Cyberpunk RT Overdrive Benchmarks, Image Quality, Path Tracing, & DLSS
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Date: 2023-04-11
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Comments and reviews: 15
Dejan
Full path tracing's effect is not going to be so much on us as consumers in the way that the games look. Because the screen space pre-baked effects are pretty good and fleshed out. The amount of time it takes to do that correctly is enormous and costly to the devs and artists. This means that full path tracing will enable devs and artists to either spend less time on baking the look of the game or spend more time on other aspects of the game which will be a win for us. It is incredible that we are coming to having fully path traced games render in real-time. Looking at these results I can honestly say that I had trouble guessing which technique was which third of the screen. Given that the path traced screenshot looks the worst only tells me that the scenes were not made with full path tracing as the primary lighting source. If and when games start using this tech primarily we will see no difference in image quality, but the games will be cheaper to make or more detailed in other ways, which will be awesome!
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Full path tracing's effect is not going to be so much on us as consumers in the way that the games look. Because the screen space pre-baked effects are pretty good and fleshed out. The amount of time it takes to do that correctly is enormous and costly to the devs and artists. This means that full path tracing will enable devs and artists to either spend less time on baking the look of the game or spend more time on other aspects of the game which will be a win for us. It is incredible that we are coming to having fully path traced games render in real-time. Looking at these results I can honestly say that I had trouble guessing which technique was which third of the screen. Given that the path traced screenshot looks the worst only tells me that the scenes were not made with full path tracing as the primary lighting source. If and when games start using this tech primarily we will see no difference in image quality, but the games will be cheaper to make or more detailed in other ways, which will be awesome!
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Филип
Call me a boomer, but the whole hype for the RT games is just not worth it at all, not even talking about path tracing at all, just good ol' ray tracing.. It's so hard for me to spot the difference in the most obvious scenes in any game in general, let alone when I'm fully focused any actually playing the game. I have to legitimately look for the differences in these slow-zoom-in-in-detail comparisons in order to spot the difference between RT off/on. If it's like 15-20% performance difference, than sure, why not, I'll try it out.. But -50-60% performance is still years away until midrange GPU users with 400-500 euros nowadays, consider actually using it without 10 other technologies that are purely made to mitigate the performance issues of RT itself. I have nothing against DLSS of course, it's great piece of tech, but now it seems that lazy devs will use it on order to ship half optimized games at promised deadlines than actually use it as a genuine performance boost where it's needed.
Cheers mate
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Call me a boomer, but the whole hype for the RT games is just not worth it at all, not even talking about path tracing at all, just good ol' ray tracing.. It's so hard for me to spot the difference in the most obvious scenes in any game in general, let alone when I'm fully focused any actually playing the game. I have to legitimately look for the differences in these slow-zoom-in-in-detail comparisons in order to spot the difference between RT off/on. If it's like 15-20% performance difference, than sure, why not, I'll try it out.. But -50-60% performance is still years away until midrange GPU users with 400-500 euros nowadays, consider actually using it without 10 other technologies that are purely made to mitigate the performance issues of RT itself. I have nothing against DLSS of course, it's great piece of tech, but now it seems that lazy devs will use it on order to ship half optimized games at promised deadlines than actually use it as a genuine performance boost where it's needed.
Cheers mate
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This
I wonder if it would look better or be easier to render if the path tracing was tracked and initiated from the players camera perspective but only limited to as many lighting zones as the monitor has, or a multiple of a 4th from it, for example having 16 paths traced for 16 local dimming zones on a low end monitor or 64 or 4 to bump up or down the quality as an option in game, though i cant imagine 4 paths being traced for lighting would be great to look at, it would be interesting as an option at least. There's also 1024 paths traced for a 1024 local dimming zone monitor on the high end i assume, i havent really looked into local dimming zones on monitors much since i find OLED to be superior in that regard, which would be an insane amount of paths traced in this case since its as many pixels exist but that's a problem for the future when OLED is more widely available as monitors or when hardware simply advances enough to allow the millions of pixels to have their individual paths traced.
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I wonder if it would look better or be easier to render if the path tracing was tracked and initiated from the players camera perspective but only limited to as many lighting zones as the monitor has, or a multiple of a 4th from it, for example having 16 paths traced for 16 local dimming zones on a low end monitor or 64 or 4 to bump up or down the quality as an option in game, though i cant imagine 4 paths being traced for lighting would be great to look at, it would be interesting as an option at least. There's also 1024 paths traced for a 1024 local dimming zone monitor on the high end i assume, i havent really looked into local dimming zones on monitors much since i find OLED to be superior in that regard, which would be an insane amount of paths traced in this case since its as many pixels exist but that's a problem for the future when OLED is more widely available as monitors or when hardware simply advances enough to allow the millions of pixels to have their individual paths traced.
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Adrenaline
Nvidia have exceptional marketing tactics.
Produce a graphics setting in a single two year old game that delivers 16 FPS raw performance on their 2,000 flagship GPU used by 0.25% of Steam users.
This is obviously irresistible for the consumer and great value.
With path tracing, a 5090 may produce 40 fps raw performance on a then 4 year old game alongside a few more rehashed 10-20 year old games that will also feature path tracing.
Obviously when people own a 5,000 Nvidia GPU based PC, the first think they want to do is play Minecraft, Quake, Portal, Cyberpunk and not new games, games that will never be developed during the lifetime of your ultra high end GPU as only a tiny proportion of gamers own the hardware so games designers aren't interested and re-boots are the only option.
Why didn't AMD think of this before?
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Nvidia have exceptional marketing tactics.
Produce a graphics setting in a single two year old game that delivers 16 FPS raw performance on their 2,000 flagship GPU used by 0.25% of Steam users.
This is obviously irresistible for the consumer and great value.
With path tracing, a 5090 may produce 40 fps raw performance on a then 4 year old game alongside a few more rehashed 10-20 year old games that will also feature path tracing.
Obviously when people own a 5,000 Nvidia GPU based PC, the first think they want to do is play Minecraft, Quake, Portal, Cyberpunk and not new games, games that will never be developed during the lifetime of your ultra high end GPU as only a tiny proportion of gamers own the hardware so games designers aren't interested and re-boots are the only option.
Why didn't AMD think of this before?
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Kryssie
I could easily pick out the path tracing in the blind test. The reason it doesn't look so good in the shot is because the games lighting is setup to not use it. All the reflections off the white balloons in the ceiling over light the scene due to the lighting being setup without path tracing in mind.
When we get full games designed from the ground up with path tracing I think the devs can balance the lighting in each scene to produce absolutely stunning results with much less work.
One thing path tracing does show though you can't really see from still images, and its the way everything moving in the space makes the lighting dynamically change. You don't get that effect with standard lighting or really even fake raytracing.
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I could easily pick out the path tracing in the blind test. The reason it doesn't look so good in the shot is because the games lighting is setup to not use it. All the reflections off the white balloons in the ceiling over light the scene due to the lighting being setup without path tracing in mind.
When we get full games designed from the ground up with path tracing I think the devs can balance the lighting in each scene to produce absolutely stunning results with much less work.
One thing path tracing does show though you can't really see from still images, and its the way everything moving in the space makes the lighting dynamically change. You don't get that effect with standard lighting or really even fake raytracing.
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Uhuru
Where I have a problem with Tech Tubers is their obsession with 4k, when most of PC Gamers, simply do NOT game at 4k, never have, never will, even if our GPU can do that.
The latest Steam Survey makes this even more clear, as gamers are moving away from 4k (And 1080p), towards 14401p VRR (Variable Refresh Rate), which is the sweet spot now.
Steam Hardware & Software Survey - March 2023 (Feb Change) 4k = 1.78% (-0.95%) Big drop 1440p = 20.72% (+8.39%) HUGE Gain, Up v Everything 1080p = 64.28% (-0.32%)
4k is losing ground hard, and fast with RT the main reason, RT Overdrive by 2025-27 Native 1440p VRR may be doable, but RT cost 4k, just moved even further out of reach today.
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Where I have a problem with Tech Tubers is their obsession with 4k, when most of PC Gamers, simply do NOT game at 4k, never have, never will, even if our GPU can do that.
The latest Steam Survey makes this even more clear, as gamers are moving away from 4k (And 1080p), towards 14401p VRR (Variable Refresh Rate), which is the sweet spot now.
Steam Hardware & Software Survey - March 2023 (Feb Change) 4k = 1.78% (-0.95%) Big drop 1440p = 20.72% (+8.39%) HUGE Gain, Up v Everything 1080p = 64.28% (-0.32%)
4k is losing ground hard, and fast with RT the main reason, RT Overdrive by 2025-27 Native 1440p VRR may be doable, but RT cost 4k, just moved even further out of reach today.
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Ryan
I get high 30s to low 40s in Afterlife (one of the most demanding areas in the game, which I like to use for benchmarking a worst case scenario) at 1440p native with a 4090.
About 70fps with just frame gen on, but mouse input feels a little weird with such a low native fps.
The framerate is about 60-70 at DLSS quality, and of course feels much better.
With FG + DLSS quality, I get over 100fps at all times and it feels amazing.
But given that it's totally playable at 1440p native, if not super smooth, I'd expect anything on Ampere that's 3080 and up to be reasonably competent at 1080p with DLSS, and anything that's Ada should crush 1440p.
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I get high 30s to low 40s in Afterlife (one of the most demanding areas in the game, which I like to use for benchmarking a worst case scenario) at 1440p native with a 4090.
About 70fps with just frame gen on, but mouse input feels a little weird with such a low native fps.
The framerate is about 60-70 at DLSS quality, and of course feels much better.
With FG + DLSS quality, I get over 100fps at all times and it feels amazing.
But given that it's totally playable at 1440p native, if not super smooth, I'd expect anything on Ampere that's 3080 and up to be reasonably competent at 1080p with DLSS, and anything that's Ada should crush 1440p.
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Arvid
I was able to identify which of the three images inside the club was which, partially because the reflection on the wall on the right side was a dead giveaway. There's no reflection there without ray-tracing, and the traditional ray tracing shows an artifact in the reflection where I'm guessing there's a edge between textured polygons. I am just guessing here, but the fully path traced reflection doesn't show this artifact because it's rendering every path independently, whereas the traditional ray tracing might be using some type of shortcut the generalizes reflections across a polygon, leading to abrupt changes at seams.
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I was able to identify which of the three images inside the club was which, partially because the reflection on the wall on the right side was a dead giveaway. There's no reflection there without ray-tracing, and the traditional ray tracing shows an artifact in the reflection where I'm guessing there's a edge between textured polygons. I am just guessing here, but the fully path traced reflection doesn't show this artifact because it's rendering every path independently, whereas the traditional ray tracing might be using some type of shortcut the generalizes reflections across a polygon, leading to abrupt changes at seams.
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Sebastian
Well, it's certainly interesting. But as explained, the developers certainly can't redesign the whole games lighting and materials of every scene,
so that pathtracing produces the same artistic visual design they intended in the beginning. And as we can all see, pathtracing isn't about looking better ,
it's about looking more realistic. The fact that even without raytracing at all the game still looks that good, is only thanks to the game designers hard work.
And in fact it's a thing we have to keep in mind. But without sufficient computing power and efficiency, it's still a long way to photo realism...
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Well, it's certainly interesting. But as explained, the developers certainly can't redesign the whole games lighting and materials of every scene,
so that pathtracing produces the same artistic visual design they intended in the beginning. And as we can all see, pathtracing isn't about looking better ,
it's about looking more realistic. The fact that even without raytracing at all the game still looks that good, is only thanks to the game designers hard work.
And in fact it's a thing we have to keep in mind. But without sufficient computing power and efficiency, it's still a long way to photo realism...
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OverCHAOS
Well it was easy to tell images apart, with that huge light source on the ceiling, it was obvious the PT image is going to be a lot brighter. Same way if we only had a weak light source, it would be way dimmer with PT. So in that way, lighting does behave in a more realistic way. Now which one looks better is a different question.
Also, the issue is that we can achieve 90% of image quality with traditional rasterization and without the game running at 19 fps or using fake frames. In other words, we are still years away from ray tracing being anything but a gimmick.
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Well it was easy to tell images apart, with that huge light source on the ceiling, it was obvious the PT image is going to be a lot brighter. Same way if we only had a weak light source, it would be way dimmer with PT. So in that way, lighting does behave in a more realistic way. Now which one looks better is a different question.
Also, the issue is that we can achieve 90% of image quality with traditional rasterization and without the game running at 19 fps or using fake frames. In other words, we are still years away from ray tracing being anything but a gimmick.
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Tarnith
Got the PT correct, as it was the most diffuse/blown out looking. Scene lighting really will need to be handled differently to get the same artistic contrast going with PT as the model obviously.
That being said I think it'll be a lot more intuitive on the artist side, and less time consuming (especially compared to the amount of work that goes into probes and mapping)
Looking forward to where this goes in 5-7 years or so when this might converge, as opposed to being a special demo for high end hardware.
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Got the PT correct, as it was the most diffuse/blown out looking. Scene lighting really will need to be handled differently to get the same artistic contrast going with PT as the model obviously.
That being said I think it'll be a lot more intuitive on the artist side, and less time consuming (especially compared to the amount of work that goes into probes and mapping)
Looking forward to where this goes in 5-7 years or so when this might converge, as opposed to being a special demo for high end hardware.
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Cromefire_
Really nice addition. The only worry I have is that NVIDIA seems to push their software into more and more games and I really hope that this doesn't kill performance on their competition too much especially with future architectures, we're already seeing this play out in some capacity with current RT titles which don't run well at all on AMD (which is to some point expected), far worse than UE5 (which AMD seems to put a lot of effort into) seems to perform (although we don't have any real games yet).
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Really nice addition. The only worry I have is that NVIDIA seems to push their software into more and more games and I really hope that this doesn't kill performance on their competition too much especially with future architectures, we're already seeing this play out in some capacity with current RT titles which don't run well at all on AMD (which is to some point expected), far worse than UE5 (which AMD seems to put a lot of effort into) seems to perform (although we don't have any real games yet).
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F1neW1ne
Great video. I prefer the look of the original RT over fully pathed. I could easily pick it out in your blind test. Speciically as I find RT overdrive over-bright and lacking contrast. Is it more realistic for fully pathed? Probably on paper but our eyes and real surfaces do not work like this. There are so many optical elements not being accounted for yet. So for me at least, this is a tech demo of full path RT in it's infancy and not a selling feature in the slightest.
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Great video. I prefer the look of the original RT over fully pathed. I could easily pick it out in your blind test. Speciically as I find RT overdrive over-bright and lacking contrast. Is it more realistic for fully pathed? Probably on paper but our eyes and real surfaces do not work like this. There are so many optical elements not being accounted for yet. So for me at least, this is a tech demo of full path RT in it's infancy and not a selling feature in the slightest.
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Avalon2040
This kind of tech preview/capability demo is one of the things I think many people forget to cover. When it is covered a lot of what I have seen is subjective analysis. Thank you to the GN team for showcasing the tech itself and providing both an objective (where possible) and a very much stated subjective commentary (when you provide them.) The less frequent use of subjective adjectives in the reporting is one of the many reasons I keep coming back to watch GN media
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This kind of tech preview/capability demo is one of the things I think many people forget to cover. When it is covered a lot of what I have seen is subjective analysis. Thank you to the GN team for showcasing the tech itself and providing both an objective (where possible) and a very much stated subjective commentary (when you provide them.) The less frequent use of subjective adjectives in the reporting is one of the many reasons I keep coming back to watch GN media
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guerrierim15
I guess the images totally wrong. But I think I m just dumb bc once the answers were revealed the path traced one made more sense physically. I think I just got caught up with comparing each image relative to the others and trying to think about how one should be relative to the other rather than just looking at the light sources and determining which is most physically accurate. Hard to tell still as I ve never been in a bar lit up like that one is in the game lol
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I guess the images totally wrong. But I think I m just dumb bc once the answers were revealed the path traced one made more sense physically. I think I just got caught up with comparing each image relative to the others and trying to think about how one should be relative to the other rather than just looking at the light sources and determining which is most physically accurate. Hard to tell still as I ve never been in a bar lit up like that one is in the game lol
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