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
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85 Comments on Remedy Shows The Preliminary Cost of NVIDIA RTX Ray Tracing Effects in Performance

#76
Xzibit
BrainCruserThe benefits of RTX won't be in AAA games. AAA games already look wonderful.
The benefits of RTX will be in low end and indie games. Low end and indie games don't use the graphics card a lot, and RTX allows them to implement global ilumination and great shadows at low production cost. So they don't need a team of 1000 artist slaves to create a game, and instead can do a game that looks close to a current AAA with a team of 10 people.
The issue with that is Nvidia RT is part of GameWorks. How many Indie houses have used GameWorks in the past ?

It will require Nvidia collaberation/bank-roll

Its going to be a "feature added" because making the game solely for RT is going to limit the targeted audience and potential income.
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#77
Fluffmeister
BrainCruserThe benefits of RTX won't be in AAA games. AAA games already look wonderful.
The benefits of RTX will be in low end and indie games. Low end and indie games don't use the graphics card a lot, and RTX allows them to implement global ilumination and great shadows at low production cost. So they don't need a team of 1000 artist slaves to create a game, and instead can do a game that looks close to a current AAA with a team of 10 people.
Agreed this is my thinking too, Turing seems to shine in Vulkan too, and with RTX coming to that I'm looking forward to see how Enlisted turns out, looks like my sort of game.
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#78
lexluthermiester
BrainCruserThe benefits of RTX won't be in AAA games. AAA games already look wonderful.
The benefits of RTX will be in low end and indie games. Low end and indie games don't use the graphics card a lot, and RTX allows them to implement global ilumination and great shadows at low production cost. So they don't need a team of 1000 artist slaves to create a game, and instead can do a game that looks close to a current AAA with a team of 10 people.
Disagree. Everyone will benefit from RTRT equally should they choose to use it. Sure current titles look good. But why stop at good when excellent is within reach? Especially when it's being made readily available for use? Everyone is going to use it.
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#79
rtwjunkie
PC Gaming Enthusiast
BrainCruserindie games don't use the graphics card a lot,
I just love this generalization born of ignorance. Spoken like someone who has not played a good variety of indie titles. There are quite a few games with very intensive and wonderful looking graphics, getting it done with....the GPU.
lexluthermiesterDisagree. Everyone will benefit from RTRT equally should they choose to use it. Sure current titles look good. But why stop at good when excellent is within reach? Especially when it being made readily available for use? Everyone is going to use it.
Just came back here and saw this. I agree, with the caveat that it will still mostly be AAA studios, especially in early years. I surmise Nvidia will be handholding, and not have the personnel to embed with every studio for help throughout the process.

Indeed, that will make it doubly hard for Indie studios to have this feature in the early years, because they do only have a small team.

One just needs to watch all the dev diaries of Ninja Theory who put out Hellblade and see how much they had to be inventive and figure out how to pull things off with only 20 people and very little budget. I doubt they would have been able to implement RTX in all the scenes without adding another year.
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#80
lexluthermiester
rtwjunkieIndeed, that will make it doubly hard for Indie studios to have this feature in the early years, because they do only have a small team.
That seems to be a point open for debate. From what I've read elsewhere, the tools needed to implement RTRT have a learning curve, but not a big one. It will be interesting to see how things play out.
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#81
Prince Valiant
lexluthermiesterThat seems to be a point open for debate. From what I've read elsewhere, the tools needed to implement RTRT have a learning curve, but not a big one. It will be interesting to see how things play out.
I think the deciding factor on how fast RT saturates the market will be when it makes it to lower end cards. Any competent developer shouldn't have trouble figuring out implementation.
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#82
ArbitraryAffection
It looks good, but it doesn't look *that* good. Certainly not 'spend 500+ quid and can't even do 1080p 60fps good'.
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#83
Adam Krazispeed
birdieYou don't need to repeat the idiocy. NVIDIA had to start with RTX and hadn't they done that now, that would have postponed for several years longer. AMD don't even have plans for RT at all - how much would we have to wait for them to realize that RT could be implemeneted right here, right now?

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.
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sure nvidia did it, its not perfect yet and still could take 2+ or more years to get the 1080p 60FPS on 2070,2080, if the 2080ti can even handle 1080p60, if not then they have problems..\\\ and sure MASSIVE EFFORT, how about more like Nvidia has enough money for R&D and prob. still had enough to buy the Whitehouse or several states or something, when u have money to burn, literally!!!! u can do almost anything, AMD Doesn't have that and how DO U know or anyone that AMD isnt doing something for Ray Tracing there is also Path Tracing, just heard about it, but we dont know whats gonna happen NO ONE DOES OR EVER WILL THIS SHIT WILL BE UNDER EMBARGO UNTIL ITS NDA IS LIFTED, SO unless u work for Nvidia, AMD or intel ect. how will u know if these companies have plans for something or not... u DONT!!!!!!!!!!!

an oh.... "bringing photorealistic lighting, shading and reflections to the masses. " I think not, not when the RTX 20 series cards manly the 2080ti, is over 1000 bucks USD, thats not for the masses, maybe 20% of the worlds population that games can actualy buy that card>>>> i cant, i dont have a grand just to buy aGPU,,, i never will..
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#84
Gasaraki
TheLostSwedeAs I posted elsewhere, RTX is a technology no gamer asked for, yet Nvidia spent millions (billions?) in making it a thing. It might very well be great in 2-3 generations, but right now it's something that offers little to no benefit, for a lot of extra cost. Thanks Nvidia.
Gamers don't ask for anything. If gamers wished we would still be playing on 1280x1024 CRT monitors. Look how "gamers" are now stuck on 1080p 60fps gaming. Gamers have taken technology backwards. I used to have 1920x1200 monitors but now everyone has 1920x1080 monitors. I got a 3440x1440 monitor 5 years ago! If the companies don't release cool new tech, we'll all be stuck in the stone age.
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#85
bajs11
They just want you to buy 2 or 4 RTX 2080Ti to get 1080p 60fps. seriously, most of us have been playing at 1080p for more than a decade now, isnt it time to move on to 4k and 8K???

at 1200+ dollars each they want you to spend 2500 USD on just the gpus PLUS an expensive motherboard that support dual gpu PLUS an expensive CPU that have enough pci-e lanes
so yeah PC gaming has gone from 600-1000 to 5000 dollars in less than a year. Congratulations!
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