we all know by now that the rtx launch
sucked hard hard enough to almost smell like an
unabashed cash grab i mean this is nvidia's most expensive generation ever
and what do we get even hang on when did
this thing launch
it's been eight months and ray tracing is still only supported by three games
and two tech demos but hold on a minute
now dxr or directx ray tracing is also
available on gtx cards so
the question we have to ask is was it all just a scam to get us to
spend more on their shiny new cards let's take a closer look shall we
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the fact that only a few games support rtx is important because each game's
implementation uses raytracing in a different somewhat limited way more on
that a bit that said we can get a good idea for how
well ray tracing on gtx cards will work and we can finally give you guys some
tangible numbers and show you exactly what kind of value rtx brings to the
table but first the obvious question did nvidia scam early adopters by hiding
pascal's ray tracing support behind a software lock
the answer boils down to the dxr fallback layer the microsoft baked into
directx 12. it allows ray tracing calculations to take place on a standard
gpu shader cores rather than requiring dedicated hardware like the rt cores
that rtx cards have that means that gpus with the necessary spec can merely have
dxr fallback support exposed in the driver so
yes nvidia did technically artificially lock ray tracing out of the pascal cards
but the flip side to that is that this fallback layer requires some significant
optimization to gain acceptable performance so nvidia would have had to put in some
significant work to the driver level just beyond just enabling it and i'll
leave you guys to debate whether they should have waited on that one in the comments section because today we have
some rtx list ray tracing the test so we grabbed our gpu test bench along
with four cards repping gtx we've got the pascal based gtx 1080 ti and touring
based gtx 1660 ti going up against the
rtx 2080 and rtx 2060. first let's take
a closer look at ray tracing and see for ourselves whether or not it actually
makes a huge difference in our games or if traditional tricks are still good
enough as i alluded to earlier each of the
three titles available does something different so let's start off with shadow
of the tomb raider where rays are only traced to appropriately enough give us
dynamic shadows and not for reflections or global illumination
this is perhaps the simplest use of the technology as it relies only on the
position and number of dynamic light sources for calculation
but simple is a very deceptive term here
because they take into account every light source candles spotlights area
lights and even sunlight as a result shadows are natural looking
and cast realistically across surfaces in ways that elude even the most
sophisticated shadow maps or shadow volumes techniques that most games have
used up until now moving on to battlefield v our rays are
used not for shadows but for reflections
because rays need to be traced for everything in the scene to accurately
portray a reflection this can be an intensive operation
depending on the number of and size of reflective surfaces visible as evidenced
by the initial release of the game too many surfaces were incorrectly being
processed as though they were reflective and this caused a major performance hit
that has since been fixed so what's the image quality like
there are reflections without dxr of course but these non-traced reflections
rely on the screen space so if an object
isn't on your screen it's not being reflected
with txr enabled however you get a more accurate and more useful reflection
potentially showing you things that are outside of your field of view
usually this isn't a big deal for gameplay but being able to see enemies
on the reflection of a window for example has probably saved at least a
few digital butts from getting hurt online
finally the most intensive scenario metro exodus this game uses ray tracing
for global illumination which means all light sources and resulting shadows are
calculated via dxr which in turn means there's a
significant amount of number crunching required in order to actually run a game
like this that's not to say that the standard rendering engine looks bad it's far from
it in fact the effect that dxr adds to metro exodus can at times be quite
subtle and difficult to discern especially underground
the biggest advantage that raytracing lends to metro therefore
is lighting accuracy or how light reflects and refracts around the scene
to create a realistically lit environment particularly above ground with games day
and night cycle ambient occlusion which can often otherwise be somewhat jittery
and inaccurate is taken care of essentially the same way as shadow of the tomb raider's shadows creating a
much more immersive feel of course nothing is without trade-offs and when
we look at our performance results well as expected enabling dxr and shadow
of the tomb raider resulted in a larger performance impact on our gtx cards than
on rtx but overall the frame rates are quite
playable when we move on to battlefield 5 again
we're still playable but our gtx 1080 ti by comparison to
traditional rendering tanks its frame rate so hard that it's basically halved
but we ain't seen nothing yet it's when we try our gtx cards on metro exodus
where things get messy even the gtx 1080
ti struggled to give us cinematic frame rates at 1080p
while our rtx 2060 doubled that and our rdx 2080 averaged over 100 fps
all of which means if you're planning to stick with pascal and want to use dxr
you should pay close attention to what exactly a game's rays are being used for
shadows and reflections probably fine global elimination to quote hardware
canucks don't bother so is it worth it
well while gtx owners can run dxr the
computationally expensive global elimination method is the direction more
impressive games will try to take and as a result rtx cards will gradually claim
their place in the market for the enthusiasts and eventually may even
become a necessity whether your upgrade path is team green or team red when navi
based radions launch with dxr support chances are you'll be doing so sooner
than later if you want the best graphics in your games and these games are coming we spoke with
epic games engineering director marcus wasper and while the complexity of
unreal engine meant that it took both his team and nvidia the better part of a
year to get it implemented from here on out game developers using ue4 are
finally going to have that it just works experience nvidia's ceo jensen wong was
talking about without interfering with traditional baked light mapping techniques
taken together support like this in unreal engine and other popular game
engines means that there's no significant increase in workload for
developers so content creators can more
easily create dxr enabled games for us consumers
whatever their reasoning rather than transform the landscape overnight in my
opinion what nvidia did with rtx was race out ahead of the competition and
kickstart the ray tracing conversation how many people actually cared when
microsoft announced dxr back in march of 2018
did anyone think that hardware would be able to implement it so soon i sure
didn't and it certainly caught amd off guard if radion7 is any indication
and now that the next generation consoles are coming even they are
rumored to have ray tracing capabilities so
while this might not have been the ray tracing generation it's truly set us up for the next one
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