General Gaming Raytracing console performance thread - DF Looks at RE2/RE3 raytracing 'upgrade'

[Duderino]

1 hour ago, Xbob42 said:

Yes what? Yes it does reflections on more than just windows? Gimme some examples!

Although based on what I remember playing on Spider-Man it definitely seemed like... I dunno how to phrase it, like a more narrow open-world game? Like there wasn't actually as much going on in the world that you could interact with. You could definitely get around, but I don't remember being able to just cause as much general fuckery, which is the kind of shit I imagine makes Watch Dogs run like ass, outside of general Ubisoft incompetence.

Also seeing some Spider-Man reflections in screenshots I was disappointed at how low-res they were. Not a big deal if you're swinging by super fast, but then you're not really caring about them to begin with, at which point just gimme the 60 FPS.

(I do consider "half the framerate" to be a pretty big sacrifice.)

Just go watch the Digital Foundry breakdown.  There are compromises, but not along these lines.  Both Spider-Man and Watch Dogs are full of objects receiving reflections and present in them, both static and dynamic.

Yes, Spider-Man’s reflection resolution and frame-rate will be lower than Watch Dogs on a high-end PC, but that doesn’t make Insomniac’s RT implementation any less impressive.  There are clear aspects it excels at.

 

Both game worlds are extremely difficult settings for Raytracing.  I wouldn’t say Spider-Man is any easier with its city scape vistas.

[JPDunks4]

 

[JPDunks4]

 

[crispy4000]

Need to see what the resolution breakdown is for the S version.  But for cross-gen at least, it's a promising sign.  It seems to hold framerate.

[The def star]

Here is the MVG video of Legion on the Series S.

 

 

[crispy4000]

Turns out there's a RT Quality mode (reconstructed 4K) and RT Performance mode (1080p).

[stepee]

I mean, basically it just dances around any locked target lol.

[crispy4000]

33 minutes ago, stepee said:

I mean, basically it just dances around any locked target lol.

 

Yep.  They'd have a greater shot at stability if they had dynamic resolution kick in.  We've seen other games with reconstruction do it.

Doing RT at 60fps is going to hard on these consoles in anyways.  There's good reason why Spiderman: MM and Watch Dogs Legion target 30fps with it.

 

I want to see NXgamer give their take, since DF didn't go into any RT lighting as much as reflections.  The devs claimed they're doing it.  If that's true, it might have been a mistake.

[crispy4000]

Here it is - the most telling video yet.

  

 

[AbsolutSurgen]

 

Watch Dogs: Legion - how does console ray tracing compare to Nvidia RTX?

 

Quote

Watch Dogs: Legion perhaps lacks the full RT spectacle of Insomniac's efforts but it does have its own plus points. Unlike Spider-Man, there are reflections within reflections, so the reflection of a puddle on the ground, for example, will show reflective properties. Also, the geometry in reflections looks to be the same level of detail and precision as those in the primary view - Miles Morales has a lower precision 'RT city' from which to draw its reflections. However Ubisoft's implementation also has plenty of similarities with the PS5 exclusive. Xbox Series S and X are using stochastic reflections much like Insomniac's tech, so they will technically produce more realistic surface reflections than other simpler types of ray tracing. Also, the ray traced reflections in Watch Dogs: Legion add to transparencies - so glass materials look very realistic. Put simply, it's a big upgrade from a visual perspective, especially for a cityscape rich in reflective surfaces.

 

 

Quote

Hardware RT is computationally expensive and right now the consoles have no AI upscaling technologies like DLSS available to mitigate the performance hit and this presents a problem. Even on my optimised settings, the PC version of Watch Dogs: Legion was managing just slightly above 30fps with ray tracing set to the lowest setting at 1440p internal resolution when using an RTX 2060 Super. Series X renders with dynamic resolution scaling between 1440p and 2160p, with Series S coming in at 900p to 1080p. So how is Ubisoft achieving this? Is it a fully featured RT implementation comparable with PC? Well, the answer is no - and we know this not just from our eyeballing but also from the Watch Dogs: Legion PC version, which rather helpfully contains all of the settings data for every rendition of the game.

The consoles do a lot behind the scenes to turn off elements not found in the PC game's menu, like disabling headlight shadows on cars, using half resolution global illumination passes and reducing shadow quality. There's no high resolution texture pack (not even on Series X, S fares even worse) on top of many other compromises. For ray tracing, a checkerboard rendering approach is used for all systems - even PC - so what are effectively half resolution RT reflections on PC become quarter resolution on Series X, calculated at 1080p, reducing to 720p on Series S.

In addition to that, cutbacks found on PC at lower RT settings are also included - like no reflections for dynamic particles or projected decals. Meanwhile, screen-space reflection fallbacks are of a lower quality. The biggest optimisation beyond internal resolution is the roughness cut off. Basically, on Series S and X, the rougher materials in the scene - like duller metals, marble, polished tiles and the like - do not receive ray traced reflections and fall back to cube maps more readily. In this sense, consoles are lower than PC's medium (ie lowest) RT preset. It's a smart optimisation really: the fewer reflective surfaces, the less work the GPU needs to do and the more performant the RT system becomes.

Thanks to some modding magic, we can import all of these additional compromises back into the PC game - except for dynamic resolution scaling. There are also minor differences in the filtering quality of the RT reflections, so PC still remains a touch higher in fidelity terms. However, overall, it's very, very close. With this in mind, I thought it would be interesting to see just exactly what GPU is needed to get comparable performance to the Xbox Series X and to do that, I found an area of the game where I saw the Xbox Series X have a countable resolution below 4K, meaning that the Xbox GPU is saturated. Loading up that exact same scene on the RTX 2060 Super at native 4K, the GPU hits 32fps in this scene, so it is running above 30fps at a higher resolution than the Microsoft console. In fact, just walking around the game world it is possible to see how the RTX 2060 Super is actually good at getting above 30fps at native 4K, though I expect that dynamic resolution scaling would be needed to get an absolute 30fps lock across all content.

I came away from this testing with several conclusions. We may well be seeing a different level of scaling from AMD's console GPUs with RT enabled. After all, in the non-RT Gears 5, an RTX 2080 is said to be comparable to Series X, yet here in Watch Dogs: Legion with RT features active, an RTX 2060 Super seems to be more performant. This means that consoles may require reduced resolution, distance, or material settings compared to mid-range PC graphics hardware. As for Ubisoft taking all of the console compromises and porting them back to PC, I'd say that this may well be a worthwhile option depending on how AMD RDNA 2 cards run the game.

With Nvidia tech, there's no real need to reduce RT settings lower than medium - turn on DLSS and you get performance back that mostly covers the hit RT incurs. However, with that said, I found the test highly enlightening and I would love for PC versions to feature console configurations as an option - it would be great for our analyses, but more importantly it would greatly benefit users who just want an easy console-like experience without having to think about graphical settings too deeply. After all, consoles typically deliver the best bang for the buck and those optimisations do tend to transfer across nicely to PC as well.

So, in this example, according to DF, SeX performs somewhat south of a RTX-2060 Super for RT.

[crispy4000]

TIn Yep. Xbox Series X runs raytracing in this game like a 2060 Super without DLSS.  Maybe just a tad worse in fidelity, but with dynamic resolution to help framerates along if things dip.  (which isn't possible in the PC build)

Console settings on Series X (and PS5 too) are below medium RT on PC, the lowest that can be selected in game.

But a 2060 Super can also run RT on Ultra settings at similar framerates, using DLSS 2.0 for reconstructed 4k.


Obligatory @TomCat quote:

 

On 2/25/2020 at 8:21 PM, TomCat said:

AMD has said that thier RDNA2  GPU is going to be DISRUPTIVE to the 4k market.  the gpu in the X is based on this tech. MS helped AMD dev their tech. It will perform better then raytracing on the 2080.

 

[Duderino]

Worth noting as well that despite not being tested yet, the raytracing setting configuration file for the Series X and PS5 match.   Means that aside from some potential dynamic resolution and FPS differences, we can expect visual parity across both flagship consoles for watchdogs.

[crispy4000]

I think Insomniac made the right call in its implementation by comparison.

Reflections in reflections seems excessive while the performance cost is still so high.  And those cut off points where it falls back to cube maps, even on PC, look mismatched.  I'd rather take a lower LoD reflection on a whole than a mixed bag.  There's probably more to it than that, so hopefully its just growing pains.

 

But there is RT in large bodies of water, so that's at least one area where WD:L beats Spider-man decisively.

[skillzdadirecta]

from layman's perspective (and as someone who, you know, is actually PLAYING both games currently) Watchdogs Legion defintely LOOKS more next gen than Miles... In fact, I started playing Miles right after playing Godfall (another very pretty game) and it was quite jarring going between the two. Miles is a GREAT game so far... but it ain't winning no awards for looks thats for sure.

[atom631]

off topic: do i have to play the other watch dogs to play legion? 

[AbsolutSurgen]

1 minute ago, atom631 said:

off topic: do i have to play the other watch dogs to play legion? 

No.

[skillzdadirecta]

1 minute ago, atom631 said:

off topic: do i have to play the other watch dogs to play legion? 

No.

[crispy4000]

15 minutes ago, skillzdadirecta said:

from layman's perspective (and as someone who, you know, is actually PLAYING both games currently) Watchdogs Legion defintely LOOKS more next gen than Miles... In fact, I started playing Miles right after playing Godfall (another very pretty game) and it was quite jarring going between the two. Miles is a GREAT game so far... but it ain't winning no awards for looks thats for sure.

 

I could see it.  WD:L and Godfall both look a lot more shiny/neon as a whole.  That's going to play better with reflections.

Given what we now know about the performance, I wonder how much RT will be leaned on in the future.  It might make more sense for ground-up next gen games to push other things and use RT reflections more sparingly.  Or maybe try more for RT GI and Shadows instead.

Until then, lots of puddles and waxed tiles.

[Duderino]

24 minutes ago, skillzdadirecta said:

from layman's perspective (and as someone who, you know, is actually PLAYING both games currently) Watchdogs Legion defintely LOOKS more next gen than Miles... In fact, I started playing Miles right after playing Godfall (another very pretty game) and it was quite jarring going between the two. Miles is a GREAT game so far... but it ain't winning no awards for looks thats for sure.

I haven’t played both, only watched 4K videos, but I could see rainy London + neon lights highlighting the RT reflections a bit more.  Reflections within reflections also probably add to the look there too.

 

I do think though WD’s cube maps fallback really wouldn’t hold up well in Spider-Man’s setting, where distant reflections of the city skyline and streets below are more front and center.  Outside of RT, Spider-Man’s character rendering looks far superior to my eyes.

 

Ultimately though what “LOOKS” more next gen is going to be a bit subjective.

[Brian]

If it ends up being this close all gen, I will buy games based of controller preferences (FPS Xbox TPS PS). 

[crispy4000]

38 minutes ago, ManUtdRedDevils said:

If it ends up being this close all gen, I will buy games based of controller preferences (FPS Xbox TPS PS). 

 

Yep.  In the here and now, we're seeing very marginal differences.  Maybe that changes when more games leverage the SSD or machine learning features.  But we won't know until we get there.

My big takeaway isn't that the consoles aren't roughly equal to each other.  It's that they won't beat a 2060 Super in raytracing unless AMD's promised upscaling algorithm absolutely nails it. 

That could change how games are developed and how much RT is embraced this gen.

[AbsolutSurgen]

1 hour ago, Duderino said:

Worth noting as well that despite not being tested yet, the raytracing setting configuration file for the Series X and PS5 match.   Means that aside from some potential dynamic resolution and FPS differences, we can expect visual parity across both flagship consoles for watchdogs.

That's entirely what one would expect given the similarity of architectures -- that PS5 would run @~3/4 of the resolution of SeX.

10 minutes ago, crispy4000 said:

 

Yep.  In the here and now, we're seeing very marginal differences.  Maybe that changes when more games leveraging the SSD or machine learning features.  But we won't know until we get there.

My big takeaway isn't that the consoles aren't roughly equal to each other.  It's that they won't beat a 2060 Super in raytracing unless AMD's promised upscaling algorithm absolutely nails it. 

That could change how games are developed and how much RT is embraced this gen.

I agree.

Some other takeaways I have:

1)  SeS doesn't look a 1440p machine anymore -- running sub-1080p for WDL.

2)  I think we know what the reviews of AMDs RDNA2 GPUs will be like.  Beginning of review -- showing the cards being very competitive (or marginally better) than their NVidia counterparts in the usual benchmarks, then getting destroyed in Control, WDL and CyberPunk.

3)  Those tensor and RT cores that take up all of that die space on NVidia GPUs, actually provide some benefit...

 

AMD reps have made very vague referecnes to a new scaling method in development for several years -- and the quotes I saw suggested it was not using DLSS-like technology.  I don't we should hold our breath for anything in the short term.

[crispy4000]

10 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

1)  SeS doesn't look a 1440p machine anymore -- running sub-1080p for WDL.

Series S wasn't a looking 1440p machine before this either, with how many last gen titles (I can say it now!) opted for 1080p.

If Series S can maintain WD:L levels of performance throughout the generation, I'd consider it a good thing!  Hardware-wise, you'd still get much more value for your dollar with a PS5 DE.  But that comparison might not matter as much with Games Pass being a thing.

[AbsolutSurgen]

1 minute ago, crispy4000 said:

Series S wasn't a looking 1440p machine before this either, with how many last gen titles (I can say it now!) opted for 1080p.

If Series S can maintain WD:L levels of performance throughout the generation, I'd consider it a good thing!  Hardware-wise, you'd still get much more value for your dollar with a PS5 DE.  But that comparison might not matter as much with Games Pass being a thing.

True.

 

Game Pass is a great deal for people who want to play the specific games that are on the service.  However, there are a tremendous amount of people who have different playing habits -- where paying $17 (Canadian) a month for that selection of games doesn't best fit how they use their consoles/PCs.

[crispy4000]

8 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

Game Pass is a great deal for people who want to play the specific games that are on the service.  However, there are a tremendous amount of people who have different playing habits -- where paying $17 (Canadian) a month for that selection of games doesn't best fit how they use their consoles/PCs.

 

I think a lot of people do, and are happy to pay the $12 a month for GP (+$3 for Gold).

As someone who plays primarily on PC and checks the r/gamedeals subreddit often, it's not worth it to me yet.  I spend <$100 on games themselves most years.  It's gotten even easier with giveaway fever lately.  I'll still buy the odd Microsoft title on the cheap.

[TomCat]

8 hours ago, crispy4000 said:

TIn Yep. Xbox Series X runs raytracing in this game like a 2060 Super without DLSS.  Maybe just a tad worse in fidelity, but with dynamic resolution to help framerates along if things dip.  (which isn't possible in the PC build)

Console settings on Series X (and PS5 too) are below medium RT on PC, the lowest that can be selected in game.

But a 2060 Super can also run RT on Ultra settings at similar framerates, using DLSS 2.0 for reconstructed 4k.


Obligatory @TomCat quote:

 

 

I've already said that raytracing was last second add on the series x because ms was late with the api. I STILL STAND BY MY 2080 COMMENT.  Even though he didnt have a ps5 to do an actual test he did have the configuration files. They showed the exact same settings for the ps5 and the series X.  We know that the series x has the hardware advantage over ps5 due to core count. So its the ps5 that performs at a 2060ti  level not the series X.  because we know the config file was set to perform on  the least powerful system.  They didnt leverage the xtra series X power.

 

Dont talk to me about Cross Gen games  Holler at me when the ACTUAL next gen games release that leverages the systems power.  

[crispy4000]

41 minutes ago, TomCat said:

I've already said that raytracing was last second add on the series x because ms was late with the api. I STILL STAND BY MY 2080 COMMENT.  Even though he didnt have a ps5 to do an actual test he did have the configuration files. They showed the exact same settings for the ps5 and the series X.  We know that the series x has the hardware advantage over ps5 due to core count. So its the ps5 that performs at a 2060ti  level not the series X.  because we know the config file was set to perform on  the least powerful system.  They didnt leverage the xtra series X power.

 

Dont talk to me about Cross Gen games  Holler at me when the ACTUAL next gen games release that leverages the systems power.  

 

The denial here pretty much speaks for itself.
 

Your 2080 comment stands as false.  The Series X is performing at 2060 S level (sans DLSS) with RT.

 

It’s even more absurd to think the PS5 is what’s holding it back, with the PC port existing as it does.

[Xbob42]

Ubisoft having to specifically design several settings lower than PC's lowest is... a little worrying.

 

On the other hand, Legion runs like shit no matter your machine. You can only get it running "acceptably," even with RT off completely. It's not a good gauge of anything.

[TomCat]

13 minutes ago, crispy4000 said:

 

The denial here pretty much speaks for itself.
 

Your 2080 comment stands as false.  The Series X is performing at 2060 S level (sans DLSS) with RT.

 

It’s even more absurd to think the PS5 is what’s holding it back when the PC exists as it does.

No its the config file thats holding it back. but keep trying.  The ps5 is the 2060 equal

[crispy4000]

4 minutes ago, TomCat said:

No its the config file thats holding it back. but keep trying

If the config file is to blame, how come it dips dynamically down to 1440p?

 

Keep those blinders on.  

[TomCat]

Just now, crispy4000 said:

If the config file is to blame, how come it dips down to 1440p?

 

Keep those blinders on.

Because its been reported by developers that amd's Raytracing is not performing correctly and needs a Driver update.  Remember how bad Nvidias Raytracing performed when first released. It Got alot better after updates.  I dont have on Blinders I use my knowledge of this stuff 

[crispy4000]

12 minutes ago, TomCat said:

Because its been reported by developers that amd's Raytracing is not performing correctly and needs a Driver update.  Remember how bad Nvidias Raytracing performed when first released. It Got alot better after updates.  I dont have on Blinders I use my knowledge of this stuff 

 

Operates on the assumption that a driver update will yield the same gains.  Remember that DLSS improvements were a huge part of that equation too.

 

Also, what dev said these consoles aren’t RT ready?  Source please.

[TomCat]

 

[TomCat]

Just now, TomCat said:

 

just finished watching this and he says what ive been saying

[TomCat]

39 minutes ago, Xbob42 said:

Ubisoft having to specifically design several settings lower than PC's lowest is... a little worrying.

 

On the other hand, Legion runs like shit no matter your machine. You can only get it running "acceptably," even with RT off completely. It's not a good gauge of anything.

exactly but crispy is on this mission to prove me wrong and is failing badly