In-depth RTX demonstration on Battlefield V

[S w a t s o n]

 

So the guys at DF spoke with DICE and got a much more in-depth demo of the current state of RTX which is said to be VERY early in implementation as it is. I really think this shows some of the reasons why raytracing makes such a big difference and demonstrates possible gameplay advantages like seeing people around corners, behind you and seeing reflections of explosions in the distance. Honestly makes me want an RTX card but I'm going to be waiting on that still I think.

It looks to be a similar or identical build as the one shown so there is still some issues like windows being too reflective but DICE acknowledged this already and said it will be further tuned which I would expect anyways, performance seems reasonable as well.

 

Interesting notes:

• DICE is not using AI de-noising but rather their own temporal filter, they could possibly switch but it looks fairly good as is.
• This build was developed on Titan V using the older Tensor Core only RTX, RT cores were not really being utilized well and they expect to be able to increase fidelity AND performance via multiple optimizations involving RT, AI/Tensor Cores and pipeline changes
• 60FPS at 1080p 30FPS at 4K on the unoptimized build, also they may allow for lower RT resolution while maintaining higher raster resolution (so 1080p quality reflections at 4k), this would be exposed an option to the player

[rcmaehl]

So enabling RTX allows you to cheat. Great, now another group of players will have an advantage in PUBG, not just those that don't render grass due to really bad GPUs!

[S w a t s o n]

Just now, rcmaehl said:

So enabling RTX allows you to cheat, great, now another group of players have an advantage in PUBG, not just those that don't render grass due to really old GPUs

I understand that it might be considered an unfair advantage but it's not cheating to properly simulate how light would work to make the game more immersive, eventually this will be a standard feature in games. (Raytracing, not specifically RTX)

[rcmaehl]

1 minute ago, S w a t s o n said:

I understand that it might be considered an unfair advantage but it's not cheating

I'm joking. The game does look better but with some benchmarks only having a 5% performance increase in non-Raytraced performance, I'll be awaiting a generation or two before getting a card.

[S w a t s o n]

Another technical demo, not really as useful as the BF V one but it's nice for showing the higher quality reflections that BF V is not implementing yet.

At around 6:00 you get the really nice mirror demo

[Commodus]

It feels like we're at a very GeForce 256 sort of moment.  That is, it's offering a peek at what the future of game graphics will be like, but this won't be the card you use to reveal the technology's full potential -- that's going to come years down the road.

 

I can't help but imagine that games several years from now will use a ton of raytracing, and we'll wonder how we lived without it.

[Mira Yurizaki]

A long time ago (I guess) there was this game called Battlefield Vietnam. One of the many features it has was changing the grass details. You could effectively turn the grass off, because hey, grass was still an expensive thing to render back then. Guess what turning on grass did though? Conceal players. So you could argue anyone who turned grass off was cheating.

 

I guess though this is effectively the opposite where lower end users would have an objective advantage over higher end ones who decided to crank up the settings.

[S w a t s o n]

5 minutes ago, Commodus said:

It feels like we're at a very GeForce 256 sort of moment.  That is, it's offering a peek at what the future of game graphics will be like, but this won't be the card you use to reveal the technology's full potential -- that's going to come years down the road.

 

I can't help but imagine that games several years from now will use a ton of raytracing, and we'll wonder how we lived without it.

If DICE is honest about how much more optimization and fidelity they can get out of RTX we might have a really good use-case from generation one. I expect 2 generations until we have universal ray-traced GI

[Commodus]

1 hour ago, S w a t s o n said:

If DICE is honest about how much more optimization and fidelity they can get out of RTX we might have a really good use-case from generation one. I expect 2 generations until we have universal ray-traced GI

Sounds about right.  Not this generation, but we might be two or three card gens in before raytracing is a widely-used feature.

[S w a t s o n]

Just now, Commodus said:

Sounds about right.  Not this generation, but we might be two or three card gens in before raytracing is a widely-used feature.

I think by next gen, RTX will be widely-used as a gameworks feature but not for full GI and ofc only on PC and only on nvidia, until AMD gets their solution up and running

[Sauron]

1 hour ago, rcmaehl said:

So enabling RTX allows you to cheat. Great, now another group of players will have an advantage in PUBG, not just those that don't render grass due to really bad GPUs!

As if pubg's developers were competent enough to implement this

1 hour ago, S w a t s o n said:

If DICE is honest about how much more optimization and fidelity they can get out of RTX we might have a really good use-case from generation one. I expect 2 generations until we have universal ray-traced GI

To be honest, seeing players around corners could easily be done even without rtx... we already had the technology for mirror like surfaces. It wouldn't look quite as good, but if it really were something they wanted in the game they'd have put it in regardless.

[S w a t s o n]

14 minutes ago, Sauron said:

As if pubg's developers were competent enough to implement this

To be honest, seeing players around corners could easily be done even without rtx... we already had the technology for mirror like surfaces. It wouldn't look quite as good, but if it really were something they wanted in the game they'd have put it in regardless.

Mirrors have existed in game but i don't believe seeing another player that was not on screen was possible before. Typically the high quality mirrors in games are still using screen space reflections or another viewport, it would be possible but very expensive to have viewports projected in every reflective surface.

 

Because it's raytraced it should work in literally every surface RTX works on, puddles, mirrors, glossy surfaces. You could not have that many viewports

[Sauron]

1 minute ago, S w a t s o n said:

Mirrors have existed in game but i don't believe seeing another player that was not on screen was possible before. Typically the high quality mirrors in games are still using screen space reflections

It was possible, it's just that not a lot of developers ever thought it was worth the effort. In racing games you can see other cars in your rear view mirrors - it's just a matter of positioning another camera at the correct angle. It doesn't quite look like a mirror, but with some filters you can get it close enough. In a game like battlefield, the situations where that's useful are very few and far between - unless they decided to make every surface in bf5 as reflective as possible to showcase rt... a real rain soaked road doesn't reflect THAT well in real life.

[S w a t s o n]

Just now, Sauron said:

It was possible, it's just that not a lot of developers ever thought it was worth the effort. In racing games you can see other cars in your rear view mirrors - it's just a matter of positioning another camera at the correct angle. It doesn't quite look like a mirror, but with some filters you can get it close enough. In a game like battlefield, the situations where that's useful are very few and far between - unless they decided to make every surface in bf5 as reflective as possible to showcase rt... a real rain soaked road doesn't reflect THAT well in real life.

Sorry, see my post with the edit. Basically you would need viewports on every surface, it would be insanely expensive

[S w a t s o n]

If you watch the video you can see the reflection of character models actually deforms with the curvature and physically based surface of the material so the puddles and cars do look worse than a window

[Sauron]

1 minute ago, S w a t s o n said:

Sorry, see my post with the edit. Basically you would need viewports on every surface, it would be insanely expensive

Less computationally expensive than raytracing for sure. Besides, only a few surfaces can truly be considered mirrors and reflect enough to see an opponent. In the worst case scenario you'd be rendering the whole scene multiple times, but as I said it doesn't really apply in a game like battlefield. There are benefits to raytracing, for sure, but I don't think this is one of them.

[S w a t s o n]

1 minute ago, Sauron said:

Less computationally expensive than raytracing for sure. Besides, only a few surfaces can truly be considered mirrors and reflect enough to see an opponent. In the worst case scenario you'd be rendering the whole scene multiple times, but as I said it doesn't really apply in a game like battlefield. There are benefits to raytracing, for sure, but I don't think this is one of them.

No actually I'm almost certain it is not less intensive than raytracing now that nvidia put RT cores on, if you tried that you might not get even 1 fps in an area with multiple reflective surface, like say a street with shops on both sides with windows would be unplayable, add cars and others and good luck

[Mira Yurizaki]

7 minutes ago, S w a t s o n said:

Sorry, see my post with the edit. Basically you would need viewports on every surface, it would be insanely expensive

While I did agree with your post, I do recall that you can sort of cheese it by having dynamic cube maps. Which I believe is basically six view ports per cube. But then you would need a lot of cube maps because too few won't produce "good enough" results. And then there's the level of detail those cube maps will be rendered at, which is another can of worms.

 

1 minute ago, Sauron said:

Less computationally expensive than raytracing for sure. Besides, only a few surfaces can truly be considered mirrors and reflect enough to see an opponent. In the worst case scenario you'd be rendering the whole scene multiple times, but as I said it doesn't really apply in a game like battlefield. There are benefits to raytracing, for sure, but I don't think this is one of them.

If we define "every surface" to be every triangle, because not all the triangles have the same normal, and thus, the same exact focal point into the world, then that could still be a prohibitively expensive operation even if you only applied it to glossy surfaces.

[S w a t s o n]

8 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Less computationally expensive than raytracing for sure. Besides, only a few surfaces can truly be considered mirrors and reflect enough to see an opponent. In the worst case scenario you'd be rendering the whole scene multiple times, but as I said it doesn't really apply in a game like battlefield. There are benefits to raytracing, for sure, but I don't think this is one of them.

Additionally that method would be useless for any reflective surface that was geometrically complex like the car, a viewport would not work period. A flat window, sure

[S w a t s o n]

2 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

While I did agree with your post, I do recall that you can sort of cheese it by having dynamic cube maps. Which I believe is basically six view ports per cube. But then you would need a lot of cube maps because too few won't produce "good enough" results. And then there's the level of detail those cube maps will be rendered at, which is another can of worms.

 

If we define "every surface" to be every triangle, because not all the triangles have the same normal, and thus, the same exact focal point into the world, then that could still be a prohibitively expensive operation even if you only applied it to glossy surfaces.

They do have cube maps (for when RTX is off and inter reflections when RTX is on) and it's the reason that BF V does not have the super high quality reflections like that Atomic Heart video I linked

[Froody129]

Hoping AMD can pull through with some RT goodness in the next few years at least

[S w a t s o n]

12 minutes ago, S w a t s o n said:

Additionally that method would be useless for any reflective surface that was geometrically complex like the car, a viewport would not work period. A flat window, sure

Sorry to keep on this but dont forget that reflection is just one part. Raytracing is about simulating light in general, viewports ain't gonna give you highly accurate ambient occlusion, highly accurate soft shadows, highly accurate and dynamic lighting. We can cheese soft shadows and AO, and bake in lighting that was modeled after a ray traced demo the developer ran, but those are additional things that can now be removed or supplemented

[Mira Yurizaki]

And now that I'm thinking about it, the extra viewport method also falls flat because the engine still has to render the scene at some resolution with some quality detail. In a lot of cases with real-time reflections, presumably using the viewport method, the resolution and details of the image are noticeably lowered. Sometimes jarringly so. If you want high quality reflections, you're going to need a lot of VRAM on top of a lot of horse power to render every viewport.

 

Ray tracing, in my very limited understanding of how it works, likely doesn't need a lot of memory because once the ray's path is determined, the final color can be generated and that's all you have to store.

[S w a t s o n]

2 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Ray tracing, in my very limited understanding of how it works, likely doesn't need a lot of memory because once the ray's path is determined, the final color can be generated and that's all you have to store.

In the video they do say the memory footprint scales with the raytracing resoultion and they are looking to optimize for various vram capacities so i'm not sure how that plays out, but the upside is that screen space was only 50% of resolution and RTX is 100% at least by default, like I said DICE is looking into scalable RT resolution

[Brooksie359]

3 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

And now that I'm thinking about it, the extra viewport method also falls flat because the engine still has to render the scene at some resolution with some quality detail. In a lot of cases with real-time reflections, presumably using the viewport method, the resolution and details of the image are noticeably lowered. Sometimes jarringly so. If you want high quality reflections, you're going to need a lot of VRAM on top of a lot of horse power to render every viewport.

 

Ray tracing, in my very limited understanding of how it works, likely doesn't need a lot of memory because once the ray's path is determined, the final color can be generated and that's all you have to store.

From my understanding it just works