Remedy Shows RTX Raytraing performance cost

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 10/17/2018 04:41 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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warezme
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#5597365 Posted on: 10/17/2018 04:56 PM

Waaaahhh..., I remember it taking me hours to render one frame of a scene that looked like this in Studio Max on my CPU.

H83
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#5597373 Posted on: 10/17/2018 05:35 PM

The graphics look very nice, specially the shadows and lighting, the objects reflecting the lights look amazing although no one is going to notice them on most games. But there are 2 things that look off: the sunlight always seems to bright and the textures of some objects seem very "grainy".
As for the performance, a FPS counter would be useful...

chispy
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#5597382 Posted on: 10/17/2018 05:52 PM

Nice looking demo , i'm all in for this new tech

. I cannot wait to see this on it's full glory , a few years from now games at 4K , HDR and full RTC would look amazing.

Caesar
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#5597385 Posted on: 10/17/2018 05:56 PM

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:

bigfutus
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#5597392 Posted on: 10/17/2018 06:12 PM

Strange noise many surfaces and i don't like the flickering sparkles. In few years when it matures enough, it will be good.

-Tj-
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#5597396 Posted on: 10/17/2018 06:33 PM

Or gpu still too slow, nvidia could have added more tensor cores, but it didn't.

Gotta save some for next gen to make a bigger wow factor.
Ok thermals and power is a limitation, can't argue there.. Well there is also a option to have more cores at lower clocks. But why should they do that if it will make e.g. flagship TitanV look much much worse, so far its still on top when it comes to using its Tensor cores.

Just saw this @ anadtech, half-precision which uses 16bit or or even faster 8bit float

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13431/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2070-founders-edition-review/13

Vega has its punch too by other compute tests, quite competitive. Wonder what it can do if its tuned extra for RTX render with those units

Fox2232
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#5597397 Posted on: 10/17/2018 06:35 PM

If they ever decide to make separate Raytracing accelerator, I may buy it.

Zooke
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#5597398 Posted on: 10/17/2018 06:36 PM

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:

I am under the impression that the 9.2ms is in addition to a non RTX time.

Yakk
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#5597402 Posted on: 10/17/2018 06:43 PM

That is a very high time penalty for partial-raytracing, especially if the work cannot be run in parallel, which a lot of it probably can't.

The partial-raytracing quality also has to be improved massively, especially noise reduction. A quality slider will only make things worst

It's a dud for me.

holler
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#5597444 Posted on: 10/17/2018 09:10 PM

This is a terrible demo as well, generally in a gaming based demo, you want some animated scenes, but this is nothing but static environs. RTX is looking like a dud to me.

HeavyHemi
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#5597449 Posted on: 10/17/2018 09:21 PM

This is a terrible demo as well, generally in a gaming based demo, you want some animated scenes, but this is nothing but static environs. RTX is looking like a dud to me.

It's a "test scene". You made a determination of a technology without even a basic knowledge of what you were looking at even though, it was described in detail what it was. AMDud for sure.

XP-200
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#5597450 Posted on: 10/17/2018 09:22 PM

This RT is going to be like DX10 cards and games all over again. lol

RealNC
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#5597458 Posted on: 10/17/2018 09:37 PM

So devs will need to use RT in heavy moderation in order not to kill perf. And this is at 1080p, even. Most people who bought RTX aren't looking to play 1080p... 1440p is probably the minimum for them, and if RT at 1080p already has this high a cost, I can only imagine what the cost is at 1440 and 4K. They'll probably use half-resolution RT? Like render the scene at 1440p, and then render the RT stuff at 720p?

I suspect we'll see visual downgrades compared to what was shown in NVidia's presentation? (We had "E3 Downgrades" in the past, now we're getting "NVidia Downgrades.")

Silva
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#5597462 Posted on: 10/17/2018 09:47 PM

Maybe in the next Nvidia cards RT can be run partially.
As it stands out, not even games support it right now.
I'm sure the RT on/off will be used in favour of performance, as IQ will be almost undistinguishable.

Monchis
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#5597491 Posted on: 10/17/2018 11:11 PM

1080p?, did they use a 20" inch monitor too?. :p

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