Forza Motorsport Gets Ray-Traced Global Illumination in December 9 Visual Update

[Cpt.Jank]

Forza Motorsport, Xbox Studios's cinematic 2023 live-service racing sim, is getting a nice visual upgrade in an upcoming update (titled Update 15) shortly after the first anniversary of its release. On December 9, Forza Motorsport will get Ray-Traced Global Illumination (RTGI), making the racing game and all its shiny cars look more realistic. RTGI will be available for all PC versions of Forza Motorsport as of December 9—as long as the game is up-to-date that is—although it will need to be manually enabled in the game's graphics settings. After being enabled, RTGI will apply to both gameplay rendering and in-game cinematics, as well as the built-in photo mode.

While Forza Motorsport's minimum recommended GPU specification is an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060, you will need at least an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20-series or AMD RX 6000-series graphics card to take advantage of RTGI, with the game's developer, Turn 10, recommending an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 or better for high graphics and RTGI settings. For the uninitiated, RTGI helps increase realism by simulating how light interacts with surfaces and materials, more accurately rendering indirect lighting and shadows in-game. In NVIDIA's blog post announcing the updated visuals for Forza Motorsport, it recommends using the RTGI in conjunction with DLSS Super Resolution or DLAA to get the highest frame rates. Forza Motorsport is available for PC on Steam (currently 50% off), the Microsoft Store, and PC Game Pass



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[The Quim Reaper]

It's not an 'upgrade'

..it's what was promised when the game was first revealed, running on PC, then massively downgraded before release.

 

[AusWolf]

Just to make sure that it looks exactly the same with a much higher performance impact. Who isn't happy?

 

[Upgrayedd]

Grandstands look worse or just me?

 

[WhateverAnotherFreakingID]

Grandstands look worse or just me?

Both images looks worse to me too, sky and seats rows on the backgrounds are washed out in image 1, and in both images GI looks like a material shader albedo boost, while shadowing looks straightforwardly like objects were floating on an invisible thin layer of water

 

[The Quim Reaper]

Both images looks worse to me too, sky and seats rows on the backgrounds are washed out in image 1, and in both images GI looks like a material shader albedo boost, while shadowing looks straightforwardly like objects were floating on an invisible thin layer of water

Well, if it is full Ray traced GI, what your seeing is 'real world' accurate but is simply the case that the previous baked lighting looks more aesthetically pleasing to your eyes whilst being technically incorrect.

Case of pick your poison.

 

[JustBenching]

Im calling it now, CPU performance will absolutely tank. It's already a CPU hog, add RT to it, it's gonna be...well not great.

 

[Vya Domus]

Possibly one of the most hilarious ON-OFF comparison screenshot yet.

 

[BlaezaLite]

Be interesting to see how my GRE copes with RTGI

 

[Tomorrow]

What images? i see three pictures in the article. Only one of them is a comparison and it's very subtle. GI can be very noticeable (in Metro Exodus EE for example) but here it looks only slightly better.

 

[AusWolf]

What images? i see three pictures in the article. Only one of them is a comparison and it's very subtle. GI can be very noticeable (in Metro Exodus EE for example) but here it looks only slightly better.

It doesn't even look better to me. Just some shadows are cast slightly differently.

 

[WhateverAnotherFreakingID]

Well, if it is full Ray traced GI, what your seeing is 'real world' accurate but is simply the case that the previous baked lighting looks more aesthetically pleasing to your eyes whilst being technically incorrect.

Case of pick your poison.

I highly doubt it those renders are accurate by any mean, let alone a correct "real" PBR unbiased representation. More likely are the result of a pipeline of approximations, AI content-filler and optimizations.

But regardless of the math of the algorithms underneath, if a render technique aims at photo-realism then it should deliver that sensation, if instead the soft shadows looks pretty generic and heavily approximated, so much that that the items seems to be floating in the scene, then the fault is in the choice of the render settings, which made the resulting image not just less visually pleasing but straightforwardly confusing and visually disturbing. Unless of course the design was to induce the consumer vision into a perspective perception trick, a bit ala M.C. Escher