Remedy Shows RTX Raytraing performance cost

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