Yep, check it out. Game is not about if you can finish the game, but how do you finish it and how fast. Tons of freedom and pure emphasis on skill :)
I have over 4 hours in this demo already as i got hooked into improving my times.
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Digital Foundry || Ghostrunner Demo Analysis: Ray Tracing on Unreal Engine 4 Tested In-Depth
- Thread starter ILikeFeet
- Start date
I have over 4 hours in this demo already as i got hooked into improving my times.
People talking about next gen consoles need to realize pretty much none of them will actually target true 4k with a bunch of ray tracing effects. When you start looking at how far you can push a reconstructed 1080p or lower image, that will open up the resources a lot for better implementations
Pretty much.
If these games had dynamic light sources, no baked shadows/AO...the difference would be massive.
People will say well why can't they just keep baking it if it works well without performance impact? Well then you get static levels, time of day etc. Not to mention the time it takes for artists to bake these details into textures...it's not economical to do it at a high quality in a bigger game. RT is going to save them so much time and money.
What I can see happenint for games with mostly static levels this gen is that the assets for then are crafted RT enabled to see how it looks and once the artists are satisfied they'll bake a lot of these details in. So basically what they already do these days except with results visible in real time while developing.
I mean, it's how shadows workBut guys! The shadow is blurry now thanks to ray tracing!
Uh yea, that's how shadows work. Look at any given shadow being cast in the room you're reading this post on, do they look more like the one on the left or the one on the right?But guys! The shadow is blurry now thanks to ray tracing!
Lol no.
Devs really need to make sure their game is suited towards RT. UE4 supporting RT is great but I feel it has also marked the beginning of some fairly useless implementations where the frame rate dies, yet the final image just looks slightly different. I first noticed this with Bright Memory and this game seems to be even worse. Just because UE4 gives you the option doesn't mean you should implement it.
Question is pretty much on what part of the performance.
If it's 4x of the pure tracing of rays we may see few FPS increase in many games.
Remember that the actual ray tracing part is usually quite small amount of frame time.
Any additional features which help ray or shader coherency, reuse etc. can improve performance quite bit as it will reduce random memory reads etc.
There are lots of funky things developers can do in future and lot of it will be about improving how shading is works with RT.
Currently games disable normal maps within reflected scenery and we can expect more and more tweaks will become common in future.
There are cheaper ways to use it though.
Not everything scales directly with resolution or framerate.
The game looks interesting enough, but the program Alex used is something incredible.
You can basically access developer console in Unreal engine 4 games that usually block them. Imagine couple years from now, when you have powerfull graphics card, you can "max out" every UE4 game as intended during development. I know it will only scale as it was programmed, but some options made by devs are just too expensive to even include in today's games. Also imagine that game uses subpar solution for one aspect of its rendering and you can't turn it off. With this program, potentially you can easily turn it off in order to replace it with better solution. If it really works with at least most UE4 games, then it will save a lot of trouble with fan patches.
You can basically access developer console in Unreal engine 4 games that usually block them. Imagine couple years from now, when you have powerfull graphics card, you can "max out" every UE4 game as intended during development. I know it will only scale as it was programmed, but some options made by devs are just too expensive to even include in today's games. Also imagine that game uses subpar solution for one aspect of its rendering and you can't turn it off. With this program, potentially you can easily turn it off in order to replace it with better solution. If it really works with at least most UE4 games, then it will save a lot of trouble with fan patches.
Considering that is how shadows work, yep RT working like it should.But guys! The shadow is blurry now thanks to ray tracing!
Also notice how the garbage bags have no self shadows on the left, while they do on the right.
I look forward to adding in RT to games that do not even have it.
Wow... what a worthless feature raytracing seems to be in practical terms.
Developers, please do your best to provide raytracing-like effects in your games instead.
Developers, please do your best to provide raytracing-like effects in your games instead.
OT: I love DF but watching fast moving first person games on Youtube gives me terrible motion sickness.
And how would this work in practice? Does the this latest version of UE4 actually understands that SSR can be replaced by RT reflections, shadows by RT shadows and so forth, even if not explicitly programmed, just by flicking a switch somewhere?
When it's so easy to say that it's not worth it, it must be a bad implementation. Make a difference or skip it altogether.
Independently of the performance, can someone explain me the difference on the quality of both, apart from the soft shadows and the lighting on the buckets at the right?
I love this so much
On this section of the video Dictator said that the fully ray traced one looked way better, but I don't know what to look at to reach that conclusion haha seems pretty similar to me?
I really think good raytracing is impressive, but this game's implementation makes me not understand it lol
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VR comfort is a big factor. Putting truly 3D displays into our homes might be a much better option for a lot of people. I bet that a lot of people would love this if it were affordable and well supported.
Just tried the demo. RTX does take a toll on performance (3440x1440/2080 Ti/max settings) but the image has so much more depth. It's still a demo though, so things can change before release.
Digital Foundry: Why don't people care about, or even reject Ray Tracing?
Also Digital Foundry: Enabling full RT cuts the frame rate by more than 12×, to single digits. Even we couldn't tell the difference most of the time.
I kid, but here's the thing which really stands out to me:
Half-measures with RT really aren't doing a whole lot for the image.
Sure, you have some more accurate shadows like the air conditioner, and some nice soft shadows on the ground, but to most people that is an extremely minor difference which is not worth a performance hit.
The roughness cut-off is doing significant harm to the effectiveness of RT.
As soon as you remove the roughness cut-off, now the image starts to look "correct" - and then adding GI completes it.
But the roughness cut-off exists because it has the biggest effect on performance.
People will say "now the image looks flat and gray" however that is only because the scene clearly wasn't lit using a fully ray-traced pipeline.
Minecraft impresses because it cannot have baked lighting, and using full path-tracing dramatically changes the image.
Most games don't need fully-dynamic lighting, and the baked solution is absolutely fine. Far from being perfect, but fine when the alternative is cutting the frame rate by 1/2 or 2/3 - and those are the performance-optimized solutions.
The 'problem' is that RT is going to happen whether people like it or not.
Developers will move to an RT-first pipeline. That makes a lot of sense, because it should dramatically improve the process of lighting an environment if it can be done in real-time without having to bake to see your results.
But there will be a point where they stop baking in the lighting after the fact. You won't have the option to disable RT unless you want a completely flat, unlit world - even if the game is not using things like a dynamic time of day.
And on top of the performance cost of RT, it still hurts image quality a lot right now. Ghosting and image noise are a real problem for current RT implementations.
I'm hopeful that a lot of this is because we're still on the first generation of RTX hardware, and RDNA2/Ampere will fix that.
There's been rumors that RT performance will increase 4× on Ampere, which should enable RT in games with only a minimal performance hit. Though I'm highly skeptical of those claims (4× RT cores ≠ 4× RT performance) that's what really needed to happen first.
My other concern is that games built to run at 30 FPS with RT on console hardware are not going to easily scale to higher frame rates on PC.
We already saw that problem this generation, where certain games that were only built for 30 FPS really struggled to even hit 60 FPS on most PC hardware despite a far greater than 2× difference in hardware capabilities.
For most people, I would say that the effects of RT -unless they are dramatic- only serve to make the image subtly more natural in a way they are not actively aware of.
It wasn't until Dictator's video about DOOM that I realized I was able to fix the viewmodel FOV in DOOM (and later DOOM Eternal) since it does not scale with FOV by default, and doesn't scale properly on ultrawide monitors.
4K TVs with passive 3D is where things should have started. Not 1080p TVs which either had migraine-inducing shutter glasses, or passive TVs which had a 540p resolution per-eye. It's so disappointing to me that LG dropped 3D support on their OLEDs to increase brightness by a few percent.
Same thing with the 3DS. 3D was a novelty at best on the original models, since the viewing angle was so narrow. The super-stable 3D on the n3DS models was a game-changer and made it comfortable to be enabled at all times. But people were already scared-off after years of bad implementations.
Also Digital Foundry: Enabling full RT cuts the frame rate by more than 12×, to single digits. Even we couldn't tell the difference most of the time.
I kid, but here's the thing which really stands out to me:
Half-measures with RT really aren't doing a whole lot for the image.
Sure, you have some more accurate shadows like the air conditioner, and some nice soft shadows on the ground, but to most people that is an extremely minor difference which is not worth a performance hit.
The roughness cut-off is doing significant harm to the effectiveness of RT.
As soon as you remove the roughness cut-off, now the image starts to look "correct" - and then adding GI completes it.
But the roughness cut-off exists because it has the biggest effect on performance.
People will say "now the image looks flat and gray" however that is only because the scene clearly wasn't lit using a fully ray-traced pipeline.
Minecraft impresses because it cannot have baked lighting, and using full path-tracing dramatically changes the image.
Most games don't need fully-dynamic lighting, and the baked solution is absolutely fine. Far from being perfect, but fine when the alternative is cutting the frame rate by 1/2 or 2/3 - and those are the performance-optimized solutions.
The 'problem' is that RT is going to happen whether people like it or not.
Developers will move to an RT-first pipeline. That makes a lot of sense, because it should dramatically improve the process of lighting an environment if it can be done in real-time without having to bake to see your results.
But there will be a point where they stop baking in the lighting after the fact. You won't have the option to disable RT unless you want a completely flat, unlit world - even if the game is not using things like a dynamic time of day.
And on top of the performance cost of RT, it still hurts image quality a lot right now. Ghosting and image noise are a real problem for current RT implementations.
I'm hopeful that a lot of this is because we're still on the first generation of RTX hardware, and RDNA2/Ampere will fix that.
There's been rumors that RT performance will increase 4× on Ampere, which should enable RT in games with only a minimal performance hit. Though I'm highly skeptical of those claims (4× RT cores ≠ 4× RT performance) that's what really needed to happen first.
My other concern is that games built to run at 30 FPS with RT on console hardware are not going to easily scale to higher frame rates on PC.
We already saw that problem this generation, where certain games that were only built for 30 FPS really struggled to even hit 60 FPS on most PC hardware despite a far greater than 2× difference in hardware capabilities.
Here's the thing: no-one else notices this. They aren't doing A/B comparisons while looking at garbage bags.
For most people, I would say that the effects of RT -unless they are dramatic- only serve to make the image subtly more natural in a way they are not actively aware of.
Honestly, the thing that excites me the most about this is being able to fix the FOV on ultra-wide monitors, and hopefully disable mouse acceleration. So many games built on UE4 seem to get those two things wrong - likely due to "bad defaults" for the engine. I know that it uses horizontal FOV by default, rather than vertical, for some stupid reason.
It wasn't until Dictator's video about DOOM that I realized I was able to fix the viewmodel FOV in DOOM (and later DOOM Eternal) since it does not scale with FOV by default, and doesn't scale properly on ultrawide monitors.
It's so disappointing to me that TV manufacturers rushed in on 3D and put out sub-par products that poisoned the well.
4K TVs with passive 3D is where things should have started. Not 1080p TVs which either had migraine-inducing shutter glasses, or passive TVs which had a 540p resolution per-eye. It's so disappointing to me that LG dropped 3D support on their OLEDs to increase brightness by a few percent.
Same thing with the 3DS. 3D was a novelty at best on the original models, since the viewing angle was so narrow. The super-stable 3D on the n3DS models was a game-changer and made it comfortable to be enabled at all times. But people were already scared-off after years of bad implementations.
Yes.
UE4 has support for the features and when using DX12 mode is used developer can enable ray tracing features with simple post process volume or command line.
After that it is really recommended to tweak basic settings and then go through materials to create versions appearing in reflections and such for extra speed.
It is such an amazing demo, but the RT impact is brutal. To be honest, I barely noticed a difference between RT and non-RT. I'm playing on 3440x1440 at max settings and the game looks BEAUTIFUL. With my 2070, I have been getting around 85-100fps without RT.
A worthless feature because 1 indie game (demo) couldn't do it right in terms of performance? lol why are you ignoring all the incredible implementation of ray tracing in other games?
Hopefully they'll make the settings more granular. Reflections seem like the real star in this game, even with the relatively conservative roughness cutoff.
I really hope AMD and Nvidia find a way to mitigate the cost of full RT in the next 5 years. Maybe in 2023 we will have cards that can do 4K RT one ray per pixel without tricks or upscaling. I also wonder what will happen to GPU's in the coming decade. Will we forego big rasta improvements in favor of RT improvements? The idea is enticing. Maybe at 3 or 1nm the rasta part of GPUs will be so efficient that basically every laptop will have 2080ti rasta performance while the real differentiator will be in the RT performance (kinda like 8 CPU cores being a no brainer soon when Ryzen is further shrunk and improved). I mean once you reach one polygon per pixel and one texel per pixel, which both consoles apparently can do the next thing is RT and path tracing.
Could you do a gif comparison of RT off vs all RT on with the reflection cutoff removed? That difference would be massive.Digital Foundry: Why don't people care about, or even reject Ray Tracing?
Also Digital Foundry: Enabling full RT cuts the frame rate by more than 12×, to single digits. Even we couldn't tell the difference most of the time.
I kid, but here's the thing which really stands out to me:
Half-measures with RT really aren't doing a whole lot for the image.
Sure, you have some more accurate shadows like the air conditioner, and some nice soft shadows on the ground, but to most people that is an extremely minor difference which is not worth a performance hit.
The roughness cut-off is doing significant harm to the effectiveness of RT.
As soon as you remove the roughness cut-off, now the image starts to look "correct" - and then adding GI completes it.
But the roughness cut-off exists because it has the biggest effect on performance.
People will say "now the image looks flat and gray" however that is only because the scene clearly wasn't lit using a fully ray-traced pipeline.
Minecraft impresses because it cannot have baked lighting, and using full path-tracing dramatically changes the image.
Most games don't need fully-dynamic lighting, and the baked solution is absolutely fine. Far from being perfect, but fine when the alternative is cutting the frame rate by 1/2 or 2/3 - and those are the performance-optimized solutions.
The 'problem' is that RT is going to happen whether people like it or not.
Developers will move to an RT-first pipeline. That makes a lot of sense, because it should dramatically improve the process of lighting an environment if it can be done in real-time without having to bake to see your results.
But there will be a point where they stop baking in the lighting after the fact. You won't have the option to disable RT unless you want a completely flat, unlit world - even if the game is not using things like a dynamic time of day.
And on top of the performance cost of RT, it still hurts image quality a lot right now. Ghosting and image noise are a real problem for current RT implementations.
I'm hopeful that a lot of this is because we're still on the first generation of RTX hardware, and RDNA2/Ampere will fix that.
There's been rumors that RT performance will increase 4× on Ampere, which should enable RT in games with only a minimal performance hit. Though I'm highly skeptical of those claims (4× RT cores ≠ 4× RT performance) that's what really needed to happen first.
My other concern is that games built to run at 30 FPS with RT on console hardware are not going to easily scale to higher frame rates on PC.
We already saw that problem this generation, where certain games that were only built for 30 FPS really struggled to even hit 60 FPS on most PC hardware despite a far greater than 2× difference in hardware capabilities.
Here's the thing: no-one else notices this. They aren't doing A/B comparisons while looking at garbage bags.
For most people, I would say that the effects of RT -unless they are dramatic- only serve to make the image subtly more natural in a way they are not actively aware of.
Honestly, the thing that excites me the most about this is being able to fix the FOV on ultra-wide monitors, and hopefully disable mouse acceleration. So many games built on UE4 seem to get those two things wrong - likely due to "bad defaults" for the engine. I know that it uses horizontal FOV by default, rather than vertical, for some stupid reason.
It wasn't until Dictator's video about DOOM that I realized I was able to fix the viewmodel FOV in DOOM (and later DOOM Eternal) since it does not scale with FOV by default, and doesn't scale properly on ultrawide monitors.
It's so disappointing to me that TV manufacturers rushed in on 3D and put out sub-par products that poisoned the well.
4K TVs with passive 3D is where things should have started. Not 1080p TVs which either had migraine-inducing shutter glasses, or passive TVs which had a 540p resolution per-eye. It's so disappointing to me that LG dropped 3D support on their OLEDs to increase brightness by a few percent.
Same thing with the 3DS. 3D was a novelty at best on the original models, since the viewing angle was so narrow. The super-stable 3D on the n3DS models was a game-changer and made it comfortable to be enabled at all times. But people were already scared-off after years of bad implementations.
The problem with Ghostrunner is that so much of the lighting and shadowing is already baked so when RT does enable something it's like eh....unless you reduce the reflective cutoff. When Alex said RT on looked way better I kind of didn't get it because it didn't change much in overall look and people won't see those differences, not with that cut off in place. In a game with less baked lighting it'll be such a big difference and more importantly devs will probably use RT to check their art and lighting in real time, and once satisfied they'll bake it in if the game doesn't have any dynamic levels or TOD...which is a fair thing to do to save on performance tbh while gaining from the development speed that RT provides over traditional baking process.
Why does removing the roughness cutoff actually get rid of the yellow light on the floor and roof?Sure:
In this comparison you made, both had RT on but one had the roughness cut off removed and it was the same story there.
You'd have to ask Dictator but my assumption was that it's the lights bleeding through due to the cut-off not handling it properly. It could also be a blinking light off-screen and the comparisons were not well-timed.Why does removing the roughness cutoff actually get rid of the yellow light on the floor and roof?
In this comparison you made, both had RT on but one had the roughness cut off removed and it was the same story there.
Or maybe something is not being rendered correctly. The more I look at it, the more I wonder if some lights are not rendering correctly with the cut-off disabled.
Because its suppose to be occluded.Why does removing the roughness cutoff actually get rid of the yellow light on the floor and roof?
In this comparison you made, both had RT on but one had the roughness cut off removed and it was the same story there.
That's not it, if it was to do with occlusion and RT was fixing that occlusion then you wouldn't be seeing it here where both screens have RT enabled.
Additionally none of these RT effects should be causing a lighting difference like that. And Pargon isn't using the RTGI feature.
The yellow light on the floor is the specular light from a non-shadowing point light. WIth the roughness cutoff gone (and since ue4 rt reflections sample the lights) it properly occludes the lighting from the point light inside the burning dumpster from. So just like icecold1983 said!
There are other commands to make the rt reflections not sample the scene lights btw where that would end up not happening.
That's not it, RT shadows, if it was to do with occlusion and RT was fixing that occlusion then you wouldn't be seeing it here where both screens have RT enabled.
Additionally none of these RT effects should be making a lighting different like that. And Pargon isn't using the RTGI feature.
RT shadows in UE4 only work from lights which have the "cast shadow map" flag set to on. So actually it is that! The diffuse lighting there is not being occluded if you notice carefully (so no full shadow, just a part of it for specular).
Can we actually not necrobump this because it is being worked on by 3D Realms? They're still actively supporting bigotry and I think we should steer clear of supporting that.
This game turns on 3 RT effects at once with its menu Option - 2 of which are practically invisible. 2060 is actually pretty fine otherwise.