Games With NVIDIA RTX, Part 1: Battlefield V, Control

[Raevenlord]

At NVIDIA's event at Koln, Germany, NVIDIA's Mark Smith took the lid of some of NVIDIA's game developing partners that are working on breinging RTX's improvements to gamers' systems. The presentation started with Christian Holmquist and Jonas Gammelholm, both with DICE, going through the graphical improvements enabled on Battlefield V through the usage of RTX.

Reflections of tank's muzzle flashes in character's eyes, reflected flames and smoke in water bodies, perfect ray tracing on reflective surfaces even with off-screen sources of lighting, static cube maps are replaced with actual transparent, reflective surfaces... And these effects are relevant even in gameplay; these aren't some screenshot-only, squinting-effort effects. You can immerse yourself in them even in the fast-paced combat of Battlefield V.







Remedy's Control was also showcased with its RTX implementation, starting with the E3 trailer we've seen as a showcase of the game running without any kind of ray tracing tech being added to it. Remedy showcased the differences in actual environment reading in a given scene, with cube maps and non-reflective surfaces determining the absence of any notion of the environment. The second example dealt with Shadow Maps and ambient occlusion, and while the difference was much more subtle, it's there. Finally, Remedy finished their presentation with a fully working RTX version of Control's trailer.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Gungar]

Holyshit Raytracing seems SO GOOD, oh wait... it's a complete failure.

 

[londiste]

 

[Vya Domus]

If you need red circles to point out the differences, you may not be "reinventing" computer graphics quite to level you wished to. I am really not trying to downplay new graphics technology, it's just that well, it's not that big of a deal.

 

[krykry]

If you need red circles to point out the differences, you maybe not be "reinventing" computer graphics quite to level you wished to. I am really not trying to downplay new graphics technology, it's just that well, it's not that big of a deal.

It is a big deal as it's the ultimate technology solving any problems with light and shadow in games and everything else, but it shouldn't be on the hype train now. Maybe in 5 years, but not now.

 

[Crustybeaver]

If you need red circles to point out the differences, you maybe not be "reinventing" computer graphics quite to level you wished to. I am really not trying to downplay new graphics technology, it's just that well, it's not that big of a deal.

Well that depends on who you speak to. I game at 4K with a high end GPU and in some games I feel we are very close to getting a photo realistic look. The problem for me is that light sourcing and hardware limitation is whats preventing games developers from creating something that perceives real to life visuals. So while the RTX twenty series may not end up giving us that at this time, it's quite possibly laying the architectural foundations to develop into something that's considered pivotal and ground breaking in the following years to come.

 

[RejZoR]

I'm pretty sure I've seen all the glossy shiny floor already in games without ray tracing. The problem here is, they need to specifically point things out and that's a problem. Because 3/4 of people can't even spot hitching and stuttering as it's happening. They can't tell framerate is low from visuals itself or from mouse feel. They hardly know a difference between MSAA or FXAA edge smoothing, they don't know what exactly SSAO does. And if you have to point at the shiny ground and say "see, that's ray traced", you have a problem. Now, I know this has been like this since forever, but back then, DX8.1 mirror reflections didn't bring such massive performance hit and requirement to run a 800+ € graphic card. And it's not global ray tracing which would be applied to entire scene. It's a selective thing.

What this causes is that games running on RTX cards will now intentionally look worse because NVIDIA will deseprately try to push this thing and make regular graphics look more plain. I've seen amazing soft shadows, amazing floor reflections that were super realistic. All this will be gone because they'll have this need to very strictly differentiate RTX from regular graphics. They'll give devs incentive not to make reflections for non-RTX cards as fancy even though they could do it.

I've been bitching about this for a long time when NVIDIA was showcasing glass shattering with PhysX in Mirror's Edge (2009). With Physics you get this nice breaking of glass into many pieces that fall on the ground and stay there. Turn HW PhysX off and suddenly, glass shatters and disappears into nothingness before it even hits the ground. Now, if I was that casual normie who can't spot low framerate, I'd think wow, PhysX is amazing. Except, I've played Red Faction back in 2001. Game running physics entirely on weak ass CPU's from that period, single cores at 1.5GHz or so. Glass shattering in hundreds of pieces depending on where you hit it, explosions blow it out of frames in correct direction and shards stay on the ground. And that wasn't an isolated case. They are doing this in Watch_Dogs too and many other games. And I think it's a disgusting way to promote your proprietary effects because you're gimping what we already had for years to make your current tech look more exciting. It is exciting, but if things were done right, not as much as they make it to be.

So what if effects are faked, if they are faked so well 99% of people can't tell a difference, who bloody cares? When we'll have 100% ray tracing, we won't even care anymore, but at this moment, faking things for faster operation is just more efficient. Ray tracing is literally brute force compute. When you're doing it, there are no shortcuts or optimizations. Light is what it is. You can't fake it or optimize it. Except limit the number of light bounces.

 

[Ed_1]

I'm pretty sure I've seen all the glossy shiny floor already in games without ray tracing. The problem here is, they need to specifically point things out and that's a problem. Because 3/4 of people can't even spot hitching and stuttering as it's happening. They can't tell framerate is low from visuals itself or from mouse feel. They hardly know a difference between MSAA or FXAA edge smoothing, they don't know what exactly SSAO does. And if you have to point at the shiny ground and say "see, that's ray traced", you have a problem. Now, I know this has been like this since forever, but back then, DX8.1 mirror reflections didn't bring such massive performance hit and requirement to run a 800+ € graphic card. And it's not global ray tracing which would be applied to entire scene. It's a selective thing.

What this causes is that games running on RTX cards will now intentionally look worse because NVIDIA will deseprately try to push this thing and make regular graphics look more plain. I've seen amazing soft shadows, amazing floor reflections that were super realistic. All this will be gone because they'll have this need to very strictly differentiate RTX from regular graphics. They'll give devs incentive not to make reflections for non-RTX cards as fancy even though they could do it.

I've been bitching about this for a long time when NVIDIA was showcasing glass shattering with PhysX in Mirror's Edge (2009). With Physics you get this nice breaking of glass into many pieces that fall on the ground and stay there. Turn HW PhysX off and suddenly, glass shatters and disappears into nothingness before it even hits the ground. Now, if I was that casual normie who can't spot low framerate, I'd think wow, PhysX is amazing. Except, I've played Red Faction back in 2001. Game running physics entirely on weak ass CPU's from that period, single cores at 1.5GHz or so. Glass shattering in hundreds of pieces depending on where you hit it, explosions blow it out of frames in correct direction and shards stay on the ground. And that wasn't an isolated case. They are doing this in Watch_Dogs too and many other games. And I think it's a disgusting way to promote your proprietary effects because you're gimping what we already had for years to make your current tech look more exciting. It is exciting, but if things were done right, not as much as they make it to be.

So what if effects are faked, if they are faked so well 99% of people can't tell a difference, who bloody cares? When we'll have 100% ray tracing, we won't even care anymore, but at this moment, faking things for faster operation is just more efficient. Ray tracing is literally brute force compute. When you're doing it, there are no shortcuts or optimizations. Light is what it is. You can't fake it or optimize it. Except limit the number of light bounces.

Those reflections you saw were static, these are dynamic and make it look realistic.
How performance runs only will tell as time comes and software and HW is improved.
I am sure you be able to turn it off as in BF5 it was turned off in alpha, we will see what happens moving forward.

 

[RejZoR]

They are not static if things in them are moving, like light, objects or fire. Even if precision wasn't exact as ray traced, who really gives a damn at this moment?

 

[londiste]

DX8.1 mirror reflections didn't bring such massive performance hit

Oh? It most definitely did. The method for proper reflections involves rendering scene in the mirror almost separately in addition to everything else.

What this causes is that games running on RTX cards will now intentionally look worse because NVIDIA will deseprately try to push this thing and make regular graphics look more plain. I've seen amazing soft shadows, amazing floor reflections that were super realistic. All this will be gone because they'll have this need to very strictly differentiate RTX from regular graphics. They'll give devs incentive not to make reflections for non-RTX cards as fancy even though they could do it.

Soft shadows and reflections will definitely improve with RTX. That is its entire goal for now. All the hacks that are currently employed to achieve these will not be needed. The current ways of doing it have pretty hard limitations on everything dynamic. For lighting and shadows - amount of light sources, their direction, amount of shadows etc. Reflections are currently just fairly statically cubemapped with some dynamic elements.

 

[Ed_1]

They are not static if things in them are moving, like light, objects or fire. Even if precision wasn't exact as ray traced, who really gives a damn at this moment?

Then I guess this tech is not for you, wait for some other HW.

 

[bug]

If you need red circles to point out the differences, you may not be "reinventing" computer graphics quite to level you wished to. I am really not trying to downplay new graphics technology, it's just that well, it's not that big of a deal.

These showcases are rather crude examples of what ray tracing can do (I mean, some scenes only use one light source, wth?). Here's an explanation with better examples in it:

 

[RejZoR]

Who knows, I might do something stupid again. Just like I did buying GTX 1080Ti where GTX 1080 would probably serve me just the same. Or maybe not given I want things at high framerates for 144Hz refresh to really shine...

 

[bug]

Who knows, I might do something stupid again. Just like I did buying GTX 1080Ti where GTX 1080 would probably serve me just the same. Or maybe not given I want things at high framerates for 144Hz refresh to really shine...

Do the smart thing and wait. As much as I love ray tracing (in part because I've been familiar with it for like two decades now), there's little chance these cards are worth all that money.
They're required for developers, if RTX is to ever take off, but as a gamer there's just too many unknowns at this time.

 

[RejZoR]

I mean, if they gave us more stuff we can use now (like SMAA in NV CP) in games that were already made and maybe use of ray tracing for things in games where they wouldn't need extra programming. I totally dig such stuff because I can't wait to see how old games look like with new effects. Like for example playing Earthsiege 3 on Radeon with those programmable shaders that faked Bloom/HDR. It was super cool and made a huge difference. I miss stuff like this on new cards. It's all hard baked in and dependent on devs. Nothing is what you could slam on top of existing stuff.

NVIDIA has some post processing color/sharpness/tone stuff with NVIDIA Experience, but it doesn't support a single game I tried so that's crap.

 

[purecain]

I think it might alleviate the main shaders, now that we have dedicated hardware to run the effects...

its going to be really interesting to see the performance deficit...

 

[Captain_Tom]

Oh boy I cant wait for framerates to be cut down to 1/3rd so unnoticeable eye reflections are included lol.

You need 8K ti notice details like that from more than 1 foot away. My god this is hilariously stupid.

 

[bug]

Oh boy I cant wait for framerates to be cut down to 1/3rd so unnoticeable eye reflections are included lol.

You need 8K ti notice details like that from more than 1 foot away. My god this is hilariously stupid.

If you think you need to squint to see what ray tracing does (and yes, the showcases Nvidia used were poor examples) you can look elsewhere:

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Soo

"Digital Foundry’s John Linneman, however, also reassured fans in a series of posts published on the ResetEra board. He saw the demos and was able to confirm that DICE, for instance, only had a couple weeks of time to implement their Ray Traced Reflections in Battlefield V."

Extract from wccftech.

Doesn't scream , great outcome to me, you would think Rtx was just imagineered or something, I thought Ea had been in the loop a while.?

 

[Crustybeaver]

Soo

"Digital Foundry’s John Linneman, however, also reassured fans in a series of posts published on the ResetEra board. He saw the demos and was able to confirm that DICE, for instance, only had a couple weeks of time to implement their Ray Traced Reflections in Battlefield V."

Extract from wccftech.

Doesn't scream , great outcome to me, you would think Rtx was just imagineered or something, I thought Ea had been in the loop a while.?

If they managed that demo in a couple of weeks, think what devs could do with it over the course of a year

 

[Xzibit]

If you think you need to squint to see what ray tracing does (and yes, the showcases Nvidia used were poor examples) you can look elsewhere:

That video game me a headache.

Try this one where they actually tell you the RTX process from Nvidia themselves (Tom Petersen)

 

[basco]

i think a multiplayer focused game is a bad example because look at the dark areas with rtx on you cant see if someone was shooting from there so me thinks not many will use that during the fight.
and i can imagine how my eyes get grilled with this and hdr on.
or maybe these pics dont serve the purpose well

 

[bug]

That video game me a headache.

Try this one where they actually tell you the RTX process from Nvidia themselves (Tom Petersen)

I already know this one. I picked the one from youtube because it shows how much better ray tracing can do, compared to rasterization.

 

[eidairaman1]

Next

 

[Octopuss]

Photographs of a monitor. YAY