what do you think can you tell if rtx is on or off going through old posts from
the launch of the rtx 2000 series is kind of like looking through a war zone
many gamers and developers were excited about the new visual improvements and
the ease of development that real-time ray tracing would bring to the table
others on the other hand were outraged at the idea of paying a premium for a
feature that they weren't asking for especially if it seemingly came at the
cost of performance in games that use rasterization
which at that time was all of them but fast
forward three years and there are about 50 commercially available games in
NVIDIA's rtx support list with more to come
leaving only one question then can normal people even tell the
difference anyway just like can they tell the difference
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below all right uh
interesting this doesn't look right trace to me but
i'm like oh actually that maybe it's gonna be harder than i
thought oh oh i'm dead
that's not the test our test setup is pretty straightforward
jesse from our writing team set up two identical gaming pcs ahead of time so
that even i won't know which one has rtx on and which one has rtx off our
subjects get up to five minutes to experience each game and will be
encouraged to just game as a normal gamer would so they can
switch back and forth between the two systems instantly using this kvm from
level one text by the way those guys are awesome and they can do whatever they
want as long as they don't enable performance metrics and don't manually
check the settings in the menu because that's cheating can i watch the
benchmark because there's a scene there at the start oh you can't because one is rtx
yeah right one's gonna perform way better oh yeah what
did you learn who's he gonna run a benchmark yeah you can't do that
i didn't want to look at the FPS it's just once their time is up they simply select
which system they thought had rtx on and describe what they liked better about
the rtx experience i've never actually
seen rtx minecraft before
where was the lava because i know
it's supposed to be like extra pretty right yes it's actually like not that hard
usually if you know what to look for
um oh sure
i know i'm so quiet and relaxed i like it Linus always scares me because he
wants more energy man that bird's got a really long tail
man that bird's got a really long tail
while ray tracing is getting a ton of attention from gamers now it's not a new
idea by any means the basic concept actually predates rasterization and in
the 3d animation industry it's been in use commercially for well over a decade
but the thing is in order to determine what a scene should look like using
real traced light rays you need to emit a
massive amount of them from a point or ambient light source which will then
bounce and diffuse around the scene enough times that they eventually become
sort of negligible bounces and are no longer needed
now that sounds fine and obvious until you realize that you might need hundreds
of thousands or millions of rays to even get a somewhat decent picture out of
them many people don't realize that the simple fact that an image is ray traced
does not mean that it will look good look at this quick blender render see
how noisy it looks as though a bunch of the detail is missing
when non-real-time ray tracing is calculated the work is divided up into
overlapping chunks called passes and they are added on top of one another
until a cleanly lit image is produced this can take minutes or even hours for
a single 4k frame though and that's on modern hardware so you can imagine why
some new ideas were needed to make this technology viable for games where we
need 60 frames per second or more while there
is a clear competitive disadvantage to using ray tracing in a fast-paced title
like fortnite for example where every frame matters it's still impressive that
NVIDIA's rt cores work as well as they do in short rt cores are designed to
perform two tasks that are specific to path tracing which is kind of a shortcut
version of ray tracing these are called bounding box tests and ray triangle
intersection tests and they save thousands of instructions per ray that
would otherwise have to be done by the GPU stream processors and in the 3000
series their second gen rg cores are more powerful than the first generation
ones meaning that we should see them continue to improve over time yeah it
seems like the shadows are just struggling more in this one i don't know
which one it is because last time i thought the one that looked better in wolfenstein i thought the one that
looked better was the the rasterized one or the uh the reflection mapped one
so maybe it's the same thing here where the shadows that look better to me are
actually the non-raytrace ones the ones that we fake so yeah this is performing better but
you know it doesn't really it's not that big a deal i guess the problem is that
it looks better too so
i mean minecraft beta is beta right so yeah
it's not like they can't add things later but man like
that water though just looks so much better so gorgeous it looks like water
whereas the water in minecraft rtx kind of looks like ocean water all the time
okay wait a minute if ray tracing is so accurate and therefore better
what was that how could any test subject fail to tell the difference or worse
prefer the traditionally rendered method think of raytracing as a final boss
that's impossible to beat because that's what it was for years
what's a gamer to do right cheat now obviously we're talking game
developers so we're i don't mean getting a subscription to game pro magazine here
but rather i mean building techniques of
clever tricks that allow you to fake realistic rendering these all together
have come to be known as rasterization
raster rendering means that a lot of the lighting shadows reflections and other
visual elements are baked into the level geometry and handled with packages of
processing and effects on a per pixel level these are called shaders
over the years these techniques have become more complex and refined allowing
things like dynamic shadows in real time by using clever projection mapping as
well as tricks like more advanced dynamic reflection mapping but the core
idea of tricking the player into thinking that the lighting is being
handled in real time has remained the same throughout all of these innovations
god this is like really hard to tell the difference
and i i don't really feel like there's like a huge performance drop like what
GPU are we using 30 80 or 30 90 30 80s
so i'm like right now creating a hard shadow like harsh like a pretty direct
reflection of the sun on here on the water
and let's switch back to system number one
they look pretty similar i don't really spot a different right
now as you can see these cheats or tricks
that game developers use have become so good that they're kind of an obstacle to
real-time ray tracing catching on even though that final boss is actually
beatable reflection maps are an excellent example
of this fake it till you make it approach they're essentially a 360
degree view of the current scene that's been remapped and projected onto an
object or surface then with the right amount of distortion
and selective color removal as well as dynamically swapping out or changing the
map as you move around you can get high performance visually appealing and quite
convincing reflections some really good examples of this are
games like dirt 3 and need for speed hot pursuit it's not perfect of course and
in games like cs go it's actually very obvious that your scope reflections for
example don't really match the environment but in the
heat of a clutch round it's not something that you're likely to notice
and certainly is a lot better than giving up
so many FPS leading us finally to the results we've
been teasing okay so
for shadow of the tomb raider i believe number two has rtx on what the
what what do you mean
i had a feeling i'm like like it's like i'm watching
like a scientist at work like analyzing okay what is it
okay so the thing that tipped me off the most is that the shadows in the center of the
screen here for this tree are shimmering as they're moving
on the machine with no rtx that
indicates to me that that's a shadow map whereas the rtx machine
it's kind of sort of shimmery but it's not
quite as bad and also the shadows are a little bit softer and they tend to um
they start sharp and then they go soft whereas the uh shadow map is
consistently soft you are 100 correct okay as expected then our most technical
staff had no trouble identifying both the benefits and drawbacks of real-time
ray tracing but mathematically speaking most people aren't Anthony so
what about them okay this might be a pretty good spot if i'm facing the sun
which is like right there i can see reflection on the water here
and also on the rock here and let's go back to system number two
wow they look pretty similar
oh my god yeah i think for number two
it looks better
it's like glowier the lava specifically
there's this effect around it
yeah whereas like for number four i feel like everything's a bit flatter
there isn't as much like detail to the the lights and stuff
like that it's just like a general like
this block has lava so then the other one should have it around too
right i don't know i could be totally wrong
i think this one number two is retracing on
and what makes you think that um the sharpness of the reflections in
the water looks a little more reflective than in
the other one and also the shadows because they're softer
i feel like that's how leaves would actually look in real life it would be a softer
shadow because they're all together you wouldn't get these crisp jagged edges
but now that i say that like i'm wondering if the light's shining so hard
through it that it's creating those jagged edges with rtx on
i don't really spot a huge difference but my gut telling me system number one
it's the one with retracing so this one is the one that we're facing
although we saw varying levels of success with the number of games each
person got right and which game specifically they got right
the overall trend from our test is pretty simple the people with any
knowledge of 3d rendering and especially with first-hand experience gaming on rtx
at home were way more likely to nail it as for everyone else
telling the difference actually isn't easy the truth of the matter is that
with current titles that support ray tracing it's pretty difficult to tell
whether it's on or off without pixel peeping more on that in a moment
even when we did prompt people to look closely or it was extremely challenging
and the results were quite similar and for fun we threw an extra scenario at
some of our participants where we had the exact same game running without rtx
in both cases to see if they could find the difference are they both off oh
oh yeah okay i was like they yeah i could not tell
the difference really i guess i was trying to find a difference but uh there
was none okay they couldn't but they also weren't a hundred percent sure
so as it turns out if a game already looks really good with rasterization our
brain will in some cases see things that are not
necessarily there and this happened to some of our
participants in wolfenstein for example they would notice parts of the lighting
that looked you know better in this one when the only difference in that game
was actually in the reflections bottom line then
is NVIDIA selling snake oil with rtx
absolutely not what kind of question is that i mean in games like minecraft for
Windows 10 and the upcoming metro exodus enhanced edition it is clear how much of
a difference it can make to the the atmosphere of a game
and in the long term ray tracing is a huge boon to game developers as well
because it behaves more like how real light does it can save a ton of time
that would have otherwise been spent setting thousands of uber hacky
parameters to get a scene to look convincing but
the tech is still in a relatively early
state but it will be the future i mean just
think about it add in your light sources set your diffusion refraction and
reflection parameters for every surface and bam you're done
kind of it's a bit more complicated than that and if you want a more detailed explanation we do have an episode over
on techwiki that goes into more detail but with all of that said it's clear
from our experiment today that in the right hands rasterization is still a
potent tool and this industry transition is going to take many years to complete
so maybe don't feel too bad if you still haven't managed to get your hands on a
newfangled rtx GPU
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off if you guys enjoyed this video maybe check out our 5 000 graphics card video
on the quadro rtx 8000 i mean what could make a GPU worth
three times more than this
five times this is a 3080 right well at msrp