Blizzard Outlines Latest Diablo IV Graphical Enhancements for PC & Consoles

[T0@st]

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!

• The Diablo IV Team

View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source

 

[phints]

Definitely some nice visual improvements even if subtle. I wonder if DirectStorage is enabled yet. The game is quite good looking but that's not the issue. The issue remains the mindless, easy, boring endgame you get to after about 40 hours.

 

[Onasi]

Am I alone in this by preferring how the non-RT shadows look? Sure, they are sharper and less “realistic”, but I feel that the defined contrast makes the picture “pop” more visually.

 

[Chaitanya]

There already were enough reasons to avoid blizzard like a plague now there is even more reasons to avoid their "products" like a plague.

 

[jonup]

Am I alone in this by preferring how the non-RT shadows look? Sure, they are sharper and less “realistic”, but I feel that the defined contrast makes the picture “pop” more visually.

I was about to drop in the same comment but you beat me to it. Maybe I'm old.

 

[MrDweezil]

Reflections look ok if you happen to be fighting on water, RT shadows are whatever. Honestly you spend your time blasting through everything so quick in this game I'm not sure I'd even notice the changes.

 

[Event Horizon]

The graphics didn't need fixing, it's the fun that's missing.

 

[Guwapo77]

Crap like this is why I'm going Nvidia next GPU... I love an amazing looking game and I'm tired of not getting all the pretties.

 

[MrDweezil]

Crap like this is why I'm going Nvidia next GPU... I love an amazing looking game and I'm tired of not getting all the pretties.

None of the new stuff is Nvidia specific.

 

[Legacy-ZA]

Crap like this is why I'm going Nvidia next GPU... I love an amazing looking game and I'm tired of not getting all the pretties.

nVidia knows this, it's why they have been doing things like this for a long time, PhysX etc.

Why they abuse their customers too if you ask me, they know the competition delivers, but always one generation too late.

 

[Guwapo77]

There already were enough reasons to avoid blizzard like a plague now there is even more reasons to avoid their "products" like a plague.

Mama taught me how to read "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."

nVidia knows this, it's why they have been doing things like this for a long time, PhysX etc.

Why they abuse their customers too if you ask me, they know the competition delivers, but always one generation too late.

Yup, I've tried...I've been AMD GPUs for 20 something years (originally Nvida), but its time to go back for me. 5090 or whatever it will be called will be in my system as long as the 5950X doesn't bottleneck it too much.

 

[zmeul]

Am I alone in this by preferring how the non-RT shadows look? Sure, they are sharper and less “realistic”, but I feel that the defined contrast makes the picture “pop” more visually.

you're not alone, I too prefer the non RT look

 

[Franzen4Real]

Definitely some nice visual improvements even if subtle. I wonder if DirectStorage is enabled yet. The game is quite good looking but that's not the issue. The issue remains the mindless, easy, boring endgame you get to after about 40 hours.

I may have to download it again to take a look at the new features. Two things that I thought D4 did very well out of the box was lighting and sound. But I stopped playing shortly after launch due to your second point of not holding my interest.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Am I alone in this by preferring how the non-RT shadows look? Sure, they are sharper and less “realistic”, but I feel that the defined contrast makes the picture “pop” more visually.

- I always find it humorous how RT effects seem to always need an explanation for why the RT-image is the "better" image between the two.

*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*

 

[Vayra86]

On the left... a picture with shadows. On the right... a picture with shadows.

This is hilariously pointless.

ReTardeeX On!

Crap like this is why I'm going Nvidia next GPU... I love an amazing looking game and I'm tired of not getting all the pretties.

Where are those pretties though, I might need new glasses...


At least you get a FREE FLOATING HORSE with your RTX effects. Awesome!

 

[Chrispy_]

Am I alone in this by preferring how the non-RT shadows look? Sure, they are sharper and less “realistic”, but I feel that the defined contrast makes the picture “pop” more visually.

Using real-time raytracing to produce distance-variable shadows is so completely wasteful, too.

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.

 

[Vayra86]

The graphics didn't need fixing, it's the fun that's missing.

Don't worry, Blizzard fixed the fun too, patched out rigorously. Don't you dare find new fun either. They will hit it with the fun police. Can't be getting (more interchangeable) gear faster than everyone else now, no no! Gotta keep players 'attached' after all...

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?

There already were enough reasons to avoid blizzard like a plague now there is even more reasons to avoid their "products" like a plague.

Oh wow. Glad I jumped ship already

 

[Guwapo77]

On the left... a picture with shadows. On the right... a picture with shadows.

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!

View attachment 340715

NGL, the left does look better. What are the settings? Is this RT with upscaling?

NGL, the left does look better. What are the settings? Is this RT with upscaling?

6900XT with Low QT RT - I get 35-45 FPS.

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.

 

[Zubasa]

Reflections look ok if you happen to be fighting on water, RT shadows are whatever. Honestly you spend your time blasting through everything so quick in this game I'm not sure I'd even notice the changes.

The problem is, good luck finding reflective surfaces in this game. Almost all of the water in this game are either muddy puddles or blood.

NGL, the left does look better. What are the settings? Is this RT with upscaling?



6900XT with Low QT RT - I get 35-45 FPS.

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.

View attachment 340753

This is without RT on...shadows just aren't great in this game. This is 1440p Ultra Settings.

Make sure the RT foliage check box is off, it just tanks performance.

 

[Guwapo77]

The problem is, good luck finding reflective surfaces in this game. Almost all of the water in this game are either muddy puddles or blood.


Make sure the RT foliage check box is off, it just tanks performance.

Bro...my performance was ass with and without foliage on.

 

[Zubasa]

Bro...my performance was ass with and without foliage on.

BTW with RT on at all, it tanks CPU performance and also the game becomes even more of a VRAM hog.
@4K with RT this game peaks at 22GB allocation lol.
It feels like there is something wrong with the RT implementation in this game.

 

[Guwapo77]

BTW with RT on at all, it tanks CPU performance and also the game becomes even more of a VRAM hog.
@4K with RT this game peaks at 22GB allocation lol.
It feels like there is something wrong with the RT implementation in this game.

Interesting observation regarding the amount of RAM utilized by this game. I may have said this numerous times already, but I'm playing at Ultra settings and on 1440p and the game takes every bit of my 16GB of RAM. Does it use it or just allocate it? I have no idea whatsoever. All I know is, don't turn on RT with a 6900XT.

 

[Zubasa]

Interesting observation regarding the amount of RAM utilized by this game. I may have said this numerous times already, but I'm playing at Ultra settings and on 1440p and the game takes every bit of my 16GB of RAM. Does it use it or just allocate it? I have no idea whatsoever. All I know is, don't turn on RT with a 6900XT.

It is a bit of both, this game suffers from traversal stutters on cards with lower vram.
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.