RTX continues to seriously disappoint me

[BFG10K]

I had a chance to check out some details about Quake 2 RTX and wow, it’s simply terrible:

This is actual game footage from real gameplay. All four cards are an unplayable slideshow @ 1080p including the “RTX ready” 2060, which offers a glorious 22FPS.

When a 22 year old game using tech coded by nVidia themselves slideshows on even a $1200 graphics card, the implementation is a complete failure.

I also happened to find this:

It seems some of BF5’s "raytraced" lighting is actually a 10 second loop timer which has no light source. This is an obvious scam, meant to fraudulently portray that ray tracing adds “immersion” when it actually does nothing in this case.

 

[BoomerD]

Meh, I dunno. I have the original Quake2 and installed it for the first time in over 10 years, just to take advantage of the nVidia RTX version. Obviously, gameplay didn't really change, although they DID add flares to the inventory for use in some of the dark places. There's a HUGE amount of difference in the appearance of the game as far as lighting goes. Isn't that what RTX is really all about?
Is it "real world perfect" of course not, but it's still much better than it's ever been. Fer cryin out loud...it's a "new" technology...give it time to mature. I for one remember how crappy water looked in games just a few years ago...nowadays? You could jump in and go swimming in it.

 

[darkswordsman17]

Meh, I dunno. I have the original Quake2 and installed it for the first time in over 10 years, just to take advantage of the nVidia RTX version. Obviously, gameplay didn't really change, although they DID add flares to the inventory for use in some of the dark places. There's a HUGE amount of difference in the appearance of the game as far as lighting goes. Isn't that what RTX is really all about?
Is it "real world perfect" of course not, but it's still much better than it's ever been. Fer cryin out loud...it's a "new" technology...give it time to mature. I for one remember how crappy water looked in games just a few years ago...nowadays? You could jump in and go swimming in it.

You can get a similarly HUGE change to the appearance without ray-tracing (you know how I know that? Because games already had accomplished that). And you could get that along with other improvements, rendered at probably 4K or higher, with better framerates. That's where the issue comes from.

I'm pretty sure there's been mods that brought huge improvements to older games like that out for quite a while (there were even ray-traced versions that I think had comparable performance to this, and those ran only on the CPUs and that was probably years back, so newer CPUs would probably run it even better). Heck, I think id themselves has an improved version of Quake 3 Arena out for several years now. They also released Quake Champions and it brings HUGE difference to the appearance compared to Quake 2.

New technology let it mature, so makes total sense for them to showcase it with poor framerates on a 22 year old game? Sheesh, Crysis brought lots of improvements (including ones that actually changed gameplay), and better framerates than that, a decade ago. The change to lighting is not enough to warrant the performance hit. Especially since newer lighting methods can get quite close (and often ray-tracing is even outright simply doing that - a lot of this ray-tracing is using the same "cheats" that people are trying to claim makes ray-tracing superior to other lighting methods that games have been using).

Which, honestly this is...wow. Framerates in the 20-40s on Quake 2 at 1080p on $350-$500 2019 GPUs? Is that a joke? And while I'm not saying it looks bad, the lighting isn't so amazing (let alone knowing that other lighting methods that games use could offer a pretty close visual approximation with a much lower performance penalty) that it impresses me, and again, that's on a 22 year old game that otherwise should have probably 10x those framerates.

 

[BFG10K]

There's a HUGE amount of difference in the appearance of the game as far as lighting goes. Isn't that what RTX is really all about?

Darkswordsman already made some good points. Take a look at this one:

Its been available for 11 years and only needs DX9 hardware + Windows XP to run.

It has far superior colored lighting. Also it has parallax mapping and particle effects which RTX completely lacks. RTX looks totally bland and washed out in comparison.

Also RTX includes HD content which has been available for over a decade, so they're lying by omission by not mentioning it.

 

[Borealis7]

slideshows on even a $1200 graphics card, the implementation is a complete failure.

You know...that sounds a lot like what we said 20+ years ago when the first 3DFX Voodoo chip came out, and we had to choose between visuals and performance. I was 15, and the game was Quake 1, but then Voodoo2 came out and the rest is history.

 

[maddie]

I had a chance to check out some details about Quake 2 RTX and wow, it’s simply terrible:

This is actual game footage from real gameplay. All four cards are an unplayable slideshow @ 1080p including the “RTX ready” 2060, which offers a glorious 22FPS.

When a 22 year old game using tech coded by nVidia themselves slideshows on even a $1200 graphics card, the implementation is a complete failure.

I also happened to find this:

It seems some of BF5’s "raytraced" lighting is actually a 10 second loop timer which has no light source. This is an obvious scam, meant to fraudulently portray that ray tracing adds “immersion” when it actually does nothing in this case.

That 2nd video should have everyone pissed. Pure deception.

 

[BFG10K]

You know...that sounds a lot like what we said 20+ years ago when the first 3DFX Voodoo chip came out, and we had to choose between visuals and performance. I was 15, and the game was Quake 1, but then Voodoo2 came out and the rest is history.

That simply isn't true. Back in the day I played software Quake 320x240 @ 25FPS. Voodoo 1 runs 640x480 @ 36.70 FPS:

But it wasn't just running faster @ four times the pixel count (a massive feat in itself), because software Quake was also a blocky 8-bit pixelated mess.

GLQuake also gave vastly more accurate 16 bit color and smooth weapon glows. But more importantly, it gave bilinear filtering which provided an IQ gain so staggering, it instantly made software rendering obsolete and fundamentally changed the way games were viewed forever. The level at which I was blown away seeing this for the first time has never been replicated with any tech, except possibly seeing Unreal outdoors for the first time.

This effect was present across the board, like in Tomb Raider. And speaking of Quake 2, OpenGL provided 30% more performance with much higher visuals, including colored lighting. It also dramatically simplified the renderer.

Meanwhile RTX provides visuals which look inferior to DX9 shown above, and slideshows the game to 1990s levels of performance on 2019 hardware.

And it was extremely simple to take advantage of. Unlike RTX/DLSS which relies on massive coding investment and R&D, still fails, and we're constantly told "games need to be rebuilt from scratch" and "needs more months/years of training", before it works as promised, blah blah blah.

Voodoo 1 was to hardware what Doom was to FPSes, and what C was to programming.

So no, we didn't have to choose at all, because Voodoo 1 completely eclipsed software rendering in every metric.

 

[DrMrLordX]

So no, we didn't have to choose at all, because Voodoo 1 completely eclipsed software rendering in every metric.

Even Rendition Ready products provided higher fps than software rendering. 3DFX pwned them regardless.

 

[GaiaHunter]

PhysX 2.0?

Anyone remembers that?

 

[nurturedhate]

Unlike RTX/DLSS which relies on massive coding investment and R&D, still fails, and we're constantly told "games need to be rebuilt from scratch" and "needs more months/years of training", before it works as promised, blah blah blah.

^ This. We still don't have mass adoption of ground up dx12 engines.

 

[Yotsugi]

PhysX 2.0?

It isn't that, but it isn't what nV pitches it as either.

 

[Juiblex]

I purchased a 2070 Super with latest AMD 3900k build. I downloaded Quake 2 RTX. The most striking thing for me was the contrast between how horrible the gameplay of Quake 2 was today, and how much I enjoyed it back in 1998. Times change.

That said, I am not impressed with Ray Tracing. The framerate was way too slow. We need another generation or 3 before it will be ready for prime time. But it does go back to the saying "Build it and they will come." It at least allows developers to start writing Ray Tracing engines, etc. By the time the hardware is ready, hopefully some software will be ready too. Right now, neither make it a worthwhile investment. That said, I am pleased with the card though. I came from an AMD 480.

 

[Stuka87]

You know...that sounds a lot like what we said 20+ years ago when the first 3DFX Voodoo chip came out, and we had to choose between visuals and performance. I was 15, and the game was Quake 1, but then Voodoo2 came out and the rest is history.

This is totally not true. I was a big time Quake World player during this period. And software rendering got blown out the window by 3dFX chips. Quake had a max frame rate of 72fps (Yes there was a hack to unlock it, but that could not be used outside of screwing around). And since the engine physics are tied to FPS, you had to maintain a solid 72fps if you wanted to be competitive. Software could do it on good CPU's if you ran it with line skipping, but then you had to jack the brightness up to counter the black lines. Which overall made it harder to see.

Glide changed all of that. High FPS and significantly better graphics, which allowed you to see things better. RTX isn't even comparable to this.

 

[guachi]

Quake 2 RTX, brought to you by AMD.

 

[mopardude87]

RTX for me is one thing i simply don't care about and i am saying that as a 2070 owner. Yes it looks amazing but at 4k where i game at its just not happening. Currently in a realm of" good graphics don't make a good game" and well owning BF5 its the only game with RTX i even play and i don't care for it! I still play much more BF4 then even BF1. I did try it at 1080p and it ran fine but gameplay felt very jerky under DX12 and the game is still trash so there's that.

Release a very good game with RTX and i may just care for it. Till then its been a lovely tech demo. Reminds me of the physic x deal and well i only played Borderlands 2 where it was a mess. I just shut the crap off and had silky smooth gameplay.

 

[BigDaveX]

PhysX 2.0?

Anyone remembers that?

A better comparison might be the GeForce FX. Good enough in old games, absolutely atrocious when it came to the groundbreaking new features it included.

In fact, the only time they've introduced a major new feature set and not had it somehow turn out a disaster was the GeForce 8800 series. Fermi (DX11) was late, power-hungry and not particularly impressive, even if its actual DX11 performance was decent, and Maxwell (DX12) got slaughtered by its AMD rivals in anything that actually used the newer API.

But yeah, I'm just waiting for AMD to come up with a ray-tracing solution that'll absolutely blow nVidia's out of the water, and be an open standard to boot... even if AMD somehow screw up everything else about the card they introduce it with.

 

[IAteYourMother]

Ray tracing is cool stuff, but to market it as a feature in the entire RTX lineup is a little ludicrous to me given that you have to make some serious tradeoffs in quality/resolution/frames to enable ray tracing, all of which are usually preferable to RTX.

 

[BenSkywalker]

An actual comparison to debunk some of the utter insanity being discussed in this thread, the old WinXP Q2 looks better than RTX? Lmao, it's just stupid reading some of these comments. Not worth the performance hit, that you can argue all day, looks better, not so much. The utter trash lighting in the old XP build is comically terrible, the 'washed out colors'..... Q2RTX is an HDR game, I've got a reference OLED here and I would love to hear about some actual games with better colour, seriously. If there are ten I'd be shocked.

So there is an industry standard for ray tracing, it's called DXR and so far AMD is the one not supporting, in any fashion, the industry standard. RTX is nVidia marketing for their RT hardware. AMD is denying their customers the chance to even try it, their hardware is fully capable, they are simply refusing to support the industry standard.

For the record, that performance they were showing in that clip is well under half of what you would actually get in game. Pretty much they ran 16x MSAA benches in essence, they were pegging the RT hardware to show the differences between the base and super cards, the supers are disproportionately faster with RT for some reason.

AMD fought the fight you people seem to want, stop progress at all costs, they tried, but everyone else in the industry with any pull demanded ray tracing so AMD will add it. They would have lost their two console contracts moving forward, I know the Microsoft platform has largely underperformed this gen but Sony has been moving some massive units.

 

[FiendishMind]

That 2nd video should have everyone pissed. Pure deception.

If it is what it's being suggested it is, it would have to be reproducible. Perhaps someone with BFV and an RTX compatible card could verify?

 

[Shmee]

I prefer Quake 2 XP for now, it is a good sourceport, and there are other options available. That said, Q2 RTX is a nice gift as it gives the old game some love and attention. Q2 was one of my favorite games. IMO it had the best Quake universe, which was continued on with ETQW and Quake 4.

 

[BFG10K]

If it is what it's being suggested it is, it would have to be reproducible. Perhaps someone with BFV and an RTX compatible card could verify?

Why wouldn't it be reproducible? Just watch the video player bar and you'll see it pulses exactly every ten seconds.

Here's the same level without RTX:

As you can see, no ten second flashing. That's not a bug or accident, it was deliberately done.

What's ironic is that a gaming chick discovered this, while heavy-hitter reviewers conducting RTX "analysis" couldn't spot something so elementary. Too busy distracted by shiny puddles, no doubt.

 

[FiendishMind]

Why wouldn't it be reproducible? Just watch the video player bar and you'll see it pulses exactly every ten seconds.

Here's the same level without RTX:

As you can see, no ten second flashing. That's not a bug or accident, it was deliberately done.

What's ironic is that a gaming chick discovered this, while heavy-hitter reviewers conducting RTX "analysis" couldn't spot something so elementary. Too busy distracted by shiny puddles, no doubt.

Has anyone else reproduced the observed effect? That's what I'm asking.

 

[nurturedhate]

Not worth the performance hit, that you can argue all day

I had a chance to check out some details about Quake 2 RTX and wow, it’s simply terrible:

This is actual game footage from real gameplay. All four cards are an unplayable slideshow @ 1080p including the “RTX ready” 2060, which offers a glorious 22FPS.

When a 22 year old game using tech coded by nVidia themselves slideshows on even a $1200 graphics card, the implementation is a complete failure.

Came to defend Nvidia, end up agreeing with the OP and then goes on to blame AMD for all this...

AMD fought the fight you people seem to want, stop progress at all costs, they tried, but everyone else in the industry with any pull demanded ray tracing so AMD will add it. They would have lost their two console contracts moving forward, I know the Microsoft platform has largely underperformed this gen but Sony has been moving some massive units.

I love this line, you really think MS saw the turing launch and said "We need some of that sweet RT, let's restart our design process on a console that's only 2 years out... Oh and sony did as well..."

 

[nOOky]

Meh, Quake 2, I'd rather fire up Quake with the Dark Places mod and crank everything up anyway

 

[Dribble]

I love this line, you really think MS saw the turing launch and said "We need some of that sweet RT, let's restart our design process on a console that's only 2 years out... Oh and sony did as well..."

I think that was probably true - no one believed ray tracing was possible till the RTX cards came out. MS having made the DXR standard are clearly interested in ray tracing, they will have seen the cards (probably quite a bit before release) and demanded that AMD add something to their chips to support it. AMD is now doing a last minute add of that support. We know it's last minute because we have Navi V1 and it's missing - if you look at AMD press releases they go along the lines of "what raytracing...err", then "we'll do it on the server" and now "it's in Navi V2 and next gen consoles".