I walk around Bright Falls and I feel like im in 2030 with how good some things look. Then I see two NPCs talking to each other with super low quality faces, both wearing identical outfits. And then Im instantly snapped back to 2010.

@jungleboy1

5 ай бұрын

yes i think they scrimped a bit on the npcs. Most of them are static and repeat their actions. I wish it was more spontaneous like GTA.

Using the "Control" location card font and sounds for your text introducing the name of the effect was such a wonderful and intelligent way to shout out your appreciation of Remedy's ongoing commitment to graphical excellence. Great work.

@MrmorpheuZ

9 ай бұрын

...and the Max Payne BGM

@athena9029

9 ай бұрын

Control introduced those texts, but Alan Wake II uses them as well for every single chapter introduction. So it's more to stay in theme with the game that referencing other games.

It's really funny that the noise from the software RT gives the illusion of additional surface details. It reminds me of when Id Software, after demands for a "high-res texture patch" from fans, added a noise grain filter to the virtual texturing system in RAGE and called it "detail texturing".

@marrow94

9 ай бұрын

Well to be honest noise (grain) adds “detail” that might be fake, but still looks great.

@azazelleblack

9 ай бұрын

@@marrow94 Sometimes! I think it looks AWFUL in RAGE though. You can actually tweak the size and intensity of the noise pattern with console variables. Reducing the intensity helps, but personally I think the game still looks great even today without it. Plus, it runs in 8K at 120 FPS locked even on RTX 2080!

@Wobbothe3rd

9 ай бұрын

​@@azazelleblackRage was designed for 720p, just like how Doom 3 was designed for 480p

@TheTechDweller

9 ай бұрын

@@marrow94 You think so? I found it super distracting. Enough on some materials that I wanted to play with RT on just to eliminate that issue.

@colbyboucher6391

9 ай бұрын

Hmm, that's got to be resolution-dependent, right? Because at 1080p it really is just noise.

This game is SO ahead of it's time. I can't wait to see it in 10 years. I just played Quantum Break and now that it actually runs right it looks SO GOOD.

@brianfunt2619

6 ай бұрын

Who else wants a path traced remaster of Quantum Break?

One thing I noticed is that the CRT monitors in the game do not emit light. They don't illuminate the room they're in and they aren't even visible in darkness

@munkeymajic

9 ай бұрын

I think we are looking at what technology is being used rather than how fun a game is to play...a guarantee for failure for gamers at least.

@PositronCannon

9 ай бұрын

@@munkeymajic Sir, this is a Wendy's. (aka, this channel's whole point is to examine the visual tech behind games, so not sure what you expect)

@ecognitio9605

9 ай бұрын

​@@munkeymajicHuh???

@gracecalis5421

9 ай бұрын

​@@munkeymajicMan's bitching that we focus too much on the technology on a channel that's dedicated on the technology.

@kingx1180

9 ай бұрын

They do emit light

I love how the pattern on the curtains in the diner actually have clear shadows with RT because the thicker fabric of the embroidery would block the light.

@alephnole7009

9 ай бұрын

FYI, I wrote this before he went back and pointed out this detail more directly

@alargecorgi2199

9 ай бұрын

Show this to every person who still thinks RT is a gimmick. Then tell them what if their waifus had RT detail

I expected a great looking game with Path Tracing after all I heard and how good control was back in the day, but the thing which impressed me the most is how good it looks when RT is off, I mean wow Remedy really hit the nail in both classes, fantastic.

@Emucratic

9 ай бұрын

It's a shame about the screen space reflections. Unreal engine has solved those issues by applying additional trickery through Lumen. You can have those mirror effects and have reflections of occluded objects. You can even have a fake umbra to make shadows softer the further they are from the object. It's all doable without raytracing, it's just a matter of devs implementing it properly by accounting for all the errors instead of just using one blanket solution.

@MPaulPhoenix

9 ай бұрын

@@Emucratic Lumen uses ray tracing so no, it's not doable without ray tarcing.

@George-um2vc

9 ай бұрын

UE is still completely unfit for games, can’t even use CPUs properly, maybe next decade.

@ThunderingRoar

9 ай бұрын

​@@George-um2vcYour statement is paradoxical considering how many games were made in UE and how many more have been announced

@George-um2vc

9 ай бұрын

@@ThunderingRoar I don’t think you know what the word paradoxical means, yes many games have been made, and many more are on the way, all with poor CPU utilisation bottlenecking performance.

Remedy’s art direction is just stunning. Agree that the technical aspect of the visuals is incredible as well, but the artistic aspect is even more striking. This game will look great even after 10 years.

@HappyDude1

8 ай бұрын

It will look better because then we can afford a gpu that will max everything out but 10 years is a lot! And tech is growing exponential so we will have games that look so much better. Just compare this game with something that looked great from 10 years ago

@akshaydabhadkarofficial5104

8 ай бұрын

@@HappyDude1 I agree but my point is tech could be outdated but art design can’t. This game’s graphical design has a lot of artistic flavours, it’s highly stylistic. Same thing with Control. Same thing with Red Dead 2. Another game with outstanding art direction is Dirt 3 which is 10 years old but looks beautiful, even today. Creating realistic graphics is easy today as there is always references available in real life. But those realistic graphics will look like shit 5 years down if they lack any artistic flavour. Games devs need to go the extra mile to give a unique look to the game to make it stand the test of time. Graphics will always feel outdated after some time but graphics with strong art direction will remain timeless. GTAV was praised on how realistic it looked in 2015. Then, only 4 years later, I saw comparisons to other technically superior games mentioning how unrealistic the lighting is. But there’s a huge factor which contributed in the way GTA V looked and will look. That’s ART DIRECTION. GTAV still looks beautiful and extremely unique in terms of its colour palate which gives an impression that it looks better than the new saints row technically, the reason being shitty art direction on Saints Row. Skyrim is technically the worst game ever made. But that dint stop it from being as iconic as it is, a massive contributor is amazing Art Direction. Uncharted 4, TLoU2, Dragon Age Inquisition, etc are more examples. In simpler words, art makes technology timeless. (My own words btw lol)

@HappyDude1

8 ай бұрын

@@akshaydabhadkarofficial5104 Ow yes its like like A BMW M3 E46, which is technically a disaster, but it looks timeless. 😁 i think the art of bioshock still looks amazing and thats very old now

@akshaydabhadkarofficial5104

8 ай бұрын

@@HappyDude1 yup. Exactly.

@lukaskubinec9608

8 ай бұрын

I am okay with what you say under circumstance that this game will be a very rare exception for at least next 5 years, it is good to push boundaries and improve on visuals, but not if most devs will try to take advantage of it and we will have to play upscaled games with 30FPS on average. I'd rather play on low settings, but native 4k. I have no problem with others seeing it differently as long as I'm given the option to play at native resolution even at the exepnse of details.

Tbh AW2 is IMO one of the best examples of how amazing games can look.... without hardware RT. Unlike some titles where RT is complete game changer I feel in AW2 RT and PT is more of a "cherry on top" effect and game looks outstanding even without those effects.

@gabber_

9 ай бұрын

Completely agree. And if we could have separate settings to toggle RT reflections only, like in Control, i think it would be an improvement. Path tracing is too expensive, while SSR mixed with the software RT is both expensive and gives an even worse result. for now, my 3070 is perfectly adequate for everything 1440p, but playing with RT in 2 games this entire year, so i can't justify upgrading to 40s cards. Remedy has to improve on animating faces and expressions however. I feel like they are stil lacking in that department. Need to consult with Naughty Dog :)

@vandammage1747

9 ай бұрын

Doesn't look better than Tlou2, Forbidden west, Forza Horizon 5, Hivebusters, Mortal Kombat 1 etc. without the raytracing and image quality is horrible let's be honest.

@TheMybabloo

9 ай бұрын

Actually, ray traced shadows are on unattainable level compared with rasterization. But indirect lighting indeed can be simulated quite good without hardware RT

@AmazikGezk

9 ай бұрын

@@gabber_I think disabling RT and enabling the transparency setting gets you RT reflections only, that’s what I did with my 7900 XT where path tracing is just too expensive

@Schizm1

9 ай бұрын

​@@vandammage1747 Disagree. Lightning and models alone look better than TLOU2. Models in ND games only look amazing in cutscenes but look at them in photo mode and you'll see how much detail is lost.

Back in the mid 90s I was in college learning about ray tracing and how it will change things, it's so nice to see it finally available. But still a shame that 99% of players will miss these details. DF you are doing such a service to all the devs out there who make this work.

@V3ntilator

9 ай бұрын

In 1980's it took up to hours to render a Ray Tracing image on AMIGA 500, but a lot faster with 68030.

@davemeredith6964

9 ай бұрын

They are but games should be gameplay first...visuals are one thing but gameplay is key.

@BiffGheek

9 ай бұрын

​@@davemeredith6964You're right, but you also need to remember that the art team and design teams are separate. Upping visual quality doesn't take away from gameplay unless we're talking about shifting funds around. Ultimately, visuals in games all come down to the proficiency of the artists and programmers working on the art team.

@xerxeslv

9 ай бұрын

Yep, that's the problem. You loose so much performance, but what you get nearly unnoticeable without close inspection. Like when I am switching full RT\PT on in this game I am just getting same good quality picture but can't say if there is any difference. Remember that empty house in AW2 first location, I got inside with full PT on and was like "wow outside light gets inside very realistically and flashlight also looks pretty nice. I walked around paying attention to all the small detail, then I switched RT off and... it's all look the same! Like I know there got to be some changes but it looks so good without RT that I have to look at direct comparison picture by picture to notice all this stuff. So I am just keeping it off cause of the framerates. So yeah, from my perspective it would be much better if all this computational power would be used somehow to actually improve gameplay, not just small details that are left unnoticed mostly.

@yasminesteinbauer8565

8 ай бұрын

@@xerxeslv Boring gameplay has nothing to do with too little computing power because of RT. AAA developers are simply usually not willing to experiment. You have to look into the indie scene for that. And if graphics aren't that important to you anyway, you'll probably be happier there.

It really is an absolutely staggering technical achievement in so many ways. I loved just about every second with this weird, wonderful, game.

@nhagan001

9 ай бұрын

Now if only the writing could have matched the graphics.

@JC-kl3uc

9 ай бұрын

@@nhagan001 🤡

@zeroskaterz92

9 ай бұрын

@@nhagan001 The writing was amazing. What are you even on about? Clearly you didn't even play the first game nor Control.

@gericon2855

8 ай бұрын

@@nhagan001 Much meta, very wow! :D

@nhagan001

8 ай бұрын

@@zeroskaterz92 yeah, that Mary Sue character was SOOOO well written! Loved how she was able to solve so many mysteries by making shit up in her “mind palace”. I especially like the part where she knew that a person has a necklace on her with no evidence to support it! And when the person with the necklace is about to ask Saga how she knew, the game cuts her off because they know it is bullshit. I like how you claim I haven’t played other games to make it sound like I’m wrong. If I have to play a game outside of Alan Wake 1 to understand your story, you have failed as a writer!

Great editing on this one, love the Remedy/AWII style title cards.

Now this is some top quality coverage guys. Really keen on this one, especially showcasing the different RT effects and how they work both in still images and in motion. Keep it up!

@nimrodpaul6875

9 ай бұрын

100% agree

i always get excited when alex talks about anything rt. Love his perspective

Edit: update 12 fixed the issue described below: Enabling frame generation introduces hitching whenever the game transitions from pre-rendered cinematics to real-time rendered graphics, similar to what The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk used to have before Nvidia released Streamline 1.5.6.

@maximefraisier1010

9 ай бұрын

Yeah and so what its a little inconvenience (that should be fixed I concede) compare to getting double FPS

@defromdark

9 ай бұрын

@@maximefraisier1010 these transitions are used for jumpscares and they often occur a dozen times in the span of 5 seconds, so it's pretty jarring. Not to mention it ruins the dev's artistic vision for the game as well as the player's immersion. Love frame gen, needs fixed tho'.

@ervinfakas3973

9 ай бұрын

This is an interesting point. How do you know it is due to FG? Also worth noting to run it maxed even with dlss quality, you need FG on to run it at a good framerate. 80-100

@AshishAdlakha

9 ай бұрын

@@ervinfakas3973 I have same issue and it disappears as soon as you turn off frame gen. Checkout Hollows’a gameplay part 1 video in the starting couple of minutes during jump scares, he also has these stutters.

@TheDarksideFNothing

9 ай бұрын

I have a theory. I bet on transition you're just losing the FG frame because for obvious reasons it can't interpolate. This may not be fixable, or at least not without getting REALLY creative. Turn on a frametime meter. I bet the hitch is about double the normal frametime. I don't have RTX 4000 so I'd love to hear results if someone tests this.

Outstanding video as always Alex. Your attention to detail is second to none and in this case really rewards the Remedy devs' attention to detail too! 👏

I wonder if the compromise rendering indoors was due to issues with insufficient ray counts / bounces for illuminating indoor scenes that are lit primarily by indirect sun lighting.

@sandrocarletto9386

9 ай бұрын

probably done to keep the art style of scenes consistent unlike in a game like cyberpunk, where many story scenes were completely different which wasn’t what the developers intended. i do like how cyberpunk does things better though, as the whole point of path tracing to me is lost in this game due to it sacrificing accurate and perfect lighting for the art style

@mikkokoponen8464

9 ай бұрын

Art style is much more preferable. Accurate lighting is nice but creators intent is better. I don't want games to look bland like most of the real world. Still this game has great art style as is in cyberpunk even though they are going for realistic lighting.

@sandrocarletto9386

9 ай бұрын

@@mikkokoponen8464 if they would be able to keep the art style similar but also let full path tracing do it's thing it would be wonderful. in cyberpunk's case its true the scenes change a lot but the vibe is mostly intact.

@mikkokoponen8464

9 ай бұрын

I think the scenes in AW2 change very much and vibe is definitely there. Comparing Alan and Saga scenes are already quite different.

@pixels_per_inch

9 ай бұрын

That definitely seems like it. Nvidia's Path Tracer only does 2 bounces which makes many indoor areas and corners pitch black in Cyberpunk, it makes sense they're relying on signed distance fields as a fallback.

Pathtraced shadows and those soft contact shadows are sooo delicious.

Thank you for doing this. I just cranked the settings to eleven and played the game, now i can appreciate every detail.

I wanna mention something about transparency in the "Ray Tracing Optimised Settings" section of the video. Yes the low setting for transparency overall looks fine, but there are major graphical issues in some scenarios with crazy blocking effects and flickering which ruins the entire presentation of the scene. I get this issue looking at the lake from the main street of Bright Falls, with a very off angle. Switching to high seems for now to be the only solution...

@sven957

9 ай бұрын

Yes, same here. Also there are a lot of mirrors in the game that straight up dont have a reflection at all, even with all path tracing maxxed.. He didnt mention that for some reason

@jackhanma376

9 ай бұрын

I get this also with the high setting, I think it's a bug

@loutrepolemique5951

9 ай бұрын

@@jackhanma376 It has to be a bug, but I haven't noticed any major issue since I switched to high

@jackhanma376

9 ай бұрын

@@loutrepolemique5951 I've only noticed it when playing as Saga (very minor spoiler>>>>>> at the Valhalla nursing home rehabilitation center

@treebeard7298

9 ай бұрын

@@jackhanma376 Same here, specifically the Police Station on first visit. The glass dividers between the cubical offices was causing like a sparkling flicker.

Alan Wake 2 indeed looks gorgeous. All Remedy games have their own & tailored look ( that for me personally works 100 % ) that differentiates them from other AAA titles and that's why even Max Payne 1 looks good to me all those years later. I showed screenshots from my playthrough to my colleagues to illustrate how Remedy applies the right amount of restraint when placing assets in the environments so that the assets, materials & overall composition can shine without unnecessary visual clutter. The only small nitpick i have with the PT & RT reflections is that they really did the mirrors in this game dirty by having this awesome tech and still making the surfaces look rather bumpy and producing really weird reflections. Other than that, looking at the extremely noisy reflections on the ground in Robocop :Rogue City i realized how much better Northlight engine ( and RED engine, for that matter , after playing through Phantom Liberty with PT on ) look when implementing those techniques than UE5 right now. P.S using music from the first Max Payne game here brought a smile on my face :)

@26:49 it seems the RTX 4070 SUPER came out early :D Great video still !!

Awesome video, loved the detailed examples in motion compared to RT/PT off.

Absolutely love your PC analysis. There's a lot more that can be said and compared on PC (due to the high configurability) than on console. Looking forward to more of this!

Such a joy to watch your videos, guys! So proficiently crafted. Beautiful speeches, such insanely deep dives into all these amazing technologies. Highly appreciated!

I love that you took the “When it’s done” approach with your analysis of this one. Cheers for staying true to yourselves. 🍻

19:00 Alex and his path traced toilets. Name a more iconic duo.

I noticed that turning on ray tracing claims it will disabled a couple of settings, but they are still listed as on ( such as SSAO) and I had to manually turn the settings off... Not sure if that actually made a difference, but I figured I would mention such.

It looks like Remedy is using a technique I was hoping devs would use when ray tracing was first introduced back in 2018. Use it as a visual guide for the non-ray traced counterpart. In art, thinking of it as tracing the source image. So many scenes are pretty close.

@livingcorpse5664

9 ай бұрын

Nice!

@RonniSchmidt-mi7pd

9 ай бұрын

PS5 games are better, Spider man 2 only has Ray tracing

@rockapartie

9 ай бұрын

You make it sound like RT is a new thing. 😉 GPU-accelerated RT was introduced to consumer graphics cards in 2018, but RT's been a thing since the 70s, has been used in movies /artworks for decades and the first real-time RT demo I've seen was Quake 3 RT (part of Daniel Pohl's bachelor's thesis AFAIR; later, he used to work for Intel for a couple of years and did a couple projects on Larrabee - but we all know how that GPU turned out. 😔).

@kevindesousa6277

9 ай бұрын

Maybe i am wrong but i feel like this is how valorant textures are made, you can see color bounce on some maps but the game is rasterized

@L1ama

9 ай бұрын

@@rockapartie Yeah, to emphasise: the new thing that's now available is real-time raytracing. Having to render 30+ times per second is a vastly different problem to waiting even a minute to get a static render which you could use to recreate with less resource intensive lighting tech.

This took a lot of time to make. There are at least 3 changes in Alex's intonation so it feels like the video was done in 3 segments. The final result may be half an hour long but this a lot more time and a lot of work to accomplish.

Fantastic video. I wish they would give us a "pure pathtracing" mode with GI taking over all lighting

The rounded surveillance mirror in the subway was really a wow moment for me

Hmm and i was thinking looking at faces in AW2 that rather weirdly there seems to be no SS which looked kinda bad. It does stand out in a bad way. But it turns out it's a byproduct of RR doing it's work. Also the fact that game seems to be using mix of GI solutions explains why Oliver in his video thought that there's much less difference in game's visuals on consoles compared to PC presentation than he was expecting. Excellent video Alex, thank you.

Between the hardware requirements and my backlog, cannot wait to play game in 5 years from now.

Thank you, Alex. Was waiting for this video. Top notch work you do. Cheers!

Ah! The video I've been waiting for hehe :) Time to find out how to optimize my RX 7900 XTX in AW2 but with keeping Raytracing (ideally path tracing).

@GOTEEGAMING

9 ай бұрын

The game works great on my 4070 just put FSR 2 on quality u be good .

4070 Super? Did the rumours already become reality or am i missing something? :D

RTX 4070 Super? Labeled at 26:58 THANK YOU for calling out the mouse stutter. Drives me crazy.

@sven957

9 ай бұрын

Why is barely anyone talking about the mouse stutter, its such a major issue. This game also has traversal stutter here and there. But I guess its not unreal engine so its not cool to complain about stutter

Love that u use Remedy`s game ost like Control, Max Payne and Quantum Break and of course, great video !

Serious question, because I don't get it. Why are SSR reflections always so chunky and slow to update? Do resolution and framerate not affect how accurate they can be or how fast they can update? I understand it is only working with information in the screen space, but that's not what I'm talking about. You would think updating at a higher framerate would mean they wouldn't need as much time to 'catch up' and a higher resolution would mean they would be 'tighter' to the objects instead of missing so much in a giant halo around them?

Great analysis Alex, keep up the good work!

On my 3080, with PT at medium settings 1440p DLSS balanced, I only had 30FPS experience in the forest segments in Saga's story, the rest of the game, and all of Alan's story, it was smooth

@tezkhaos

9 ай бұрын

Those Saga forest sections seem to be the most demanding parts of the game. Return 2 tanks performance on PS5 in both quality and performance mode.

@api3de

9 ай бұрын

rtx 4070 1440p,ultra,raytracing max with path tracing/dlss quality - minimum 50fps in the forest :)

@BigBoss-kk4sr

9 ай бұрын

@@api3dewith frame gen?

@api3de

9 ай бұрын

@@BigBoss-kk4sr yes,looks & runs great

@belwa42

9 ай бұрын

Same for me. Seemingly all the scenes in Bright Falls have way more stuttering. I have to turn off RT entirely to get it to run well. Then I turn it back on when I get to Alan/Dark Place/'indoor' portions

Increadibly elaborated video giving an outstanding analysis. Secont to none. Kudos and thank you very much!

This is such a great video, I love your work Alex, much appreciated- this helped me decide which version to get

I'm sorry...how are you ever achieving 60fps with even low path tracing settings on a 3080 10g in foresty areas? Like I barely get 35± in those situations...with dlls performance at 1440p, medium preset.

Once I go out of the forest sections, I was really able to take advantage of RT/Path Tracing on low, with all other settings on High/Ultra on a 3090 with a pretty solid framerate in the 80-90s. That forest section is just an absolute beating with RT/PT on.

@simongravel7407

9 ай бұрын

True. Like a ~60% drop in performance. I guess there's too much geometric detail.

@PedroNWO

9 ай бұрын

New PC user here with a 3090 too. Do you recommend DLSS performance or balanced? I still don’t understand what this technology actually does. I feel if I use performance I’m doing it wrong so I put it on balanced.

@termitreter6545

9 ай бұрын

@@PedroNWO DLSS you should either use quality or not at all. Because otherwise youre massively losing imagine clarity, while getting a lot more artifacts. Especially on a GPU like a 4090 you should never use balanced/performance. Otherwise why even have a high end GPU, if you just look at a blury image like that?

Thank you Alex for this, frankly, listening to you go in such detailed description of the graphical features of this game, it is really turning me on

Thanks Alex for the insane amount of work put into this. I don’t play the game but I couldn’t stop watching this video

I just don't get how games in 2023 lack true reflections from mirror's and the like when I played games from the early 2000's that had it?

@patrikkrywult

8 ай бұрын

Doom 3 mirrors were perfect example

@Die-Coughman

Ай бұрын

The mirrors are made to look rough intentionally. Only the developers are artists know why that is but the game is capable of sharp mirror reflections.

HDR and SDR have weird color grading for me, shadows are almost always lifted quite a lot (oled), sometimes blacks completely crushed, lights also crushed or have strange tonality, overly saturated and skin tone issues, I can’t find any settings which help 😢

Love how you emphasized the increased fidelity while the game is in motion, still image comparisons don't do rt effects justice a lot of the time atm. It's while the camera is moving that they just look and feel completely surreal

I would love to use frame generation on my 4070 Ti, but i've noticed that switching between the FMVs/jumpscare videos, or at the beginning of in-game scenes, there's always a massive stutter. Is this something DF or anyone else has experienced?

I don't think you can call this path tracing. Path tracing takes cares of everything, reflections, shadows, bounce lighting, etc. You wouldn't have different switches for different effects. Sure, you can configure path tracing to not render shadows, reflections, etc but this game allows you to have some RT effects on or off AND "path tracing". Wouldn't it make more sense to do those RT effects with path tracing instead of mixing them different algorithms? Is performance a problem? Cyberpunk does it.

I hope Northlight won't have the same 'killed eventually by Unreal" fate like REDEngine.

I appreciate that you've done this video similarly to the Control video from 2019 :D Can't wait for the videos about the Max Payne remake.

As always, the attention to detail is second to none. Love your videos.

I've been playing with RT on and suffering the decrease in frames. Worth it tho. Game is pretty stable. When you first enter the overlap and the red light is shining thru the leaves I just had to keep it on.

Why do the mirrors in AW2 have such a low resolution? Every puddle looks better. That had me wondering...

This is awesome! Makes it so much easier to decide what settings are worth using compared to the performance loss.

Amazing in depth analysis. Thank you very much for your work!

We should praise Remedy for making small and relatively insigificant cuts to ray tracing in order for the game to run well. That is how you optimize a game. They made cuts that no one would notice in game to give most systems a chance to hit 60fps. Well Done!

@Kabodanki

9 ай бұрын

my 3090 can't run 4k/60fps constant with RT lowest setting enable lol

@ecruz010

9 ай бұрын

@@Kabodanki Alex literally provides optimized settings at the end of the video, you obviously need to use DLSS if you want to do 4K.

@b4ttlemast0r

9 ай бұрын

@@Kabodanki bro even a 4090 cant run pathtracing 4K60, not realistic to expect

@b4ttlemast0r

9 ай бұрын

PC games have settings that you can change for lower end systems. Of course they can do this for lower settings but the highest available settings should be uncompromised.

@criticalt3

9 ай бұрын

It's disappointing to see people praise this game for optimization when it brings the 4090 to 1080p with RT off. The game has some issues.

Thank you Alex, this kind of analysis is second to none! Hope you’re having a great weekend.

Incredible coverage! You guys are awesome. I love QUALITY.

Top notch video as usual, Digital Foundry. Thank you for this. I have found that using DLSS Quality has better framerates overall for obvious reasons and it's the "set it and forget it" setting if you have the hardware for it. There's also some lighting issues especially indoors where it takes you out of the immersion. One with an NPC sitting on the toilet was brightly lit while the surrounding was totally dark. Overall, this game looks amazing and path tracing is the future. Again thank you for your amazing work.

I would have assumed that they are 'blending' path-tracing with the software GI system at least in part in order to preserve the artistic intent in certain scenes where full path-tracing may otherwise lead to a different/undesirable aesthetic outcome. Still a gorgeous game, but the overall technical impression is somehow a little less impressive than Cyberpunk's path tracing implementation (art aside, of course). Either way, really exciting to see developers embracing new technology in this way, especially in a game which seemingly does require such precise artistic lighting of scenes. Perhaps an unblended and improved path tracing mode would be a good addition for a potential rerelease some years down the line, as with Control's Ultimate edition/patched in ray tracing enhancements on PC. Thank you for the ever enlightening content!

great in depth analysis and what a great game from the technical side if they fix the rest of the flaws :)

Alex, I think your PC monitor may have its brightness set too high. A lot of your videos include really dark shots that can't be seen well unless I watch with the lights out. I have my C2 calibrated to 175 nits in SDR mode, optimized around my lighting conditions.

I have a RTX 3080 and turning on Path Traced Indirect Lighting will drop my FPS to 30 or even below. The DLSS quality settings and Path Tracing settings have barely any impact. I just started the game and visited the murder scene. Setting Path Traced Indirect Lighting to low = 25fps, high = 22 fps. Is this scene just badly optimised? Just entered Bright Falls and I am around 50fps now (3440x1440).

There are certain SSR algorithms that caches the current frame and reprojects to fill in the missing data caused due to dis-occlusion , but these algorithms are very niche and very performance intensive.. These algorithms doesn't completely removes the dis-occlusion artifacts, it just reduces them... But still I wonder how the game would look, if they used real time cubemaps and planer reflections for the reflections along with baked GI for primary light bounces and screen space global illumination for secondary bounces for the diffuse lighting... and instead of cascade shadow maps, how about, resolution independent contact hardening virtual shadow maps...

It is pretty but most of the time, most people will not notice these details especially when we're focusing on the story.

@cybernet343

7 ай бұрын

Yeah, I feel like the minor quality improvements dont justify the insane hardware requirements that come with enabling RT at any capacity. If anything it proves that RT is still too demanding despite the advancement of hardware since its 2018 debut, when the improvement it provides (when it actually looks good) are overall marginal at best.

@dembro27

5 ай бұрын

It depends on the game. I haven't played AW2, but it looks like a slower-paced, investigative, narrative-driven adventure. While you can zoom through it if you want, you're probably missing out. The better the graphics in a game are, the more I'm willing to slow down and smell (with my eyes) the (digital) flowers.

I am not sure if it's on my end or YT's or DF's source material, but at certain points in the video I get SERIOUS mpeg block artifacts. For example at ~18:00. This seems to show regardless of the resolution I select.

@godzoookie

9 ай бұрын

Same here.

Amazing analysis as usual...that software RT noise could very well be mistaken for some kinda of granular detail, ahah XD

3:42 just mind blowing shadow. Totally worth to enable RT at least to see this

Thank you for the hard work, well done.

So when I’m trying to change the rt settings the direct lighting and path traced indirect light options are greyed out and I can only change them by switching between the quality presets is there a fix for this? I can’t even switch to the custom preset to change stuff manually

Great work as always. Would have loved to see some more issues that i think are related to ray reconstruction addressed though. Like the super smearing of text when interacting with pcs in the game, and sometimes the videos on tvs showing a lot of noise at times (as if the noise reduction is not happening there. Sometimes i also see the denoiser not working on the edges of the image, specially in cyberpunk, and that made me stop playing with dlss3.5 cause it was too distracting. Basically the bottom 5% of the screen is full of noise. Idk if it's some wrong config but couldn't find a solution.

Word of advice play this game on a big screen. It looks nuts.

I know RT is the future, mostly due to how much work time is saved from letting RT do the heavy lifting instead of spending so much time faking it. However I find that in AW2 just like Metro Exodus, a good looking game just looks good. And RT is just a horizontal visual alternative to me not a next level game changer. And honestly not worth the performance hit, until you can RT at a small enough cost to performance I dont see the benefit for consumers at all. That said good looking games are good looking. The only true upgrade of RT is in reflections, SSR artifacts and limitations being replaced by RT reflections is a game changer. Light and shadows tho you can fake it well enough to basicly be no difference at the cost of more dev work.

Amazing video and attention to detail. I wish every game had RT to remove SSR, gotta be the single most distracting effect in gaming history.

Ehm at 26:49 it is written RTX 4070 SUPER… Is this a typo or DF have access to unreleased SUPER models?

No offense though, the mirrors look VERY weird in this game, even with all ray tracing on. The game does a fantastic job in some places with reflections, but then in others (like mirrors) does a pretty crummy job. I get materials having imperfections (hey that's reality too), but what mirror doesn't give you mostly crisp sharp reflections? That's the ENTIRE POINT of a mirror. And what's more bizarre with those mirrors is that they are ALMOST always (might even be always, unless I'm remembering incorrectly) in small, tightly condensed spaces. So the fact they couldn't render the image properly with path tracing seems wrong/odd to me.

@musicxxa6678

9 ай бұрын

Mirrors are kryptonite of video games. Extremely expensive

@sven957

9 ай бұрын

@@musicxxa6678 I mean last of us remake did it pretty much perfectly.

I've been looking forward to this. For the first time in a long time, asset quality is now the limiting factor in realism. Lighting is effectively a solved problem.

@squirrelsinjacket1804

9 ай бұрын

I'm hoping full ray tracing (aka path tracing) becomes the norm for AAA releases.

@SentinelxPrime

9 ай бұрын

I'm not sure about that, there still seemed to be issues with the GI system. It's good but not mind blowing.

@ImplyDoods

9 ай бұрын

nah pathtracing as the way its used in these games still as problems mainly beacuse its using previous frame information to construct a good looking image and low sample and bounce counts not to mention its not simulating light asif it was a wave/partical but just a partical what is not entirely acurate and breaks some effects that work in real life nvidia released a paper on a wave/partical tracer that would be more acurate but its 10x slower so not viable for games

@existentialselkath1264

9 ай бұрын

@@ImplyDoods sample counts are an easy fix. As time goes on you can run these games at higher internal resolutions which will increase the amount of samples. Ideally, you'd have better anti aliasing options including the ability to disable TAA for this future hardware, but any time that subject is brought up, DF gets strangely defensive. But regardless, higher resolutions are all you really need. My point isn't that this game looks perfect, it's that all the tech is now available to reach a level of perfect photorealism that we've seen in movie CGI for just over a decade now. As for wave/particle stuff. Stuff like spectral rendering is neat for edge cases, but if you avoid using complex materials you can render photorealistic images without it and even a lot of photoreal CGI rendered offline doesn't use it.

@alexatkin

9 ай бұрын

Clearly not solved as pointed out in the video, but were much much closer. I will never understand people who dismiss lighting as not matters and its the biggest thing that gets us close to photo realism.

Oh, I tought the stutters when moving camera with mouse was a problem on my end, but it turns out it's a bug from the game, thanks for mentioning that

Wow those shadows from the crochet curtains blew my mind. 🤯

I was waiting for you to point out that the two red ketchup squeeze bottles in in the diner scene were entirely omitted from the RT shadow and RT reflection.

Next-gen graphical fidelity but why does Saga Anderson clip through foliage like she is a ghost? I am unsure if this is a bug and physics interaction is broken or if this is just an oversight by the developer despite the attention to detail everywhere else.

I'm really happy to see where frame generation can shine. FG is something I've wanted for a decade. Obviously TVs use a more rudimentary version of it, often just interpolating frames. But in games where latency is not a huge factor, frame generation can drastically improve the experience.

I love this kind of video, thanks Alex!

I kinda wonder how it would look like if something similar to AI ray reconstruction would be used on rasterization. like training a AI model to detect the parts that are wrong in a cascaded shadow and improving it to make it more realistic or improving the screenspace reflections. Sure it would never look like pathtracing but it would basically be a free upgrade i think?

@Crazy09starkillor

9 ай бұрын

Reminds me of the "real life ai filter" video I saw for Gta 5

@gavinderulo12

9 ай бұрын

You would need a model for each part of the render pipeline. With Ray reconstruction you only need one.

@DMPLAYER1000

9 ай бұрын

I like this idea, but it seems like something that would take a lot of computational power just to do what ray tracing already does, but with a worse outcome. I think Nvidia’s making the correct choice by offloading ray tracing denoising to AI, and that will lead to better visual outcomes for the performance cost rather than training AI to fix up screen-space errors

@bb5307

9 ай бұрын

@@DMPLAYER1000 I don't know, if you already have made 2 versions of the game (raster and pathtracing) the AI could be trained on the pathtraced version of the game to get a better idea how something is supposed to look like and more or less use that data to more accurately recognize the parts where rasterization is failing and improve on it.

@aladdin8623

9 ай бұрын

It does not make sense to enhance rasterization per a.i. because you always want to train a.i. on the most accurate light and shadow calculations possible as a solid basis. A.I. RT and even PT does already exist by the way and can even run on a GTX 1050 or even intel iGPUs, no joke.

Remedy, bring us pure path tracing in an update, I have the power to withstand it

Man, reminds me of how 20 years ago, I experimented with path tracing renderers at university and had conversations around whether that could ever be done in real time... especially because to get the noise to acceptable levels, you had to render for a really long time.

I wonder if they use path-tracing to clean up the edges in their baked lighting for the GI in buildings. That would explain how RT does improve the accuracy of the baked GI, but inherits "missing objects", since there is no "shadow edge" in the baked solution to clean up there.

26:53 RTX 4070 Super ? Does Alex knows something we don't ?

Im definitely a bit jealous of how clean the PC version looks..The only issue i have with console versions is the horrible implementation of FSR2..It's seriously horrible looking I haven't seen so much aliasing since the 360 Ps3 era...Other games that use FSR2 definitely still have aliasing but not even close to the same level as AW2...It really really takes away from the otherwise sublime visuals..

@RonniSchmidt-mi7pd

9 ай бұрын

You are jealous of DLSS optimization, PC with FSR has shimmer too This is a Nvidia optimized game

@vandammage1747

9 ай бұрын

It's because native resolution is way too low. 850p on XSX/PS5 is basically ps3 output

@biggreek4022

9 ай бұрын

@RonniSchmidt-mi7pd Thats not what I'm saying...DLSS is a much better upscaling solution but FSR2 is used in Starfield and Immortals of aveum and cyberpunk 2077 and like I originally stated they all have aliasing and shimmering issues but not even close to how badly it looks in AW2...Capcom updated RE4 remake on series x to use FSR2 and looked like a shimmering mess and a week later updated it again to go back to its original upscaling solution because it looked so much better....They can use other anti aliasing techniques on top of FSR2 to help lesson the horrible aliasing..

@biggreek4022

9 ай бұрын

@vandammage1747 in quality mode it's about 1280p native...Immortals of Aveum is 1080p native upscale and still looks cleaner with less aliasing and shimmering.

@nuruddinpeters9491

9 ай бұрын

Would be nice if customers had an option to buy nvidia sku hardware for home consoles, but thats not cost effective for either nvidia or sony/xbox. However... Nintendo will likely be your best bet, though their power budget on switch 2 will be pathetic, i am going to be stoked to see how DLSS creates relatively sharp as hell imagines for the tiny tablet screen... Wish my steamdeck could use an nvidia SOC like Nintendo's upcoming Switch 2. Im very jealous. Fack FSR.

chain link fences rarely fall off as much as they do in the ray tracing example and does make sense in the real world depending on the lighting.

What font is used for captions "ALL RAY TRACING OFF/ON"?

And the winner of DF's best graphics of the year is...

@majstorringo

9 ай бұрын

Spiderman 2

@adknife2046

9 ай бұрын

Gollum? I mean cyberpunk 2077 😂

@Hexentric8

9 ай бұрын

​@@majstorringono

@Bestwick1983

9 ай бұрын

@@majstorringo I think you mean Spiderman 1.5

@majstorringo

9 ай бұрын

@@Hexentric8 Ok, what is the best graphic game in your opinion? Open world game in first place.

All is fine, but I cannot get close to constant 60 FPS with DLSS on my 3090 with RT. It's really a joke at this point. But this being a nVidia marketing channel dedicate the whole video to RT.

@musicxxa6678

9 ай бұрын

Rt is disappointing in this game for us 3000gen users. Perf hit is too big and there isnt enough good options like rt reflections, rt ao. Path tracing isnt usable.

One annotation. If you focus the flashlight to a mirror you don't see the reflection of the flashlight on the near walls or objects. With RTX on or off.

Absolutely loved the video and how it really outlined the difference between scene specific RT on and RT off representation of that scene. However, one critique must be that it's never a great idea to compare an Nvidia series x of generation a with a series y of generation b (3080 vs 4070). That simply can't end well, and the comparison should be between either gen a series x vs Gen a series y, or Gen a series x vs Gen b series x... And so on, especially when talking about fps/throughput alone. Anyhow, I'm rambling... Awesome video!