Discussion The Digital Foundry Cyberpunk path tracing puff piece has been uploaded.

[blckgrffn]

Completely agree up until this sentence. I will be surprised Pikachu if they redirect time to other aspects. Publishers will simply use it to pressure the devs to shovel more out faster. Increasing profits, which is all they care about. /Cynical Man speaks.

I feel the same way with the ubiquity of reasonably good upscaling techniques.

"What is this optimization you speak of? We added support for DLSS5/FSR4, it's optimized."

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I feel the same way with the ubiquity of reasonably good upscaling techniques.

"What is this optimization you speak of? We added support for DLSS5/FSR4, it's optimized."

Exactly. Money will drive the decisions. I am not saying we won't get a masterpiece here and there, but the rest will be paint by numbers, if you will.

I will say that as someone concerned with our energy future, at least in the short term while we continue to rely on fossil fuels like primitives. That I'd prefer lower powered hardware with frame generation over continuing to make bigger and more power hungry cards. Which also use more raw materials and thus are likely to have a higher cradle to grave energy cost.

Our crowd is a small one. Pixel peeping is the norm. I don't think that extends to most gamers.

My son and his friends while in high school were heavy into some pixel art games like Terraria. Before that Minecraft ruled. They don't care much about photo realism, they want to play fun games. Look how popular Cuphead became using hand drawn old school animation. None of which needs ray tracing to sell like crazy. That ray tracing in Minecraft is one of the best implementations of it IMO, is sort of comical. My hot take, is ray tracing as a faster and cheaper production tool is what will drive it forward successfully. Not the visuals themselves; almost no one to this point cares. Because gameplay will always be more important, to the point that as cited, pixel art and cartoons are perfectly acceptable as long as the game is a blast. Meanwhile a game that originally killed it on Playstation is getting roasted on PC because they tried to do too much for most people's system to handle. The refunds have been fast and furious, and the outcry deafening.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Completely agree up until this sentence. I will be surprised Pikachu if they redirect time to other aspects. Publishers will simply use it to pressure the devs to shovel more out faster. Increasing profits, which is all they care about. /Cynical Man speaks.

I find myself agreeing with you on that. I am turning into a cynic. Dang. Was hoping to avoid that.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I find myself agreeing with you on that. I am turning into a cynic. Dang. Was hoping to avoid that.

With enough years of the PC gaming industry as context, I'd contend we are merely realist.

 

[blckgrffn]

Exactly. Money will drive the decisions. I am not saying we won't get a masterpiece here and there, but the rest will be paint by numbers, if you will.

I will say that as someone concerned with our energy future, at least in the short term while we continue to rely on fossil fuels like primitives. That I'd prefer lower powered hardware with frame generation over continuing to make bigger and more power hungry cards. Which also use more raw materials and thus are likely to have a higher cradle to grave energy cost.

Our crowd is a small one. Pixel peeping is the norm. I don't think that extends to most gamers.

My son and his friends while in high school were heavy into some pixel art games like Terraria. Before that Minecraft ruled. They don't care much about photo realism, they want to play fun games. Look how popular Cuphead became using hand drawn old school animation. None of which needs ray tracing to sell like crazy. That ray tracing in Minecraft is one of the best implementations of it IMO, is sort of comical. My hot take, is ray tracing as a faster and cheaper production tool is what will drive it forward successfully. Not the visuals themselves; almost no one to this point cares. Because gameplay will always be more important, to the point that as cited, pixel art and cartoons are perfectly acceptable as long as the game is a blast. Meanwhile a game that originally killed it on Playstation is getting roasted on PC because they tried to do too much for most people's system to handle. The refunds have been fast and furious, and the outcry deafening.

My almost-a-teen son has a 8700K/6700XT rig that is reasonably capable. He Minecrafts and Starcrafts more than anything else by a mile. Next up? Valheim. Maybe Deep Rock Galactic. All of these with chill enabled, of course. He's only got a 32" 75hz 2k monitor for gosh sakes, so he's slumming it at a 100 FPS cap.

How dare he have so much fun without ray tracing? And running at native resolution no less? It's a shame.

 

[igor_kavinski]

In the early days of 3D gaming a good chunk of the effort was spend on designing game engines that are actually capable rendering realistic 3D environment, think of progression Wolfenstein>Doom>Duke Nuken 3D>Quake.

Sucks that John Carmack dropped out of the 3D engine race just when raytracing became relatively economical to use. I bet that he would have discovered some nifty trick to speed up his ID Engine RTX.

 

[CP5670]

But isn't this solved by the better lighting provided by this new RT?

It's not the lighting, something else looks off, like a surface is overly reflective and has low res textures at the same time.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

The hard push for frame generation so you can use path tracing is here -

Brought to you by Digital Foundry "a subsidiary of Nvidia marketing." 🤫

- YouTube

Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.

youtu.be

Just in time for the 4070. Don't you want to play a two and a half year old game again? To experience all the thrills and spectacle of path tracing and fake frames?

 

[Aapje]

Completely agree up until this sentence. I will be surprised Pikachu if they redirect time to other aspects. Publishers will simply use it to pressure the devs to shovel more out faster. Increasing profits, which is all they care about. /Cynical Man speaks.

If AAA developers don't find a way to usefully spend that extra money, they will turn into AA developers. In general, I see it as quite a good development if very good looking games can be made with a limited budget. That increases competition in the games market, which is good for us.

 

[Aapje]

It's not the lighting, something else looks off, like a surface is overly reflective and has low res textures at the same time.

I think that RT/path tracing exposes other limitations. For example, a real brick wall has actual depth, where the grouting is not at the same depth of the brick, but both the grouting and the brick itself also have a lot of depth changes/imperfections.

In traditional rasterization, this is mimicked with a texture on a flat surface, which is easy to render. In principle they can prebake the lighting in the texture based on an actual 3D-model of the wall, which takes time when making the texture, but then is easy to render. To get proper lighting on a ray/path-traced wall, all the depth needs to be present in the game, as a high-polygon wall.

In the absence of this, ray/path-tracing is going to result in games where surfaces are more mirror-like than the same surfaces in reality.

 

[AtenRa]

The Overdrive patch is clearly a Tech Demo, 90% of the cards with dedicated RT Hardware cannot play the game at just 1080p + PT.
We need to wait another 4-5 years for $300 GPUs to come that will be able to play the game with 50-60fps at 1080p +PT


For now,
RTX 3060 12GB on Win 11 Pro , 531.41

1080p High

1080p High + RT

1080p High + PT

 

[igor_kavinski]

1080p High

1080p High + RT

1080p High + PT

Funny.The photo without RT seems to be the best in letting my eyes make everything out clearly. RT darkens everything. PT makes the scene look closer to no RT, at a huge fps loss.

 

[AtenRa]

1080p High

1080p High + RT

1080p High + PT

 

[KompuKare]

Does Cyberpunk do ripples when you step into puddles? That was all the rage when shaders were new (think Morrowind).

To me the two RT have far too flat water making it look unrealistic as water is rarely that mirror-like.

I do agree that for RT and especially full PT, flat walls and floor no longer work. It will take more than some bump-mapping to get realistic walls and pavements.

 

[amenx]

Does Cyberpunk do ripples when you step into puddles? That was all the rage when shaders were new (think Morrowind).

To me the two RT have far too flat water making it look unrealistic as water is rarely that mirror-like.

Just amazes me how a 19 year old game was able to do water reflections. We've come all this way to barely improve much on that if at all.

 

[BFG10K]

16 FPS @ 4K on a $1600 4090. LMAO. Guys, guys, the 2060 6GB is totally "wray traycing ready", yo! Reminds me of hardware PhysX when they told us blowing cloth @ 15 FPS was the "game-changing future".

Ray Tracing is a solution looking for a problem. We already had very good approximated water reflections, water ripples, mirrors and lighting that ran fast on basic hardware. Heck, mirrors were around in Duke Nukem 3D software rendering back in 1996.

Also "just flip a switch and everything automatically works without developer effort" is an absolute lie. In reality assets/surfaces/textures need to be specifically designed for bouncing rays or they won't look right.

The classic example is when they bolt RT onto old games and have to add a flashlight and a fake sun in the middle of the sky because three quarters of the game is pitch black now.

And now that we have RT, it has created a new problem: too slow. So the "solution"? TV upscaling and frame interpolation, branded as "aye eye features". All vendor-locked to nVidia, of course.

 

[coercitiv]

Does Cyberpunk do ripples when you step into puddles?

What you need to keep in mind about Cyberpunk is the game prioritizes first impressions over depth. People made fun of it over the poor immersion mechanics it shipped with (water segment here). Later patches improved things (another water segment here), to the point where we could say it's no longer embarrassed by other well done AAA titles.

The game mechanics and animations are still superficial though, and this is reflected (pun intended) in their RT efforts: they aim to impress the public, get as much attention as possible while also doing less than planned in terms of developing the game. It's a great game for anyone looking for a good RPG with enjoyable story and fun combat, but it's a complete flop in terms of scope and original sale pitch.

Ray tracing in Cyberpunk is the proverbial lipstick on a pig. It's a great technological demo and looks impressive as long as you don't ask questions about the game mechanics. So leave the poor piglet alone, will you?

 

[DAPUNISHER]

GN did a much more professional evaluation than Alex -

 

[Zepp]

ray-tracing to me is still largely a gimmick. Not as big a gimmick as fake-res upscaler tech though.
I don't know if its more me or my generation but growing up with Atari and all through the 2D graphics era and early 3D era the sense of wonder from huge leaps of graphical advances has been gone for years.

Just amazes me how a 19 year old game was able to do water reflections. We've come all this way to barely improve much on that if at all.

Yep, and in an age where games like minecraft are still massively popular and new games like Valheim have such huge success, gamers are still so easily hyped by slightly more realistic soft lighting, shadows and reflections. to the tune of spending thousands more on a new PC to be able to run it.

Infectious hype reminds me of a twitch streamer I used to watch who was far from tech savvy and played mostly retro and indie games in 1080p, yet back when the Nvidia 3000 series hype started they put up a donation goal to buy a 3090...

 

[DAPUNISHER]

ray-tracing to me is still largely a gimmick. Not as big a gimmick as fake-res upscaler tech though.
I don't know if its more me or my generation but growing up with Atari and all through the 2D graphics era and early 3D era the sense of wonder from huge leaps of graphical advances has been gone for years.


Yep, and in an age where games like minecraft are still massively popular and new games like Valheim have such huge success, gamers are still so easily hyped by slightly more realistic soft lighting, shadows and reflections. to the tune of spending thousands more on a new PC to be able to run it.

Infectious hype reminds me of a twitch streamer I used to watch who was far from tech savvy and played mostly retro and indie games in 1080p, yet back when the Nvidia 3000 series hype started they put up a donation goal to buy a 3090...

We are almost 5yrs in and it's still a gimmick.I keep seeing poll after poll by various outlets, and few care about ray tracing or path tracing. GN just did one about path tracing and over half of respondents said don't care or no to playing Cyberpunk'd with it. 36% said they don't have the hardware. Only 16% yes. It is all the marketing machine pushing it because AMD is great for raster and cost less while offering more VRAM at most tiers.

My favorite is we are told to use it in conjunction with DLSS at high res to get playable frames. Which as I describe it, is lowering visuals to improve visuals. Truly a double-think moment. Consoles won. Now everyone will settle for internal upscaling.

 

[WelshBloke]

New cyberpunk ray tracing mode insta crashes on my PC!
I'm kinda over that game though, I'm not sure if I could play it again just because of some better lighting and much worse performance.

As an aside I didn't notice a massive visual difference between the ray tracing options, might have to make a nice save spot and take some screenshots to see the difference!

 

[Grooveriding]

This is one game where I like the RT effects and find them impactful, the others being Control and Metro EE PCE.

I think the PT mode looks good too, the performance hit is massive though. It’s playable on my monitor, but not acceptable at 4K on my TV.

To get it playable on my monitor I have to use either frame gen or DLSS, I don’t like using both as I find it degrades IQ too much. I don’t like frame gen because I notice fast turns have a sort of motion blur effect to them I don’t like. But it runs well enough with DLSS quality at 1440p, about 70 to 80fps.

Seems a massive compromise to get it on with playable frames. What I like about the card I’m using is not having to use DLSS or frame gen. I prefer the look of stuff at native res with none of that turned on. But it is definite improvement over the previous RT to my eyes. Some scenes are really cool with the new lighting and shadows.

 

[CP5670]

I like RT in those other two games but not this one. There is just too much of a performance hit, even the regular RT, and I can only tell the difference in a few places with reflections. Many of those screenshots just look different with RT, not obviously better.

 

[pj-]

The next few years of rt should be focused on adding it to older games. I think this was wasted on cyberpunk. Even some of the pause and zoom comparisons don't show meaningful differences.

Witcher 3's implementation seems to have a bad reputation on the internet but I thought it was great, aside from the steep hw requirements and random crashes on my 7900xtx..

Rt off:


Rt on:


Witcher might have even been a better testing ground for PT since it's older, 3rd person and slower paced so the massive perf hits are more tolerable

 

[igor_kavinski]

Witcher 3's implementation seems to have a bad reputation on the internet but I thought it was great, aside from the steep hw requirements and random crashes on my 7900xtx.

Those pics are like night and day. Witcher 3 should be a poster child for RT!