Next gen lighting technologies - voxelised, traced, and everything else *spawn*

Lots of great stuff coming for Q2VKPT.

 

LIES!!!!

edit: To be honest I still doubt it was running on a PS4. I believe although they showed it at a Playstation event it was just a demonstration of the technologies that were supposed to come on on the console

 

But was it running Real-Time?

 

Wow those screenshots on the new version look incredible. Great stuff from the original author and Nvidia devs.

 

Tech-demos ≠ games unfortunately

Running @ 1440P@30fps on a desktop GPU (no RT, just rasterization):

 

What specs????

 

God knows !? Probably a 2080Ti if I had to guess. As it's usually the case with Unity they will release the assets and demo in a few months so everybody will be able to try it out.

 

Looks truly next gen, hope it was running on something more mortal such as a 2070. And it goes to show the kind of graphical fidelity you can achieve without RTX slavery . Dear lord everything in this demo smacks around any raytracing demos I've seen. Now 1440p/30fps checker-boarding to 4k with this fidelity would be the benchmark for next gen graphics.

 

Some screenshots of Control RT for you guys to snipe at

 

Too easy! There's not a great deal of instant visual difference. In fact very little indeed. You have to stop and analyse what's different in the RTX version. That's why I think these particular game demos are poor. RTX needs to show dynamic scenery and lighting that the baking can't compare to.

The volumetric lighting examples have been more impressive in visual pop and obvious improvement in lighting quality, but with the nasty latency artefacts. The only thing RTX examples are really bringing at the moment is reflections, but not an advance in scene believability.

Edit: The Quake II improvements by nVidia are actually more impressive. Now take that and make it destructible/dynamic, and you'll have an RT lighting demo that actually means something.

 

I don't see why it wouldn't have been running on a PS4 (or devkit), the (adaptive?) resolution for example is clearly quite poor without pixel counting

 

That videos honestly does not spend nearly enough time with the camera focusing on what the RT effects are doing in the game - I wonder if a programmer was responsible for the video or just someone else on the team/NV. Like in the area where they showed off reflections - they had the camera at parallel view to the ground and such. They should have had it look directly at the ground to show how it has off screen reflections. Or that diffuse GI porition should have had a side by side!

I think it will be quite the big difference in control.

 

Yeah, that's likely true. As I say, poor demos.

 

Now imagine how much better it will look with ray tracing!

 

Remedy mention that they wouldn't add anything that they couldn't replicate in the non-ray tracing version of the game so DXR is limited to only quality improvements here.

 

Yeah honestly that video and screenshots will only show consumers that they really don't need RTX yet.

The environment lighting in Control looks like standard baked GI, which is expected for a single player experience with no ToD. And then RTRT is used to cast additional shadows where they should exist. And obviously with the scene objects it's a better visual with the RT version, and reflections are of course much more accurate.

Any info from presentations as to perf hit with these features enabled?

 

Once again, lets not confuse these demo's as being respective of appearing in game.
2011 UE3 Samaritan Demo running on 3x580 (maximum power equivalent of 4.5TF, unlikely to be fully extracted under SLI)


2013 UE4 Infiltrator demo running on a GTX680 (~3TF)


We still don't see games today looking much like either, but we're sitting way above the power and memory envelope on a single chip 8 years later.
Something to consider if you're going to discount Ray Tracing. A tightly knit scene with pre-determined camera, you can make a lot of things happen with rasterization. Ray Tracing can offer all these globally at heavy processing costs, but at a significantly less burden for development. We can apply Ray Tracing to any form of game and get superior lighting and shadows, GI, AO etc, at heavy processing costs, but gain the ability to apply to the game world on any type of game.

For comparison sake, Cyberpunk 2077 which still won't be released for quite some time leveraging the best techniques we've evolved over the last 8 years that haven't even been developed back when either of these demos were made.


That makes Ray Tracing a feature for next-gen because it's addressing a major problem we have with development costs/game type/dynamism restrictions while letting us have the next-gen graphical fidelity, at a heavy cost of performance.

When Jensen says it just works, he means ray tracing, performance is a different discussion, but that can be overcome in time. If you look past nvidia's marketing of RT. You can see the whole industry is moving in this direction. With RT being a dominant topic of discussion at GDC for now 2-3 years and all sorts of Ray Traced solutions under development. We're seeing a different use of that compute power.

 

But the wheel turns!
ok... the lighting is baked on it, but it can turn!

 

Do muzzleflashes cast shadows? That's the most important question.

 

Tomb Raider runs very well even on an RTX 2060 @1440p. DLSS handles IQ well too.




https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/Shadow_of_the_Tomb_Raider_RTX_DLSS/4.html