GPU Ray Tracing Performance Comparisons [2021] *spawn*

The difference can be really drastic in some scenes.

Knew I should not have trusted Steve from HBU saying its not noticeable.

 

Have they deliberately made the non rt surfaces look bad
Mirror from Prey 2007

 

They mix SSR with RT reflections and gives some really weird results. (stairs reflected on the deck pictured above). I guess it's okay if you don't mind breaks in the immersion.

 

Yea... no... that's not ok in my book lol.

 

Lol that is terrible.

Some really nice improvements on reflections. Makes the large reflective ocean surfaces using SSR look silly in comparison.

 

Well, the mirror is flat. It's hard to make non-flat surfaces reflect correctly. Cube maps can only get you so far.

 

Seems Techspot/HWUB have updated their approach to RT and now include it as a “standard” setting in their benchmark suite though just for a few games.

“We tested F1 2021 with ray tracing because it's enabled by default on supported hardware. Metro Exodus Enhanced is another ray tracing title and in this case the feature is required to run the game, so you can’t disable ray tracing here and so we’ve gone with the ‘normal’ setting for testing.”

https://www.techspot.com/review/2329-geforce-rtx-3080-ti-vs-radeon-6800-xt/

 

they look a hell of a lot better than whatever farcry is using
nvidia cube map demo


Chameleon Mark

 

No Raytracing in Doom Eternal. It must be really difficult for them to do an objective review. Doom Eternal runs ~100FPS on a 3080TI with raytracing in 4K. That is nearly the 120/144Hz of the fastest 4K displays and TVs...

 

Yeah, well, their stance on RT was never going to age well and it was bound to happen that RT would suddenly become a feature which they are using alongside any other graphical feature of modern games.

 

Cubemaps of open natural environments look fine on small objects with complex geometry. They can't reflect dynamic geometry. They break down on flat surfaces, especially with close large objects (e.g., buildings) in the reflection. On floors, esp. indoors, they are vertigo-inducing.

SSR works great as long as you can see the objects being reflected. Once they get occluded they disappear from the reflection. If you can't see it, neither can the reflection. Reminds me of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beat of Traal.

Some devs painstakingly blend cubemaps with SSR and make it all kinda-sorta work. Others put in a half-hearted effort and you end up with scary shit. It's all a bunch of hacks.

Ray tracing fixes everything. There are still some hacks (SSR/cubemap blending) needed to moderate the perf cost but it's head and shoulders superior to any prior hackery, and there's a graceful improvement path with increasing hardware capability. But buggy/half-hearted implementations can still lead to bizzaro-worlds.

 

Save for the rather important matter of performance required for real time rendering.

 

Scalability is the best thing about raytracing. That’s why there is zero excuse for low resolution or low ray counts with no option to increase the settings for more powerful hardware.

Perspective correctness and support for dynamic objects are major limitations of cube map reflections. Some games try to address this by placing lots of cube maps all over the level and blending them to get a reasonable approximation of perspective correctness but that still doesn’t solve the problem of dynamic objects. In the end it’s so clumsy and expensive that it’s easier to just use raytracing. We are quickly approaching the point where for a given quality level raytracing will be cheaper to implement and run than all the hacks put together.

 

They never stated otherwise.

It's like all the reviewers who were critical of AirPods and wireless bluetooth earphones back in 2016. They said that wireless headphones were the future, but the then available options left a lot to be desired.

 

That ship has sailed. We have games making great use of RT and running at 60 fps now.

That’s not what happened in this case. Even “after” there were good implementations of both RT and DLSS HWUB still went out of their way to downplay both and treat them as unimportant factors in a purchase decision. I’m surprised they came around already. I expected it would take Avatar and a few more next gen exclusive games to change their minds.

 

1 - Define "great use".
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2 - At what rendering resolution and what base generation/type of games? RTX Minecraft and RTX Quake may be nice demos, but they aren't exactly why people are spending money on new gaming systems.
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3 - Using hardware that is accessible / owned by what percentage of a multiplatform game's total addressable market?



Claiming you get 60 FPS on a RTX 3090 that right now costs ~$3000 is as useful for a game's short-medium term profitability as making a 10 000 room hotel in the caribbean that only serves customers who come by private jet.

 

They have been very positive about DLSS since 2.0 and have actually been recommending the RTX series since day 1 over RDNA 2.

 

From the article mentioned above:

Some people will predictably grasp at straws to get some petty revenge on HWUB for the time they acted as whistleblowers to Nvidia's underhanded tactics to control the narrative on independent hardware review publications., but HWUB does recommend getting a RTX 30 over its MRSP-equivalent RX 6xx, and have been doing so for a while.
The thing is during the current shortage+scalper prices and availability, the only sane recommendation anyone can make is "try to grab whatever you can find at MSRP if you're lucky enough to get one".


Truth be told, if the shortage / COVID had never happened the 6800XT would have probably gone down to $500 or less at this point, and the 3080 Ti could launch comfortably at $700.

 

I'm pretty sure that Steve stated that he doesn't care about RT many many times on every possible occasion.
The fact that Metro EEE can't run without RT h/w now means little - Q2RTX and Minecraft RTX both couldn't run without RT h/w since 2019.

 

He doesn't find the current implementations very compelling outside of a select few titles, which is very reasonable.