Thanks for watching, everyone! Full GPU suite to come still. The team turned this around in only 1.5 full days and it was impressive the amount of benchmarking and capture we could do in that time -- as usual, I'm proud of the team and what each person contributed. We just got access and had to carefully choose our focus with that limited time (and our embargo only just lifted on this content), so there's still a LOT we want to do with RT Overdrive benchmarking as it continues to update. We might give this a deeper benchmark numbers look in the future, but for now, you've got a good starting place. Thanks again! BTW, we just posted 2 new Patreon behind-the-scenes videos last week if you'd like to support our type of work: www.patreon.com/gamersnexus
Do you think more and more developer deciding to use UE5 which got Lumen etc. Raytracing will be any nessesary in the future? I mean Lumen & Nanite are incredible but I don't think Raytracing or Pathtracing will be any relevant or am I wrong? Thank you
Path tracing is on the unreal engine 5... seems to me Nvidia should have used their time to make sure that every next game using the UE5.2+ would be able to use it easily... putting path tracing on the red engine... going to the trash soon... is a waste of time and effort IMO... but Nvidia wants it for PR purposes... will it work? Maybe for 5 minutes.
The blur effect of DLSS3 is outrageously visible. Nevertheless, on the RT side tech, it's the first real demo that show something interesting. It's clearly not ready, and for now would force the game artist to work twice as much, one version for the wealthy rtx5xxx owner and another for everybody else. So nothing new since 20xx series, RTX is not that much of use. NVIDIA: replacing frame with 'AI" crap replacing artist with computed light consuming 600W to play a game. Forgetting gameplay matters most. CDPR: really trying to show case the best of it.
I actually don't mind devs adding settings that are clearly reserved for future GPU's. The new lighting looks great, even if only the 4090 w/ fake frames can run it well.
Definitely! Just benchmarked my 4080 and it's averaging over 90 fps (77 minimum) with everything at max at 3440x1440 using DLSS Auto and FG enabled. Plays well and looks great!
@@GamersNexus I mean, it’s clearly paid by NVidia, and them being CDPR the customers would expect it to be free at this point. Still, cool update. If the founders 4090 actually exists in Canada, I probably would have gone for it.
By the way I don't think nvidia will be building gaming gpus for much longer. 7090 may not be a thing. We might not need a PC to play games. Streaming as a service.
@@zushikatetomotoshift1575 Dont fall for it. 3060ti or higher can play this fine. The multi card video is gonna be eye opening to a lot of r/pcmr fans.
100% I'm not even bothering with The Witcher 3 (reloaded) on my 2070.. when I upgrade to whatever the series after the 4000 is in a couple of years, I'll look at Ray Tracing again seriously :P
I can't believe how good those shadows look when teabagging. Never has a game quite captured such a nuanced technique with realistic environmental reactions.
Why did Nvidia put ray tracing into their products when clearly all of their GPUs can't handle it's all just for show to put higher prices on their crap DLSS GPUs all they have to put on their old GPUs gtx1080 gtx1070 is DLSS and it would be same performance as rtx3080 and rtx 3090
@@dssd7685 Becuase this stuff is always gradually integrated. It takes time for stuff to be integrated. None of the effects we have today for rasterization just popped up and were performant on release. SSAO, Shadow Maps, SSR, and many other modern effects take time to become performant. Ray tracing is in a similar boat while being far more accurate. This was the best approach to adding it in and it's only going to become more popular. Plus this technology does not only benefit gamers
I always appreciate how GN does the blind "Image 1, 2, 3" tests to check biases and set expectations; even though I'm usually able to get them all right, the act of _doing that_ really changes how I approach the rest of the comparisons in the video. In the blind test I was able to say "Okay, 1 is very dark so it's probably Off, 3 has more 'real' lighting so it's the RT and 2 has more bounce lighting so it's probably PT, ... _but_ this bar actually looks better when it's a bit darker, so the PT is a neat tech demo but it kinda takes away from this scene in particular"
Yeah, the bars lighting clearly wasn't tuned for Pt, theyd have to change the gloss of many surfaces and probably change lighting source intensity to bring it back to intent
But the image appear more neat, and the reflection seems better without RT/PT on this image. I'll pick first mode over the two other. I think there is too much reflection there. On the outdoor environnement RT looks nicer if you stand by and watch the city. But the perf cost is so huge... More than doubling the resolution if you don't activate DLSS.
Doesn't this sort of suggest that path-tracing is just a way for devs to save time - so it hurts our performance while saving them time making the game, ultimately costing developers less and us more? Like the parade scene where there was barely any difference due to the effort already put in by the devs.
This really helps immerse me in my ideal world. A dystopian hell scape with every surface covered with gloss and a vengeful sun that constantly attacks you with god rays and blooming straight into your retinas
Conversely, even though this makes Hollywood Big Budget films cheaper and faster, some how the CGI of modern films looks horrible next to what came out years earlier.
@@kurtwinter4422 the 'how' there is a simultaneous shortage of artists, studios not wanting to spend that much money on said artists, and normalisation of new industry conventions allowing re-writes, re-shoots, re-cuts .etc way later in the production process, all giving the artists way less time to make it look good.
Nvidia saying it's revolutionary in order to sell overpriced cards and not getting crushed by AMD doesn't means it's true... look at the image and at the frametime...
Several years ago, just before the first Nvidia RTX cards were released, I took a college game programming class on ray tracing. We talked about this kind of full scene ray tracing being several years away, but possible, of course. Really cool to actually see it fully implemented. I will say even having taken that course, some explanations take me a bit to figure out. I'm sure some of it will be gibberish to most people, but it's still fun to think about. Lots of lines shot at things and telling the computer what to show you. Woo!
@@azynkron Still getting a lot closer. It makes sense there are various exceptions. What Unreal Engine is doing is super cool too. It's just fun that I took a class on something before it became mainstream. 😁
@@azynkron shadows, reflections, and indirect lighting are plenty. All other factors are negligible and would add cost for no noticeable benefit. We've already hit the point where cutting edge GPUs are struggling, let alone ones further down the stack that most people get.
Regarding the "bloom-iness" and higher light intensities of light in RT and especially non-RT vs PT: I wonder if it's because developers made light stronger, and surfaces more reflective than what is realistic because, with non-RT and RT, you needed that to have enough lighting so the scene is not too dark. If this is true, then putting in more realistic reflectivity values + PT could yield more realistic brightness levels in scenes (compared to the pre-PT ways of rendering scenes), for future games where PT is a realistic mainstream option.
I wondered that too. I think they tweaked the brightness of emissive surfaces to maintain the same average level of direct and indirect illumination in the scene, compared to artist-tweaked lighting in the non-OD version, thus making some light sources brighter/bloomier.
Yes this is exactly what they did. The original visuals were specifically calibrated to work well both with full raster, and also conventional RT. It means some lights were overdone, some additional light sources were added in specific places exclusively to artificially illuminate them to mimic true traced lighting, and some environment materials were made brighter and more reflective than need be since fewer light sources from fewer angles were interacting with them. Basically like if you have a movie theater, and you paint the walls white while the lights are off, and it looks fine and not bright- but rather perhaps looks like a dark grey due to the lack of light. But then when the movie is on and the screen lights up, all the walls just bounce the excess light and everything gets overexposed as a result of the original artistic direction that didn't account for the excess light during a movie playback.
No it has to do with stronger differences in exposure, there's less of an "average" more areas are much darker than they could be before so exposure compensation needs to be stronger.
Could be that in part, but also many shadowed areas are properly dark now as opposed the glow they had before, which means there is a larger exposure difference between lit and shadowed parts. So, when in a mostly shadowed area, other lights will get blown up
Can't wait to experience this 10 years from now when I have a GPU that can actually run it. That's about how how long it took me to be able to play Crysis.
@@volvo09 It's not about price in this instance, the technology is not there yet. Even if they make a 20000$ GPU right now it would still not be able to run it smoothly. The main issue is the technology isn't there.
If it's 20 fps at 4k with a 4090 and the 50 series is rumored to be twice as powerful then you can assume a 40 fps on the 5090 at 4k which means that in 2026 with the 60 series they might actually achieve above 4k60 in Cyberpunk with PT. So, only 3-4 years left to go.
@@a-mir905 Sure, but with the 4090 you can at least use DLSS 3 to get a smooth experience. It's not ideal, but it's at least an option. So it's at least partially about price. A couple years from now when the next generation of GPUs comes out the 5090 might be able to run this at 4K60 with DLSS Quality in a best case scenario. But lower end more affordable SKUs like a 5070 or 5060 are likely to be slower than a 4090 so it's still going to be inaccessible to most people. Maybe in 4 years a 6070 class GPU might be capable enough, but realistically I don't expect this to become a more mainstream option until the 7000 series from Nvidia and whatever equivalent Radeon GPUs are out at the time.
I can't agree more ! While RT/PT optimized pictures might be « better » for enthousiasts, I'm not a big fan of the « improvements » they bring to us. The pictures without any RT or PT seemed perfectly enjoyable, in my opinion. They were more than enough for my needs ^^
Not really, the game is terribly optimized for path tracing (not to mention releasing a horrendously incomplete game at launch). This cult-like worship of devs on TH-cam and reddit is insane where they get praised for any mildly positive thing whereas they're shielded from all criticism regarding bugs and incomplete launches where it's not the devs fault but "the suits" and "management".
Love the blind test for ray and path tracing you should do them more often! Got them right, but actually think the path tracing looks worse than ray tracing in this scenario.
I find this true more often than not, because they are not used to how much light propagates and are used to over compensating. I see this quite often in HDR, as well. I also got it right based on this expierence.
Just bought a 4080 so I was super thrilled to see I got the blind test right 😅 probably helps that I spend my professional life thinking about how light bounces
Its going to be really cool to see future games made with path tracing from the ground up. Hopefully they will be able to run more efficiently with PT as well. Very exciting.
@@JoriDiculous that was super weird. You could stand next to the tree and it's fine, it's only if you look at the tree lol. Nice to know it wasn't just a problem with me specifically 😂
@@yoonigan You drop fps in the whole area as long the tree is "in you sight" but not crazy much, think it went down to around 40 for me. At the tree it dropped to at least 6 fps. And if you managed too turn around fps got almost normal. Weird as heck. Wonder what is wrong there?
i dare not curse my rx 580 with these terribly optimized recent games, poor thing barely manages heavily modded bethesda games. PC gamers really ought to hold companies to higher standards than this, this is getting ridiculous.
Got the PT correct, as it was the most diffuse/blown out looking. Scene lighting really will need to be handled differently to get the same artistic contrast going with PT as the model obviously. That being said I think it'll be a lot more intuitive on the artist side, and less time consuming (especially compared to the amount of work that goes into probes and mapping) Looking forward to where this goes in 5-7 years or so when this might converge, as opposed to being a special demo for high end hardware.
I recall 4A talking about the workflow improvements with it when they did the Metro Exodus RT edition. The workflow gains from the dev side are incredible.
@2freeIvX he also described it from the Wikipedia page as including caustics, which o highly doubt is implemented here. Proper caustics and full light transport typically requires bidirectional path tracing which is quite a bit more costly. This implementation seems to handle scene light minus reflections and transparency which was still handled with the RT approach. Luxcore handles them quite nicely. This isn't a physically correct path tracer yet, but it's a great step forward for real time lighting.
I got all 3 correct, only because I've done this kind of test on my own when I got my 3080 Ti. I usually prefer the game with RT off because of your exact point.. more environments in the game simply look better with RT off. There are some scenes that look better with RT on, mostly outdoors and at night, but the areas with tons of indoor lighting just get blown out so bad. I'm also excited to see more games that are designed with RT in mind.
Man Cyberpunk runs so shite still. Raytracing still looks pretty bad, it's better to have an environment custom created with no rt than trying to use rt. It would be good for realistic looking games, but as none of them exist it just seems like a useless technology right now. Traditional rendering methods still run and look the best.
Path tracing actually seems kind of cool. A lot of stuff felt kind of different with more realistic lighting. It seems like a lot of your complaints of how scenes changed and the developer baked in lighting looked better (which I thought it did too). It seems that's more a complaint of not designing the scenes around the tech more that path tracing being actually worse. It would be fascinating to see a path traced game where the lighting is designed around light working realistically. I can see it get very interesting when cards can actually run it and devs start to design around it.
The frametime consistency was always one of the most impressive parts of this game. It runs so incredibly smoothly even with all the settings maxed out, on hardware that a lot of newer games struggle to stay above 30 fps with.
This just proves how badly optimized TLOU, RE4, and Forspoken are. I'm not spending a dime on games that have arbitrarily demanding requirements under the guise of "next-gen" graphics, when CP2077 looks as good as it does.
Idk. It might better now but it is still not very consistent in my opinion and it used to be a mess. The marketplaces (the one near Tom’s Diner for example) in this game have a lot of stress on the CPU. I always have significant fps dip in those areas.
I could tell the difference in the images. The extra bounces make the lighting look richer, and overall, I'm in love with this effect.... but yeah, if I were in a bar that bright, I'd think the bartender was trying to tell me to go home.
I appreciate the constant teabagging of enemies during the shown gameplay runs - no doubt any benchmarks that do not include teabagging are considered invalid from now on, regardless of game or technology tested.
19:00 - guessed it the first time, but had to really look for it. I managed by choosing the one that seemed "flawless", not a single element felt out of place, like the base of the chair on the other ones. And the way characters are lit more uniformly, because of soft lighting on the ceiling instead of sharp shadows coming out of nowhere. Fun fact: soft lighting like in the pathtraced image makes more sense for a bar than the raster, as this kind of lighting makes the faces look more flattering.
@@hellterminator You guys are all optimists. By then we will have a high-end graphics unit separate from your actual pc tower. Am I joking? Perhaps. But think about it, it's way better for the company if they can just create their own cooling solution without having to rely on users selecting the right case, fans etc.
Honestly I'm more impressed with how well the game is already presented without any ray tracing. At most I'd want ultra ray tracing, but path tracing seems like it would need a game designed with it in mind from the beginning.
As a technological demonstration path tracing is kind of mind blowing. I remember thinking that the cutscenes in playstation x final fantasy games were incredible, and advent children was a marvel. I'm in awe of how fast technology and software can advance in spite of supposed limitations
Agree. I also think Psycho RT would be a more playable experience than PT (aside from FPS) since it looks like PT gives super dark shadows which I actually kind of hate in games. Like I want to see the textures of the models the devs crested, not just a black blob, even if the black blob is closer to what you'd see in real life.
@@GiuseppeSan I think you've nailed my feelings on it. If I wanted a simulator I'd buy one, but a game can still be immersive and satisfying without being true to real life
Got it right on the blind test. The no RT/PT is pretty obvious, but for the PT one there's just more reflection and it's more bright overall because of the light bouncing more I guess.
If I have to choose between enabling raytracing or hiring more artists, the answer for the next few years is: more artists. After 5 years, ray tracing is an imperfect, forced technology, which could be more accessible in the future but I don't see anything for now.
The stuff that was done manually looks just as good imo. The back alleys that they didn't spend time on improve a lot though, at a huge cost of course.
as a 3d artist, 90% of what actually demands hard work, is often what gets overlooked haha. But all the flashy stuff has to be supported by a great foundation, and it's the foundation that takes time and effort even if it isn't what stands out at an immediate glance.
This is all great but lets be honest here,when u complete the campaign there is nothing to do in this game.Yes it looks beatiful but the game has no content,i pass this game long time ago.Division 2 has more content then this game its sad.
Honestly the 4090 is chewing through it pretty well even at 19 FPS. It's also wild hearing the description of how the dlss frames are generated through all that so fast that it's still playable without crazy latency. Like it or not you have to at least be impressed by the tech. Cool video guys, thanks
Nah the pathtracing is def chewing the 4090, eating its ass per se. Really doesn't seem worth it. The difference in lighting vs no RT is hardly noticeable, the only thing you'd seriously notice is 70FPS vs 20FPS, lol.
Totally got that image test wrong, and I think it's because I somehow have associated extra bright scenes with lower game settings (i.e. having Ambient Occlusion off) even though I was fully aware of the actual setting being used lol. That scene in particular looked quite flat with Path Tracing, and I think I'd actually prefer the version with no RT/PT when comparing the two side-by-side. That being said, RT Ultra looks really nice, and seems to not have the issue with "flatness" in that particular screenshot
The callout of Ambient Occlusion being turned off usually leading to a more-bright scene and thus PT looking "lower quality" is a really good one, and it makes me want to see a comparison of the two features side by side to see how the effects differ.
Definitely path tracing is more realistic as now ALL light sources are taken into account for shadows and all reflected light is also too. Give it a few years, this will be the norm and possibly no more rasterization will be needed.
I also thought Ray Tracing looked MUCH better. It feels to me like the Path Tracing scenes look way too bright to be even remotely realistic and even eye scorchingly annoying in it's brightness. It's like it's all dialed up to 11 when it should be 6 to be comfortable on the eyes and look realistic in terms of the brightness and fidelity of colors like the clothes and leather on the seats for instance in the bar scene and also the air conditioning unit looks way too bright, like they just disabled all shadows or removed all grey values making the colors look flat and boring whereas in the raytraced scene it all looks realisticly dark and the colors are much richer and warmer.
@@ArmadaOne Indeed, but as mentioned this is probably in large part because (as Steve mentioned) the game wasn't designed for path tracing. Some areas are too bright because of the added reflections adding more light, and some areas turn too dark (compared to no RT). It's not an issue with the technique itself and games designed for PT/full RT will look better.
@@Noe2iq I can tell you right now that your 3600 is holding you back in Cyberpunk, GPU limited or not. I had the superior 3700X and even upgrading to a 5700X will massively improve your gaming performance, specifically in the 1% lows. And that's important because it's the metric that determines how smooth your game looks
Actually a bit disappointed you didn't discuss the DLAA addition at all as I think it's the most important update for 30 series owners. It allows for 1440p gameplay that looks markedly superior visually to native 1440p while also maintaining fantastic FPS.
Stuff like this is cool and makes me kinda excited for what can happen down the line, then a i remember how much these cards cost and my joy leaves lol.
Running it at Max settings 1440p on my 4070Ti and the only crashes Ive had have been to do with photo mode (after mods were installed) Gotta say, this update went really smooth
For the question 19 minutes in, I mixed up the no RT/PT and Path Tracing results, but I got the RT ultra correct I honestly think the no RT/PT result looks better than the Path Tracing too, with the RT ultra looking better than both
@@MinishMan It's because of the white balloon ceiling. Makes for a weird vibe in there. The nice contrast of the non-rt mode makes for a more pleasing image.
The floor caught my eye - I wasn't really sure which was which - I figured path tracing was one of the first two - felt like image 3/RT ultra looked the worst and assumed that was everything off. I also enjoy that path tracing gives people cowboy hats. (/s) Weirdly, I was able to spot RT Psycho vs Ultra for some reason. Can't wait to play this on truly max settings without frame generation in 2077.
Path-traced images can easily be identified by the "color bleed" - secondary bounces from colored surfaces "bleed" that surface color onto nearby objects. No other technique can beliveably simulate this effect.
@Rute Fernandes There are a lot of articles about everything, but I've never seen this actually implemented in the real games. It is very hard to faithfully reproduce indirect lighting, pretty much all existing "approximations" fail more often than they work (especially screen-space techniques fail spectacularily at this), and none of them get anywhere close to what path tracing produces.
For the question I immediately picked the 2nd image since its much brighter, also one of the factors also that make me choose it is because I know somewhat of how Path Tracing works and also I have worked with it before which is used in 3D renderers like Octane, Redshift and Cycles to name a few. Generally a 3D scene with a lot of reflective material or bright-colored materials is that it brightens the image due to it being able to bounce light to the objects near it.
Simply being experienced with how scenes look in real life should also allow one to draw the same conclusions, as path-tracing is attempting to emulate realistic light scatter, bounce, and refraction!
I very much appreciate the blind test, usually I'm pretty good at discerning ray-tracing (and variants thereof) as I feel that it makes the overall scene 'feel' much more natural even if I can't necessarily point to the individual parts that look better, and while RT Off was the clear outlier, I did confuse RT Ultra and PT in this case!
I personally preferred the first image with RT off, despite knowing it's the one without RT/PT. I think as Steve said, the artists likely made the game without RT and then had to go back and calibrate it for the RT tech. In the future, we'll likely see games natively being made in RT then "interpreted" with traditional render methods. The whole point is to make things look better and it seems like PT is just the next RT which will be an unnecessary performance hit and no one will use for 2-3 more years before it becomes an actual value-add to the experience.
Thanks for reading "projekt" correctly :) Most forgets that it is not cd project red. Projekt is polish word for project which should be read accordingly just like any english word.
I actually much prefer the look of no path tracing and no ray tracing. The path traced image looks incredibly blown out and it almost give the impression that you're losing a lot of contrast in low light areas like under the stools.
For me, for now at least, RT seems to be the sweet spot. No RT/PT looks unnatural to me. You have a fully dark pillar right next to a light source, come on. The stool reflects like the floor is a mirror...
That club scene is a fantastic example of why you can't change lighting tech in a scene without affecting it adversely away from the director's intent. It's also a great example of how imperfect path tracing often is. The compounded light is certainly more physically accurate, but the summed exposure is perceptually inaccurate as our eyes would naturally turn it down. That would need _another_ shader pass to fix.
You really don't need a 40 series card to run this. I'm playing it just fine at 30 to 40 fps 1080p dlss quality on a 3070 laptop. 1440p performance dlss gets around 30 fps with some dips into the mid 20s. It is very demanding but I think because all the marketing around this has been about hyping up 40 series, tech channels haven't even checked how well 30 series cards can run it. It can actually be a playable experience.
That's a super cool implementation of the tech for sure! I certainly won't be doing as in-depth a look for my charts and review as you guys did but obviously it also makes it very challenging to benchmark. That balloon-ceiling'd cafe looks great though; can really see the changes there!
I actually expected some mention on the Nvidia DLAA setting too instead of just DLSS. I currently play at 1440p + DLAA + Frame generation + Path Tracing on a RTX4080.
DLAA at 1440p should have theoretically around the same performance as 4k dlss quality I would think. Since its basically doing the same thing. It's basically DSRing the imagine and treating it like 4k DLSS on quality.
I am considering selling my 3090 and copping a 4080. So far it's been running Cyberpunk fantastic, but I really want to try path tracing with DLSS3. Would you recommend the switch? I already use a bunch of graphics mods to make the game look great but, i can't pull the trig yet.
@@Slushkin since you have a 3090 i would consider even the 4090 for the bigger upgrade leap. But still the 4080 can handle anything with frame generation.
@@nonserviam_ I did just come from a 3060 4 months ago so i'm not super trying to upgrade heavily. I'm just trying to swap my 3090 for a 4080 but if I can get a 4090 cheap enough i think i might do it. Oh that's sick to hear the 4080 would pull its weight i was worried about that.
I had to watch the 3 images a cuple of times before guess. But to mi the 1st is No RT, because its the most good looking one, Just like the developer wants the scene look with a lot of contrast. And is like the bigger light source (balls in the roof) dont exist for the rest of the space. The 3rd is RT ON because there are much more prescence of the withe light of the ballas but they produce a hard light with higt contrast (se de AC machine at top of the image). And 2nd is PT where all the lights shadows and reflextions are very soft. Because of the so big white light source on the roof and the fact that the floor is not a mirror. Its look ugly because the scene wasent created to be render with this level of acuraccy
@@igorthelight Except raytracing still looks barely better in most titles compared to no RT and cripples your performance disproportionately. So the technology that was promised back then still isn't even close to a "great feature" today.
I am now quite looking forward to how much more real-time path tracing can be rendered in one or two GPU generations, also how 3D artists are going to account for it.
I also really love the fact that for lower-end RTX video cards with at least 8GB VRAM, CDPR provided the option to render path-traced screenshots in Photo Mode. So if you don't have a high-end 40 series card, you won't be able to enjoy RT Overdrive during gameplay, but at least you'll be able to take screenshots with the same technology/visual upgrade as long as you have a ray tracing capable GPU with at least 8GB of VRAM.
For the images, I guessed the RT off correctly, but mixed the two RT implementations. Gotta say though that scene is a perfect example of RT not always being better, at least for me personally. The light sources were clearly placed and designed with traditional lighting in mind, and led it to be way too bright with RT.
I got all three of the images wrong, I thought the middle was Raster, left was RT and right was PT. I know the PT would look softer in some ways but the middle image is so washed out compared to the other two that I instinctively thought it was the worst image.
I got path tracing right. But the first looked better. There are so many lights in the room it basically turns the room into a giant bright washed out mess.
I got it right. Surprisingly as in the past I failed to see the differences and sometimes preferred the images with RT off but of course it's very dependent on the scene. Thanks Steve for the excellent explanation this video was so well done and informative I will be watching it again to absorb some more knowledge. The more you know about these technologies makes for better optimization in different games. This means less trial and error for gamers to get better looking gameplay and playable experiences at the same time.
reflections made by cd projekt are very good, it's what makes this game has very good graphics. RT is a cherry on top of the cake, but there are places where advanced refection look better than RT and vice versa. RT cost a lot of perf, so if you gpu can't allow you to run it smoothly, I don't think you are being ripped off, because you have still great reflections.
Games have to include high quality baked in visuals for those not using ray tracing, that's what makes it hard a lot of the time. Especially when games only had RT shadows and ambient occlusion (cough cough Elden Ring update). When we get to the point that everyone has RT hardware it will make game development a fair bit faster since they won't have to faff about with engineering fake lighting.
For it being an afterthought, the changes look amazing in certrain areas. Other videos have shown PT outside and how it affects lighting under a staircase and it just looks amazing. It might not really work rn, but neither did the OG RT on the 2000 series cards. Games using it from the ground up will probably look amazing and maybe even save the artists some time manually adjusting it everywhere.
The way muzzle flash also impacts surrounding scenery, as well as lighting things/people on fire etc, explosions, and so on - this changes the game dramatically, especially at night where it's more noticeable. I personally would want to play this game fully pathtraced exclusively for this aspect of the lighting visuals -even if everything else looked the same.
I got the comparisons right and I tried it myself on a 3080 and I sometimes prefer the RT ultra/ psycho mode over path tracing With lots of lights in the scene it gets kinda blown out like shown in your example.
My few early impressions with Path tracing (having an RTX 4070 ti) was a somewhat "foggy" , or hazy picture with shadows being too dark, like in that night scene with the barges and the dragons, characters become darky/blurry, I mean it could have been interesting, but it's just blurry / brownish ... I am not yet convinced and I get from 70/80 fps to 50/60 which not so great but still very playable. That and I think I noticed some glitches / pop ups. Work in progress I guess ? I think there is some potential but needs improvement and some sliders perhaps.
Meh. I'd rather focus on improving AI. Obviously, Nvidia is in the business of graphics. However, CD Projekt Red - as opposed to trying to implement the latest Nvidia gimmick - should be focussing on improving the actual game.
I got it right 😂. But because I work on 3D graphics. The way those light balloons shower the entire scene with light, especially those tall white pillars, you can see how bright they get at the top. Also path tracing give scenes this sort of, "foggy" feel to them, like there's pollution in the air, in 3d renders you can add actual fog to the scene and get the that photorealistic look.
It is really hard to tell the difference between RT ultra and path tracing, but with enough time I could tell the images apart (though I did have to pause to take a long hard look). Honestly, I would just take the FPS over path tracing, but this could be an exciting feature in the future.
I was 3 for 3 but it took me some time since you obviously chose a place and lighting conditions making it as hard as possible haha! The increased light noise and superior occlusion showed me the way to the PT and the kinda good reflections and occlusion was the RT. Although I noticed that you had kind of a sarcastic way of talking about rt and pt like saying the game runs faster 3 times WITHOUT rt or pt so I guess you think it sucks and is totally unnecessary? You aren't everybody my friend! Playing games with incorrect lighting for me is just as bad as watching a movie by, for example, letting your friend putting on the color of everything and shadows as well! It's usually SOO bad in many games and having Autism with a specific interest in how things should look, through drawing, painting and photographing professionally my whole life, I cant tell you enough how it really hurts me when games are simulating the actual real life but don't understand lighting .. like at all.. and colors.. or shadows from indirect lights... it actually hurts me quite a lot actually!! It hurts me like actual physical pain would hurt a non autistic person is the easiest way for me to describe it. We are all different! I like to immerse myself through games and RT helps quite substantially when you have a trained eye for how something "should look". Many best whishes //David from Sweden
The bloom seems to be more of a compatibility issue with lighting models for intensity. Even as a 4090 owner who gets giddy about tech, I worry when I see models like this. The good looks cool but the blow out looks worse. Perhaps it'll boil down to a simpler Intensity model for RT/PT/NA. As someone who focuses on lighting in design and architecture of actual facilities (hospitality), that neon blow out is hideous 😂 so um sure I'm waaaay over thinking it.
Still waiting for the 'stable image update' that gives me any setting that eliminates details and shadows popping in ahead of me. Its insane that no modern game gives any setting to make the picture stable.
Pathtracing in Cyberpunk 2077 does not have any fallback technique, that is to say - it works all the way to the horizon. There's not going to be any shadow popping in, period. It's a complete solution. As for LOD pop in, that's a separate problem but mods can alleviate this to some extent. For example there is a "Improved Draw Distance" mod released on Nexus Mods by Sosuine just a few days ago. Test it out with PT.
Path tracing appears to emphasize HDR lighting (in my own testing), in the sense that it really stacks well on top of each other and feels very realistic.
That's because raster doesn't actually compute proper light values - it's all a bunch of hackery. Properly clamped (or unclamped) RT output would have realistic light values by default.
Of the three images I liked 1 and 3 the best. #2 looks overexposed and unnatural. I think the implementation of RT and more so with PT creates instances of overexposure and excessive light blooming, almost fog like in lighting. One has to wonder just how much a gamer playing a game, particularly an action game, will notice RT or PT in such game. If most of the time your eyes just glaze over it is it then worth the considerable FPS hit?
Is it bad if I think the non-ray traced looks better? I love the accurate shadows and reflections from ray tracing but everything is just too bright and shiny for me. I feel like the in-game "camera" needs to have it's exposure reduced with RTX on. During the comparisons section, I actually squinted a few times because the ray traced scenes actually hurt my eyes. 🤷 Additionally, I think the RTX Psycho looks better than Path-traced. Everything in Path tracing is too reflective and you loose the nice contrast of dark surfaces.
Honestly Mirror's Edge (2008) has a better global illumination in the outdoor spaces, and that beautiful game was using a modified lighting pipeline for the unreal engine 3.
To me PT is super cool, and most noticable in an indirect way - as in you don't consciously know why but it looks more realistic lol. That said, high refresh rate is way, way cooler. Give me 144hz first, then we will talk RT/PT (and that's really both before resolution personally)
As awesome and mindboggling as ray tracing in games are, and it is awesome technology, and yet I find I prefer the graphics with RT off... That is me as a gamer. If it was a movie then full fat ray tracing is looking way better. But when I'm gaming I want the best possible visibility. In the Cyberpunk scenes I've seen RT in any form almost always means that shadows get deeper and visibility lower. This may be more "correct", but for me as the one running the mouse that makes things harder as it's harder to see what is happening in the dark. "But shadows!" If it works for you then good job. For me shadows are pretty much unimportant while gaming. I just don't have time to stare at the graphics and be wowed, and even when I do stop and stare I feel the standard graphics is good enough, for Me. All of this is my personal feelings. I'm north of fifty by several years, and reflexes, hearing and sight is not as good as they were twenty or even ten years ago. When playing games I usually tweak graphics settings to get as good visibility as possible, which usually means that a lot of options handling the quality of light and shadows, subsurface scattering, global illumination and such features are turned down or even disabled, while textures, render distance, antialiasing and geometry is turned up to max of what the machine can handle.
Wow i got all 3 right. The giveaway is Path Tracing is way to bright and way to dark in most areas. Dullest 1 was normal non RT or PT. Seriously do npt get the visual appeal with Path Tracing as visually it washes put any area with lights. I would never use it. Technically Path Tracing awesome /chefs kiss. I look forward to PT being properly up and running.
I get the blind comparisons wrong literally every time 🙈 Just shows how an RTX 40xx would be wasted on me, I'm happy playing years-old games on my mid-range Radeon.
Thanks for watching, everyone! Full GPU suite to come still. The team turned this around in only 1.5 full days and it was impressive the amount of benchmarking and capture we could do in that time -- as usual, I'm proud of the team and what each person contributed. We just got access and had to carefully choose our focus with that limited time (and our embargo only just lifted on this content), so there's still a LOT we want to do with RT Overdrive benchmarking as it continues to update. We might give this a deeper benchmark numbers look in the future, but for now, you've got a good starting place. Thanks again! BTW, we just posted 2 new Patreon behind-the-scenes videos last week if you'd like to support our type of work: www.patreon.com/gamersnexus
Do you think more and more developer deciding to use UE5 which got Lumen etc. Raytracing will be any nessesary in the future? I mean Lumen & Nanite are incredible but I don't think Raytracing or Pathtracing will be any relevant or am I wrong? Thank you
VRAM Usage on these different settings would be good to see their cost on memory
Path tracing is on the unreal engine 5... seems to me Nvidia should have used their time to make sure that every next game using the UE5.2+ would be able to use it easily... putting path tracing on the red engine... going to the trash soon... is a waste of time and effort IMO... but Nvidia wants it for PR purposes... will it work? Maybe for 5 minutes.
The blur effect of DLSS3 is outrageously visible.
Nevertheless, on the RT side tech, it's the first real demo that show something interesting. It's clearly not ready, and for now would force the game artist to work twice as much, one version for the wealthy rtx5xxx owner and another for everybody else.
So nothing new since 20xx series, RTX is not that much of use.
NVIDIA:
replacing frame with 'AI" crap
replacing artist with computed light
consuming 600W to play a game.
Forgetting gameplay matters most.
CDPR:
really trying to show case the best of it.
Props to the GN team. Favorite TH-cam channel hands down 😎 y’all are just too real 💯💯💯
I actually don't mind devs adding settings that are clearly reserved for future GPU's. The new lighting looks great, even if only the 4090 w/ fake frames can run it well.
Especially when it's a free update. Updating games in a future-looking way keeps them alive and fresh as they age, which tends to be a good thing.
The Crysis treatment. Reminds me of the days when devs were stretching the possibilities of at the time hardware and software.
Definitely! Just benchmarked my 4080 and it's averaging over 90 fps (77 minimum) with everything at max at 3440x1440 using DLSS Auto and FG enabled. Plays well and looks great!
@@GamersNexus I mean, it’s clearly paid by NVidia, and them being CDPR the customers would expect it to be free at this point. Still, cool update. If the founders 4090 actually exists in Canada, I probably would have gone for it.
Right. I think they are positioning Cyberpunk in the same spot as Crysis was so many years ago. A tech lab/benchmark.
It'll be cool to revisit this with a 7090.
I wonder what would be the prefix model name for those cards. RGTX ? GRTX ? GTRX ?
@@LtCatscratch low end RTGTXRTX-X and high end RTGTXRTX-XXX. Add more X's for higher tier cards.
By the way I don't think nvidia will be building gaming gpus for much longer. 7090 may not be a thing.
We might not need a PC to play games.
Streaming as a service.
@@zushikatetomotoshift1575 Dont fall for it. 3060ti or higher can play this fine. The multi card video is gonna be eye opening to a lot of r/pcmr fans.
100% I'm not even bothering with The Witcher 3 (reloaded) on my 2070.. when I upgrade to whatever the series after the 4000 is in a couple of years, I'll look at Ray Tracing again seriously :P
I can't believe how good those shadows look when teabagging. Never has a game quite captured such a nuanced technique with realistic environmental reactions.
All we need is some jiggle physics for the balls flopping about 😉
@@Kholaslittlespot1 You didn't play RDR2 I take it ;P
I noticed the teabagging towards the end of the video and searched for this comment. Never has teabagging looked so good.
Why did Nvidia put ray tracing into their products when clearly all of their GPUs can't handle it's all just for show to put higher prices on their crap DLSS GPUs all they have to put on their old GPUs gtx1080 gtx1070 is DLSS and it would be same performance as rtx3080 and rtx 3090
@@dssd7685 Becuase this stuff is always gradually integrated. It takes time for stuff to be integrated. None of the effects we have today for rasterization just popped up and were performant on release. SSAO, Shadow Maps, SSR, and many other modern effects take time to become performant. Ray tracing is in a similar boat while being far more accurate. This was the best approach to adding it in and it's only going to become more popular. Plus this technology does not only benefit gamers
I always appreciate how GN does the blind "Image 1, 2, 3" tests to check biases and set expectations; even though I'm usually able to get them all right, the act of _doing that_ really changes how I approach the rest of the comparisons in the video. In the blind test I was able to say "Okay, 1 is very dark so it's probably Off, 3 has more 'real' lighting so it's the RT and 2 has more bounce lighting so it's probably PT, ... _but_ this bar actually looks better when it's a bit darker, so the PT is a neat tech demo but it kinda takes away from this scene in particular"
Yeah, the bars lighting clearly wasn't tuned for Pt, theyd have to change the gloss of many surfaces and probably change lighting source intensity to bring it back to intent
if i want the scene to look brighter and more fake ill just disable shadows and it will looke like RT
But the image appear more neat, and the reflection seems better without RT/PT on this image. I'll pick first mode over the two other. I think there is too much reflection there. On the outdoor environnement RT looks nicer if you stand by and watch the city. But the perf cost is so huge... More than doubling the resolution if you don't activate DLSS.
Doesn't this sort of suggest that path-tracing is just a way for devs to save time - so it hurts our performance while saving them time making the game, ultimately costing developers less and us more? Like the parade scene where there was barely any difference due to the effort already put in by the devs.
@@naturesown4489 exactly right
This really helps immerse me in my ideal world.
A dystopian hell scape with every surface covered with gloss and a vengeful sun that constantly attacks you with god rays and blooming straight into your retinas
So exactly like real life, then?
California
@@GamersNexus uncomfortably close to real life at this point
Mirror's Edge?
@@Aggrofool only reason there’s no mirrors edge with RT is because you can’t freerun if you’re constantly flashbanged by any piece of glass in eyeshot
I absolutely love being alive at a time where I could see path tracing go from hours-per-frame to frames-per-second
Conversely, even though this makes Hollywood Big Budget films cheaper and faster, some how the CGI of modern films looks horrible next to what came out years earlier.
@@kurtwinter4422 the 'how' there is a simultaneous shortage of artists, studios not wanting to spend that much money on said artists, and normalisation of new industry conventions allowing re-writes, re-shoots, re-cuts .etc way later in the production process, all giving the artists way less time to make it look good.
Wait till AI gets its hands on it..lol
But 99.9% of gamers cannot tell the difference. Yes I know its very impressive and worth every cent!
@@lurch789 whine more
im still impressed by the fact that we can play raytraced games now. it’s like a 90’s 3D animator’s vision coming true
Except it looks bad
Nvidia saying it's revolutionary in order to sell overpriced cards and not getting crushed by AMD doesn't means it's true... look at the image and at the frametime...
@@lupintheiii3055 Nope, It doesn't
@@RaikoH6644 Their greed aside, the technology is revolutionary. We literally went from hours per frame to frames per second with path tracing.
Tell me about it first game i played was called Prince of Persia, i was so bad at jumping in this old classic
I love that gamerneuxus intro so much. Who ever created it did a great job.
Thank you. Nice that you like it.
Several years ago, just before the first Nvidia RTX cards were released, I took a college game programming class on ray tracing. We talked about this kind of full scene ray tracing being several years away, but possible, of course. Really cool to actually see it fully implemented. I will say even having taken that course, some explanations take me a bit to figure out. I'm sure some of it will be gibberish to most people, but it's still fun to think about. Lots of lines shot at things and telling the computer what to show you. Woo!
But it's not. Not all elements are raytraced yet which is clearly mentioned.
@@azynkron Still getting a lot closer. It makes sense there are various exceptions. What Unreal Engine is doing is super cool too. It's just fun that I took a class on something before it became mainstream. 😁
@@azynkron shadows, reflections, and indirect lighting are plenty. All other factors are negligible and would add cost for no noticeable benefit. We've already hit the point where cutting edge GPUs are struggling, let alone ones further down the stack that most people get.
I mean, mainstream for games and real time. Path tracing has been mainstream for renders for decades. @@802Garage
it just lacks good environment though, racing part is dam good
Regarding the "bloom-iness" and higher light intensities of light in RT and especially non-RT vs PT: I wonder if it's because developers made light stronger, and surfaces more reflective than what is realistic because, with non-RT and RT, you needed that to have enough lighting so the scene is not too dark.
If this is true, then putting in more realistic reflectivity values + PT could yield more realistic brightness levels in scenes (compared to the pre-PT ways of rendering scenes), for future games where PT is a realistic mainstream option.
or its so that its not so subtle that most people wont notice the ray tracing
I wondered that too. I think they tweaked the brightness of emissive surfaces to maintain the same average level of direct and indirect illumination in the scene, compared to artist-tweaked lighting in the non-OD version, thus making some light sources brighter/bloomier.
Yes this is exactly what they did. The original visuals were specifically calibrated to work well both with full raster, and also conventional RT. It means some lights were overdone, some additional light sources were added in specific places exclusively to artificially illuminate them to mimic true traced lighting, and some environment materials were made brighter and more reflective than need be since fewer light sources from fewer angles were interacting with them.
Basically like if you have a movie theater, and you paint the walls white while the lights are off, and it looks fine and not bright- but rather perhaps looks like a dark grey due to the lack of light. But then when the movie is on and the screen lights up, all the walls just bounce the excess light and everything gets overexposed as a result of the original artistic direction that didn't account for the excess light during a movie playback.
No it has to do with stronger differences in exposure, there's less of an "average" more areas are much darker than they could be before so exposure compensation needs to be stronger.
Could be that in part, but also many shadowed areas are properly dark now as opposed the glow they had before, which means there is a larger exposure difference between lit and shadowed parts. So, when in a mostly shadowed area, other lights will get blown up
Can't wait to experience this 10 years from now when I have a GPU that can actually run it. That's about how how long it took me to be able to play Crysis.
Unbelievable that a $1700 graphics card can be brought to it's knees and deliver unplayable framerates!
@@volvo09 It's not about price in this instance, the technology is not there yet. Even if they make a 20000$ GPU right now it would still not be able to run it smoothly. The main issue is the technology isn't there.
@@a-mir905 very well said!
If it's 20 fps at 4k with a 4090 and the 50 series is rumored to be twice as powerful then you can assume a 40 fps on the 5090 at 4k which means that in 2026 with the 60 series they might actually achieve above 4k60 in Cyberpunk with PT. So, only 3-4 years left to go.
@@a-mir905 Sure, but with the 4090 you can at least use DLSS 3 to get a smooth experience. It's not ideal, but it's at least an option. So it's at least partially about price. A couple years from now when the next generation of GPUs comes out the 5090 might be able to run this at 4K60 with DLSS Quality in a best case scenario. But lower end more affordable SKUs like a 5070 or 5060 are likely to be slower than a 4090 so it's still going to be inaccessible to most people. Maybe in 4 years a 6070 class GPU might be capable enough, but realistically I don't expect this to become a more mainstream option until the 7000 series from Nvidia and whatever equivalent Radeon GPUs are out at the time.
Round of applause for the devs who optimized the game really well for rasterized lighting.
I can't agree more ! While RT/PT optimized pictures might be « better » for enthousiasts, I'm not a big fan of the « improvements » they bring to us. The pictures without any RT or PT seemed perfectly enjoyable, in my opinion. They were more than enough for my needs ^^
CP 2077 is not the best case of a good rasterized lighting though, most outdoor urban areas look like greenish-grey pile of mud with no shadows
@@КОМБИНАТ-т1ъ untrue
Not really, the game is terribly optimized for path tracing (not to mention releasing a horrendously incomplete game at launch). This cult-like worship of devs on TH-cam and reddit is insane where they get praised for any mildly positive thing whereas they're shielded from all criticism regarding bugs and incomplete launches where it's not the devs fault but "the suits" and "management".
@@DragonZombie2000 wow you got all that from my 1 sentence comment that didn't say any of those things?
Love the blind test for ray and path tracing you should do them more often! Got them right, but actually think the path tracing looks worse than ray tracing in this scenario.
yeah, I think they need to tone it down a little. Maybe the light sources are too bright because initially they did not plan for pathtracing?
I find this true more often than not, because they are not used to how much light propagates and are used to over compensating. I see this quite often in HDR, as well. I also got it right based on this expierence.
Just bought a 4080 so I was super thrilled to see I got the blind test right 😅 probably helps that I spend my professional life thinking about how light bounces
I've never used RT or PT, and I got it all wrong lmao ^^ Looks like I'm not made for this technology 😅
Its going to be really cool to see future games made with path tracing from the ground up. Hopefully they will be able to run more efficiently with PT as well. Very exciting.
Time to try it on my 3060 12GB and taste that delicious single digit fps :D
@@JoriDiculous is it the tree in the area with the snidgets? lol
@@yoonigan Yes :D Amazing area :P
@@JoriDiculous that was super weird. You could stand next to the tree and it's fine, it's only if you look at the tree lol. Nice to know it wasn't just a problem with me specifically 😂
@@yoonigan You drop fps in the whole area as long the tree is "in you sight" but not crazy much, think it went down to around 40 for me. At the tree it dropped to at least 6 fps. And if you managed too turn around fps got almost normal. Weird as heck. Wonder what is wrong there?
SPF maybe
Meanwhile, on 8Gb graphic cards 👹
Bro I got a 1050 ti. It has 4gb vram
Bro me with intel hd 620 😂😂😂
8 Gigabit?! That's even worse than 8GB!
@@GamersNexusI love the smell of pedantry in the morning! 😂😘
i dare not curse my rx 580 with these terribly optimized recent games, poor thing barely manages heavily modded bethesda games. PC gamers really ought to hold companies to higher standards than this, this is getting ridiculous.
Got the PT correct, as it was the most diffuse/blown out looking. Scene lighting really will need to be handled differently to get the same artistic contrast going with PT as the model obviously.
That being said I think it'll be a lot more intuitive on the artist side, and less time consuming (especially compared to the amount of work that goes into probes and mapping)
Looking forward to where this goes in 5-7 years or so when this might converge, as opposed to being a special demo for high end hardware.
I recall 4A talking about the workflow improvements with it when they did the Metro Exodus RT edition. The workflow gains from the dev side are incredible.
@2freeIvX he also described it from the Wikipedia page as including caustics, which o highly doubt is implemented here. Proper caustics and full light transport typically requires bidirectional path tracing which is quite a bit more costly.
This implementation seems to handle scene light minus reflections and transparency which was still handled with the RT approach.
Luxcore handles them quite nicely.
This isn't a physically correct path tracer yet, but it's a great step forward for real time lighting.
I got all 3 correct, only because I've done this kind of test on my own when I got my 3080 Ti. I usually prefer the game with RT off because of your exact point.. more environments in the game simply look better with RT off. There are some scenes that look better with RT on, mostly outdoors and at night, but the areas with tons of indoor lighting just get blown out so bad. I'm also excited to see more games that are designed with RT in mind.
Man Cyberpunk runs so shite still.
Raytracing still looks pretty bad, it's better to have an environment custom created with no rt than trying to use rt. It would be good for realistic looking games, but as none of them exist it just seems like a useless technology right now. Traditional rendering methods still run and look the best.
Path tracing actually seems kind of cool. A lot of stuff felt kind of different with more realistic lighting. It seems like a lot of your complaints of how scenes changed and the developer baked in lighting looked better (which I thought it did too). It seems that's more a complaint of not designing the scenes around the tech more that path tracing being actually worse. It would be fascinating to see a path traced game where the lighting is designed around light working realistically. I can see it get very interesting when cards can actually run it and devs start to design around it.
The frametime consistency was always one of the most impressive parts of this game. It runs so incredibly smoothly even with all the settings maxed out, on hardware that a lot of newer games struggle to stay above 30 fps with.
This just proves how badly optimized TLOU, RE4, and Forspoken are. I'm not spending a dime on games that have arbitrarily demanding requirements under the guise of "next-gen" graphics, when CP2077 looks as good as it does.
Idk. It might better now but it is still not very consistent in my opinion and it used to be a mess. The marketplaces (the one near Tom’s Diner for example) in this game have a lot of stress on the CPU. I always have significant fps dip in those areas.
I mean, a lot of games will preform better when running at like 60% render res with DLSS on. The frametimes look like a nightmare without it
Maybe with newer tech. The gameplay was horrific with a 3000-series CPU.
@@steph_on_yt They spent 2 years to reach where they are right now. It used to be a complete mess too at launch.
Well, Ngreedia is laying down the foundation for their fanbois to upgrade to the 5000 series next year !!! 🤣
I could tell the difference in the images. The extra bounces make the lighting look richer, and overall, I'm in love with this effect.... but yeah, if I were in a bar that bright, I'd think the bartender was trying to tell me to go home.
It is weird because I actually like classic ray tracing more than how path tracing looks.
Yup, PT looks too bright. But maybe the game wasn't made for this at first
The exercise you did where you show us the three slices of graphical quality to tailor our expectations was absolutely brilliant. Cheers bro.
I appreciate the constant teabagging of enemies during the shown gameplay runs - no doubt any benchmarks that do not include teabagging are considered invalid from now on, regardless of game or technology tested.
19:00 - guessed it the first time, but had to really look for it. I managed by choosing the one that seemed "flawless", not a single element felt out of place, like the base of the chair on the other ones. And the way characters are lit more uniformly, because of soft lighting on the ceiling instead of sharp shadows coming out of nowhere.
Fun fact: soft lighting like in the pathtraced image makes more sense for a bar than the raster, as this kind of lighting makes the faces look more flattering.
I look forward to thinking about possibly using this 5-6 years from now.
Same. Hopefully by then I'll have the funds to comfortably build a rig with an RTX 6090 Ti to try this out.
@@Shieftain $2,000 graphics card
@@boredgunner lol that would be the 5090. 6090 ti will probably be 3 grand MSRP. I like your optimism though!
@@boredgunner That was the 3090ti, buddy. For a 6090ti, we're looking at $3000-$3500.
@@hellterminator You guys are all optimists. By then we will have a high-end graphics unit separate from your actual pc tower. Am I joking? Perhaps. But think about it, it's way better for the company if they can just create their own cooling solution without having to rely on users selecting the right case, fans etc.
Maybe they can bring back NVlink bridge on the 5090’s. Then you can buy two 5090’s for $2.5k ea. to make the game playable. 😂 🖕 Nvidia.
I thought "NO RT/PT" looked the best so I assumed THAT was "path tracing" lolol ... cool tech I guess but kinda worthless.
Those AI generated graphics cards on thumbnail are so cursed. Love it
Our best prompt yet!
Honestly I'm more impressed with how well the game is already presented without any ray tracing. At most I'd want ultra ray tracing, but path tracing seems like it would need a game designed with it in mind from the beginning.
As a technological demonstration path tracing is kind of mind blowing. I remember thinking that the cutscenes in playstation x final fantasy games were incredible, and advent children was a marvel. I'm in awe of how fast technology and software can advance in spite of supposed limitations
Agree. I also think Psycho RT would be a more playable experience than PT (aside from FPS) since it looks like PT gives super dark shadows which I actually kind of hate in games. Like I want to see the textures of the models the devs crested, not just a black blob, even if the black blob is closer to what you'd see in real life.
@@GiuseppeSan I think you've nailed my feelings on it. If I wanted a simulator I'd buy one, but a game can still be immersive and satisfying without being true to real life
Why does this come off as cope?
Got it right on the blind test. The no RT/PT is pretty obvious, but for the PT one there's just more reflection and it's more bright overall because of the light bouncing more I guess.
If I have to choose between enabling raytracing or hiring more artists, the answer for the next few years is: more artists. After 5 years, ray tracing is an imperfect, forced technology, which could be more accessible in the future but I don't see anything for now.
Me : "#1 must be Path Tracing since its the one that looks the best. The middle one looks like actual garbage, so its probably RT Ultra."
The stuff that was done manually looks just as good imo. The back alleys that they didn't spend time on improve a lot though, at a huge cost of course.
the real amazing part is that any solo dev can just put their lights where they're supposed to be and it instantly looks great.
@@Volker_A4 not great per se, but it'll look right.
It definitely highlights how much we take artists in the gaming industry for granted, always seeming to focus on the technical aspects of graphics.
as a 3d artist, 90% of what actually demands hard work, is often what gets overlooked haha. But all the flashy stuff has to be supported by a great foundation, and it's the foundation that takes time and effort even if it isn't what stands out at an immediate glance.
Your thumbnail is so good
hahaha
This is unter nonsense. You are always time limited in projects, maybe fix the Bugs first before implementing the next ingame benchmark, yes?
This is all great but lets be honest here,when u complete the campaign there is nothing to do in this game.Yes it looks beatiful but the game has no content,i pass this game long time ago.Division 2 has more content then this game its sad.
Another useless feature.
Honestly the 4090 is chewing through it pretty well even at 19 FPS. It's also wild hearing the description of how the dlss frames are generated through all that so fast that it's still playable without crazy latency. Like it or not you have to at least be impressed by the tech. Cool video guys, thanks
Nah the pathtracing is def chewing the 4090, eating its ass per se. Really doesn't seem worth it. The difference in lighting vs no RT is hardly noticeable, the only thing you'd seriously notice is 70FPS vs 20FPS, lol.
turn down the resolution from 4K to 1440p. immediately get double the framerate.
@@ISirSmoke well yeah, turning down the resolution by more than half will give you roughly double the frames, who could've guessed?
@@SlickSloth everyone seems fixated on 4090 and 4K. thanks for your input.
@@ISirSmoke Imagine buying the latest and greatest GPU and not even be able to play in 4k.
Totally got that image test wrong, and I think it's because I somehow have associated extra bright scenes with lower game settings (i.e. having Ambient Occlusion off) even though I was fully aware of the actual setting being used lol. That scene in particular looked quite flat with Path Tracing, and I think I'd actually prefer the version with no RT/PT when comparing the two side-by-side. That being said, RT Ultra looks really nice, and seems to not have the issue with "flatness" in that particular screenshot
The tell was that PT has extra pink color bleeding on the vertical dark surfaces
The callout of Ambient Occlusion being turned off usually leading to a more-bright scene and thus PT looking "lower quality" is a really good one, and it makes me want to see a comparison of the two features side by side to see how the effects differ.
19:08 wow the path tracing looks the worse of the 3 the line on the table rather than a gradient and the fuzzyness of the immage. no way
I actually got the Path Tracing and Ray Tracing mixed up. I think I just preferred the RT’s darker/more dynamic look? Very interesting
Definitely path tracing is more realistic as now ALL light sources are taken into account for shadows and all reflected light is also too. Give it a few years, this will be the norm and possibly no more rasterization will be needed.
I also thought Ray Tracing looked MUCH better. It feels to me like the Path Tracing scenes look way too bright to be even remotely realistic and even eye scorchingly annoying in it's brightness. It's like it's all dialed up to 11 when it should be 6 to be comfortable on the eyes and look realistic in terms of the brightness and fidelity of colors like the clothes and leather on the seats for instance in the bar scene and also the air conditioning unit looks way too bright, like they just disabled all shadows or removed all grey values making the colors look flat and boring whereas in the raytraced scene it all looks realisticly dark and the colors are much richer and warmer.
@@ArmadaOne Indeed, but as mentioned this is probably in large part because (as Steve mentioned) the game wasn't designed for path tracing. Some areas are too bright because of the added reflections adding more light, and some areas turn too dark (compared to no RT). It's not an issue with the technique itself and games designed for PT/full RT will look better.
I don't like either and rasterized, i haven't found a game that looks as clean for lighting as Crysis remastered.
Thank you for the amazing overview of the PT technology. I wonder if the 12700k is impacting those highly GPU bound tests in any capacity.
I frickin hope not (me with a Ryzen 3600) 😂
@@Noe2iq I can tell you right now that your 3600 is holding you back in Cyberpunk, GPU limited or not. I had the superior 3700X and even upgrading to a 5700X will massively improve your gaming performance, specifically in the 1% lows. And that's important because it's the metric that determines how smooth your game looks
20fps is fucking impresive. Not long ago rendering single pathtraced frame took minutes.
Actually a bit disappointed you didn't discuss the DLAA addition at all as I think it's the most important update for 30 series owners. It allows for 1440p gameplay that looks markedly superior visually to native 1440p while also maintaining fantastic FPS.
Stuff like this is cool and makes me kinda excited for what can happen down the line, then a i remember how much these cards cost and my joy leaves lol.
Running it at Max settings 1440p on my 4070Ti and the only crashes Ive had have been to do with photo mode (after mods were installed)
Gotta say, this update went really smooth
Mad props for Polish pronunciation of "Projekt" :)
For the question 19 minutes in, I mixed up the no RT/PT and Path Tracing results, but I got the RT ultra correct
I honestly think the no RT/PT result looks better than the Path Tracing too, with the RT ultra looking better than both
@@MinishMan It's because of the white balloon ceiling. Makes for a weird vibe in there. The nice contrast of the non-rt mode makes for a more pleasing image.
Now if only Cyberpunk were a game worth playing...
The floor caught my eye - I wasn't really sure which was which - I figured path tracing was one of the first two - felt like image 3/RT ultra looked the worst and assumed that was everything off. I also enjoy that path tracing gives people cowboy hats. (/s)
Weirdly, I was able to spot RT Psycho vs Ultra for some reason. Can't wait to play this on truly max settings without frame generation in 2077.
Path-traced images can easily be identified by the "color bleed" - secondary bounces from colored surfaces "bleed" that surface color onto nearby objects. No other technique can beliveably simulate this effect.
@Rute Fernandes There are a lot of articles about everything, but I've never seen this actually implemented in the real games. It is very hard to faithfully reproduce indirect lighting, pretty much all existing "approximations" fail more often than they work (especially screen-space techniques fail spectacularily at this), and none of them get anywhere close to what path tracing produces.
@Lurch Preach
@@asmi06 Look at RAGE 2 - it has non-RT Global Illumination with color bleeding. But it's worse than Path Tracing ;-)
For the question I immediately picked the 2nd image since its much brighter, also one of the factors also that make me choose it is because I know somewhat of how Path Tracing works and also I have worked with it before which is used in 3D renderers like Octane, Redshift and Cycles to name a few. Generally a 3D scene with a lot of reflective material or bright-colored materials is that it brightens the image due to it being able to bounce light to the objects near it.
Simply being experienced with how scenes look in real life should also allow one to draw the same conclusions, as path-tracing is attempting to emulate realistic light scatter, bounce, and refraction!
I very much appreciate the blind test, usually I'm pretty good at discerning ray-tracing (and variants thereof) as I feel that it makes the overall scene 'feel' much more natural even if I can't necessarily point to the individual parts that look better, and while RT Off was the clear outlier, I did confuse RT Ultra and PT in this case!
Rasterization @native >>> Ray Traced DLatencySS
Even harder to tell since TH-cam makes videos look like dog poop
@@kostasdinos8982 tech illiterate spotted. Dlss 3 with reflex has lower latency then native. Try again AMDumb.
I personally preferred the first image with RT off, despite knowing it's the one without RT/PT. I think as Steve said, the artists likely made the game without RT and then had to go back and calibrate it for the RT tech. In the future, we'll likely see games natively being made in RT then "interpreted" with traditional render methods. The whole point is to make things look better and it seems like PT is just the next RT which will be an unnecessary performance hit and no one will use for 2-3 more years before it becomes an actual value-add to the experience.
Thanks for reading "projekt" correctly :) Most forgets that it is not cd project red. Projekt is polish word for project which should be read accordingly just like any english word.
super late but a minor correction, projekt doesn't mean project, it means design
I actually much prefer the look of no path tracing and no ray tracing. The path traced image looks incredibly blown out and it almost give the impression that you're losing a lot of contrast in low light areas like under the stools.
watch on a 1000+ nits screen with HDR and this no longer is the case.
For me, for now at least, RT seems to be the sweet spot. No RT/PT looks unnatural to me. You have a fully dark pillar right next to a light source, come on. The stool reflects like the floor is a mirror...
That club scene is a fantastic example of why you can't change lighting tech in a scene without affecting it adversely away from the director's intent. It's also a great example of how imperfect path tracing often is. The compounded light is certainly more physically accurate, but the summed exposure is perceptually inaccurate as our eyes would naturally turn it down. That would need _another_ shader pass to fix.
3070ti here, perfectly playable at 1440p with DLSS on balanced.
Indeed! Fellow 3070Ti owner.
You really don't need a 40 series card to run this. I'm playing it just fine at 30 to 40 fps 1080p dlss quality on a 3070 laptop. 1440p performance dlss gets around 30 fps with some dips into the mid 20s. It is very demanding but I think because all the marketing around this has been about hyping up 40 series, tech channels haven't even checked how well 30 series cards can run it. It can actually be a playable experience.
So on an Nvidia RTX 4090 20 to 30 FPS @ 4K however on an AMD RX 7900 XTX you can finger count .. or will AMD even run without locking up??
That's a super cool implementation of the tech for sure! I certainly won't be doing as in-depth a look for my charts and review as you guys did but obviously it also makes it very challenging to benchmark. That balloon-ceiling'd cafe looks great though; can really see the changes there!
Appreciate all you do Steve (and team) trust your opinion 100%
Agree... But 98.7%
I actually expected some mention on the Nvidia DLAA setting too instead of just DLSS. I currently play at 1440p + DLAA + Frame generation + Path Tracing on a RTX4080.
DLAA at 1440p should have theoretically around the same performance as 4k dlss quality I would think.
Since its basically doing the same thing.
It's basically DSRing the imagine and treating it like 4k DLSS on quality.
I am considering selling my 3090 and copping a 4080. So far it's been running Cyberpunk fantastic, but I really want to try path tracing with DLSS3. Would you recommend the switch? I already use a bunch of graphics mods to make the game look great but, i can't pull the trig yet.
@@Slushkin since you have a 3090 i would consider even the 4090 for the bigger upgrade leap. But still the 4080 can handle anything with frame generation.
@@nonserviam_ I did just come from a 3060 4 months ago so i'm not super trying to upgrade heavily. I'm just trying to swap my 3090 for a 4080 but if I can get a 4090 cheap enough i think i might do it. Oh that's sick to hear the 4080 would pull its weight i was worried about that.
I had to watch the 3 images a cuple of times before guess. But to mi the 1st is No RT, because its the most good looking one, Just like the developer wants the scene look with a lot of contrast. And is like the bigger light source (balls in the roof) dont exist for the rest of the space. The 3rd is RT ON because there are much more prescence of the withe light of the ballas but they produce a hard light with higt contrast (se de AC machine at top of the image). And 2nd is PT where all the lights shadows and reflextions are very soft. Because of the so big white light source on the roof and the fact that the floor is not a mirror. Its look ugly because the scene wasent created to be render with this level of acuraccy
Everything but DLSS performance/FG on/PT on! LOL..that probably would of gave matching performance of DLSS Quality FG/RT Ultra.
This will be a great feature in 5 years.
We were told that about regular raytracing 5 years ago.
@@zxbc1 And modern videocards do regular Ray Tracing pretty good. Maybe, not in 4k tho xD
@@igorthelight Except raytracing still looks barely better in most titles compared to no RT and cripples your performance disproportionately. So the technology that was promised back then still isn't even close to a "great feature" today.
@@zxbc1 True. It's like "Ultra+" for those who have to spare 30% of their FPS.
I am now quite looking forward to how much more real-time path tracing can be rendered in one or two GPU generations, also how 3D artists are going to account for it.
I also really love the fact that for lower-end RTX video cards with at least 8GB VRAM, CDPR provided the option to render path-traced screenshots in Photo Mode. So if you don't have a high-end 40 series card, you won't be able to enjoy RT Overdrive during gameplay, but at least you'll be able to take screenshots with the same technology/visual upgrade as long as you have a ray tracing capable GPU with at least 8GB of VRAM.
750€ 4060ti best screenshot card confirmed!
That sounds great! I’ll definitely give that a try on my 2070 when I’m able to
That's a nice feature. The photo mode in CP2077 is neato.
@@veduci22 I really don't get where you take that price from.
Wow screenshots! Thanks ScamVidia!
18:22 I did not expect a 50 Cent In Da Club reference, kek. Great content as always. Very informative and entertaining throughout!
I wanted to see an RTX 3070 run @ 1080p DLSS performance, disappointed 😢
Very impressive given that it wasn’t that long ago when the idea of real time ray tracing was a pipe dream.
Real time raytracing hs existed since the mid 90's.
@@enjoshi-godrez8775 only in tech demos, and almost nearly always on hardware that wasn’t consumer level.
@@rare6499 no, that wasn't a pipe dream. The supercomputer pixar used to make monsters ink used it. It was in actual use 20 years ago.
@@enjoshi-godrez8775 since when was monsters ink real time? It took 29 hours to render a single frame on monsters ink.
@@rare6499 it wasn't, but the machine was able to do it. By mid 2000's all the frames of most CGI movies were raytraced.
For the images, I guessed the RT off correctly, but mixed the two RT implementations.
Gotta say though that scene is a perfect example of RT not always being better, at least for me personally. The light sources were clearly placed and designed with traditional lighting in mind, and led it to be way too bright with RT.
I got all three of the images wrong, I thought the middle was Raster, left was RT and right was PT. I know the PT would look softer in some ways but the middle image is so washed out compared to the other two that I instinctively thought it was the worst image.
I got path tracing right. But the first looked better. There are so many lights in the room it basically turns the room into a giant bright washed out mess.
I got it right. Surprisingly as in the past I failed to see the differences and sometimes preferred the images with RT off but of course it's very dependent on the scene. Thanks Steve for the excellent explanation this video was so well done and informative I will be watching it again to absorb some more knowledge. The more you know about these technologies makes for better optimization in different games. This means less trial and error for gamers to get better looking gameplay and playable experiences at the same time.
reflections made by cd projekt are very good, it's what makes this game has very good graphics. RT is a cherry on top of the cake, but there are places where advanced refection look better than RT and vice versa. RT cost a lot of perf, so if you gpu can't allow you to run it smoothly, I don't think you are being ripped off, because you have still great reflections.
Games have to include high quality baked in visuals for those not using ray tracing, that's what makes it hard a lot of the time. Especially when games only had RT shadows and ambient occlusion (cough cough Elden Ring update). When we get to the point that everyone has RT hardware it will make game development a fair bit faster since they won't have to faff about with engineering fake lighting.
For it being an afterthought, the changes look amazing in certrain areas. Other videos have shown PT outside and how it affects lighting under a staircase and it just looks amazing. It might not really work rn, but neither did the OG RT on the 2000 series cards. Games using it from the ground up will probably look amazing and maybe even save the artists some time manually adjusting it everywhere.
The way muzzle flash also impacts surrounding scenery, as well as lighting things/people on fire etc, explosions, and so on - this changes the game dramatically, especially at night where it's more noticeable. I personally would want to play this game fully pathtraced exclusively for this aspect of the lighting visuals -even if everything else looked the same.
Artist here and I will confirm that PT is much more plug-and-play compared to all the hacky techniques you have to juggle together with rasterization
I got the comparisons right and I tried it myself on a 3080 and I sometimes prefer the RT ultra/ psycho mode over path tracing
With lots of lights in the scene it gets kinda blown out like shown in your example.
My few early impressions with Path tracing (having an RTX 4070 ti) was a somewhat "foggy" , or hazy picture with shadows being too dark, like in that night scene with the barges and the dragons, characters become darky/blurry, I mean it could have been interesting, but it's just blurry / brownish ... I am not yet convinced and I get from 70/80 fps to 50/60 which not so great but still very playable. That and I think I noticed some glitches / pop ups. Work in progress I guess ? I think there is some potential but needs improvement and some sliders perhaps.
Meh. I'd rather focus on improving AI. Obviously, Nvidia is in the business of graphics. However, CD Projekt Red - as opposed to trying to implement the latest Nvidia gimmick - should be focussing on improving the actual game.
I got it right 😂. But because I work on 3D graphics. The way those light balloons shower the entire scene with light, especially those tall white pillars, you can see how bright they get at the top. Also path tracing give scenes this sort of, "foggy" feel to them, like there's pollution in the air, in 3d renders you can add actual fog to the scene and get the that photorealistic look.
It is really hard to tell the difference between RT ultra and path tracing, but with enough time I could tell the images apart (though I did have to pause to take a long hard look). Honestly, I would just take the FPS over path tracing, but this could be an exciting feature in the future.
This is a game changer but only if you have Nuclear Reactor as a power supply for you native 18fps.
I was 3 for 3 but it took me some time since you obviously chose a place and lighting conditions making it as hard as possible haha! The increased light noise and superior occlusion showed me the way to the PT and the kinda good reflections and occlusion was the RT. Although I noticed that you had kind of a sarcastic way of talking about rt and pt like saying the game runs faster 3 times WITHOUT rt or pt so I guess you think it sucks and is totally unnecessary? You aren't everybody my friend! Playing games with incorrect lighting for me is just as bad as watching a movie by, for example, letting your friend putting on the color of everything and shadows as well! It's usually SOO bad in many games and having Autism with a specific interest in how things should look, through drawing, painting and photographing professionally my whole life, I cant tell you enough how it really hurts me when games are simulating the actual real life but don't understand lighting .. like at all.. and colors.. or shadows from indirect lights... it actually hurts me quite a lot actually!! It hurts me like actual physical pain would hurt a non autistic person is the easiest way for me to describe it. We are all different! I like to immerse myself through games and RT helps quite substantially when you have a trained eye for how something "should look".
Many best whishes //David from Sweden
The bloom seems to be more of a compatibility issue with lighting models for intensity. Even as a 4090 owner who gets giddy about tech, I worry when I see models like this. The good looks cool but the blow out looks worse.
Perhaps it'll boil down to a simpler Intensity model for RT/PT/NA. As someone who focuses on lighting in design and architecture of actual facilities (hospitality), that neon blow out is hideous 😂 so um sure I'm waaaay over thinking it.
You lose a fuckton of detail in the dark, runs at 10 FPS and devours power... Hard pass
Still waiting for the 'stable image update' that gives me any setting that eliminates details and shadows popping in ahead of me. Its insane that no modern game gives any setting to make the picture stable.
Pathtracing in Cyberpunk 2077 does not have any fallback technique, that is to say - it works all the way to the horizon. There's not going to be any shadow popping in, period. It's a complete solution.
As for LOD pop in, that's a separate problem but mods can alleviate this to some extent. For example there is a "Improved Draw Distance" mod released on Nexus Mods by Sosuine just a few days ago. Test it out with PT.
Path tracing appears to emphasize HDR lighting (in my own testing), in the sense that it really stacks well on top of each other and feels very realistic.
That's because raster doesn't actually compute proper light values - it's all a bunch of hackery. Properly clamped (or unclamped) RT output would have realistic light values by default.
It's not deliberate, the two technologies just naturally complement each other very well.
To me it looks like same result as if some one played with «shadow» slider in photoshop… in 50% of the cases it doesn’t actually make it look better.
@@airBornFpv Some people are blind and have poor attention to detail. It's fine, play something else.
It's a thought I had myselft when using traditional RT on games, these tech do indeed go very well together.
1:33 already the best part of the video.
Of the three images I liked 1 and 3 the best. #2 looks overexposed and unnatural. I think the implementation of RT and more so with PT creates instances of overexposure and excessive light blooming, almost fog like in lighting. One has to wonder just how much a gamer playing a game, particularly an action game, will notice RT or PT in such game. If most of the time your eyes just glaze over it is it then worth the considerable FPS hit?
Is it bad if I think the non-ray traced looks better? I love the accurate shadows and reflections from ray tracing but everything is just too bright and shiny for me. I feel like the in-game "camera" needs to have it's exposure reduced with RTX on. During the comparisons section, I actually squinted a few times because the ray traced scenes actually hurt my eyes. 🤷
Additionally, I think the RTX Psycho looks better than Path-traced. Everything in Path tracing is too reflective and you loose the nice contrast of dark surfaces.
Honestly Mirror's Edge (2008) has a better global illumination in the outdoor spaces, and that beautiful game was using a modified lighting pipeline for the unreal engine 3.
Dude, Mirror's Edge used fully baked-in lighting. It is absolutely nowhere near being comparable to real-time RT.
@@gargean1671 have you seen the final effect?
To me PT is super cool, and most noticable in an indirect way - as in you don't consciously know why but it looks more realistic lol. That said, high refresh rate is way, way cooler. Give me 144hz first, then we will talk RT/PT (and that's really both before resolution personally)
As awesome and mindboggling as ray tracing in games are, and it is awesome technology, and yet I find I prefer the graphics with RT off... That is me as a gamer. If it was a movie then full fat ray tracing is looking way better. But when I'm gaming I want the best possible visibility. In the Cyberpunk scenes I've seen RT in any form almost always means that shadows get deeper and visibility lower. This may be more "correct", but for me as the one running the mouse that makes things harder as it's harder to see what is happening in the dark.
"But shadows!" If it works for you then good job. For me shadows are pretty much unimportant while gaming. I just don't have time to stare at the graphics and be wowed, and even when I do stop and stare I feel the standard graphics is good enough, for Me.
All of this is my personal feelings. I'm north of fifty by several years, and reflexes, hearing and sight is not as good as they were twenty or even ten years ago. When playing games I usually tweak graphics settings to get as good visibility as possible, which usually means that a lot of options handling the quality of light and shadows, subsurface scattering, global illumination and such features are turned down or even disabled, while textures, render distance, antialiasing and geometry is turned up to max of what the machine can handle.
Wow i got all 3 right. The giveaway is Path Tracing is way to bright and way to dark in most areas. Dullest 1 was normal non RT or PT. Seriously do npt get the visual appeal with Path Tracing as visually it washes put any area with lights. I would never use it. Technically Path Tracing awesome /chefs kiss. I look forward to PT being properly up and running.
cool.... another techdemo that shows - should humanity survive the AI-pocalypse - what games might look like in about 20 years for the mainstream.^^
I get the blind comparisons wrong literally every time 🙈
Just shows how an RTX 40xx would be wasted on me, I'm happy playing years-old games on my mid-range Radeon.