Raytracing

[Emery]

Until more sim titles support raytracing, at least there's one to help you judge if it's worthwhile...

 

[R8pilot]

I always direct my complete, detailed attention on the shadows under a railing while sim racing.

 

[Neilski]

I always direct my complete, detailed attention on the shadows under a railing while sim racing.

Excellent! You are clearly the target end user for raytracing

(Btw, I was really astonished at how little difference it made. It's wonderful though, cos now I can feel good about how little I'm missing )

 

[Emery]

Btw, I was really astonished at how little difference it made.

Me, too. I feel the only embellishment it offered that I might notice while driving is better chainlink fences.

 

[RasmusP]

This is Watkins Glen in ACC, everything set to epic.
I reduced the shadow "distance" to show it better. With the distance at epic, the same LOD-borders are a bit further ahead but still absolutely clearly in your vision. Same for cockpit view!
It's okay in Screenshots but while driving, you're pushing 2 detail borders in front of you.

I really don't get why developers don't find ways around this and provide a setting with smoother shadow detail switches and lower overall quality.
Especially in games with higher speeds like racing games.

Ray tracing helps a lot with this in my experience. All games that have RT shadows have smooth shadow edges and no clearly visible detail borders.

 

[Deleted member 197115]

Even 3 generations of GPUs since raytracing introduction it's still prohibitively expensive with very little practical benefits.
Remember ACC had demo with raytraicing, devs straight refused to include it in any consecutive releases for the reasons above.

 

[Neilski]

I reduced the shadow "distance" to show it better. With the distance at epic, the same LOD-borders are a bit further ahead but still absolutely clearly in your vision. Same for cockpit view!
It's okay in Screenshots but while driving, you're pushing 2 detail borders in front of you.

Yuck! That's nasty.

I really don't get why developers don't find ways around this and provide a setting with smoother shadow detail switches and lower overall quality.
Especially in games with higher speeds like racing games.

My solution (wth was wrong with 1980s graphics? ) would be to remove the fences entirely

 

[Ole Marius Myrvold]

I always direct my complete, detailed attention on the shadows under a railing while sim racing.

Well...
People who have done night-racing with me in rFactor 2 have heard me talking a lot about every cool thing outside the track, how you see the lights from other cars on the other side of the track etc.
Not to mention that the scoring pylons, especially on US-tracks where they have 30+ numbers, do update live depending on the # on the cars and what position they are in.


Sooo, I mean

 

[metalnwood]

I don't know how many RT cores, Tensor cores are in the cards, what they cost and how much space they take on the cards but I would be over the moon if on my 3080 and my next card they just replaced them with as many cuda cores as they could for the same cost.

I have a feeling I paid a good bit more for performance I will never use, I would have certainly just taken the extra raster performance they could have fit in for the same price.

 

[Deleted member 197115]

Bumping up old thread.
Anyone with RTX 4090, what fps are you getting in remastered Witcher 3 in 4k and Ray Tracing enabled, same for CP2077 (no DLSS).
With 3080Ti both are unplayable with anything RT.

 

[demetri]

Bumping up old thread.
Anyone with RTX 4090, what fps are you getting in remastered Witcher 3 in 4k and Ray Tracing enabled, same for CP2077 (no DLSS).
With 3080Ti both are unplayable with anything RT.

My bet would be less than 60 in CP2077 with everything maxed out and no fake frames. Probably around 40-50. With DLSS3 though, even 4070ti will do over 60 without breaking a sweat

 

[RiddleTime]

I would definitely support the Raytracing option, it helps for immersion and adds the next level of graphical fidelity. (I mean not defending it being there is like saying you prefer 2d over 3d, it's the next big step compared to screen space reflections.)

In ACC all my screenshots lack the proper real reflections on the glossy surfaces and refractions on the glass materials. Also in terms of broadcast quality this would be a step up from what things are right now, it would shut the people that keep come in with "ooh this looks fake".

Being able to see a 3rd car in the reflection of the car in front of you, that's immersion to me. Vague reflections that by no way represent the entities within the active scene is not.

 

[RKH916]

I'm really not a fan of the advent of Ray Tracing. I believe it was Mark Cerny (Playstation 5) that said he wasn't sold on the technology for gaming, and I agree.

The biggest benefit from it has been the innovation of DLSS (and FSR, to a degree); otherwise it appears wholly an issue of diminishing gains to me. Wasting both silicon space and computational power on something that very few people actually pay attention to.

I personally don't use it, and I'd give it up in a second in exchange for typical rasterization silcion/performance.

 

[Kiryu]

The biggest benefit from it has been the innovation of DLSS

Which is a double edged sword sadly. On paper it is a great tech, in reality it feels like more and more devs skimp on optimizing and letting upscaling "fix" performance.

 

[Deleted member 197115]

Which is a double edged sword sadly. On paper it is a great tech, in reality it feels like more and more devs skimp on optimizing and letting upscaling "fix" performance.

Remnant 2 is a testament to that. 4090 can only run it at 45fps at native 4K.
The developers' response "we developed this game with upscaling in mind". WTF.

 

[Neilski]

The developers' response "we developed this game with upscaling in mind". WTF.

Whoa, that's odd. Sounds a hell of a lot like "performance sucks and we couldn't fix it, so we decided to just depend on upscaling to make the fps acceptable".

 

[Marcel Offermans]

I really don't get why developers don't find ways around this and provide a setting with smoother shadow detail switches and lower overall quality.
Especially in games with higher speeds like racing games.

Probably because there are no better algorithms out there. I would say most games implement some variation of the following algorithms: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/w...ommon-techniques-to-improve-shadow-depth-maps

I do agree with you that the problems with shadows are more noticeable on racing games, because you're going fast and because the camera, and therefore also the shadow cascades, move with you. I don't think it's as easy though as making cascades that are stationary with the track instead. Lower quality shadows do allow you to stretch the cascades further. If you've ever tried doing that in an experiment yourself (pick your favorite game engine, they all allow you to tweak those things) you will find that it's hard to find a good looking compromise, especially if you also consider all the different possible camera angles for which it needs to work.