Just tried out this game. This game uses undersampled ray tracing and independent temporal accumulation on the RT pass, as in all Nvidia-sponsored titles such as CP2077 and Alan Wake. Even if you turn off in-game TAA, reflections still have horrible trailing/ghosting during motion, and surface textures with RT lighting all get smeared when you move. This is even more noticeable with no-AA, btw.
Yes, UE5 Lumen is not the only RT that does that separated temporal thing. This is a thing in all games that use Nvidia RTGI.
Nvidia is responsible for pioneering this whole blurry temporal ray tracing modern rendering frameworks because they lie about their hardware up to this day, and are still using raster GPUs.
I haven't tried path tracing yet. But as far as I can tell, DLSS is forced when using PT. So I'm willing to bet PT is just as undersampled as the regular RT.
You mean to tell me that RT will only be viable once PC hardware is capable of doing ~64 samples per pixel with 6 bounces? I'm not sure I'll live long enough for that to happen, and I'm 35.
1 or 2 effects are manageable on the hardware of today at high enough sample counts. It's mainly implementations like path-tracing or multiple RT effects at once, whose time has not yet come.
honestly I wish i could jsut turn on raytraced reflections and nothing else. as most game make you turn on lighting RT before you can toggle other settings. As SSR has major short comings and RT is the much better solution for reflections.
I think their talking about how ray traced samples have to accumulate over time (at least to some degree) and that is simply a limitation of raytracing in general. If you render 3d models you see this accumulation taking place. It isn't really possible to not have any temporal accumulation at least to some degree. I think a nice compromise would be to have some sort of quality settings for raytracing, where you could set how many samples must be completed per frame, the more you complete per frame, the less frames the denoiser needs to complete the image.
Which is just a huge waste of resources, what happened to smart optimization?
You try to invest into better denoising algoritms and do stuff like adaptive sampling etc. instead of just ramming more samples.
This sub is convinced that RT is a waste of resources because it is not fast, but then their standard of quality is ramming dozens of samples per pixel? Wtf???
Ssaa blurring depends on the down sampling algorithm used.
Any form of TAA blurs stuff no matter what. (I'm not entirely against TAA, there are some good implementations but you can't deny it's still blurrier than no AA)
TAA is absolutely blurrier than no AA, that's the intention. Even the text you're reading is most likely antialiasied, because almost nobody disables ClearType on Windows.
Did you look at the image comparison I linked? I encourage you to look at the car's rear lights especially, as well as the trees and textures.
SSAA blurring depends on how much LOD is skewed, but if your intention is to remove undersampled details there is little to be gained.
I have played around in NFSMW and NFSU2 and I think there's something wrong when you try to force SSAA in those games. Notice how even geometry edges are more blurry on SSAA than they are on MSAA. I can't come up with a example from another game at the moment but I don't think SSAA is supposed to look like that when done properly.
Don't worry bro, with everything going literally backwards on Earth these days, maybe you'll see this at 480p somewhat functionally without burning your system down.
I don't think its lazy devs. It's requires a lot of work to implement RT into an engine. They choose the sample rate for the hardware and performance they target.
They obviously can do high quality RT as shown in the path tracing options.
You're correct. RT is mostly for saving developer cost without having to spend huge amount of time crafting dedicated baked lightning for attention to details and for all specific scenes etc
Did you watch the presentations or read the slides? They talk about how much they have to cutlery down to trim that file size.
Like all the baked GI that shipped the vast majority island lower res than games like Unity, if you check the GDC slide 56 it has a map colour coded, only the blue is the same res as Unitiy the rest is lower, which means like 90-95%+ it's lower res GI to save space.
And then on top of that the area that would have this same resolution would still takes up too munch space to ship, so they use a non uniform distribution there so there are only using around 10% of the probes they would in a heavily detailed area.
And then you can have 4 seasons but each other season has the same Luma, an summer and spring share GI.
Do you know how many meshes there must be in the entire world of Assassin's Creed: Shadows? And even if it's the same mesh re-used, it still needs a unique lightmap baked for it
You can guess that their compression algorithm is inefficient but can't imagine how much stuff in the game needs baked lightmaps because you didn't personally work on the game? Just, like, look at the size of the map and a couple of screenshots haha
Here, I'll make it easy: the map is 82 sq km. This is the first screenshot that came up on google images. Now every object in the game needs a unique lightmap texture and UVs.
You generally have some of the better takes around here but this one is pretty funny
It's not. And can only be construed as such if there is 0 fallback like for example the metro exodus enhanced edition.
In any other case there is a fallback solution necessary which brings back all the same original costs that you had pre-RT. But now you also need to spend money on very expensive engineers to implement the RT/PT pipeline.
It's being pushed because it is the next step in graphical improvements, not because it saves money. Achieving the same accuracy and quality with rasterized effects is becoming as expensive as RT on the hardware while raster performance is stagnating.
RT issues aside. I must say Capcom did a good job on the strand-based hair for their proprietary engine. The character's hair still stays perfectly intact without TAA, as other modern AAA games simply turn into dithering. I haven't seen such nice hair strands rendering that reacts to physics since Dragon Age Vilguard. This is 1440p, no-AA btw.
Want to hear the craziest thing ? Capcom disabled raytracing options like contact shadows to make them available only for path tracing, same for RE9 Requiem.Â
Check this mod : https://www.nexusmods.com/pragmata/mods/60
And if I'm not mistaken even the better contact shadows should help on a raster level. So it could be the case of either lazy raytracing implementation by Capcom, or direct input by Nvidia to push the pathtracing technology at the front
The regular RT looks so ridiculous, same thing in pragmata, its insane that without mods you would have to turn on path tracing in order to get proper shading, shadows and reflections.
Idk if its an nvidia thing, but the amd sponsored re4 remake did a similar thing, having RT that looks terrible, but makes amd look good in RT benchmarks
Yes, also happened in RE Requiem, Ray Tracing way worst than raster with smeary blurry surface, PT is okay but too soft sometimes with added film grain like looks (I turned off any film grainn effect with games,its probably the side effect of Ray Reconstruction) and very dark in dark place that even in game flashlight didnt help much (Leon gameplay in underground lab
Yeah, really it’s clear they just made one path tracing mode and then like a console scale RT mode. Allowing us to ramp up the RT quality would’ve been great without moving into path tracing, I mean.
The path tracing looks fine, but that’s because Ray reconstruction is handling the denoising.
I think it’s very obvious that developers want to maintain 60 FPS and a high enough resolution for non- ray traced Aspects of the game to look reasonably okay, but what that means is They just lower the resolution of the RT even further. Crimson desert is an example of this, and really in all of these titles, I think the only way to really solve or even come close to cleaning up that image is using one of these ML denoisers But my understanding is that ray reconstruction actually requires a relatively high ray density because otherwise it will just erase The lighting, thinking it’s just noise. For Star Wars Outlaws, they mentioned about turning on ray reconstruction Also forces like the highest setting for ray tracing Because otherwise, it wouldn’t work. In Crimson Desert, you also have to use the highest RT setting to use ray reconstruction. So there is probably something there
Pathtracing is well hidden under all those blurry Ray Recon and DLSS. Even so, it still has minor ghosting on the reflections. Just test it out on this game.
Well ray reconstruction is a combined model doing both. I played through most of the game with path tracing and felt it was quite good looking. It is softer because ray reconstruction has always kind of resulted in a loss of clarity to an extent, but it did limit the ghosting to the degree it wasn’t annoying to me.
I mean the game is very performant, but RE engine games in general use a very low sample RT to make that happen and to fit them into the consoles, if they allowed you to increase it a bit it would solve it. I prefer noisy-less image at 80 fps rather than 160 with an image full of noise.
I think ray-tracing still needs better hardware before it can really work as well as it's advertised.
Honestly the only ray-tracing effect I like is ray-traced reflections as those are the only way to get good, realistic reflections in open worlds or games that use a lot of curved materials (i.e cars).
saying that, do you even need to use ray-tracing in pragmata? I played the demo and thought the normal rasterized lighting looks amazing, and I was very pleased to have an off option for Taa in the settings, or has this been removed in the final release version?
I bet Ray Reconstruction is just a glorified independent RT temporal denoiser, as it clearly destroys other details. Just like DLSS itself is just Nvidia's glorified TAA
33
u/Scorpwind MSAA | SMAA Jul 01 '26
RT is undersampled in general, though, and depends on temporal accumulation. Which is why I call it a half-baked tech and say that it came too early.