Metro Exodus - NVIDIA RTX Real-Time Raytracing Demo

#5530886 Posted on: 03/23/2018 05:32 PM

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the other RTX ray trace vids of late make this look pretty lame

#5530888 Posted on: 03/23/2018 05:33 PM

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And that's how not to do it. What did this raytracing add?
Missing grass shadows. Missing shadows (Ambient Occlusion) almost everywhere. Main thing of raytracing should be great quality reflections and refractions.
Instead here things are missing.

#5530890 Posted on: 03/23/2018 05:39 PM

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Water looks good, and the light coming through the windows makes a massive difference on those interior scenes. Rest of the graphics didn't look particularly good, but not bad either.

#5530891 Posted on: 03/23/2018 05:40 PM

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And that's how not to do it. What did this raytracing add?
Missing grass shadows. Missing shadows (Ambient Occlusion) almost everywhere. Main thing of raytracing should be great quality reflections and refractions.
Instead here things are missing.

It only uses raytracing for GI/AO, which are basically the same. I think the AO looks good here, especially inside the house - where is it missing?

#5530893 Posted on: 03/23/2018 05:42 PM

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Looks great, but all of this could be accomplished without RTX. The requirements and extra load of RTX just isn't justifiable.

#5530896 Posted on: 03/23/2018 05:48 PM

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What are the requirements? AFAIK there hasn't been any performance metrics posted. And yeah, a lot of things can be manually tuned/adjusted for quality by hand to get similar results.. the idea behind raytracing is that you setup the initial parameters and it should look more realistic or as realistic automagically with little work by artists. There is going to be diminishing returns going forward no matter how much optimization you do.

#5530897 Posted on: 03/23/2018 05:51 PM

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One thing everyone has to remember here, this is not made to make the game look better as it is now. It was the same thing when Intel demoed Ray tracing on Quake 4 and Quake Wars, it broke most of the rendered but added the features Raytracing promised. This is more or less a proof of concept, I think engines and applications designed with Ray tracing from the ground up we will see some nice results. But despite this breaking a number of things in an already published game and engine with no real updates aside from support for RTX, it does show what RTX is capable of.

There are also people saying that things like real time shadows, reflections, heck even the geometry are present in games now but at some point we are going to hit a wall. If Ray tracing is the way to get past this wall, I'm all for it.



I don't think there have been any of the recent results from RTX or AMD's version(can't think of the name off the top of my head) for DX12RT, but in the past ray tracing was more done on CPU if I remember correctly?

#5530898 Posted on: 03/23/2018 05:51 PM

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AO is literally missing everywhere outside. That shadow under car looked more like baked in. Inside, there was something looking like AO, but unrealistically weak and on most places missing too.
Only good shadows were those sourced from Sunlight. And those were cast only by some objects.

And I did watch from 4K source as 1080p has compression artifacts.

#5530900 Posted on: 03/23/2018 05:58 PM

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For one, I'm pretty sure it requires Volta-generation hardware or newer, as well as DX12. I think (might be remembering wrong) it uses tensor cores, which is a pretty beefy requirement. I think it's pretty safe to assume that it will have a substantial impact on GPU load, seeing as raytracing has never been considered a basic calculation.

I have considered your second point about adding realism with less work to the artists, though. That is something I have a hard time brushing away.

Aside from seeing performance metrics, I'm also curious to see what a side-by-side comparison is like of "traditional" scenarios, where the demo is made to be as realistic as possible without RTX, and then the same demo using RTX. As stated in other articles, UE4 could already do the things RTX claims and it had the demos to prove it, and it had more lenient requirements.

Here's another way to look at this in a concerning way:
If RTX allows you to have the same (maybe slightly better) visuals than what game engines could already supply, this might mean game devs will intentionally save time and effort not putting in the extra effort to add that realism. What this means is because of RTX, anyone who has a setup not compatible with it might get a worse visual experience than if RTX never existed. Does this make sense? I'm not sure I explained that clearly.

#5530902 Posted on: 03/23/2018 06:05 PM

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Ehm, RTX is only supported for Volta or newer cards, meaning anything RTX you see, was based on at least one Volta card.

DirectX Raytracing was added by Microsoft as an API specifically within DirectX 12. And tensor cores, are not mandatory for RTX, but can be used for real-time stuff like de-noiser and filters.

#5530923 Posted on: 03/23/2018 07:33 PM

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AO is literally missing everywhere outside. That shadow under car looked more like baked in. Inside, there was something looking like AO, but unrealistically weak and on most places missing too.
Only good shadows were those sourced from Sunlight. And those were cast only by some objects.

And I did watch from 4K source as 1080p has compression artifacts.

I disagree, I think the AO was fine outside, especially near the fence on the left and bridge objects.. shadows were definitely missing, in fact compared to the E3 2017 demo the entire scene looks downgraded by a lot and lots of objects are missing/changed - I don't know what that's about but I think that's why the AO looks less than it should be because shadows supplement the AO.

For one, I'm pretty sure it requires Volta-generation hardware or newer, as well as DX12. I think (might be remembering wrong) it uses tensor cores, which is a pretty beefy requirement. I think it's pretty safe to assume that it will have a substantial impact on GPU load, seeing as raytracing has never been considered a basic calculation.

I have considered your second point about adding realism with less work to the artists, though. That is something I have a hard time brushing away.

Aside from seeing performance metrics, I'm also curious to see what a side-by-side comparison is like of "traditional" scenarios, where the demo is made to be as realistic as possible without RTX, and then the same demo using RTX. As stated in other articles, UE4 could already do the things RTX claims and it had the demos to prove it, and it had more lenient requirements.

Here's another way to look at this in a concerning way:
If RTX allows you to have the same (maybe slightly better) visuals than what game engines could already supply, this might mean game devs will intentionally save time and effort not putting in the extra effort to add that realism. What this means is because of RTX, anyone who has a setup not compatible with it might get a worse visual experience than if RTX never existed. Does this make sense? I'm not sure I explained that clearly.

RTX requires Volta, idk if the solution these guys are implementing will work on DXR. I don't know what the impact is but this implementation isn't the same as like the UE demo, which was using final production level settings and raytracing the entire scene. This is only raytracing GI/AO and supposedly it's only doing it partially. So without an A/B test between it off/on i can't even tell what RTX is doing vs what is baked in.

And yeah what your saying makes sense but I don't really agree with it. It's like a value-add checkbox that will only 4% of people will enable over the lifespan of the game. They'll still polish the final lighting the normal way and hopefully the inclusion of raytraced elements will push the rest of the industry forward and get more devs working on making it the default in engines.

#5530929 Posted on: 03/23/2018 07:58 PM

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So this turns to be an annoyingly heavyweight game for rich spoiled burned up gamers pushed from nvidia for gpus total cost over 1000$. I like.

#5530932 Posted on: 03/23/2018 08:04 PM

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Metro Exodus looks sweet, but not Ray-Tracing sweet.
And something is wrong with their artistic concepts. It looks more like Gothic than it looks like Ukraine, or Russia, or post-apocalypse or cold-war

This does nothing for me.



While this totally does:

#5530942 Posted on: 03/23/2018 08:27 PM

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It's wip. There's going to be compromises along the way to get RT working well enough that it can be a real-time feature for games. I honestly don't think it's something that's achievable with the vast majority of current hardware. It should be obvious that most of us will need to upgrade to make use of such a feature and even then, it's only a "slice" of what's possible in-terms of potential quality. While some of you might not be impressed, this demo is still a lot closer to a realistic achievable target than other demos that are higher quality, but, much smaller in scope.

When RT is finally put into games as a user-side configurable feature, it'll be with the understanding that it'll likely be optional and that most people will run games with it off. I would rather this feature be implemented early on, though, rather than be like the movie industry who only kept 2K masters and didn't keep 4K masters until it became possible for consumers to use it (total lack of foresight).

#5530962 Posted on: 03/23/2018 09:45 PM

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Just playing the video of this in 1080p makes my GTX 1070 stutter as mfer