NVIDIA Improves DXR Ray Tracing Performance in Battlefield V By Up To 50% {WCCF)

[happy medium]

Optimizations will also be coming from Denoiser and filter improvements which will play a large part on more specular surfaces that occur in snow maps such as the Frozen Lake. BVH or Boundry Volume Hierarchies which allows ray tracing to be faster and efficient in triangle intersections. The devs also found a bug to be the culprit behind major performance dips with RTX when destroying objects. Since Battlefield V comes with lots of destructible environments, the removal of the bug increases the performance by a huge factor, allowing the ray tracing hardware to be utilized much more efficiently. This also applies to foliage and vegetation which have been optimized to use ray tracing properly as too many rays were falling on them.

https://wccftech.com/nvidia-dice-battlefield-v-game-ready-driver-50-percent-performance-improvement/

• 60 FPS at 2560×1440 with DXR Raytraced Reflections Set to Ultra on an RTX 2080 Ti
• 60 FPS at 2560×1440 with DXR Raytraced Reflections Set to Medium on an RTX 2080
• 60 FPS at 1920×1080 with DXR Raytraced Reflections Set to Medium on an RTX 2070

 

[Dribble]

No surprise that a brand new rendering method added late into a game has lots of scope for optimisation. If they are finding such major gains still it's likely there is still quite a few smaller optimisations to do which are going to give further performance boosts.

 

[nurturedhate]

While nice and a definite improvement the percentage of people willing to play bfv multiplayer at 60fps on a system supporting a 2070 or up is incredibly small.

 

[Despoiler]

This also applies to foliage and vegetation which have been optimized to use ray tracing properly as too many rays were falling on them.

Translation: We are limiting or no longer doing ray tracing on these objects because we can't without tanking performance.

 

[nurturedhate]

Translation: We are limiting or no longer doing ray tracing on these objects because we can't without tanking performance.

And this is also the press release for it, expect performance to be close but less than stated as per usual marketing.

 

[Headfoot]

Translation: We are limiting or no longer doing ray tracing on these objects because we can't without tanking performance.

Basically, yeah. There was an interview with one of the big time rendering engineers at DICE with Eurogamer I believe, and he went into some depth on these topics. Ray tracing will be just like rasterization in that clever tricks and optimizations which do not look noticeably worse will be the standard approach. Personally, I think it makes a ton of sense to direct the majority of rays to the surfaces and objects which most benefit from ray tracing and leave the rasterization lighting techniques to the rest. The fully rasterized BFV already looks incredible so its not like it's much of a downgrade

 

[Despoiler]

And this is also the press release for it, expect performance to be close but less than stated as per usual marketing.

I'd like to see what the typical uplift actually is rather than them quoting the peak from isolated, bugged scenarios. Hopefully we get a deeper dive from GN or Hardware Unboxed.

 

[Dribble]

Some reviews now:
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews...ield_V_Tides_of_War_RTX_DXR_Raytracing/3.html

So we are looking at a 30-38% min hit now, which is on med/low but as med basically looks identical to ultra and low is only slightly worse that's also the biggest hit you really need to take. They original press article hints they still have further improvements planned - moving the time they start calculating the ray tracing forward for example. They also don't use the tensor cores at all (the de-noise uses cuda cores). If they can get it down just a bit more then I'd think I'd call that a result as it would mean even 4K it did 60fps on a 2080Ti. A long way from the 2080Ti does 60fps at 1080p manta so popular in RTX bashing around here.

 

[Qwertilot]

Presumably anything using the tensor cores to denoise would manage that? Not doing that is a big loss.

 

[Phynaz]

Translation: We are limiting or no longer doing ray tracing on these objects because we can't without tanking performance.

You must be using the AMD translation, because you are wrong.

Perhaps you would like to hear from Dice themselves?

“We also had a bug that spawned rays off the leaves of vegetation, trees and the like. This compounded with the aforementioned bounding box stretching issue, where rays were trying to escape OUT while checking for self intersections of the tree and leaves. This caused a great performance dip. This has been fixed and significantly improves performance”

You can educate yourself further here:
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2018-battlefield-5-rtx-ray-tracing-analysis

Alpha software is alpha, who would have thought of that!

 

[Despoiler]

You must be using the AMD translation, because you are wrong.

Perhaps you would like to hear from Dice themselves?

“We also had a bug that spawned rays off the leaves of vegetation, trees and the like. This compounded with the aforementioned bounding box stretching issue, where rays were trying to escape OUT while checking for self intersections of the tree and leaves. This caused a great performance dip. This has been fixed and significantly improves performance”

You can educate yourself further here:
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2018-battlefield-5-rtx-ray-tracing-analysis

Alpha software is alpha, who would have thought of that!

Convenient you left out half of the same paragraph

Another problem we are having currently in the launch build is with alpha tested geometry like vegetation. If you turn off every single alpha tested object suddenly ray tracing is blazingly fast when it only is for opaque surfaces. Opaque-only ray tracing is also that much faster since we are binning rays as diverging rays can still cost a lot. We are looking into optimisations for any hit shaders to speed this up.

Perhaps you've never seen light glint off fall leaves or light pass through leaves? In real life vegetation interacts with light. Everything interacts with light. As RT is simulating real life then it's valid that it does so. Alpha software is alpha except for JHH saying over and over how "it just works."

 

[darkswordsman17]

Translation: We are limiting or no longer doing ray tracing on these objects because we can't without tanking performance.

Sounds like Tessellation factor all over again. But of course they wanted to try to wow people and say "see how good it looks!?!" so they cranked it up.

In the Digital Foundry stuff, is it just me or are they using different textures on the guns in the DXR Med-High setting? There's one where it looks like its between just the DXR on/off, but then there's one where the Low DXR also looks like its using a very simplified texture. It looks like its more than just lighting too, as the little painted design doesn't even look the same. Maybe that's something unrelated to DXR.

In one it says something about roughness cut-off determining if some materials are even shown at all. That makes it sound like they're using different textures to try and make it look better. That comes off really fishy as is the image quality improvement actually coming from using better textures? Which, I've actually wondered if that wouldn't be the best way to do their "DLSS" stuff, where they basically pre-render the game at highest settings, and then save the way things look as textures that they'd then push down.

There's other things (like the lamp reflection on the marble floor) that I'm pretty sure are possible without ray-tracing, they just chose not to do them, possibly to make ray-tracing look better. And looking at the marble trim around the bottom of the pillar, the DXR ones all look blurry in comparison (which they might argue is more realistic to the lighting, but it looks off to me). And then the gold decorative trim at the top of the pillar, the High and Ultra DXR look like they're using completely different textures to the rest.

As things stand right now, the DICE developers responsible for the DXR implementation see it as a work-in-progress. Further optimisations are due, both in an imminent patch and also down the road as the title receives further support in the coming months. Even Nvidia driver updates are expected to deliver further boosts to frame-rates, such as the ability to run ray tracing compute shaders in parallel. Expect to see more granularity added to the DXR settings, perhaps with a focus on culling distance and LODs. Other quality and performance improvements in development include a hybrid rendering system that uses traditional screen-space reflections where the effect is accurate, only using ray tracing where the technique fails (remember, SSR can only produce reflections of elements rendered on-screen, while full ray tracing reflects anything and everything accurately, within the bounds set by the developer). This should boost performance hopefully improve some of the pop-in issues RT reflections occasionally exhibit right now.

So...ray-tracing is going to require all the same tricks and other stuff that normal rendering would? So much for the "It'll simplify things and make everything easier! The devs won't have to try and use tricks to approximate stuff any more." claims. And sounds like they're going to reduce as much of the full fat ray-tracing on the dedicated hardware as possible too. But of course Nvidia will use those shadow box scenes to try and claim how much doing real ray-tracing will improve image quality. Great, let us know when you can actually deliver that in games at playable framerates.

 

[krumme]

Who cares anymore. If you actually can see a difference it sometimes even looks worse.
The standard reflections in bf5 is perfectly adequate. I can't really see what this is about.
Worst feature/cost ever by a long shot.

 

[BFG10K]

So...ray-tracing is going to require all the same tricks and other stuff that normal rendering would? So much for the "It'll simplify things and make everything easier! The devs won't have to try and use tricks to approximate stuff any more." claims.

Yep, "ray tracing won't need application hacks anymore" they said, "just switch it on and it'll automatically work everywhere with no developer effort!"

Now we see hacks and a reduction in image quality in a desperate attempt to make RTX usable. So instead of 25% performance we get 50% performance with the same blurry pixelated mud puddles.

It's hilarious, apparently 60FPS is now acceptable for $1200 hardware. I guess high refresh rate monitors are now a complete waste of time?

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Glad to see an uplift and the RTX series getting some functional frame rates.

Hopefully this trend continues with other games that utilize Ray Tracing.

DICE/Frostbyte games always tend to perform better than their visual class and it will be interesting to see how other engines that already chug along in rasterized scanerios handle RTX.

 

[beginner99]

The standard reflections in bf5 is perfectly adequate. I can't really see what this is about.

The logical failure here is that it's assumed gamers want realistic lighting in every scenario which obviously isn't true.

I guess most here have driven at night in the rain with heavy traffic. You bascially see jack and doing a racing game like need for speed with such realistic lighting would only be an act of frustration. Also with realistc lighting in a BF game people could easily camp in buildings behind windows. you don't see inside if it's sunny outside but you can see out nice and clear.

I would rather want them to make physics and movements much more realistic as that seems doable especially with the current core-count increases.

 

[krumme]

The logical failure here is that it's assumed gamers want realistic lighting in every scenario which obviously isn't true.

I guess most here have driven at night in the rain with heavy traffic. You bascially see jack and doing a racing game like need for speed with such realistic lighting would only be an act of frustration. Also with realistc lighting in a BF game people could easily camp in buildings behind windows. you don't see inside if it's sunny outside but you can see out nice and clear.

I would rather want them to make physics and movements much more realistic as that seems doable especially with the current core-count increases.

Agree 100%. What bf needs is better physics and motion. Not tons of mm2 dedicated to next to nothing. That would add excitement and fun. Lot of stuff to play with.

 

[Kippa]

Is Nvidia doing 100% pure brute force rendering in the games or are they using a form of interpolation to cut down on processing times?

 

[ub4ty]

The logical failure here is that it's assumed gamers want realistic lighting in every scenario which obviously isn't true.

I guess most here have driven at night in the rain with heavy traffic. You bascially see jack and doing a racing game like need for speed with such realistic lighting would only be an act of frustration. Also with realistc lighting in a BF game people could easily camp in buildings behind windows. you don't see inside if it's sunny outside but you can see out nice and clear.

I would rather want them to make physics and movements much more realistic as that seems doable especially with the current core-count increases.

The failure is in thinking these big block buster games that continue to marginalize the people who play them will have a big enough user base to solidify a marginal showing of ray tracing. Meanwhile, ancient CS:GO, pubg, and fortnite dominate because they're fun and accessible to everyone.

Big companies who've been around too long get arrogant and disconnected with their consumers and they make epic mistakes like this. This makes way for new and fresh blood thank God.

 

[Headfoot]

Agree 100%. What bf needs is better physics and motion. Not tons of mm2 dedicated to next to nothing. That would add excitement and fun. Lot of stuff to play with.

I've been playing BFV quite a lot lately and the motion is quite fantastic, all directional dives and the vaulting system work really well. There are a few bugs here and there but nothing crazy. The physics are really pretty good too. Have you played the game yet? I thought both of those thing specifically were standouts as being well done compared to other games...

 

[ozzy702]

I've been playing BFV quite a lot lately and the motion is quite fantastic, all directional dives and the vaulting system work really well. There are a few bugs here and there but nothing crazy. The physics are really pretty good too. Have you played the game yet? I thought both of those thing specifically were standouts as being well done compared to other games...

Yup. BFV runs smooth as butter. It's actually quite amazing.

 

[Headfoot]

Yup. BFV runs smooth as butter. It's actually quite amazing.

TBH I am really enjoying BFV and its clearly got DICE's trademark level of polish. I really disliked BF1 but the changes they've made for 5 completely change the feel of the game. More than the sum of the changes would lead you to believe on paper IMO

 

[TheELF]

Yup. BFV runs smooth as butter. It's actually quite amazing.

And all it takes is a measly i7-8700k @4.7ghz
with a EVGA FTW3 1080ti
and barely 16GB GSKILL @4133mhz.

 

[ozzy702]

And all it takes is a measly i7-8700k @4.7ghz
with a EVGA FTW3 1080ti
and barely 16GB GSKILL @4133mhz.

Yep, even peasants can play on their potatoes!

 

[darkswordsman17]

Is Nvidia doing 100% pure brute force rendering in the games or are they using a form of interpolation to cut down on processing times?

This update sounds like they're basically using normal rasterized mirroring where they can so as to minimize how much they're having to use the ray tracing hardware. I think the interpolation is more what the DLSS stuff is, and I believe that's not really being done yet in this game. Supposedly some denoising or something (which I believe is part of the DLSS algorithm development, but its not actually using the hardware that's intended for that on the RTX cards in this game, they're doing their own version - probably just because DICE operates that way).

The failure is in thinking these big block buster games that continue to marginalize the people who play them will have a big enough user base to solidify a marginal showing of ray tracing. Meanwhile, ancient CS:GO, pubg, and fortnite dominate because they're fun and accessible to everyone.

Big companies who've been around too long get arrogant and disconnected with their consumers and they make epic mistakes like this. This makes way for new and fresh blood thank God.

I agree with the last part, but I think there will continue to be a place for these blockbuster titles from the major publishers/devs/etc. I think the future of this stuff (especially a game like Battlefield where it touts the number of concurrent players) is cloud processing. This provides a more level playing field for everyone, and they can throw lots of power to max the visuals while still getting good framerates. While this could be a downgrade for some (namely the people always buying the latest greatest, running 120Hz+ monitors, but for many - console gamers, many PC gamers, it'd be an upgrade if they can minimize latency and offer good consistent framerates but with maxed out visuals that would only lose based on the resolution they'd be compressed to before streaming). I think shorter term maybe we see them do some hybrid approach (store high res textures and other things that eat up tons of bandwidth locally).

But basically this way, people have to worry less about spending hundreds for new graphics cards and stuff, just pay a monthly subscription. Probably even tiered, with different options, maybe they offer things in increments of resolution and framerate, and they just try to pool people on similar settings in the same instance (so maybe there's people that just want pretty graphics, they do 4K30, but others want 1080p120; have like 720p/1080p/1440p/2160p, and then 30/60/90/120, or maybe even be able to offer 10 or even 5 increments for people with variable refresh rate capable hardware, or like a range where they guarantee a minimum but it can go up to another amount if bandwidth allows).

They'd have on site servers for competitions. Maybe license it for like internet cafe/Arcade situation, where if they have the hardware (like Nvidia Teslaboxes), and then alternate games on different days or something, with certain games getting like a week or month promotion when they come out. That'd be especially interesting for VR (where it'd have the hardware to make it shine, with maxed out visuals, high framerates, and then the higher than consumer quality VR headsets and tracking stuff, it'd be providing the environment too).