Well, it now seems to be a very very nice improvement and it does worth considering if you have the money. Still i wonder how the RTX picture quality on this patch vs the old version is.

I bet they have disabled some visual effects.

I too am curious to see what the difference in visual fidelity is. But I understand that this might be too much to ask of @Hilbert Hagedoorn (already being a PITA with hardware restrictions and all)?

Patch seems to be working quite well .... someone on the GeForce forums with a RTX 2080 commented:

Installed new update and just tried a quick go at a story to check performance, i'm getting around 10fps more now. If i have ray tracing at high with everything else on ultra at 1440p i'm able to get 60-75fps so i'm happy with that. Hopefully this continues with future optimizations. I'll check online play tomorrow

fantaskarsef:

I too am curious to see what the difference in visual fidelity is. But I understand that this might be too much to ask of @Hilbert Hagedoorn (already being a PITA with hardware restrictions and all)?

Updated with a full RTX 2080 Ti result set, next up will be the 2080 and then the 2070. I cannot see a visual degradation as NVIDIA uses variable raytracing, meaning what you look at is getting more priority in the rendering engine. It's a bit of a clever trick, but might be a good one opposed to raytracing weverything in the scene.

Hilbert Hagedoorn:

Updated with a full RTX 2080 Ti result set, next up will be the 2080 and then the 2070. I cannot see a visual degradation as NVIDIA uses variable raytracing, meaning what you look at is getting more priority in the rendering engine. It's a bit of a clever trick, but might be a good one opposed to raytracing weverything in the scene.

Thanks for the heads up boss, great work as always.

They've dialled it down of course, but I don't think you'd notice any of that wile in a heated fight.

Are nvidia going to have enough resources as more and more games come out with not only raytracing but also looking at the DLSS side also? And also more driver revisions for this new hardware, and new bugs. Things are moving in the right direction though. Roll on 7nm and hopefully AMD giving them a bit more competition to get some price changes downwards ......

cryohellinc:

I bet they have disabled some visual effects.

Silva:

They've dialled it down of course, but I don't think you'd notice any of that wile in a heated fight.

Do you have any evidence of this? You guys have got to stop jumping to conclusions.

DOWNGRADED the visuals LOL its obvious

Lets wait until someone go into details. It would be interesting to see if they really reduced the quality.

Are you planning on retesting DX11 vs DX12 eventually?

NaturalViolence:

Do you have any evidence of this? You guys have got to stop jumping to conclusions.

I doubt its actual code optimizations, perhaps some settings tweaks and certain features disabled altogether.

cryohellinc:

I doubt its actual code optimizations, perhaps some settings tweaks and certain features disabled altogether.

DICE Rendering engineer says the opposite: Code Optimizations: [Quote]One of the optimisations that is built into the BVHs are our use of “overlapped” compute - multiple compute shaders running in parallel. This is not the same thing as async compute or simultaneous compute. It just means you can run multiple compute shaders in parallel. However, there is an implicit barrier injected by the driver that prevents these shaders running in parallel when we record our command lists in parallel for BVH building. This will be fixed in the future and we can expect quite a bit of performance here since it removes sync points and wait-for-idles on the GPU.

Another optimisation we have in the pipe and that almost made launch was a hybrid ray trace/ray march system. This hybrid ray marcher creates a mip map on the entire depth buffer using a MIN filter. This means that every level takes the closest depth in 2x2 regions and keeps going all the way to the lowest mip map. Because this uses a so-called min filter, you know you can skip an entire region on the screen while traversing. With this, ray binning then accelerates the hybrid ray traverser tremendously because rays are fetched from the same pixels down the same mip map thereby having super efficient cache utilisation. If your ray gets stuck behind objects as you find in classic screen-space reflections, this system then promotes the ray to become a ray trace/world space ray and continue from the failure point. We also get quality wins here as decals and grass strands will now be in reflections.

[Quote]We have optimised the denoiser as well so it runs faster and we are also working on optimisations for our compute passes and filters that run throughout the ray tracing implementation. Bugfixes that resulted in performance increases:

We have a few bugs in the launch build which prevent us from utilising the hardware efficiently such as the bounding boxes expanding insanely far due to some feature implemented for the rasteriser that didn't play well with ray tracing. We only noticed this when it was too late. Basically, whenever an object has a feature for turning certain parts on and off, the turned-off parts would be skinned by our compute shader skinning system for ray tracing exactly like the vertex shader would do for the rasteriser. (Remember we have shader graphs and we convert every single vertex shader automatically to compute and every pixel shader to a hit shader, if the pixel shader has alpha testing, we also make a any hit shader that can call IgnoreHit() instead of the clip() instruction that alpha testing would do). The same problem also happens with destructible objects because that system collapses vertices too.

Another problem we are having currently in the launch build is with alpha tested geometry like vegetation. If you turn off every single alpha tested object suddenly ray tracing is blazingly fast when it only is for opaque surfaces. Opaque-only ray tracing is also that much faster since we are binning rays as diverging rays can still cost a lot. We are looking into optimisations for any hit shaders to speed this up. We also had a bug that spawned rays off the leaves of vegetation, trees and the like. This compounded with the aforementioned bounding box stretching issue, where rays were trying to escape OUT while checking for self intersections of the tree and leaves. This caused a great performance dip. This has been fixed and significantly improves performance.

[Quote]We are also looking into reducing the LOD levels for alpha tested geometry like trees and vegetation and we are also looking at reducing memory utilisation by the alpha shaders like vertex attribute fetching (using our compute input assembler). All in all, it is too early to say where we are bottlenecking on the GPU as a whole. First, we need to fix all of our bugs and the known issues (like the aforementioned from alpha testing problem and bounding box issue among others). Once we get things together with all of our optimisations, then we can look at bottlenecks on the GPU itself and start talking about them. Optimizations that still aren't even in this patch:

We also plan on running BVH building using simultaneous compute during the G-Buffer generation phase, allowing ray tracing to start much earlier in the frame, and the G-Buffer pass. Nsight traces shows that this can be a big benefit. This will be done in the future.

Unless he's just making all of this up - all of these changes seem way more than just "tweaking settings" and "disabling things" Also they are still running the denoising process on regular shaders and not tensor cores (I don't think they ever plan on changing this) but potentially an implementation that uses tensors could add additional performance.

@Denial Well, that's great then, if it will look the same and perform better - kudos to them.

That's a pretty decent performance boost. Too bad it's still not really enough.

cryohellinc:

I bet they have disabled some visual effects.

I'm guessing they probably just limited what RTX actually renders. In particular, particle effects. So for example, if a single leaf is a bit far away, it's probably not calculated for RT. That's computationally expensive for a detail that might not even show up in reflections. There's also the idea of just tracing fewer rays.

I was hoping something like this might happen. Glad I went with a 2080 over a 1080Ti for sure now 🙂 @Denial thanks for the good info on how this came about. Obviously early days of a really new tech from a games perspective.

schmidtbag:

That's a pretty decent performance boost. Too bad it's still not really enough.

It's just the beginning with more to come! If features are functionally working, combining "new architecture" features does take developers time to determine the most optimal mix.

They obviously shouldn't optimize this too well as the 2080 is now creeping up to the 2080Ti with playable framerates...:p

NaturalViolence:

Do you have any evidence of this? You guys have got to stop jumping to conclusions.

I've seen screenshot comparisons, the reflections have clear differences. But as I said, you will not notice it on a heated fight.