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what do you think can you tell if rtx is on or off going through old posts from

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the launch of the rtx 2000 series is kind of like looking through a war zone

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many gamers and developers were excited about the new visual improvements and

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the ease of development that real-time ray tracing would bring to the table

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others on the other hand were outraged at the idea of paying a premium for a

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feature that they weren't asking for especially if it seemingly came at the

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cost of performance in games that use rasterization

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which at that time was all of them but fast

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forward three years and there are about 50 commercially available games in

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NVIDIA's rtx support list with more to come

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leaving only one question then can normal people even tell the

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difference anyway just like can they tell the difference

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notified instantly get 25 off using code

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Linus at the link down

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below all right uh

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interesting this doesn't look right trace to me but

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i'm like oh actually that maybe it's gonna be harder than i

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thought oh oh i'm dead

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that's not the test our test setup is pretty straightforward

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jesse from our writing team set up two identical gaming pcs ahead of time so

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that even i won't know which one has rtx on and which one has rtx off our

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subjects get up to five minutes to experience each game and will be

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encouraged to just game as a normal gamer would so they can

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switch back and forth between the two systems instantly using this kvm from

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level one text by the way those guys are awesome and they can do whatever they

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want as long as they don't enable performance metrics and don't manually

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check the settings in the menu because that's cheating can i watch the

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benchmark because there's a scene there at the start oh you can't because one is rtx

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yeah right one's gonna perform way better oh yeah what

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did you learn who's he gonna run a benchmark yeah you can't do that

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i didn't want to look at the FPS it's just once their time is up they simply select

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which system they thought had rtx on and describe what they liked better about

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the rtx experience i've never actually

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seen rtx minecraft before

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where was the lava because i know

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it's supposed to be like extra pretty right yes it's actually like not that hard

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usually if you know what to look for

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um oh sure

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i know i'm so quiet and relaxed i like it Linus always scares me because he

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wants more energy man that bird's got a really long tail

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man that bird's got a really long tail

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while ray tracing is getting a ton of attention from gamers now it's not a new

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idea by any means the basic concept actually predates rasterization and in

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the 3d animation industry it's been in use commercially for well over a decade

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but the thing is in order to determine what a scene should look like using

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real traced light rays you need to emit a

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massive amount of them from a point or ambient light source which will then

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bounce and diffuse around the scene enough times that they eventually become

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sort of negligible bounces and are no longer needed

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now that sounds fine and obvious until you realize that you might need hundreds

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of thousands or millions of rays to even get a somewhat decent picture out of

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them many people don't realize that the simple fact that an image is ray traced

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does not mean that it will look good look at this quick blender render see

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how noisy it looks as though a bunch of the detail is missing

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when non-real-time ray tracing is calculated the work is divided up into

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overlapping chunks called passes and they are added on top of one another

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until a cleanly lit image is produced this can take minutes or even hours for

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a single 4k frame though and that's on modern hardware so you can imagine why

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some new ideas were needed to make this technology viable for games where we

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need 60 frames per second or more while there

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is a clear competitive disadvantage to using ray tracing in a fast-paced title

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like fortnite for example where every frame matters it's still impressive that

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NVIDIA's rt cores work as well as they do in short rt cores are designed to

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perform two tasks that are specific to path tracing which is kind of a shortcut

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version of ray tracing these are called bounding box tests and ray triangle

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intersection tests and they save thousands of instructions per ray that

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would otherwise have to be done by the GPU stream processors and in the 3000

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series their second gen rg cores are more powerful than the first generation

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ones meaning that we should see them continue to improve over time yeah it

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seems like the shadows are just struggling more in this one i don't know

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which one it is because last time i thought the one that looked better in wolfenstein i thought the one that

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looked better was the the rasterized one or the uh the reflection mapped one

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so maybe it's the same thing here where the shadows that look better to me are

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actually the non-raytrace ones the ones that we fake so yeah this is performing better but

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you know it doesn't really it's not that big a deal i guess the problem is that

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it looks better too so

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i mean minecraft beta is beta right so yeah

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it's not like they can't add things later but man like

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that water though just looks so much better so gorgeous it looks like water

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whereas the water in minecraft rtx kind of looks like ocean water all the time

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okay wait a minute if ray tracing is so accurate and therefore better

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what was that how could any test subject fail to tell the difference or worse

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prefer the traditionally rendered method think of raytracing as a final boss

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that's impossible to beat because that's what it was for years

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what's a gamer to do right cheat now obviously we're talking game

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developers so we're i don't mean getting a subscription to game pro magazine here

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but rather i mean building techniques of

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clever tricks that allow you to fake realistic rendering these all together

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have come to be known as rasterization

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raster rendering means that a lot of the lighting shadows reflections and other

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visual elements are baked into the level geometry and handled with packages of

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processing and effects on a per pixel level these are called shaders

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over the years these techniques have become more complex and refined allowing

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things like dynamic shadows in real time by using clever projection mapping as

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well as tricks like more advanced dynamic reflection mapping but the core

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idea of tricking the player into thinking that the lighting is being

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handled in real time has remained the same throughout all of these innovations

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god this is like really hard to tell the difference

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and i i don't really feel like there's like a huge performance drop like what

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GPU are we using 30 80 or 30 90 30 80s

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so i'm like right now creating a hard shadow like harsh like a pretty direct

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reflection of the sun on here on the water

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and let's switch back to system number one

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they look pretty similar i don't really spot a different right

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now as you can see these cheats or tricks

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that game developers use have become so good that they're kind of an obstacle to

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real-time ray tracing catching on even though that final boss is actually

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beatable reflection maps are an excellent example

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of this fake it till you make it approach they're essentially a 360

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degree view of the current scene that's been remapped and projected onto an

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object or surface then with the right amount of distortion

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and selective color removal as well as dynamically swapping out or changing the

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map as you move around you can get high performance visually appealing and quite

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convincing reflections some really good examples of this are

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games like dirt 3 and need for speed hot pursuit it's not perfect of course and

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in games like cs go it's actually very obvious that your scope reflections for

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example don't really match the environment but in the

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heat of a clutch round it's not something that you're likely to notice

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and certainly is a lot better than giving up

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so many FPS leading us finally to the results we've

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been teasing okay so

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for shadow of the tomb raider i believe number two has rtx on what the

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what what do you mean

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i had a feeling i'm like like it's like i'm watching

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like a scientist at work like analyzing okay what is it

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okay so the thing that tipped me off the most is that the shadows in the center of the

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screen here for this tree are shimmering as they're moving

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on the machine with no rtx that

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indicates to me that that's a shadow map whereas the rtx machine

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it's kind of sort of shimmery but it's not

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quite as bad and also the shadows are a little bit softer and they tend to um

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they start sharp and then they go soft whereas the uh shadow map is

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consistently soft you are 100 correct okay as expected then our most technical

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staff had no trouble identifying both the benefits and drawbacks of real-time

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ray tracing but mathematically speaking most people aren't Anthony so

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what about them okay this might be a pretty good spot if i'm facing the sun

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which is like right there i can see reflection on the water here

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and also on the rock here and let's go back to system number two

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wow they look pretty similar

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oh my god yeah i think for number two

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it looks better

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it's like glowier the lava specifically

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there's this effect around it

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yeah whereas like for number four i feel like everything's a bit flatter

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there isn't as much like detail to the the lights and stuff

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like that it's just like a general like

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this block has lava so then the other one should have it around too

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right i don't know i could be totally wrong

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i think this one number two is retracing on

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and what makes you think that um the sharpness of the reflections in

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the water looks a little more reflective than in

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the other one and also the shadows because they're softer

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i feel like that's how leaves would actually look in real life it would be a softer

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shadow because they're all together you wouldn't get these crisp jagged edges

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but now that i say that like i'm wondering if the light's shining so hard

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through it that it's creating those jagged edges with rtx on

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i don't really spot a huge difference but my gut telling me system number one

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it's the one with retracing so this one is the one that we're facing

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although we saw varying levels of success with the number of games each

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person got right and which game specifically they got right

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the overall trend from our test is pretty simple the people with any

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knowledge of 3d rendering and especially with first-hand experience gaming on rtx

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at home were way more likely to nail it as for everyone else

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telling the difference actually isn't easy the truth of the matter is that

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with current titles that support ray tracing it's pretty difficult to tell

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whether it's on or off without pixel peeping more on that in a moment

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even when we did prompt people to look closely or it was extremely challenging

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and the results were quite similar and for fun we threw an extra scenario at

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some of our participants where we had the exact same game running without rtx

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in both cases to see if they could find the difference are they both off oh

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oh yeah okay i was like they yeah i could not tell

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the difference really i guess i was trying to find a difference but uh there

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was none okay they couldn't but they also weren't a hundred percent sure

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so as it turns out if a game already looks really good with rasterization our

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brain will in some cases see things that are not

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necessarily there and this happened to some of our

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participants in wolfenstein for example they would notice parts of the lighting

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that looked you know better in this one when the only difference in that game

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was actually in the reflections bottom line then

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is NVIDIA selling snake oil with rtx

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absolutely not what kind of question is that i mean in games like minecraft for

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Windows 10 and the upcoming metro exodus enhanced edition it is clear how much of

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a difference it can make to the the atmosphere of a game

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and in the long term ray tracing is a huge boon to game developers as well

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because it behaves more like how real light does it can save a ton of time

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that would have otherwise been spent setting thousands of uber hacky

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parameters to get a scene to look convincing but

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the tech is still in a relatively early

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state but it will be the future i mean just

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think about it add in your light sources set your diffusion refraction and

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reflection parameters for every surface and bam you're done

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kind of it's a bit more complicated than that and if you want a more detailed explanation we do have an episode over

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on techwiki that goes into more detail but with all of that said it's clear

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from our experiment today that in the right hands rasterization is still a

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potent tool and this industry transition is going to take many years to complete

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so maybe don't feel too bad if you still haven't managed to get your hands on a

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newfangled rtx GPU

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you know what you should get your hands on though your own website making a

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website doesn't have to be hard just use squarespace and you'll be up and running

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in a matter of hours maybe even faster than that they have award-winning

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templates that'll help make your website stand out instead of looking like it's from the 90s and if you're interested in

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how your website's doing they have built-in tools so you can find out what

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you're doing right and what you're doing wrong both our Linus media group and ltx

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expo websites were built quickly using squarespace and i mean quickly they're

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super easy to maintain and if you get stuck making your website they have 24 7

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support that is ready to help you out so head to squarespace.com LTT and get 10

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off if you guys enjoyed this video maybe check out our 5 000 graphics card video

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on the quadro rtx 8000 i mean what could make a GPU worth

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three times more than this

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five times this is a 3080 right well at msrp