Remedy Shows RTX Raytraing performance cost

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 10/17/2018 04:41 PM | source: golem | 84 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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sykozis

Posts: 21801
Joined: 2008-07-14

#5597518 Posted on: 10/18/2018 12:41 AM

Looks like "film grain" effect.

The amount of time it takes to render a FULL FRAME = 9.2 milliseconds.... (Impressive)

1,000 Milliseconds = 1 Second

For 60 Frames Per Second, a full frame will cost approx 16.67 Milliseconds.

So,........ to make calculations on shadings and lighting effects, it "costs" less time! :confused:

Time to render a full frame, as stated in the article, is 42.2ms... the raytracing effects added an ADDITIONAL 9.2ms to the time needed to render a frame.

RealNC
Senior Member

Posts: 3366
Joined: 2011-11-24

#5597519 Posted on: 10/18/2018 12:42 AM

Max performance for what? Do you also turn down the rest of the settings to low for 'max performance'?

I don't enjoy playing games at lower FPS. For some games ~60FPS is my minimum, for some others it's 90FPS. So yeah, of course we turn down or disable some graphics settings. That's one of the main points of PC gaming. You can configure graphics settings so the game runs better.

If a game that uses RT runs poorly at 1440p or 4K, and it only runs OK on 1080p, and even there it only achieves mediocre frame rates, why wouldn't I turn off RT?

XenthorX
Senior Member

Posts: 3729
Joined: 2014-06-17

#5597520 Posted on: 10/18/2018 12:47 AM

I'm truly confident in the optimization possibility between AI-based denoiser and lower-resolution RT workload. (see the Star Wars demo from HH with DLSS running fairly well at high resolution despite extremely expensive post-process effect like convolution bloom, and ultra high quality depth-of-field for cinematic experience etc...)
We're still extremely early for this tech and no one can deny Nvidia is taking a risk shipping those products.
All the implementation demos we've seen so far are rough first pass after a couple weeks with the cards, barebone drivers, early test version of windows with DXR support (as it was just released last week)...

Only time will tell, but we can already see the enthusiasm of major studios like DICE/EA (and their R&D SEED division)/Remedy/Epic Games...

I also see a lot of possibility for indie studio using unity/UE4 to get access to otherwise extremely expensive features like realtime GI, faster lightmap baking etc...

FookDat
Senior Member

Posts: 447
Joined: 2005-11-27

#5597521 Posted on: 10/18/2018 12:49 AM

What is "Raytraing"?

FOFINHO
Junior Member

Posts: 6
Joined: 2016-10-20

#5597529 Posted on: 10/18/2018 01:25 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.

This is the future, of course, a far away future. Hardware development should be working in tandem with software devs. What happened is that Nvidia surprised everybody, throwed the tech in the lap of devs out of nowhere and is hyping up the near release of games using RTX tech. By the way, in order to get this logo in the box of your game ,only to show a few scenes or locations using RT/DLSS is enough.

Why had DICE to tone down the feature in order to keep the framerate & to Improve realism? For example, think about the surfaces in video games wich are unrealistically plane so they lack the roughness of real materials. Some objects would be even interpreted as almost perfect mirrors by the card, wich combined with the already proven unbalanced HDR aproach by DICE in BF1 (never look at the sun with HDR on) can create Battlefield V: blinding company. Rotterdamn already look way too clean, specially for city ravaged by war, and with RTX on, objects like bricks and wood look too shiny.

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