oh boy I can't wait to play the new Indiana Jones
game huh hang on a minute Billy for
modern games you'll need Modern Hardware with Ray tracing Ray tracing what's that
Mr Murdoch why it's quite an old technology
but now done in real time thanks to powerful accelerators in your GPU that
sounds expensive it is very expensive but you
don't want your games to look ugly do you ugly like you well I guess not but I
don't have enough money for a new GPU what can I do it's easy you just need to
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order yep it's true Indiana Jones and
the great circle is the first game that was developed from the ground up to use
ra tracing not as an option to make the lighting a bit more realistic but as a
core required component of the game so
we've set up two test systems one using the latest and greatest at the time of
film NVIDIA's RTX 490 and one using
NVIDIA's entry point into R Trace lighting Splendor the60 we're at 15
frames that being said on both PCS we've set everything to Max on the 490 side
we're still 4K native we have everything turned on except for path tracing
there's still a lot of raate tracing that's happening like the reflections you can see in the window big thing I've
noticed is that even in raid Trace games there's still just visual anomalies like
his hair kind of changing color we are consistently above 60 frames a second
Which is far above what I expected in
this scenario but there is one thing NVIDIA really bunged up and that's the
messaging we call RTX Ray tracing but in
truth most games even this one only switch to Global Ray Trace illumination
if you turn on path tracing I'm very impressed with the 49s ability to do
over 60 frames a second and I've had to verify the settings many many times to
make sure that I'm not secretly using dlss but that's going to tell you
nothing about how the starter point for Ray tracing is going to do the 2060 and
immediately you'll notice that the 2060 has a bit of challenge giving us the
performance we'd like to see and so why don't we turn down some settings and give this thing a chance one thing to
note is that Indiana Jones does a vram
test when it boots if you have 12 or less gigs of vram it's it's going to set
it to the lowest settings if you use a custom exe you can actually boot the
game and skip that vram check uh to get access to those settings but uh
unfortunately if you try and turn them on the game will crash actually we're
going to leave 4K we're going to turn turn on some dlss baby 23 frames a
second this is incredible even with an internal resolution of 1080p we are
still having around 20 frames a second what if you have a 2060 and you want to
make it actually run let's turn down some settings this game is running on
the 2060 at a native 1080p High settings
and it looks drastically worse which is no surprise but this is still a rate
Trace experience if you bought your card 6 years ago you would still be able to
play these games in Fairly High Fidelity oh those Reflections are
oh remember when there was bright light reflecting on the floor from that window
David remembers now it's clear that the 2060s first generation Our Tor were not
chosen wisely in terms of future proofing but as you can see you don't
need full rayra Global illumination for a game to look really impressive and it
could be argued that NVIDIA's big selling point for this generation
somewhat came true even if lonus wasn't wrong that you'd be better off waiting
for a second third or fourth four or fifth gen card but why are we switching
in-game lighting to Ray tracing more importantly why are we doing it now it's
been used in film for decades and long before it was a selling feature on the
side of GPU boxes even video games were using it to create the pre-bake lighting
Maps used in traditional rendering we'll get to that but first you may already
know the difference between path tracing and rasterization but let's lay them out
just in case rasterization is the process of converting vector graphics or
polygons and their inter intersecting points into a raster image which
consists of pixels shaders are then applied that best approximate what those
pixels should look like based on lighting texture and material properties
path tracing often used interchangeably with the term Ray tracing even though
they aren't exactly the same thing simulates the path of light rays as they
travel through a scene hitting objects bouncing reflecting refracting or being
absorbed Based On A material's Properties there are numerous methods
that impact the accuracy of the simulation recursive Ray tracing for instance has Shadow rays that are sent
out at each Ray intersection Point towards light sources and Photon mapping
emits light particles from the light sources of a scene in a preliminary
rendering pass but the principle of both Ray tracing and path tracing Remains the
Same simulate light by tracing the paths
of rays through a scene how many Rays
you ask well that depends but the short answer is if you want to do it right a
lot and when you do it right it offers a big advantage in terms of realism
especially in scenes with Dynamic lighting like open worlds with day and
night cycles as for why we're doing it now well it was inevitable the industry
has wanted to for a long time and for good reasons don't take my word for it
or inv videas but Pixar describes it as conceptually and mathematically simple
and elegant that means that not only does Ray tracing code take up much less
storage than the large light Maps we need for pre-baked lighting but no
longer making those light Maps or adding extra lights to simulate indirect
lighting should both save developers time and in result make for prettier
games that was one of the key sales pitches for rate tracing that the
reduction in manh hours outweighs the increased Hardware costs the only
problem is that in the context of gaming The increased Hardware cost falls on the
gamers whose gpus now need to perform those lighting simulations continuously
every time they play a game Power build what power build and there are other
costs NVIDIA has taken a lot of our money during RTX is awkward adolescence
and maybe more importantly there's a cost in performance the most expensive
gaming GPU at least until you can get its replacement over here is the RTX 490
it has over three times the ray tracing prowess of the underwhelming first
generation RTX cards and still can't consistently render a native 4K 60 Path
traced experience even the newly announced $2,000 RTX 5090 is advertised
to only hit 28 frames per second natively in cyberpunk with all the ray
traced bells and whistles AI assisted upscaling with dlss is meant to make up
for that and if my lovely assistant will move oh yeah you can see clearly it can
deliver impressive results but from talking to one of pl's old games
industry contacts Gamers aren't the only ones feeling like this transition might
have been rushed a little bit see the pitch to developers including to our
contact was of course Time Savings but
the time that they saved from less manual lighting work ended up getting
replaced with more time testing and optimizing performance on those
underwhelming early generation cards optimization that usually resulted in
turning down visual settings which in many cases left us with image quality
that didn't look that much better than traditional rasterization as hard run
box pointed out in an excellent recent deep dive those compromises caused some
glaring issues such as noise and artifacting appearing as a a boiling
effect those can be caused by low r counts needing to accumulate lighting
information over multiple frames and suboptimal D noising techniques if you
haven't experienced rate tracing at home it can be hard to tell sometimes YouTube
compression and screenshots will cover a lot of those sins furthermore devs are
still learning how to implement ra tracing both technically and artistically and the available tools are
more rudimentary than their rasterized equivalent for example our contact set
that key features such as light linking where lights will affect certain objects
and not others are not as simple to use in Ray traced scenes some some of you
might be old enough to remember the era of Bloom video game Graphics where every
surface was slathered in a soft fuzzy glow that made it look like you were
playing the game in a foggy mirror games like Burnout Paradise Twilight Princess
and Oblivion come to mind and just as Bloom and motion blur and depth of field
and other visual tricks went from flashy and new to overused and disgusting to
intelligently applied I think raate tracing will hit those same milestones
in due time strangely enough the strongest use case today for raid
tracing in our opinion is the dazzling
effect it can have when implemented into older titles either through discrete
remasters custom mods or RTX remix NVIDIA's Suite of modding tools designed
to make transformative upgrades of old PC games super easy I recently played
through the original fear with added rate tracing via reshade and it was n
transformative even though it pushed a 20-year-old game back to sub 60fps
performance part of that performance hit is the hybrid raster and R Trace
rendering committing to full rate tracing can actually improve performance
like we've seen in Metro Exodus enhanced Edition or Indiana Jones so once raid
tracing Tech has evolved to the point where most games fully transition to
raid Trace rendering we may experience a bump in overall playability and maybe
just maybe GPU makers can reduce the die
space use for raster performance in exchange for even more raid tracing
prowess or dare I say cost savings gosh
that would be real nice the worst part of all this is that until we fully solve
the chicken egg problem these issues will linger and the transition is
clearly going to take some time I mean nearly one in every 30 PC Gamers is
still running a 1060 for God's sake that came out in 2016 so I don't blame you
guys for asking yeah it's pretty but is Ray tracing even worth it worth it like
our new more compact commuter backpack at LTC store.com okay Jokes Aside only
you can answer that question but what I can say is that no matter who you are
you've got your head in this sand if you think that R tracing isn't happening and
that you won't need it at some point I mean I remember back when people thought
that fancy mesh shaders were just deployed to sell new graphics cards but
I think in hindsight most people would agree now that we're better off for
their widespread implementation I mean Allan Wake 2 looks incredible and runs
well on lower-end Hardware as long as it's somewhat recent and has an
up-to-date feature set but these things take time and I can hear a lot of you
saying well yeah sure it's cool but
I'm going to wait till it can be done natively with real frames no AI but I
think it's becoming clear that that's not happening the real solutions are
going to come in the form of optimizations like improvements to
proprietary Solutions like dlss Ray reconstruction or generalized shortcuts
like better distribution rate tracing because the thing is even in offline CG
rendering studios are still using optimized shortcuts instead of brute
forcing more rays and that's when we're talking about some sometimes 24 plus
hour render times for a single frame so
if you want your game to hit 60 plus frames per second you're going to have
to accept that some Corners are going to be cut to bring the time down um 5.2
million times really I don't think the problem is real-time rate tracing itself
or even the AI upscaling techniques but rather that we've been forced to live
through and pay for their infancy once we've worked through the current
shortcomings we could see r traced motion blur and depth of field that can
push cinematic realism to a whole other level or Hardware level support for
advanced features like bidirectional path tracing to reduce noise at an equal
render time and maybe even the promise of easier developer side implementation
actually coming true so instead of seeing the new Indiana Jones as the
harbinger of GPU pain and suffering I'm
choosing to see it kind of like the hint of a whisper of a twinkle of a bright
light at the end of a very expensive albeit beautifully lit
tunnel speaking of the light I can see it no wait that's just a segueway to our
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still on the fence about R tracing you should probably watch the video where we have people blindly test RTX on and off
to see if they can even tell the difference the results may surprise you