Wednesday, October 17th 2018
Remedy Shows The Preliminary Cost of NVIDIA RTX Ray Tracing Effects in Performance
Real time ray tracing won't be cheap. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 Series graphics cards are quite expensive, but even with that resources the cost to take advantage of this rendering technique will be high. We didn't know for sure what this cost would be, but the developers at Remedy have shown some preliminary results on that front. This company is working on Control, one of the first games with RTX support, and although they have not provided framerate numbers, what we do know is that the activation of ray tracing imposes a clear impact.
It does at least in these preliminary tests with its Northlight Engine. In an experimental scene with a wet marble floor and a lot of detailed furniture they were able to evaluate the cost of enabling RTX. There is a 9.2 ms performance overhead per frame in total: 2.3 ms to compute shadows; 4.4 ms to compute reflexions; and 2.5 ms for the global denoising lighting. These are not good news for those who enjoy games at 1080p60.
Remedy may be able to reduce that impact in the final version of its engine and in the game, but those 9.2 ms will clearly influence the framerate we can achieve. Playing at 30 fps requires 33 ms and playing at 60 fps requires 17 ms per frame. If we enable NVIDIA's RTX effects that would translate to a framerate of about 40 fps during the game with a 1920x1080 resolution on a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. The result is excellent visually: clearer shadows and reflections that are independent of the camera and angle show up and give a photorealistic finish to the game, but the cost is high. Too much, maybe?
Source:
Golem
It does at least in these preliminary tests with its Northlight Engine. In an experimental scene with a wet marble floor and a lot of detailed furniture they were able to evaluate the cost of enabling RTX. There is a 9.2 ms performance overhead per frame in total: 2.3 ms to compute shadows; 4.4 ms to compute reflexions; and 2.5 ms for the global denoising lighting. These are not good news for those who enjoy games at 1080p60.
Remedy may be able to reduce that impact in the final version of its engine and in the game, but those 9.2 ms will clearly influence the framerate we can achieve. Playing at 30 fps requires 33 ms and playing at 60 fps requires 17 ms per frame. If we enable NVIDIA's RTX effects that would translate to a framerate of about 40 fps during the game with a 1920x1080 resolution on a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. The result is excellent visually: clearer shadows and reflections that are independent of the camera and angle show up and give a photorealistic finish to the game, but the cost is high. Too much, maybe?
85 Comments on Remedy Shows The Preliminary Cost of NVIDIA RTX Ray Tracing Effects in Performance
There should be an amount of workload from RTX that is "free".
It is not clear here and this is just beta, I am sure it will get optimized and probably options given for user level settings in the end.
At 4K in AAA titles, the 2080Ti delivers great performance, so again, if you want maxed out 4K gaming, go nuts... but that's the only area where the 2080Ti will ever excel, and even there it's not going to hold out forever, especially given how close it is to 60FPS in some games already. A year from now, it's going to be struggling unless you start turning down settings.
More importantly, even though they've come down some video card prices generally are still artificially high from the mining gold rush craze. And on top of that there is absolutely massive glut of 1070/1080 (and similar AMD) cards out there in store inventory and in customers hands from the mining rush. You never know how things will turn out, but every sign has to be pointing to a this gen returning back to more normal pre-mining sales levels - if not kind of being a flop. It's actually kind of a "perfect storm" in a negative way for them.
So far, we know it only as "on and off": a middle option would greatly boost performance while still showing serious visual improvement over "more traditional" AA, no?
As it stands, with what we know so far, i have serious doubts nVidia will manage 60 FPS @ 1080p with full RT on, with the exception of maybe the 2080ti: forget about higher resolutions, with 2000 series, IMO.
We shall see ...
It surely looks like >95% of people commenting on RTX are either young and/or stupid but programmable shaders used to be a new "unneeded" "slow" "superficial" "do really gamers need it?" feature as well when it was introduced over ten years ago. Strangely there are next to zero games nowadays which don't use programmable shaders.
I for one commend NVIDIA for their massive effort of bringing photorealistic lighting, shading and reflections to the masses.
Meanwhile I'm not going to buy any RTXs just yet because they are way over my budget - the cheapest one costs more than my monthly salary but I will most likely buy the RTX 3060 in 2019/2020.
One other thing most illiterate idiots fail to realize is that RTX makes games' development a lot easier, quite cheaper and significantly faster and the end result is just jaw-dropping.
P.S. Sorry for being a little bit harsh.
You clearly know me really well, young and stupid... Right...
I have no problem with technological advances, it just seems like this is a product that brings something that's barely usable to the table for a very, very high extra cost. Hence my comment that it'll most likely be good in 2-3 generations, once they've managed to improve the efficiency. However, launching it in a "beta" state and using its customers as beta testers is getting tiring, especially when they expect everyone to pay a large premium for a feature that brings little to no tangible benefit. Yes, a handful of games will look pretty, but it sounds like they'll play like a pig on anything apart from the 2080Ti, which most of us either can't afford, or are unwilling to invest in.
But please, Mr I Know Better Than You, go ahead, spend your hard earned cash on a beta card, as it's your money and you may spend it on whatever you like. Me? I would've preferred something a bit less expensive. Then again, it seems like you're not willing to do so, yet you're talking smack when others are criticising a half baked product. If it's so great, why aren't you getting one?
Don't forget in your doomsaying that RTX isn't the only difference between 2xxx and 1xxx.
2080ti first single GPU that can push 4k120fps.
DLSS major advancement in AA.
Typical 2x1x cards being faster than 1x2x cards, i.e 2070 is better than 1080, 2080 is better than 1080ti (except for the rare occasion when game uses more than 8gb VRAM).
Major advancement in SLI, breathing new life into multiGPU with NVLink.
RTX only for those that aren't poor, i.e those that buy 2070+, at which point you have the kind of cash available to demand the best. 2060 and below will just be faster versions of last gen cards.
Nvidia now 2x faster and 2x more power efficient than AMD, their only competitor. You're surprised they charge a hefty premium?
Cry more, but you live in a capitalist society where the objective of business is to make money. If you don't want to buy the product don't buy it, but quit whinging.
I wonder if AMD really could compete though, it seems like something went wrong with their architecture this time around, maybe because they relied too much on the abilities of their Chinese engineering team? I have a feeling that they have to go back to the drawing board and come up with a vastly improved GPU design to be able to properly compete at the high-end again.
It really sucks to be a consumer right now if you're looking at buying a high-end graphics card.
Those that don't adopt the RTX 20xx series because of either cost or immature technology are perfectly ok in not doing so. Likewise those that want to, by all means do so. RT will see it's day in affordable mainstream because it is great, just not at this time.
The Low, Med, High settings might just be exclusions of features.
Example: GI only being enabled at High or Shadows on Med & High only. Another way they can go is what the BF5 Devs alluded to, Lower LOD for RT effects (Makes sense but defeats the purpose of RT since your back to "faking it"). Could end up with combinations of all these things.
nGreedia has you by the balls, and you like it!