Discussion The Digital Foundry Cyberpunk path tracing puff piece has been uploaded.

[DAPUNISHER]

Alex with his usual effusiveness about how great all things Nvidia tech demo... I mean... Cyberpunk are. Even the video description is a cringy advertisement. THE Triple A videogame? he asks. GTFO, not even close.

I agree with the quip in the comments about needing a flashlight mod. Many scenes are too dark. The comparisons of lighting are supposed to make me want to play it again? Or buy a 40 series so I can use frame generation? This guy has no shame.

I do think it's cool they are adding features like this. Years from now, I'll be able to go back and try it on an affordable mid range AMD or Intel card. So I can judge for myself.

If I somehow missed the thread for this, link it and I'll merge this into it. Thanks.

 

[blckgrffn]

It's like Crysis, which I played (and enjoyed immensely once I figured out I was the Predator) where I played it several years after launch and it ran really well.

Once you get rid of the baked in lighting that was probably done bit by bit as needed and instead depend on natural lights, it does seem like an additional full QA pass needs to be taken to ensure the game is still playable. Sounds like a job I would not want.

I'll do the same for this title in the distant future, maybe it will be completely patched up then too!

It will be interesting to see if UE5 lighting simply makes this approach obsolete, but that already hast its own thread too.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

I do think it's cool they are adding features like this. Years from now, I'll be able to go back and try it on an affordable mid range AMD or Intel card. So I can judge for myself.

That's actually what I do with most games. By the time midrange cards have caught up, all the bugs are (usually) squashed too and optimisations added. Save a lot of cash and frustrations that way.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

That's actually what I do with most games. By the time midrange cards have caught up, all the bugs are (usually) squashed too and optimisations added. Save a lot of cash and frustrations that way.

If enough time has passed, the game may even be available for free, making it a double win. I have a surprising number of AAA games in my library I didn't have to pay for.

Anyone have comments on the path tracing. Personally, I LOL'd when he was showing how the light bouncing of the blue container onto the ceiling was blue tinted. Someday all of these little things will culminate and enhance immersion. For now, I guess I am on team - the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

 

[blckgrffn]

If enough time has passed, the game may even be available for free, making it a double win. I have a surprising number of AAA games in my library I didn't have to pay for.

Anyone have comments on the path tracing. Personally, I LOL'd when he was showing how the light bouncing of the blue container onto the ceiling was blue tinted. Someday all of these little things will culminate and enhance immersion. For now, I guess I am on team - the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

For me, its like the Portal Nvidia "redo" - wow, pictures are shiny, but does it make the game better at all to justify a $3k PC to play it in that glory? naaaaah.

I do love me some shiny, but it's a bridge too far atm.

 

[KompuKare]

It's like Crysis, which I played (and enjoyed immensely once I figured out I was the Predator) where I played it several years after launch and it ran really well.

Once you get rid of the baked in lighting that was probably done bit by bit as needed and instead depend on natural lights, it does seem like an additional full QA pass needs to be taken to ensure the game is still playable. Sounds like a job I would not want.

I'll do the same for this title in the distant future, maybe it will be completely patched up then too!

It will be interesting to see if UE5 lighting simply makes this approach obsolete, but that already hast its own thread too.

I think the bolded is true.

Meantime this is a tech demo but it looks worse for more often than it looks better.

The only real better looking area I noticed was the room with the coffee table and even then it just a bit better (vs best raster - didn't see a compare vs saner RT) - but why is the drinks glass so low polygon?

Now lighting choices are questionnable in all kinds of things (even films: yes well done to the cinematographers for capturing all those scenes which are 80% pitch black but I do not watch films to be impressed with cameras which work work in the dark at the expense of being able to see something).


A lot of ENB mods are far too dark for my liking too and don't get me started on overly reflective rain, depth of field, and all kind of other effects which strike me as the modern equivalent of letting a youngster loose on a DTP package where they make every second character a new font, style and/or colour.

It's a game and above all it should be playable without sitting in a dark room with HDR display. And even in that case, with everything really dark would my eyes ever appreciate then being dazzled with 1000 Nit explosion? No - no matter how realistic that may be.

 

[coercitiv]

Wait, are you telling me all the previous RT modes in Cyberpunk were fake and still utilized copious amounts of "rasterized" lightning? But it was... Ultra, it was PSYCHO! How can that be? /s

The part that I like the most in this demo is how the improved lighting also improves character faces, since incorrect lightning is something we perceive as "fake" on a human face. By comparison, it's much harder to immediately asses that an entire room isn't rendered with correct shadows and indirect lighting.

 

[Ajay]

Well, RT makes some nice to look at games if they are slower paced and heavier on atmospherics. I tilt 90% towards fast action FPS/TPS. Fallout 4 was one of the few more RPG games that I spent a lot of time playing. I would have appreciated better visuals on that. Epic has done some really nice stuff with global illumination and the like (w/o RT hardware) in demos, but I don’t know what they have going on in shipping games. I'm half way self imposed vacation from PC gaming - so I haven’t kept up and even had a couple games I was just getting too. I hope there are some good Black Friday sales this year, because this 1070 really needs to go.

 

[Panino Manino]

I can't stand the "hype" for this game's tech.
The previous RT mod was already not that great IMO, specially when factoring the coast. And now?! Isn't Metro Exodus also fully raytraced? And despite this it runs surprisingly well, right? Why is this game so much heavier? Don't feel justified to me, can't shake the thought that Nvidia is using a few exaggerated settings to make it heaver to justify DLSS 3.

 

[blckgrffn]

“Fully Raytraced” is something we will get to someday. In the meantime it’s all about how much raytracing can be done and have it still run. Nvidia is going to invariably trot out new “Even more fully raytraced” tech demos with each big hardware release that brings old cards down and new cards just playable to keep the FOMO burning.

In the meantime, how many PC games are out there that really make RT a core part of their aesthetic? I think Control is still the only one I really want to experience in its full glory, it’s soooo atmospheric and I think they really built it out with RT in mind, so it’s also playable.

Smh.

At the same time, I bought into it just enough that I had to have at least a 6800. I wanted more oomph than the current Gen consoles so when the ports had their bit of RT enabled (Doom Ultimate!) I could flip it on and… not miss out. The reflections are cool, I suppose.

 

[CP5670]

I can't stand the "hype" for this game's tech.
The previous RT mod was already not that great IMO, specially when factoring the coast. And now?! Isn't Metro Exodus also fully raytraced? And despite this it runs surprisingly well, right? Why is this game so much heavier? Don't feel justified to me, can't shake the thought that Nvidia is using a few exaggerated settings to make it heaver to justify DLSS 3.

Metro Exodus looks better as well to me. Cyberpunk's graphics are very inconsistent, some areas look amazing and others have a plasticky or low detail look. I preferred it without RT, over RT with scaling. RDR2 is only rasterized but has beautiful outdoor graphics and lighting, better than many of the RT games.

 

[Panino Manino]

Metro Exodus looks better as well to me. Cyberpunk's graphics are very inconsistent, some areas look amazing and others have a plasticky or low detail look. I preferred it without RT, over RT with scaling. RDR2 is only rasterized but has beautiful outdoor graphics and lighting, better than many of the RT games.

But isn't this solved by the better lighting provided by this new RT?

 

[GodisanAtheist]

“Fully Raytraced” is something we will get to someday. In the meantime it’s all about how much raytracing can be done and have it still run. Nvidia is going to invariably trot out new “Even more fully raytraced” tech demos with each big hardware release that brings old cards down and knew cards just playable to keep the FOMO burning.

In the meantime, how many PC games are out there that really make RT a core part of their aesthetic? I think Control is still the only one I really want to experience in its full glory, it’s soooo atmospheric and I think they really built it out with RT in mind, so it’s also playable.

Smh.

At the same time, I bought into it just enough that I had to have at least a 6800. I wanted more oomph than the current Gen consoles so when the ports had their bit of RT enabled (Doom Ultimate!) I could flip it on and… not miss out. The reflections are cool, I suppose.

-Feels like the new "tessellate all the things" that NV did back in the early DX11 days.

 

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Aussie Steve is testing a bunch of cards with overdrive mode, and posting the clips to his twitter. He's being cheeky with the descriptions = good stuff. FPS in the 20s on a 2060 with DLSS ultra performance mode. He does the iGPU on Zen 4, and the infamous RX 6500 XT.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1645783433048911876

 

[In2Photos]

HWUB is killing it with their tweets today!

 

[Spjut]

I agree about the various comments about the raytracing modes, both of them IMO, sometimes overdoing it with the lighting, and sometimes making it too dark.

In the end, I would still prefer rasterization in these games even if they had the same performance.
I don't like how Digitalfoundry's rhetoric is that chasing realistic lighting equals better visuals, there's plenty of drawbacks with chasing realism for video game graphics.

Also, huge contrast between HWUB and Digitalfoundry. HWUB shows you their scenes, gives some of their takes and ultimately says you have to decide for yourself, but for Digitalfoundry it's all as if he's stating facts from a sheet.

 

[Ajay]

Aussie Steve is testing a bunch of cards with overdrive mode, and posting the clips to his twitter. He's being cheeky with the descriptions = good stuff. FPS in the 20s on a 2060 with DLSS ultra performance mode. He does the iGPU on Zen 4, and the infamous RX 6500 XT.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1645783433048911876

Isn't that the rub? The most used card on Steam is the RTX 3060, which just can't run any significant amount of ray-tracing to really matter that much to developers. Maybe in a generation or two, NV's XX60X class cards will be able to - and then a real change will occur.

 

[Dribble]

Discussion sounds like every other discussion about new visual effects. In the end they become standard and no one worries about them any longer.

This is certainly going to become one of those things - all games min spec will be fully path traced eventually, mainly because it'a much easier to do so saves a lot of dev time over older raster only methods, so devs will switch over as fast as they can get away with it.

 

[blckgrffn]

Isn't that the rub? The most used card on Steam is the RTX 3060, which just can't run any significant amount of ray-tracing to really matter that much to developers. Maybe in a generation or two, NV's XX60X class cards will be able to - and then a real change will occur.

It will take that and the next full gen of consoles, IMO. So by 2027 or so when those 3060's are getting replaced and we've had Pro series of consoles that upped the RT performance a bit, if RT is really a thing those consoles will probably tout "next generation RT performance" instead of just inclusion, and then new console exclusive games might use RT as their only lighting model.

So... 2030 or so for real AAA games that "require" RT to play? ha.

That is, RT as nvidia is showing us as a method today. I have no doubt there are nerds out there doing some fancy things that might make it much more viable on lesser hardware. With math and stuff.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

It's like Crysis, which I played (and enjoyed immensely once I figured out I was the Predator) where I played it several years after launch and it ran really well.

I was fully into my console gaming days by the time Crysis came out, due to my son. Someone posted the link to the demo here, and I tried it out. I was on the build that would last me most of a decade - overclocked AMD64 X2 3800+ and overclocked 7600GT 720p LCD panel. I was so used to Xbox and 360 level graphics and fps, that I thought it was amazing. I was probably getting drops in the 20s I don't think I was even using FRAPS anymore.

Discussion sounds like every other discussion about new visual effects. In the end they become standard and no one worries about them any longer.

This is certainly going to become one of those things - all games min spec will be fully path traced eventually, mainly because it'a much easier to do so saves a lot of dev time over older raster only methods, so devs will switch over as fast as they can get away with it.

You're not wrong. I have read a developer say things like ray traced global illumination would make their job much easier, faster.

I did mention that someday all of these things will culminate and increase immersion. For now the juice ain't worth the squeeze. And we have been virtually beaten over the head about TEH AMAZING RAY TRACING!1!!! for almost 5yrs now. I for one, ain't holding my breath for the wonderous future it holds....in the future..any day now...

 

[Spjut]

Most games are still released on last-gen consoles and officially support the non-DX12 Ultimate Pascal and Polaris cards too, unless there's a breakthrough for DXR performance on the PS5 and Series S, I'm absolutely not expecting raytracing or pathtracing to take over until the PS6 era has started.

I think Lumen will be the most used solution throughout this generation and right now the standard Lumen path isn't even using the dedicated DXR hardware

 

[KompuKare]

I agree about the various comments about the raytracing modes, both of them IMO, sometimes overdoing it with the lighting, and sometimes making it too dark.

In the end, I would still prefer rasterization in these games even if they had the same performance.
I don't like how Digitalfoundry's rhetoric is that chasing realistic lighting equals better visuals, there's plenty of drawbacks with chasing realism for video game graphics.

Also, huge contrast between HWUB and Digitalfoundry. HWUB shows you their scenes, gives some of their takes and ultimately says you have to decide for yourself, but for Digitalfoundry it's all as if he's stating facts from a sheet.

As I've pointed out lots of times, ultimate realistic lighting can mean an almost pitch black screen.

Realistic? Yes.
Playable? IMO, no.

But of course this is just a tech demo. To really show off RT requires making a game from the ground up with RT in mind and no raster lighting. Otherwise, half baking RT onto a raster game will not work. The financial calculation (unless Nvidia are willing to sponsor a full AA game just to sell 4090s) isn't there yet and won't be for years. Maybe 2030?

 

[fleshconsumed]

I agree about the various comments about the raytracing modes, both of them IMO, sometimes overdoing it with the lighting, and sometimes making it too dark.

In the end, I would still prefer rasterization in these games even if they had the same performance.
I don't like how Digitalfoundry's rhetoric is that chasing realistic lighting equals better visuals, there's plenty of drawbacks with chasing realism for video game graphics.

The way I see it, ray tracing is the way to drastically simplify game development. In the early days of 3D gaming a good chunk of the effort was spend on designing game engines that are actually capable rendering realistic 3D environment, think of progression Wolfenstein>Doom>Duke Nuken 3D>Quake. A lot of time has been spent on building basics of modern 3D engine. However, as games started looking more and more realistic more and more time has become necessary to devote to the artistic aspect of the game, develop digital assets such that would make up realistic environment, NPC models, water, clouds, rocks, houses, chairs, tables, enemies, etc, and on top of that game artists need to devote ever expanding amount of effort on replicating lighting effects to make sure game looks real. Manually creating lighting effects in a modern game is a gargantuan effort and greatly limits development efforts. Being able to offload all of that lighting work to the game engine/hardware would simplify artistic process and allow game designers to make much more immersive games. This will result in much higher quality games simply because all the effort that is spent on lighting will be redirected to other aspects of the game.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

This will result in much higher quality games simply because all the effort that is spent on lighting will be redirected to other aspects of the game.

Completely agree up until this sentence. I will be surprised Pikachu if they redirect time to other aspects. Publishers will simply use it to pressure the devs to shovel more out faster. Increasing profits, which is all they care about. /Cynical Man speaks.

 

[A///]

how long did it take godrays to become standard and most pcs handle them?