Remedy Shows RTX Raytraing performance cost

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 10/17/2018 03:41 PM | source: golem | 85 comment(s)

Remedy has shown how much Raytracing in their Northlight engine costs on the frame rates on a Turing graphics card. Even the Geforce RTX 2080 Ti loses double-digit fps in complex 1080p effects.

Thus far, there is no game available that contains ray tracing effects under Direct3D or Vulkan - Battlefield 5 however will be released in November 2018. A presentation by Remedy Entertainment, the developers of Max Payne and Alan Wake and most recently Quantum Break: Das Studio integrates raytracing into its own Northlight engine for Control, the next game of the Finns. At GTC Europe 2018, they explained how certain effects affect the 1080p resolution frame rate.

Shown was a test scene created with the Northlight engine, which features, among other things, a wet marble floor and a lot of detailed furniture and can also demonstrate the benefits of global lighting. Specifically, Remedy experimented with contact and sun shadows, with reflections and with a so-called Indirect Diffuse Illumination. The Finns used a Geforce RTX 2080 Ti (test) and rendered the demo with 1920x1080 pixels.

Very noticeable is the higher scene quality with raytracing, for example, the shadows are cleaner and, above all, the reflections are independent of the camera angle, and the global lighting does not show any rendering errors such as banding.

However, the cost is significant: the contact and sun shadows calculated with two beams per pixel, including noise rejection, together require 2.3 ms per frame and the reflections a whopping 4.4 ms. Global denoising lighting extends the rendering process by another 2.5ms. This is a total of 9.2 ms per frame and thus an almost one-third higher computational overhead if we take 30 frames per second as the basis (42.2 ms instead of 33 ms per frame).

Of course, these are pretty early experiments without explicit tweaking, as it is a demo and not a finished game. Nevertheless, the presentation gives an impression of the advantages and disadvantages of raytracing. Watch the video from

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pharma
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#5597990 Posted on: 10/19/2018 10:15 AM

Funny how things get overblown when taken out of context. One of the editors at PCGH (PCGamesHardware.de) said the following regarding the Remedy tech demo.

The quoted ms-numbers were from their internal experiments with the Northlight-Engine in general, the presenter (Juha Sjoholm, an Nvidia devtech engineer, not from Remedy themselves) made it a point that his was about not "the" Control-implementation. Though he did not explicitly reference the tech demo as a whole either, there was a single scene as shown in the photographs, which he centered many aspects of the talk around.

Turanis
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#5598028 Posted on: 10/19/2018 11:37 AM

to me the real feature of the RTX cards is DLSS

karma777police
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#5598094 Posted on: 10/19/2018 01:55 PM

If you bought 2080 RTX for ray tracing reason, boy you made a mistake. Ray tracing is the future but not now, more like in 3 years at least. In other words 4000 series card is going to be the one for actualy ray tracing enabled games. 2080 RTX is nothing but demo card...and last time I checked is that I don't play or care about demos and that demo costs $1200. No, thanks.

Speaking of DLSS, I find it useless. TAA implementation in new Tomb Raider for example is just awesome and I get 60> FPS (All the time) in that game on Ultra Setting 4k with 1080ti SLI. Two 1080ti costed me less than single 2080 RTX which dips into 30-40 in this game without Ray Tracing enabled. Got lucky to buy 1080ti for $525 when 2080 was announced and unfortunately for others the price for 1080 ti went up.

Maddness
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#5598099 Posted on: 10/19/2018 02:16 PM

If you watch a game from a microscope you will see the differences,otherwise not.
DLSS("Deep Learning" Super Sampling) its a feature not implemented anywhere,but will have a future sometime if more devs will want it.

The thing with DLSS is, the game dev's don't have to do any work. They simply supply there game code to Nvidia and they use there super computer to run the algorithm, then Nvidia releases that in a driver update. So dev support isn't needed, there's nothing for them to do. So as long as Nvidia supports it and there is no issues with compatibility to games almost all games could use it.

tunejunky
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#5598133 Posted on: 10/19/2018 02:53 PM

The thing with DLSS is, the game dev's don't have to do any work. They simply supply there game code to Nvidia and they use there super computer to run the algorithm, then Nvidia releases that in a driver update. So dev support isn't needed, there's nothing for them to do. So as long as Nvidia supports it and there is no issues with compatibility to games almost all games could use it.

...and DLSS gets better the more data points it has.
nothing in the first six to 8 months will be all that impressive, but once it has collected the data it could be amazeballs.

Turanis
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#5598441 Posted on: 10/20/2018 09:08 AM

Yeah,but hopefully will see this in real-time games and why not simulation programs. Soon™.

^
"but once it has collected the data it could be amazeballs". Hopefully,hope they dont collect data like M$ and fb.

sykozis
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#5598700 Posted on: 10/21/2018 10:52 AM

I must be seeing something different here. I actually thought it looked pretty damn good. Seeing the reflections in almost everything rendered on the screen, but not even in the picture was amazing. I can't understand why there is so much negativity towards Ray Tracing. Does everyone want to stay in the dark ages, this is the future people.

While this demo looked good, the second demo (the lunar landing) looked much better albeit much shorter as well.

We aren't exactly in the "dark ages", but yes, Ray Tracing is the future. We've known it for years. However, until graphics cards supporting Ray Tracing are more accessible to the masses, there will be negativity towards it. Not all of us see it as a feature worth paying an additional premium for because not all of us are as concerned for graphics features as we are the overall story and game play. Personally, I could easily go back to NES quality graphics for a great story and game play and I'm not the only one that thinks this way. Some people are also just against any feature that's going to have a performance impact. Give it a couple graphics card generations and people's view of Ray Tracing will change as performance improves.

Fox2232
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#5598738 Posted on: 10/21/2018 02:21 PM

StewieTech
Chuck Norris

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#5598779 Posted on: 10/21/2018 06:50 PM

Well, we gotta start somewhere.

HARDRESET
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#5598877 Posted on: 10/22/2018 01:31 AM

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