing, even Crytek, so I don't know your point exactly. UE5 uses hardware ray tracing to render an entrie city.

I was pretty disappointed to find out they work in SW-Lumen as well, I thought it was a HW-RT exclusive feature.

May I remind you that HW-RT works faster than SW-RT while delivering higher quality GI and reflection resolution, it's actually a bonus, as more developers will be inclined to enable HW-RT on PC.

The point is, UE5 is constantly adding new RT things, don't judge it with the current state only. Heck, two years ago it didn't even have a functioning HW-RT path. Please take some time before you judge the current state hastely.

 

[Dampf]

But RT-HW keeps on getting faster and there will become a point where the performance drop (In percentage terms) will be the same as or lower than SW for the HW implementation while also offering better quality.

SW will be good foe really old GPU's but give it another two years or so will it really be worth it for the average GPU if they have a good amount of HW-RT performance?

That is a limitation of the technique itself. Whether you use a 3050 or a 3090Ti doesn't matter, HW-Lumen will always get super slow if you have over 100.000 overlapping meshes. This is why it's disabled in Lumen in the Land of Nanite and Ancient Valley.

Maybe they find a way around this, sure, we can hope for that. And the 4090 also accelerates Lumen further. But as it stands right now, this is a limitation of HW-Lumen.

By the way, what you say is already the case. SW-Lumen and HW-Lumen perform identical in a new project, you basically get better graphics for free, having better reflections and lighting for no performance impact. The Matrix Demo also has a very small performance impact from HW-Lumen in GPU-Limit. But the Matrix Demo was specifically designed around this limitation. There is not much foliage for example and the buildings by their nature do not have much overlapping meshes.

 

[davis.anthony]

HW-Lumen will always get super slow if you have over 100.000 overlapping meshes.

But how do you know that will always be the case?