Tuesday, March 26th 2024
Blizzard Outlines Latest Diablo IV Graphical Enhancements for PC & Consoles
Today (on March 26), wanderers can conquer the horrors of Hell with a suite of new graphical enhancements available to them with patch 1.3.5. Arriving alongside our next content update, Sanctuary will be further imbued with the luscious shadows and enhanced reflections of ray tracing, plus other visual enhancements.
BASK IN THE GLOW OF NVIDIA GeForce
Players using GeForce RTX 40 Series can max out their ray tracing settings and frame rates with NVIDIA DLSS 3 Frame Generation, while other GeForce RTX users can accelerate performance with DLSS 2's Super Resolution technology. With a GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU, you can multiply performance by up to 3X thanks to DLSS 3. NVIDIA Reflex is a game-changer, reducing system latency on GeForce graphics cards and laptops. Pinpoint accuracy and timing are key to overcoming Diablo IV's most difficult fights; NVIDIA Reflex reduces system latency, making gameplay smooth and more responsive, delivering the reaction time needed in critical moments. The newest GeForce Game Ready Driver delivers the optimum experience with ray tracing, available now for download.
RAY TRACING: SHADOWS
Ray tracing is the term that broadly refers to the ability for game engines to produce more lifelike images. For example, shadows cast by the Sun are enhanced with ray tracing.
(Above) On the left, ray tracing is toggled off, resulting in sharper and less accurate shadows. On the right the ray tracing is enabled—the shadows from the tree are much more realistic and lifelike. Notice the further you look from the base of the tree, the softer the shadows become.
(Above) Ray tracing off (Left), ray tracing enabled (Right).
(Above) On the left, ray tracing is disabled, and the shadows are more angular and harsher. On the right, ray tracing is enabled and the shadows are softer and more lifelike.
RAY TRACING: REFLECTIONS
Ray tracing also produces more lifelike reflections on surfaces like a still pond or a broad mirror. This enhanced feature can reveal more details around your environment, by not only bringing depth to the reflections of the water, but adding to the broader environmental storytelling as well.
In this Asset below, with ray tracing enabled you can see the reflection of the Ball Lightning off the surface of the water. One of the benefits of ray tracing is that it can also enable you to see the reflection of something off-screen, like the off-screen rock face in the top right-hand corner of the below image. The reflections from ray tracing will help provide more lifelike instances where you can view pieces of environment that were previously unseen!
AMBIENT OCCLUSION
Diablo IV already includes Ambient Occlusion, which measures the extent of which a surface is obscured from surrounding light shadows. In other words, it determines how much surrounding objects prevent a surface or object from receiving light from a source such as a campfire or lantern. Now available on all platforms, we have updated and enhanced the Ambient Occlusion feature. PC users who use the pre-set Graphics option 'Ultra Quality' will notice this change the most, but it can be seen on all quality settings on all platforms.
CONTACT SHADOWS
We've recently updated Contact Shadows to apply to more characters in Sanctuary than before. Previously, Contact Shadows only displayed the shadows around player characters, but now—at the highest graphics settings—includes shadows for all player characters, NPCs and Monsters alike.
GRAPHICS SETTINGS REQUIREMENTS AND HOW TO ENABLE:
PC
To enable ray tracing and other visual enhancements on PC, select 'Options' from the in-game Menu. Under 'Performance,' you can manually select the various visual improvements that have been included with this content update outlined in this blog.
For additional details on which Graphics Cards are eligible for ray tracing, please see our Diablo IV System Requirements article here.
Console
On Console, Select 'Options' from the in-game Menu. From there, navigate to the 'Graphics' Tab. Under 'Performance,' select 'Enhanced Visuals.' This enables Enhanced Visuals on Console, feast your eyes on your improved ray tracing visuals! It increases the quality of textures like fur, hair, and fog. Shadows will have a more realistic response to light at various distances, and many reflections will be enhanced. In order not to compromise overall performance, this feature is locked at 30 FPS (frames per second) overall.
We hope you enjoy these new visual improvements when carving through Hellspawn in Diablo IV!
Source:
Blizzard News
BASK IN THE GLOW OF NVIDIA GeForce
Players using GeForce RTX 40 Series can max out their ray tracing settings and frame rates with NVIDIA DLSS 3 Frame Generation, while other GeForce RTX users can accelerate performance with DLSS 2's Super Resolution technology. With a GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU, you can multiply performance by up to 3X thanks to DLSS 3. NVIDIA Reflex is a game-changer, reducing system latency on GeForce graphics cards and laptops. Pinpoint accuracy and timing are key to overcoming Diablo IV's most difficult fights; NVIDIA Reflex reduces system latency, making gameplay smooth and more responsive, delivering the reaction time needed in critical moments. The newest GeForce Game Ready Driver delivers the optimum experience with ray tracing, available now for download.
Ray tracing is the term that broadly refers to the ability for game engines to produce more lifelike images. For example, shadows cast by the Sun are enhanced with ray tracing.
RAY TRACING: REFLECTIONS
Ray tracing also produces more lifelike reflections on surfaces like a still pond or a broad mirror. This enhanced feature can reveal more details around your environment, by not only bringing depth to the reflections of the water, but adding to the broader environmental storytelling as well.
In this Asset below, with ray tracing enabled you can see the reflection of the Ball Lightning off the surface of the water. One of the benefits of ray tracing is that it can also enable you to see the reflection of something off-screen, like the off-screen rock face in the top right-hand corner of the below image. The reflections from ray tracing will help provide more lifelike instances where you can view pieces of environment that were previously unseen!
AMBIENT OCCLUSION
Diablo IV already includes Ambient Occlusion, which measures the extent of which a surface is obscured from surrounding light shadows. In other words, it determines how much surrounding objects prevent a surface or object from receiving light from a source such as a campfire or lantern. Now available on all platforms, we have updated and enhanced the Ambient Occlusion feature. PC users who use the pre-set Graphics option 'Ultra Quality' will notice this change the most, but it can be seen on all quality settings on all platforms.
CONTACT SHADOWS
We've recently updated Contact Shadows to apply to more characters in Sanctuary than before. Previously, Contact Shadows only displayed the shadows around player characters, but now—at the highest graphics settings—includes shadows for all player characters, NPCs and Monsters alike.
GRAPHICS SETTINGS REQUIREMENTS AND HOW TO ENABLE:
PC
To enable ray tracing and other visual enhancements on PC, select 'Options' from the in-game Menu. Under 'Performance,' you can manually select the various visual improvements that have been included with this content update outlined in this blog.
For additional details on which Graphics Cards are eligible for ray tracing, please see our Diablo IV System Requirements article here.
On Console, Select 'Options' from the in-game Menu. From there, navigate to the 'Graphics' Tab. Under 'Performance,' select 'Enhanced Visuals.' This enables Enhanced Visuals on Console, feast your eyes on your improved ray tracing visuals! It increases the quality of textures like fur, hair, and fog. Shadows will have a more realistic response to light at various distances, and many reflections will be enhanced. In order not to compromise overall performance, this feature is locked at 30 FPS (frames per second) overall.
We hope you enjoy these new visual improvements when carving through Hellspawn in Diablo IV!
22 Comments on Blizzard Outlines Latest Diablo IV Graphical Enhancements for PC & Consoles
Why they abuse their customers too if you ask me, they know the competition delivers, but always one generation too late.
*shakes cane at clouds* I remember back in the day, you knew a game looked better when you looked at it with your eyes and it obviously looked better *get off my lawn*
This is hilariously pointless.
ReTardeeX On!Where are those pretties though, I might need new glasses...
At least you get a FREE FLOATING HORSE with your RTX effects. Awesome!
Regardless of whether you prefer sharp shadows or more accurate distance-variable shadows, we were faking those with raster/shader techniques without the need to throw raytracing at it. Serious Sam 3 was one of the games that implemented such techniques 13 years ago and it runs on what would be considered an obsolete potato by today's hardware standards.
Unlike raytracing, the old method of mip-blended shadowmaps to fake this effect was done in realtime for each frame, so the result was correct for the current frame, and rendered the same every time in a static image. With raytraced shadow implementations, there's a lot of inherent noise that gets temporal denoiser treatment so the shadow lags the content of the geometry by tens of frames and will 'crawl' in a static scene as the random noise of raytraced shadows can never be fully eliminated by the temporal denoiser.
And then you figure out the above isn't even a joke. Its actual policy and Blizzard doesn't even lie about it. Speaking of disconnected with the user base, or whatever gaming is overall. I wonder what MS will do with the franchise honestly. Are they going forward with this cesspool or is a reset inc? Or, probably best... was 4 the last one?Oh wow. Glad I jumped ship already
I just have to play the game on Ultra settings for a respectable 208FPS on 1440p res. No upscaling for me. I would love to have maxed out RT, but sadly I can't even run it on Low.
This is without RT on...shadows just aren't great in this game. This is 1440p Ultra Settings.
@4K with RT this game peaks at 22GB allocation lol.
It feels like there is something wrong with the RT implementation in this game.
So while it doesn't require all of the vram to function, frame times tanks if it can't load assets into vram.
Edit: Just did some testing, with RT off the game will happily sit within 16GB of vram @4k native.
As soon as you enable RT it jumps to around 18GB and usually settle at around 20GB.
This is just standing around in town, in a dungeon with mob density it pulls more.