The devs mentioned that they developed the artistic feel of the game with Lumen and then RT is added afterwards with help from NVIDIA. So it is possible that the more saturated image with Luman is the intended effect from the devs.
@@vincentz2390 Maybe the settings for nvidia are way off? @11:43 the shadows only make sense if it's ant scale. Go outside and look at shadows, they are filled with bokeh, from trees. I don't know how nvidia rt got a good reputation. real trees in the forest cast bokeh balls onto the path, and yeah they wiggle around like a psychedelic monochrome show. Sharpness if shadows should basically depend on the diffuse material, especially for things like grass. A lamp on a pole will cast a very blurry shadow of the top. I also want to point out those bowls of fire are simple unrealistic. To have such brightness that they coukd overpower the sun, even in shade, they would be blindingly bright, and if they were fires, you would need something like a spaceship's blast shield to get near. the thing that drives me nuts about the water effects is it doesn't look like water, and there's no justification for a realtime effect especially for reflections off water. The purpose of the 3D artist is illusion, it's not a crime scene reconstruction. bottom line, the sun is bright, shadows are blurry and sophisticated, stagnant water is rarely clear, and if you move through it... eh, there is no bottom line, the whole thing looks fake... ...unless you turn off enough effects so it looks like there is cloud cover. but you don't get a drop shadow under your player in that setting lol
@@runoncortisol Because it has nothing to do with Lumen. Lumen is a global illumination solution. They using for shadows the same old tech what unreal and other games used in the past years called cascade shadows.
I personally like the atmosphere in the Lumen examples more, as much as RTX does add detail into the shadows I think the drama is really lost as a result.
@@luisdavidrivero1776 The technology is ok for single player games that don't require fast reflex and timing. Any game that is PVP comp, single player fast paced reflex dependent, or a case where u have low frames like 40 ish.... Frame gen is not for you as it adds latency, and require base framerate of at least 50 preferably 60 to work good enough. It's the lamest most situational tech we saw in the last few years. Compared to say DLSS or ray reconstruction
@@steven9617Well that can be possible if game science wants to,if "Nvidia" cares about gamers instead of a new RTX series and it's so called next gen benefits n bla bla
Lumen doesn't do shadows. The shadow technology is called Virtual Shadow Maps, and they can look very sharp, almost like RT shadows. But then the cost is too high. It seems that developers turned up shadow LOD bias significantly and lowered some other parameters so it performs better.
Lumen without any hardware RT seems to be worth using even on a lot of Nvidia graphics cards, given how much performance it saves you. Of course, it's likely to be a much better choice than running hardware RT if you're running an AMD GPU. And, of course, technically, Lumen can be worth using in some UE5 games even on a 1080 ti or Titan XP, which obviously don't have the option to run hardware RT anyway. It's pretty amazing that actually nice looking ray tracing can run on an 8 year old graphics card.
Personally even having a 4090 im playing without RT. So much better experience cause it eliminate the stutter and i can adjust dlss to quality, removing the sharp looking effect dlss give at perfomance . Getting around 100fps at 4k and still think this is the best looking game i’ve played. Chapter 2 was just simply amazing with RTX HDR
Lumen is still RT...the difference with Nvidia is that Nvidia Full RT uses path tracing tailored only to Nvidia 4000 series high end cards. Which honestly it's bad practice...
@@StudioFocus-hh7dx The 4000 cards aren’t the only GPU capable of Path Tracing technically. The software is optimized for their cards but both AMD and Intel cards are still capable of doing so.
Great video, but I totally disagree that the Nvidia looks better with Global illumination. It's basically like you turned on full-bright. There's no contrast in the scene and it takes out all of the color and over blooms the light when you transition into the more lit area to the right of the Buddha statue. The haze is from Lumen lighting the volumetric fog. It's supposed to be there. Also the screen space reflections doesn't make much sense to me because with Lumen you can get traced reflections as well. It seems like a setting the devs chose. Oh, also the flickering effect in the shadows is something that the devs could have tweaked in UE5.3 and it's got even more control in 5.4. My guess is they're using an earlier version because they were so close to release. It might get patched in the future. It actually has to do with how UE5 implements their Anti Aliasing. Basically the AA implementation in UE sucks. You either get a lot of smearing and artifacts with TAA,/TSR or you get really bad bluring with FAA. There's really no built in solution yet that I'm aware of. There is a shadow cascade option in the engine that determines the distance at which shadows drop to a different LOD. It's strange how close it seems to be set in this game but it's likely because of all the other rendering costs.
That's not true, if true is just 10 feet long then you see it clear, it true more higher than shadows like blurring you can check it in real life. but in this particularly that place the tree was not that high. its around 10f or less.
Where do youlive man? This is not true, please consider a glass prescription. Light is properly represented with path tracing. You may argue that some leaves are not uniform and they let pass part of the light or scattered it on the edge let to a small softer shadow. But this is a material modelling and too extreme to handle. Neverthelss, in real life you do not have a unique piece of shadow without smaller or sharp point.
@@damazywlodarczyk Go out and touch grass? I am looking at a tree in my backyard right now while i type this and its shadows look WAY more similar to the RT one Just google "picture of shadows of a tree" and you'll see.
3:07 ... The thing I love most about Ray Tracing is the ray traced POP IN 10 meters from player , present on a 2000$ rtx 4090 with 600$ 7800x3d CPU system. It's so immersive, that I love to enable it just to get that sudden jump scare .I love it. (Witcher 3 looks better without Ray tracing for the same reason)
All I see is that the "full RT" mode was definitely not used while creating the world in terms of artistic vision but it was added as an afterthought. As a result, full RT mode makes the game lose a lot of artistic atmosphere.
"Lost about 25 FPS, again, the difference is not that big". Bruv. That's 20% loss in FPS. What are you talking about? Using the same specs and same exact game settings but on a 4k monitor, I am achieving 110 FPS (Lumen) and 70 FPS (Very High RT). On a high refresh rate monitor that makes a huge difference.
Yes and also while using dlss and FG which absolutely tells nothing about the change of performance. Turn that off and then see the real difference, maybe it would be even 50%
Pathtracing is pretty heavy to run, we peasant gamers can't afford 1000$ cards, it's not worth it at the moment, fortunately Lumen looks really good and I'm happy it's at least a solid alternative.
I'm playing this game with path tracing on an RTX 4060 TI 16GB using Hardware Unboxed's optimized settings. Yes it's heavy and I'm using frame generation, but it's a single player and I chose the breath taking visuals over 80+ FPS
@@maldosogamer I hear you, I have the same GPU on 1440p. As casual gamer, I preferred the overall feel of the game to the FPS, or supposed crazy high rez. I have full RT with an average of 72 FPS. I had to sacrifice super resolution to 50. And honestly I don't see the difference with the 75.
@@OmnianMIU At what cost thought? Seriously, to run ray tracing on more modest hardware, you have to make some big cuts in other areas to get a smooth frame rate. It's only when you spend big that you don't really have to compromise but even then, on many games you still have too but it's modest compared to more modest hardware. Ray tracing isn't worth it yet for most and I don't think it will be till the next gen consoles are out and once the hardware on the PC is far more affordable that developers can target it from the ground up and not slap it onto of games that were designed around baked lighting, which is what most of them do. From my experience under normal play conditions, you can get away without ray tracing in most cases apart from reflections on marble or glass surfaces, they look a lot better, but in every other area, the difference is a lot smaller and because of the performance hit, it's not really worth it yet.
Ray tracing is better but in normal play, the difference becomes far less noticeable to really care about it, especially when you consider the performance hit of ray tracing. Still, some would disagree with that like Alex at DF who seems to make it seem like ray tracing is like going from C64 visuals to the latest PC visuals lol. Honestly, when it comes to ray tracing, the real highlight for me is reflective surfaces like marble floors or glass, everything else is passable with normal baked lighting under normal play conditions. With that said, ray tracing is the future but I think the real game changer of that will be with the next gen consoles and once the hardware is cheap enough on PC that even low end gpu's can do it without having a heart attack, and for now, the performance hit and hardware needed is just too expensive to care about ray tracing for what is not really that big of a difference under normal play and I've tried a few times with ray tracing on with games but I usually end up switching it off with the exception of the odd game like Spider-Man that does look better with it on, but with most games, you can do without it, without it really taking much away from the game.
RT is overrated, its far from being mainstream. Like C64 to modern PC games, the limits of raster has not been fully reached. For RT to be mainstream, you'd need to have at least the mainstream GPUs like RTX xx60 and RX x600 models to be able to run RT games and max settings above 60fps minimum. And from there, newer generation of RT games will slowly increase the RT qualities like number of rays and bounces, better reflection, refraction and sub surface scattering. But that kind of future is probably decades away. We took almost 40 years from C64 to reach where we are today, the path of RT has barely just started.
If I'm not mistaken, the version they used is UE 5.0, so, because at the time UE didn't support Nanite for vegetation they had to disable VSM and use standard Cascade SM, this is why you see the resolution changing with the distance. They also use Lumen only with Signed Distance Field and not with Proxy Meshes, plus, Lumen improved a lot since 5.0, both in performance and quality, same goes for reflections. I don't know how the difference would compare between NVRTX and Lumen in 5.4. Usually you have a benefit when you have multiple light sources, but this game seems to just mostly relay on sunlight, so shadows and GI should be pretty close in the last version. Too bad they didn't upgrade to 5.2 at least, but I understand it's not a small endeavor.
Yeah UE5 has improved quite a lot. I also notice there's some lower rea textures like rocks while others are higher res. Kind of unusual looking. Not sure it it's a creative choice. Would be nice if they could update to latest UE5 but I don't know much about what it takes to do that. What I'd like to know is if the NVRTX can be split into each RT effect be it's own settings and use Lumen lighting for ex and RT reflections and shadows instead of it all being lumped into one Full Ray Tracing setting.
im pretty sure it does not matter that much cause even the current version has problems with VSM. VSM cache gets invalid if world position offset get used even tho you can deactivate world position offset on distance to save performance the performance hit is anyway still pretty huge. You would need a pretty different pipeline for vegetation which would involve world position offset textures to reduce the logic in the shader as much as possible.
Ray tracing looks great, no one is arguing it doesn't. The problem is that it requires a 4090... if you replace that 4090 (and the 7800X3D) with actually affordable alternatives (in other words, don't go with the money is no object setup, which is the reality for I dunno, 99% OF GAMERS) Ray tracing makes the games a slide show, Lumen does look worse but it doesn't cripple performance as much as Ray tracing. The real problem is that both are unplayable on anything other than a money is no object rig.
to me the only ray tracing that makes a big difference that is worth the frame rate hit is the shadows. it really brings out the image to life compared to the more brighter and HDR colors of RT global illumination and reflection. reflection is pretty minor tbh. Shadows is a big impact as you see it a lot throughout the game. The lighting can be compromised with ingame Lumen from UE5.
What are you talking about, gentlemen? I'm playing the game on 4070 at 1440p at all max, rt-max, with dlss-quality-85 and a low-latency generator (on) at 70 fps in beauty. Dla\ dlss on UE5 work out perfectly as well as the frame generator. Shadows can be lowered by ultra, there will be no difference, but there will be another +5 fps. Actually, NV users have been playing games on ultra and rt-max for a long time in 1080p and 1440p even on medium maps (just not the heaviest version of the "path"). But in Wukong, the 4070 at max copes in 2k and with rt-path, unlike all Amd cards.
The transition from shadow to light makes sense if you hike a lot in the real world. Your eyes take some time to adjust. Also it actually makes sense that shadows are dark - your eyes can only accomodate so much. I am sure they can patch in any of these missing features into UE5 at some time. It is good practice to include Lumen so that people can compare and complain so that maybe we get some feature parity.
Your eyes adjust? I though it was only on camera. Like, if you put the camera in a view with both indoor and outdoor at the same time, it will adjust just for one and the other will be too dark or too bright. With my eyes I see both at adequate lightning with no adjustment when steping outside or inside.
@@TheEllord33 I am unsure of your question. Of course eyes adjust from going from light to dark and vice versa. That’s the entire job of the pupils. As you transition from light to dark initially you will be unable to make out detail - the darker it is the more time it will take to adjust - ever hear of night blindness? The inverse is also true - if you go from very dark to light. Where are you coming up with adequate lighting - if you are hiking around outside under trees and then you find a cave or deep alcove you initially won’t be able to see well until your eyes adjust. I still am unsure if I am understanding your question.
@@diggledoggledo But the brain filter and the pupil is so fast that it's not noticeable. Going from bright to dark does't make me blind. Maybe for you having very constrasted environnement is realistic because that's how you see the world. For me, when I play Wukong, having the environnement visibility change when going to a tunnel is unrealistic. Another exemple is the absence of starbust light, for 33% of the population having astimatism it's unrealistic. Therefore "realistic" is relative.
It looks so gorgeous with full RT. Console owners and brokies seethe and cope. "Duh, ray tracing isn't that important. Duh, lumen looks more realistic" lol Sad. Especially the "lumen looks more realistic" comment. Ultra cope right there.
Performance tests should always be done in raw card performance to really compared the difference, no DLSS and no Frame Gen ! So you can see the difference between Full RT raw perf vs Lumen raw perf, and then you can do a test with DLSS and frame gen if you want to see the performance improvements of the added tech !
Great job man! Im actually surprised how little of a hit to performance Full RT was.. Shadows are definitely the biggest stand out. The water reflections being next! Im currently playing on the XTX however and in fairness i have no real complaints with Lumen. The difference when you see full RT cant be argued however..
@TerraWare Tiger Boss was a nightmare although not my hardest. Make sure you pick up the wind tamer to do the final chapter 2 boss. There's a lot of hidden stuff in chapter 2 that also takes you back to chapter 1. A waterfall unlock and a pretty cool Dragon fight etc. Definitely worth doing as you'll pick up materials for a cool staff.
@@Spratty-wb3is I'd heard the tiger boss was hard but I got him on my 4th try. The toughest boss so far that too me a bunch of tries was the Whiteclad Noble. The guy with the white hair in the swamp. I'm exploring all the areas I can though, a lot of hidden bosses.
About the "cascade shadows" I prefer "no cascade" xD because the transition in the cascade shadows is very abrupt. I mean, I prefer all shadows in low quality, before you have low, middle and high depending of the distance. Or at least, increase the distance of the high showdow. In this game is very close. Or have a cascade, but with a smooth transition between high, middle and low resolution shadows.
3:07 ... The thing I love most about Ray Tracing is the ray traced POP IN 10 meters from player , present on a 2000$ rtx 4090 with 600$ 7800x3d CPU system. It's so immersive, that I love to enable it just to get that sudden jump scare .I love it. (Witcher 3 looks better without Ray tracing for the same reason)
Dude. Who ever says PT in this game is real life definitely never left the basement. Ex GI in the game, lumen is real life lighting. You don't go in cave with light bouncing so bright light PT
Great image quality analysis, thanks! But i do agree with other commenters that for an action game comparison should be done with framegen off. The lumen haze looks likely an intended stylistic choice that dousnt work on RT
Thanks. Frame gen was only enabled in the performance difference section. All image quality comparisons was done with a 60 FPS lock on both Lumen and Full RT no frame gen.
The default shadows of the non RT example are bad cause they don‘t use the new tech virtual shadowmaps cause of the performance hit by world position offset objects such as vegetation moving etc. . This can cause a pretty huge hit in ms. They still using the old cascade shadows tech. Virtual Shadow maps would have similiar details like the RT version which you showed.
The adjustments from the game are directly responsible for the loss of details on the shadows in the Lumen software RT setup. It should be possible to tweak those via console commands. Technically speaking, we are talking here about Lumen hardware RT and Lumen software RT (surface cache), because Lumen is the graphics component inside the Unreal Engine responsible for RT calculations.
Lumen is a realistic illumination, that hazy effect is part of its feature, just like in real world, we have atmosphere. You can tell by your character which is not affected by the hazy effect because it was near the camera while the farther objects are getting hazy. And one notable thing is, if you are in a darker area and approach a beam of light, you can't see what that backgroud is until you are in the beam of light, just like a real like camare works, due to dynamic range.
@@TerraWare yeah I know, but some feature of the RT was far superior and its realistic unlike Lumen. For example the reflected lights that bounce off from the water. Its pretty realistic in RT.
Some of these are tradeoffs made for artistic or performance reasons and not intrinsically a limitation of Lumen, for example the shadow resolution comparisons. Also, the caustic refraction is a hack that can be applied to non ray tracing scenes and doesn't seem to be fully RT even though it is labeled an RT feature. The brightness adaption to the interior lighting and fractional contribution of GI is also possibly a bit of an artistic choice. Softness might be a contrast sensitivity metric or participating media or a simple Nanite setting. Basically I think NVIDIA have some talented experts who have added several tricks and enhancements under the RT umbrella that sometimes aren't RT when discussing isolated features so you're seeing additional NVIDIA polish they've been allowed to tweak via Unreal settings plus some RT features bundled under an RT brand.
Like another Vincent mentioned, you can definitely tell in the Global Illumination which was used to work on the Game and what is the intended "mood" for the game, but god damn those Shadows are in a whole different league with how crisp they are. I also wish the Fog/Blur with Lumen wouldn't be so intense as I feel when there isnt much of it, it can go much closer to RT but with that insane Blur/Fog at some places, it looks like a much worse Option. Also that Shadow on the cliff side with the Tree with Lumen felt like something not loading in haha.
Here's the main difference between Lumen and RT in simple terms from consumers pov from a artist whos working in UE5. RT Pros: Better, softer shadows from light source (with increase cost with dynamic lighting) Better reflection/refraction (with increased cost depending on bounces and depth ie. if 3 chrome balls are in the scene do they reflect off each other infinitely. Or how deep does water depth goes) RT Cons: Doesn't work without RTX Increased performance cost depending on how many triangles in the scene GI is not as realistic (doesn't mean its not good looking) Lumen Pros: Better performance with nanite geometry (the bigger the world, the more detail the mesh the better) VSM (virtual shadow maps) works really well with nanite and have better performance than RT shadows GI is technically closer to Path Tracing (which is more realistic, but doesn't mean players prefer the look) Lumen Cons: Shadows can become very unrealistic if you push past its limits (overlapping foliage) and lose detail in certain parts such as 14:03 the tree on the left is losing shadow details (doesn't mean the players care too much) Reflection is catching up to RT but not quite there yet Not much performance gain if not using nanite geo Not much performance gain compare to RT if the geo is very low poly Overall Lumen is slowly taking over RT and it will be the future of gaming. I know Wukong doesn't use Nanite foliage (it wasn't stable when the devs were working at the time) that's why the game technically doesn't have a bigger, better performance gain with Lumen on and might actually lose a bit of performance because of that. Lumen is also very close to looking like Path Tracing, its going to be crazy in a few years how games is going to perform and look.
I almost wish UE5 would have been designed so that Lumen could utilize the RT cores itself, rather than switching to a secondary pipeline for RT. Use it to accelerate Lumen and run it in higher detail AND a faster speed. It seems like that would be easier on artists as well. From what I can tell from the videos, the game was probably designed around Lumen. I think the "washed out" look being commented on is the fact that they probably did a decent amount of tweaking with the fog, much of which seems to be lost when switching to RT. It seems like it loses some of its environmental feel. So the artists likely would have had to do two set of lighting and composition adjustments. The shadows look WAY better with RT. I like RT as a shadow solution because it doesn't need cascaded shadow maps. Shadows are full resolution and already scaled properly. But I do wish they were a bit softer.
Yeah I agree, the full RT shadows should be a bit softer based on distance of object to shadow casting surface. Lumen can be utilized to utilize hardware RT according to Digital Foundry's extensive coverage of Lumen but its something devs for the most part don't do. I'm not sure why.
Lumen looks significantly more realistic, with lighting that feels natural, while Nvidia’s ray tracing tends to overly brighten everything. I immediately noticed the difference between regular RT and path tracing, where path tracing is darker and more authentic. Lumen achieves a similar darker, realistic look, making Nvidia’s ray tracing appear outdated. I don't think it's worth paying $1,500 for Nvidia's ray tracing anymore. When comparing textures, Lumen's details are incredibly lifelike, whereas Nvidia’s ray tracing looks more like a photo edit. Lumen's realism really stands out, especially in the vegetation and ground textures, which look remarkably real.
I honestly feel like Lumen is the way the devs intended the game to look. Realistic lighting is in my opinion inferior to artistic lighting... I mean, imagine if Movies were lit "realistically", it takes away a lot from the artistic vision of the medium.
Realistic and artistic lighting are not mutually exclusive things. Movies typically *do* use realistic lighting, even ones that are more stylized. They're just artistically composed scenes making excellent use of that realistic lighting in creative ways, rather than just throwing some lights around and calling it a day. The reason some scenes like this in games don't always hit the mark isn't because they're "too realistic" it's because most video game artists are accustomed to working with more limitations, and it isn't yet easily accessible to consumers, so the pay off still lies largely in using older techniques when it comes to consumer views on the final product. In other words, if you put a bunch of development time/effort into a feature that only ~25% (for example, not saying those are the exact numbers) of your consumers will be able to use and you don't make artwork that still holds up for the rest, then you're wasting most of your resources. So these scenes are often developed with the mid/lower end systems in mind, so the scenes are primarily composed by artists who are limited by simpler rendering tech. Higher end settings are then reserved for marketing and hype purposes, and if the studio is managed well enough, it can lead to some stellar results too (see Alan Wake 2, for example). If "realistic < artistic" was true, then all sorts of movies would look like trash, including things like pixar, studio ghibli, etc. All of those artists base their work HEAVILY in the principles of real-world light propagation. Don't get me wrong, I agree that having an artistic eye and applying it to your work is extremely important for such things, I'm just saying those things are not mutually exclusive. Even in this example, you're not even comparing apples to oranges. You're comparing apples to... slightly fresher apples lol. Both lighting methods shown in the video are using the principles of realistic light paths, and one is just more physically accurate and robust than the other.
Thank you! Finally, I can see the difference between full RT and Lumen! Anyways, price policy of Nvidia is out of this world. There are no budget RTX cards suitable for real full RT gaming so...
as a game dev, lumen is definitely more realistic, the rtx in wukong doesn't have indirect lighting, look at 3:40 and how with lumen the whole place is filled with orange from the light bouncing of the cliffs, that is how it's supposed to be. Even if you can afford ray tracing in my opinion having realistic indirect lighting is much more important.
There is something extremely suspicious to me @3:58, that hut cant be properly lit/shadowed. (looks like it has a hole in roof with the RT) I think sometimes UE5 needs a restart to apply certain graphic options, and sometimes it simply bugs out.
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I agree. Not only that, lumen in this case looks more aesthetically pleasing. Also, RT reflections look way too perfect and well defined whereas in real life they’re more distorted, especially when the water is agitated.
i love the lumen one cuz it seems to be more concept arty and has a more intense mood to the whole place imo. which in this case i prefer more than complete realism
It is really professional of you to turn down shadow, ambient occlusion and reflection quality. Most influencers out there knows nil about these cutting edge technologies and they just jump on the bandwagon of criticism
The lumen effect is actually visually a lot more appealing, ambient noise (fog, dirt, sand, etc.) and high shadow/light contrast, to me it appear more realistic instead of casting 1:1 from a high resolution camera photo of the rtx, unfortunately is bit bugged and struggle to render leaving the result a bit off sometimes.
Obviously hardware lumen or Nvidia raytracing is better than software lumen, but you can't deny that software lumen reflections with SSR over them is way better than SSR with a cubemap underneath. The lumen reflections really help with removing a lot of the problems with SSR. Still has artifacts for sure, but it's way better.
thanks again for this interesting video. I think its not possible to mix up path tracing with the lumen, its one or the other. i might be wrong, but i think if you choose the lumen route, everything is in that pipeline. so if you want both, you might end up with double gpu taxing. not sure though, but this is how i think it works.
correct. although not 100%. For RT, many of the operations overlap. So if you are already creating bvh for reflections and other things, it would be more efficient to do GI with RT as well, and more expensive to add lumen. In fact, reflections require more detailed RT data, so getting GI as a byproduct of that is a lot better
Not true. Digital Foundry mentioned this in their videos a few time. Lumen is a software RT. It can be improved by hardware enhancements, accelerated by RT cores. Not sure about other engines, but UE5 works exactly like this. Hardware RT just improves accuracy of RT effects.
Yes we need a 4090 for this. XDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD Very nice games in 2024. If need the max graphics buy a 3500$ PC for a 35$ game. This is the future of the PC gaming? RT Off, thanks.
Holy mother of.... At 3:15 and 3:56 the difference between the two is night & day. Lumen eliminates SO MUCH of the "gamey" lighting we've grown so used to when looking in dark/interior areas. Just look at the way everything blends together the more away it is from our view... Just... wow... And no texture detail is not gone, its the volumetrics at play naturally obstructing details/ sharpness based on camera distance (I think). RT in this comparison, IMO is only worth it for the water realism. If the game gets updated to feature caustics tech in Lumen I really see no reason to use RT, it's also heavier to run.
Interesting how I have got so many comments of some people preferring Lumen, others ray tracing. Some have been very blunt about preferring one over the other.
5:00 that is a massive difference to me in the cave. I'd already be in my monitor settings to lift up those shadows because it's unplayable (for this genre, not creeping in the shadows in a horror game) with so much detail missing compared to the nV solution. Of course I'd like to hear what the devs have to say about artistic intention, because these two images are nothing alike.
yes i agree with you, it does not halve my fps but it takes arround 20% away on a rtx4070. also i have alot of crashes because of out of memory errors, so i guess the game isnt really optimized.
@@DenizD-g4b maybe 4000 series is just that much better at RT, plus frame generation. But I had no game crashes, so at least I have that going for me 😁
@@DenizD-g4b out of memory error might from your CPU being degraded if you have an Intel i9, I have a 4070 Super and no crash at all, in fact the game doesn’t use that much memory, I never gone past 8GB of VRAM.
Lumen looks to be doing that thing cameras do where they adjust to surrounding light, making darker areas lighter when the entire area is dark. Admittedly that's accurate, but if you remember having to line up a shot with your phone against a light, it is indeed very annoying.
There is a shocking truth. There is a channel called "Guille Ghemi" which is in spanish. He discovered that there is raytracing options that comes with a change of textures instead to be another way of redendering in the light by it self. So, we can't really know how deep goes raytracing. I think that raytracing could be a "competitive advantage" for some games where you need other ilumination.
The Lumen look is the originally intended look! And it even feels that way in this very comparison. Unfortunately, for technical reasons (early UE 5.0), the Lumen shadows are unstable and too low rez. Same for réflexions. The RT is cleaner, but looses a lot of the original artistic intentions. Even Digital Foundry didn't notice that, which seems so obvious to me.
Lumens Global Illumination is much better IMO, it adds so much depth to the scenes, giving it a grandiose feel to it. While RT seems more "gamified" to make easier to see. The RT shadows are too sharp also. In everything else, RT wins.
I got to say, water and shadow looks way better on RT. (Maybe a bit too much sharp sometime, that is not that much realistic) Lumen is really good if you need some extra performance and i fell it even looks having a better ambiance in some case scenario. If it can make me reach the 120fps or something stable, i would take it using Lumen. At this level of details, I don't care that much about water and shadow over a smooth gameplay.
bro is quite clear that lumen got volumetric ilumination , is like nvidia is a 30 mm lens f8 and lumen is 30 mm f1.8 got depth got softer image out focus
Lumen is less accurate, hence there is less light bounce and scenes are darker. Its the same with path tracing, if you decrease light bounces it becomes darker. Also, lumen is the GI solution of UE5. Reflections, Shadows and other stuff is not 'lumen'
Regarding the shaows section and definition of the leaves: For what reason do developers not record an animated loop of waving leaves and just run that over the ground texture?
Hopefully, Game Science devs just made truckloads of money. They release a patch for more graphical settings and, a sharpening slider. Also sucks the game doesn't have HDR.
it's pretty cool that as simple humans, we can preceive difference in the behaviour of water waves and try to solve them on our head, in my case for some reason my brain keeps telling me that tha wukong is based on smaller animals, with like half a meter of height, that for somer reason corects the problem with waves, i thik they are too big and are moving too fast
3:07 ... The thing I love most about Ray Tracing is the ray traced POP IN 10 meters from player , present on a 2000$ rtx 4090 with 600$ 7800x3d CPU system. It's so immersive, that I love to enable it just to get that sudden jump scare .I love it. (Witcher 3 looks better without Ray tracing for the same reason)
No, you do not, and that pop-in is a bug rather than norm (BVH set too low for certain shadows, it was fixed in later revisions of Witcher 3 NG). And Witcher 3 looks insanely better with RT, especially in interiors, you need new glasses: th-cam.com/video/_o59iS_4SHY/w-d-xo.html&pp=ygUgcmF5IHRyYWNpbmcgcmV2b2x1dGlvbiB3aXRjaGVyIDM%3D
@@soulsbourne You have obviously 0 idea what you're talking about and haven't played the game in ages. Try it on the latest build with ray tracing, and then talk shit, please.
It's a fast paced game and RT is not there yet, people expect to be enjoying the game play on the hardware they've got and the devs did an great job of polishing the product while still being able to run on older hardware. Until Ray/Path Tracing at a decent level is not available in budget cards it's still only a nice PR. Does it look nice - yes it does, does you need RT to be able to enjoy yourself in a good game - no.
Yeah I agree. Next gen engine with great visuals that runs great on current hardware and has tech for high end and future hardware. Ideally this would be every PC version of every AAA game.
imo as a 3d artist lumen looks better it blends the volumentrics and environment assets really well yea the RT looks more detailed if you only look at the individual assets, but if you actually look at the overall picture properly, lumen is better by far :)
Lumen does look really good. It's a bit too dark if I had to point out something that stands out. If I could choose I'd keep RT reflections, shadows and caustics
the full rt does look better but keeping it real....Lumen looks good enough....only thing I DON'T like is the extra haziness you see when lumen is used. I'd use whichever tech uses the lower resources for RT. I'm more interested in smooth gameplay than getting the very best visuals.
1. Both look overshapened 2. I prefer lumen for GI. It just looks artistically better, some areas should be dark... 3. I prefer the RT water and shadows, it's just better.
Hey mate! There is actually a game which already splits reflection, Shadow and GI RTX raytracing in its optons. Check Control from remedy which is still to this day one of the best showcase of what RTX raytrace can do. It aged well, looks a bit dated though for sure.
Thanks. It uses the Nvidia branch of UE5 to implement these RT effects which is why I phrased it that way. I also get comments of people saying Lumen is ray tracing too which is technically true. So it makes it a bit challenging to separate both solutions which are at the end of the day ray tracing if that makes sense.
13:24 Lumens shadow is more realistic like in real life. Nvidia shadows looks more cosmetic. You don't see those shadows in real life. UE5 Raytracing has another level of detail.
Take note that you need to restart the game to apply RTX, It was strange I didn't see any difference when I turn RT On but turn out I need reboot the game. RT look much better in person than what you see in comparison videos, although still might not worth it unless you have OCD with blurry and flickering shadows
Not a fan of rtx. I have a RTX3080, but it is not enough to be able to run rayteacing smoothly on any game. The only ways is to select low quality raytracing and use DLSL. Or maybe Buy a 4090. But it is too expensive
This game needs the option for removing the sharpening effect
yes
Hell yeah it does need that
For what I understand there's a solid mod for that
@@matuzaato People should not be needed to download an external mod just to lessen the sharpness of the a game..
@@MrUchiha nobody said they shouldn't add one. He just offered a quick solution
I took a shot of Vodka at every "don't get me wrong" and I woke up at the hospital thank you
I did the same with solution.
@@SixSioux bro said it so much that I got him wrong
@@ryreyraph 😂
The devs mentioned that they developed the artistic feel of the game with Lumen and then RT is added afterwards with help from NVIDIA. So it is possible that the more saturated image with Luman is the intended effect from the devs.
@@vincentz2390 Maybe the settings for nvidia are way off? @11:43 the shadows only make sense if it's ant scale. Go outside and look at shadows, they are filled with bokeh, from trees. I don't know how nvidia rt got a good reputation. real trees in the forest cast bokeh balls onto the path, and yeah they wiggle around like a psychedelic monochrome show. Sharpness if shadows should basically depend on the diffuse material, especially for things like grass. A lamp on a pole will cast a very blurry shadow of the top. I also want to point out those bowls of fire are simple unrealistic. To have such brightness that they coukd overpower the sun, even in shade, they would be blindingly bright, and if they were fires, you would need something like a spaceship's blast shield to get near. the thing that drives me nuts about the water effects is it doesn't look like water, and there's no justification for a realtime effect especially for reflections off water. The purpose of the 3D artist is illusion, it's not a crime scene reconstruction. bottom line, the sun is bright, shadows are blurry and sophisticated, stagnant water is rarely clear, and if you move through it... eh, there is no bottom line, the whole thing looks fake...
...unless you turn off enough effects so it looks like there is cloud cover. but you don't get a drop shadow under your player in that setting lol
@@vincentz2390 oh puh-lease then why does the default forced sharpening look so bad and sometimes dynamic shadows look blocky af and flicker super bad
@@runoncortisol Because it has nothing to do with Lumen. Lumen is a global illumination solution. They using for shadows the same old tech what unreal and other games used in the past years called cascade shadows.
@@runoncortisol because that's what lumens do. it can't be fixed
I personally like the atmosphere in the Lumen examples more, as much as RTX does add detail into the shadows I think the drama is really lost as a result.
You didnt lose 25fps in the first example, you lost 25 generated frames.... testing should be done with frame gen off.
Exactly.
Why? If the technology is there? Who plays with RT whitout framegen jajajaja.
@@luisdavidrivero1776
The technology is ok for single player games that don't require fast reflex and timing. Any game that is PVP comp, single player fast paced reflex dependent, or a case where u have low frames like 40 ish.... Frame gen is not for you as it adds latency, and require base framerate of at least 50 preferably 60 to work good enough. It's the lamest most situational tech we saw in the last few years. Compared to say DLSS or ray reconstruction
@@luisdavidrivero1776 you should not comment on subjects you don't understand bro
@@Ieokk What don't I understand? Illustrate it to me, computer genius, I am waiting for you to explain it to me. JAJAJAJAJA
An update separating ray tracing and path tracing will be much appreciated by all the gamers 👍🏻
I'd like to see it if possible.
achieving path tracing quality at ray tracing performance cost would be appreciated
@@steven9617Well that can be possible if game science wants to,if "Nvidia" cares about gamers instead of a new RTX series and it's so called next gen benefits n bla bla
@@AlphaHub13 it's only gen benefit if Nvidia sells 4090 for the same price as 3090, but nah
Lumen doesn't do shadows. The shadow technology is called Virtual Shadow Maps, and they can look very sharp, almost like RT shadows. But then the cost is too high. It seems that developers turned up shadow LOD bias significantly and lowered some other parameters so it performs better.
@FireF1y644 yup I know that now. Thanks
Lumen without any hardware RT seems to be worth using even on a lot of Nvidia graphics cards, given how much performance it saves you. Of course, it's likely to be a much better choice than running hardware RT if you're running an AMD GPU.
And, of course, technically, Lumen can be worth using in some UE5 games even on a 1080 ti or Titan XP, which obviously don't have the option to run hardware RT anyway. It's pretty amazing that actually nice looking ray tracing can run on an 8 year old graphics card.
Personally even having a 4090 im playing without RT. So much better experience cause it eliminate the stutter and i can adjust dlss to quality, removing the sharp looking effect dlss give at perfomance . Getting around 100fps at 4k and still think this is the best looking game i’ve played. Chapter 2 was just simply amazing with RTX HDR
Lumen is still RT...the difference with Nvidia is that Nvidia Full RT uses path tracing tailored only to Nvidia 4000 series high end cards. Which honestly it's bad practice...
@@or1on89 how is it a bad practice when NVIDIA 40 series is are the only cards that can do pathtracing lmao
@@StudioFocus-hh7dx that's exactly why it's bad practice. other cards could handle it, but nvidia makes it exclusive only to 40 series
@@StudioFocus-hh7dx The 4000 cards aren’t the only GPU capable of Path Tracing technically. The software is optimized for their cards but both AMD and Intel cards are still capable of doing so.
Great video, but I totally disagree that the Nvidia looks better with Global illumination. It's basically like you turned on full-bright. There's no contrast in the scene and it takes out all of the color and over blooms the light when you transition into the more lit area to the right of the Buddha statue. The haze is from Lumen lighting the volumetric fog. It's supposed to be there. Also the screen space reflections doesn't make much sense to me because with Lumen you can get traced reflections as well. It seems like a setting the devs chose. Oh, also the flickering effect in the shadows is something that the devs could have tweaked in UE5.3 and it's got even more control in 5.4. My guess is they're using an earlier version because they were so close to release. It might get patched in the future. It actually has to do with how UE5 implements their Anti Aliasing. Basically the AA implementation in UE sucks. You either get a lot of smearing and artifacts with TAA,/TSR or you get really bad bluring with FAA. There's really no built in solution yet that I'm aware of. There is a shadow cascade option in the engine that determines the distance at which shadows drop to a different LOD. It's strange how close it seems to be set in this game but it's likely because of all the other rendering costs.
Lumen tree shadows are way worse but paradoxically they look more realistic. You just don't see sharp shadows in real life.
That's not true, if true is just 10 feet long then you see it clear, it true more higher than shadows like blurring you can check it in real life. but in this particularly that place the tree was not that high. its around 10f or less.
Where do youlive man? This is not true, please consider a glass prescription. Light is properly represented with path tracing. You may argue that some leaves are not uniform and they let pass part of the light or scattered it on the edge let to a small softer shadow. But this is a material modelling and too extreme to handle. Neverthelss, in real life you do not have a unique piece of shadow without smaller or sharp point.
@@IcaniCorrono Where do you live? On mars? Leaves shadows look like lumen shadows, not like path tracing. Don't be absurd.
@@damazywlodarczyk Go out and touch grass? I am looking at a tree in my backyard right now while i type this and its shadows look WAY more similar to the RT one
Just google "picture of shadows of a tree" and you'll see.
3:07 ... The thing I love most about Ray Tracing is the ray traced POP IN 10 meters from player , present on a 2000$ rtx 4090 with 600$ 7800x3d CPU system. It's so immersive, that I love to enable it just to get that sudden jump scare .I love it. (Witcher 3 looks better without Ray tracing for the same reason)
Dude is talking about reflections, and here I am just looking at the caustics looking so damn good on rtx
To be fair I talked about them too and they do look really nice.
All I see is that the "full RT" mode was definitely not used while creating the world in terms of artistic vision but it was added as an afterthought. As a result, full RT mode makes the game lose a lot of artistic atmosphere.
sad part is those can be faked easily but they didnt bother for non 4090 owners...
@@damara2268 No it doesn't. I think you're just poor-coping
"Lost about 25 FPS, again, the difference is not that big". Bruv. That's 20% loss in FPS. What are you talking about? Using the same specs and same exact game settings but on a 4k monitor, I am achieving 110 FPS (Lumen) and 70 FPS (Very High RT). On a high refresh rate monitor that makes a huge difference.
Yes and also while using dlss and FG which absolutely tells nothing about the change of performance.
Turn that off and then see the real difference, maybe it would be even 50%
Not the best at math
Who cares. DLSS + FG is the real performance, as that's how I perceive it on my screen and while playing the game.@@brunocerny
he's talking about graphics differences
@@soumitrasarkar Stop bitching
Pathtracing is pretty heavy to run, we peasant gamers can't afford 1000$ cards, it's not worth it at the moment, fortunately Lumen looks really good and I'm happy it's at least a solid alternative.
1000$ GPU it self is a mockery. Its only due to crypto mining prices of gaming GPU rose so high.
Ok AMDemential. Even a rtx 4060 can run path tracing 🤡
I'm playing this game with path tracing on an RTX 4060 TI 16GB using Hardware Unboxed's optimized settings. Yes it's heavy and I'm using frame generation, but it's a single player and I chose the breath taking visuals over 80+ FPS
@@maldosogamer I hear you, I have the same GPU on 1440p. As casual gamer, I preferred the overall feel of the game to the FPS, or supposed crazy high rez. I have full RT with an average of 72 FPS. I had to sacrifice super resolution to 50. And honestly I don't see the difference with the 75.
@@OmnianMIU At what cost thought? Seriously, to run ray tracing on more modest hardware, you have to make some big cuts in other areas to get a smooth frame rate.
It's only when you spend big that you don't really have to compromise but even then, on many games you still have too but it's modest compared to more modest hardware.
Ray tracing isn't worth it yet for most and I don't think it will be till the next gen consoles are out and once the hardware on the PC is far more affordable that developers can target it from the ground up and not slap it onto of games that were designed around baked lighting, which is what most of them do.
From my experience under normal play conditions, you can get away without ray tracing in most cases apart from reflections on marble or glass surfaces, they look a lot better, but in every other area, the difference is a lot smaller and because of the performance hit, it's not really worth it yet.
Ray tracing is better but in normal play, the difference becomes far less noticeable to really care about it, especially when you consider the performance hit of ray tracing.
Still, some would disagree with that like Alex at DF who seems to make it seem like ray tracing is like going from C64 visuals to the latest PC visuals lol.
Honestly, when it comes to ray tracing, the real highlight for me is reflective surfaces like marble floors or glass, everything else is passable with normal baked lighting under normal play conditions.
With that said, ray tracing is the future but I think the real game changer of that will be with the next gen consoles and once the hardware is cheap enough on PC that even low end gpu's can do it without having a heart attack, and for now, the performance hit and hardware needed is just too expensive to care about ray tracing for what is not really that big of a difference under normal play and I've tried a few times with ray tracing on with games but I usually end up switching it off with the exception of the odd game like Spider-Man that does look better with it on, but with most games, you can do without it, without it really taking much away from the game.
RT is overrated, its far from being mainstream. Like C64 to modern PC games, the limits of raster has not been fully reached. For RT to be mainstream, you'd need to have at least the mainstream GPUs like RTX xx60 and RX x600 models to be able to run RT games and max settings above 60fps minimum. And from there, newer generation of RT games will slowly increase the RT qualities like number of rays and bounces, better reflection, refraction and sub surface scattering. But that kind of future is probably decades away. We took almost 40 years from C64 to reach where we are today, the path of RT has barely just started.
The best way to tell if raytracing is on is if the fps drops very low, really low.
If I'm not mistaken, the version they used is UE 5.0, so, because at the time UE didn't support Nanite for vegetation they had to disable VSM and use standard Cascade SM, this is why you see the resolution changing with the distance. They also use Lumen only with Signed Distance Field and not with Proxy Meshes, plus, Lumen improved a lot since 5.0, both in performance and quality, same goes for reflections. I don't know how the difference would compare between NVRTX and Lumen in 5.4. Usually you have a benefit when you have multiple light sources, but this game seems to just mostly relay on sunlight, so shadows and GI should be pretty close in the last version. Too bad they didn't upgrade to 5.2 at least, but I understand it's not a small endeavor.
Yeah UE5 has improved quite a lot. I also notice there's some lower rea textures like rocks while others are higher res. Kind of unusual looking. Not sure it it's a creative choice.
Would be nice if they could update to latest UE5 but I don't know much about what it takes to do that. What I'd like to know is if the NVRTX can be split into each RT effect be it's own settings and use Lumen lighting for ex and RT reflections and shadows instead of it all being lumped into one Full Ray Tracing setting.
Development is apart from 2018. so its hard or even impossible to upgrade to UE5.3 and more
Not true.. VSM works just needs to be turned on.
im pretty sure it does not matter that much cause even the current version has problems with VSM. VSM cache gets invalid if world position offset get used even tho you can deactivate world position offset on distance to save performance the performance hit is anyway still pretty huge.
You would need a pretty different pipeline for vegetation which would involve world position offset textures to reduce the logic in the shader as much as possible.
Could they utilize UE5.4 if they release a new patch in a near future?
Ray tracing looks great, no one is arguing it doesn't. The problem is that it requires a 4090... if you replace that 4090 (and the 7800X3D) with actually affordable alternatives (in other words, don't go with the money is no object setup, which is the reality for I dunno, 99% OF GAMERS) Ray tracing makes the games a slide show, Lumen does look worse but it doesn't cripple performance as much as Ray tracing. The real problem is that both are unplayable on anything other than a money is no object rig.
to me the only ray tracing that makes a big difference that is worth the frame rate hit is the shadows. it really brings out the image to life compared to the more brighter and HDR colors of RT global illumination and reflection. reflection is pretty minor tbh. Shadows is a big impact as you see it a lot throughout the game. The lighting can be compromised with ingame Lumen from UE5.
at 4k sure, but at lower resolutions something like 4060ti on medium ray-tracing 1080p can run it i'm sure. 4070 for 2k high rt probably.
What are you talking about, gentlemen? I'm playing the game on 4070 at 1440p at all max, rt-max, with dlss-quality-85 and a low-latency generator (on) at 70 fps in beauty. Dla\ dlss on UE5 work out perfectly as well as the frame generator. Shadows can be lowered by ultra, there will be no difference, but there will be another +5 fps. Actually, NV users have been playing games on ultra and rt-max for a long time in 1080p and 1440p even on medium maps (just not the heaviest version of the "path"). But in Wukong, the 4070 at max copes in 2k and with rt-path, unlike all Amd cards.
@@evrussia on a $600 USD GPU, with upscaling and frame gen, that was my whole point
@@Jkend199 dawg. full raytracing runs over 60fps fine on my 3080 on 1440p, it dosent require a 4090
Wow, I thought this channel had at least half a mil' subscribers, judging by the quality of the content.
Thanks that's flattering
Ineed, but he is on the path. Suscribed!
The transition from shadow to light makes sense if you hike a lot in the real world. Your eyes take some time to adjust. Also it actually makes sense that shadows are dark - your eyes can only accomodate so much. I am sure they can patch in any of these missing features into UE5 at some time. It is good practice to include Lumen so that people can compare and complain so that maybe we get some feature parity.
Your eyes adjust? I though it was only on camera. Like, if you put the camera in a view with both indoor and outdoor at the same time, it will adjust just for one and the other will be too dark or too bright. With my eyes I see both at adequate lightning with no adjustment when steping outside or inside.
@@TheEllord33 I am unsure of your question. Of course eyes adjust from going from light to dark and vice versa. That’s the entire job of the pupils. As you transition from light to dark initially you will be unable to make out detail - the darker it is the more time it will take to adjust - ever hear of night blindness? The inverse is also true - if you go from very dark to light.
Where are you coming up with adequate lighting - if you are hiking around outside under trees and then you find a cave or deep alcove you initially won’t be able to see well until your eyes adjust.
I still am unsure if I am understanding your question.
@@diggledoggledo But the brain filter and the pupil is so fast that it's not noticeable. Going from bright to dark does't make me blind.
Maybe for you having very constrasted environnement is realistic because that's how you see the world. For me, when I play Wukong, having the environnement visibility change when going to a tunnel is unrealistic. Another exemple is the absence of starbust light, for 33% of the population having astimatism it's unrealistic.
Therefore "realistic" is relative.
This was superbly analyzed buddy, really appreciated and thank you for making this video in-depth analysis.
Thanks. It's a learning process.
Full ray tracing is just a dream for console gamers... Maybe the next generation of consoles might have this feature..
It looks so gorgeous with full RT. Console owners and brokies seethe and cope. "Duh, ray tracing isn't that important. Duh, lumen looks more realistic" lol Sad. Especially the "lumen looks more realistic" comment. Ultra cope right there.
Performance tests should always be done in raw card performance to really compared the difference, no DLSS and no Frame Gen !
So you can see the difference between Full RT raw perf vs Lumen raw perf, and then you can do a test with DLSS and frame gen if you want to see the performance improvements of the added tech !
The water physics looks funny. First time I've seen a game where water travels at the speed of light. Damn them waves.
They're using an older version of UE5.0 I think. They've improved the water with later updates.
very good comparison, i would also like to see developers include settings like amount of rays per pixel and amount of bounces.
Yeah that'd be nice. Someone will probably drop a mod.
I prefer how Lumen looks, darker areas that should be dark, are dark, the RT looks like there's way too much light in the scene
I agree
Eh. I like to be able to see the game.
yeah ... lumen seems more realistic here. I think the RT would look better if contrast and sharpness was turned down a bit
I agree except for the RT shadows. Shadows and infinite reflections always look great
@@fenixa2z936So you aren't able to see in real life?
Great job man!
Im actually surprised how little of a hit to performance Full RT was..
Shadows are definitely the biggest stand out.
The water reflections being next!
Im currently playing on the XTX however and in fairness i have no real complaints with Lumen.
The difference when you see full RT cant be argued however..
Nice, yeah I saw you made it to the next area. I Downed the Tiger boss last night.
@TerraWare Tiger Boss was a nightmare although not my hardest.
Make sure you pick up the wind tamer to do the final chapter 2 boss.
There's a lot of hidden stuff in chapter 2 that also takes you back to chapter 1.
A waterfall unlock and a pretty cool Dragon fight etc.
Definitely worth doing as you'll pick up materials for a cool staff.
@@Spratty-wb3is I'd heard the tiger boss was hard but I got him on my 4th try. The toughest boss so far that too me a bunch of tries was the Whiteclad Noble. The guy with the white hair in the swamp.
I'm exploring all the areas I can though, a lot of hidden bosses.
About the "cascade shadows" I prefer "no cascade" xD because the transition in the cascade shadows is very abrupt.
I mean, I prefer all shadows in low quality, before you have low, middle and high depending of the distance. Or at least, increase the distance of the high showdow. In this game is very close.
Or have a cascade, but with a smooth transition between high, middle and low resolution shadows.
Depends what you prefer in games but Lumen looks way more realistic.
not realistic, but cinematic.
you have to be a serial basement dweller to say that lumen looks more realistic than RT which is how light behaves in reality
@@s1ndrome117 Or dude just owns a shitty low tier GPU that can't handle path tracing lol.
not even close lmao
reality has light in the shadows at daytime.. Lumen is cinematic but not realistic
3:07 ... The thing I love most about Ray Tracing is the ray traced POP IN 10 meters from player , present on a 2000$ rtx 4090 with 600$ 7800x3d CPU system. It's so immersive, that I love to enable it just to get that sudden jump scare .I love it. (Witcher 3 looks better without Ray tracing for the same reason)
Dude. Who ever says PT in this game is real life definitely never left the basement. Ex GI in the game, lumen is real life lighting. You don't go in cave with light bouncing so bright light PT
Great image quality analysis, thanks! But i do agree with other commenters that for an action game comparison should be done with framegen off. The lumen haze looks likely an intended stylistic choice that dousnt work on RT
Thanks. Frame gen was only enabled in the performance difference section. All image quality comparisons was done with a 60 FPS lock on both Lumen and Full RT no frame gen.
The default shadows of the non RT example are bad cause they don‘t use the new tech virtual shadowmaps cause of the performance hit by world position offset objects such as vegetation moving etc. . This can cause a pretty huge hit in ms. They still using the old cascade shadows tech. Virtual Shadow maps would have similiar details like the RT version which you showed.
The adjustments from the game are directly responsible for the loss of details on the shadows in the Lumen software RT setup. It should be possible to tweak those via console commands. Technically speaking, we are talking here about Lumen hardware RT and Lumen software RT (surface cache), because Lumen is the graphics component inside the Unreal Engine responsible for RT calculations.
Hey your content is pretty rare and this video is great!
Lumen is a realistic illumination, that hazy effect is part of its feature, just like in real world, we have atmosphere. You can tell by your character which is not affected by the hazy effect because it was near the camera while the farther objects are getting hazy. And one notable thing is, if you are in a darker area and approach a beam of light, you can't see what that backgroud is until you are in the beam of light, just like a real like camare works, due to dynamic range.
Right. I've got tons of comments of people prefering lumen lighting and others prefering RT. Guess pick your poison. LOL
@@TerraWare yeah I know, but some feature of the RT was far superior and its realistic unlike Lumen. For example the reflected lights that bounce off from the water. Its pretty realistic in RT.
Some of these are tradeoffs made for artistic or performance reasons and not intrinsically a limitation of Lumen, for example the shadow resolution comparisons. Also, the caustic refraction is a hack that can be applied to non ray tracing scenes and doesn't seem to be fully RT even though it is labeled an RT feature. The brightness adaption to the interior lighting and fractional contribution of GI is also possibly a bit of an artistic choice. Softness might be a contrast sensitivity metric or participating media or a simple Nanite setting. Basically I think NVIDIA have some talented experts who have added several tricks and enhancements under the RT umbrella that sometimes aren't RT when discussing isolated features so you're seeing additional NVIDIA polish they've been allowed to tweak via Unreal settings plus some RT features bundled under an RT brand.
Like another Vincent mentioned, you can definitely tell in the Global Illumination which was used to work on the Game and what is the intended "mood" for the game, but god damn those Shadows are in a whole different league with how crisp they are.
I also wish the Fog/Blur with Lumen wouldn't be so intense as I feel when there isnt much of it, it can go much closer to RT but with that insane Blur/Fog at some places, it looks like a much worse Option.
Also that Shadow on the cliff side with the Tree with Lumen felt like something not loading in haha.
I think a sort of in between could be a good option. The shadows can be a bit too sharp with full RT.
Here's the main difference between Lumen and RT in simple terms from consumers pov from a artist whos working in UE5.
RT Pros:
Better, softer shadows from light source (with increase cost with dynamic lighting)
Better reflection/refraction (with increased cost depending on bounces and depth ie. if 3 chrome balls are in the scene do they reflect off each other infinitely. Or how deep does water depth goes)
RT Cons:
Doesn't work without RTX
Increased performance cost depending on how many triangles in the scene
GI is not as realistic (doesn't mean its not good looking)
Lumen Pros:
Better performance with nanite geometry (the bigger the world, the more detail the mesh the better)
VSM (virtual shadow maps) works really well with nanite and have better performance than RT shadows
GI is technically closer to Path Tracing (which is more realistic, but doesn't mean players prefer the look)
Lumen Cons:
Shadows can become very unrealistic if you push past its limits (overlapping foliage) and lose detail in certain parts such as 14:03 the tree on the left is losing shadow details (doesn't mean the players care too much)
Reflection is catching up to RT but not quite there yet
Not much performance gain if not using nanite geo
Not much performance gain compare to RT if the geo is very low poly
Overall Lumen is slowly taking over RT and it will be the future of gaming. I know Wukong doesn't use Nanite foliage (it wasn't stable when the devs were working at the time) that's why the game technically doesn't have a bigger, better performance gain with Lumen on and might actually lose a bit of performance because of that. Lumen is also very close to looking like Path Tracing, its going to be crazy in a few years how games is going to perform and look.
I almost wish UE5 would have been designed so that Lumen could utilize the RT cores itself, rather than switching to a secondary pipeline for RT. Use it to accelerate Lumen and run it in higher detail AND a faster speed. It seems like that would be easier on artists as well.
From what I can tell from the videos, the game was probably designed around Lumen. I think the "washed out" look being commented on is the fact that they probably did a decent amount of tweaking with the fog, much of which seems to be lost when switching to RT. It seems like it loses some of its environmental feel. So the artists likely would have had to do two set of lighting and composition adjustments.
The shadows look WAY better with RT. I like RT as a shadow solution because it doesn't need cascaded shadow maps. Shadows are full resolution and already scaled properly. But I do wish they were a bit softer.
Yeah I agree, the full RT shadows should be a bit softer based on distance of object to shadow casting surface. Lumen can be utilized to utilize hardware RT according to Digital Foundry's extensive coverage of Lumen but its something devs for the most part don't do. I'm not sure why.
Lumen looks significantly more realistic, with lighting that feels natural, while Nvidia’s ray tracing tends to overly brighten everything. I immediately noticed the difference between regular RT and path tracing, where path tracing is darker and more authentic. Lumen achieves a similar darker, realistic look, making Nvidia’s ray tracing appear outdated. I don't think it's worth paying $1,500 for Nvidia's ray tracing anymore.
When comparing textures, Lumen's details are incredibly lifelike, whereas Nvidia’s ray tracing looks more like a photo edit. Lumen's realism really stands out, especially in the vegetation and ground textures, which look remarkably real.
I honestly feel like Lumen is the way the devs intended the game to look. Realistic lighting is in my opinion inferior to artistic lighting... I mean, imagine if Movies were lit "realistically", it takes away a lot from the artistic vision of the medium.
Realistic and artistic lighting are not mutually exclusive things. Movies typically *do* use realistic lighting, even ones that are more stylized. They're just artistically composed scenes making excellent use of that realistic lighting in creative ways, rather than just throwing some lights around and calling it a day.
The reason some scenes like this in games don't always hit the mark isn't because they're "too realistic" it's because most video game artists are accustomed to working with more limitations, and it isn't yet easily accessible to consumers, so the pay off still lies largely in using older techniques when it comes to consumer views on the final product. In other words, if you put a bunch of development time/effort into a feature that only ~25% (for example, not saying those are the exact numbers) of your consumers will be able to use and you don't make artwork that still holds up for the rest, then you're wasting most of your resources. So these scenes are often developed with the mid/lower end systems in mind, so the scenes are primarily composed by artists who are limited by simpler rendering tech. Higher end settings are then reserved for marketing and hype purposes, and if the studio is managed well enough, it can lead to some stellar results too (see Alan Wake 2, for example).
If "realistic < artistic" was true, then all sorts of movies would look like trash, including things like pixar, studio ghibli, etc. All of those artists base their work HEAVILY in the principles of real-world light propagation. Don't get me wrong, I agree that having an artistic eye and applying it to your work is extremely important for such things, I'm just saying those things are not mutually exclusive. Even in this example, you're not even comparing apples to oranges. You're comparing apples to... slightly fresher apples lol. Both lighting methods shown in the video are using the principles of realistic light paths, and one is just more physically accurate and robust than the other.
Great video I also was impressed with how good lumen looks in this game hopefully more devs learn how to use it properly
Nah... Path Tracing is still the best.
@@HDRGamingHub This
Amazing work sir
Thank you! Finally, I can see the difference between full RT and Lumen!
Anyways, price policy of Nvidia is out of this world. There are no budget RTX cards suitable for real full RT gaming so...
Yeah it's expensive
Amazing video, I look forward to more videos
as a game dev, lumen is definitely more realistic, the rtx in wukong doesn't have indirect lighting, look at 3:40 and how with lumen the whole place is filled with orange from the light bouncing of the cliffs, that is how it's supposed to be. Even if you can afford ray tracing in my opinion having realistic indirect lighting is much more important.
Lumen GI is way too dark, that's my biggest complaint otherwise it's great.
It's a known fact that RT doesn't support incoherent rays.
@@TerraWarewith proper hdr, it would be better
There is something extremely suspicious to me @3:58, that hut cant be properly lit/shadowed. (looks like it has a hole in roof with the RT)
I think sometimes UE5 needs a restart to apply certain graphic options, and sometimes it simply bugs out.
I agree. Not only that, lumen in this case looks more aesthetically pleasing. Also, RT reflections look way too perfect and well defined whereas in real life they’re more distorted, especially when the water is agitated.
i love the lumen one cuz it seems to be more concept arty and has a more intense mood to the whole place imo. which in this case i prefer more than complete realism
спасибо за проделанную работу)
It is really professional of you to turn down shadow, ambient occlusion and reflection quality. Most influencers out there knows nil about these cutting edge technologies and they just jump on the bandwagon of criticism
The lumen effect is actually visually a lot more appealing, ambient noise (fog, dirt, sand, etc.) and high shadow/light contrast, to me it appear more realistic instead of casting 1:1 from a high resolution camera photo of the rtx, unfortunately is bit bugged and struggle to render leaving the result a bit off sometimes.
Obviously hardware lumen or Nvidia raytracing is better than software lumen, but you can't deny that software lumen reflections with SSR over them is way better than SSR with a cubemap underneath. The lumen reflections really help with removing a lot of the problems with SSR. Still has artifacts for sure, but it's way better.
thanks again for this interesting video. I think its not possible to mix up path tracing with the lumen, its one or the other. i might be wrong, but i think if you choose the lumen route, everything is in that pipeline. so if you want both, you might end up with double gpu taxing. not sure though, but this is how i think it works.
I don't know, it could be the case I guess. I have thought that maybe thats why they didn't do it.
correct. although not 100%. For RT, many of the operations overlap. So if you are already creating bvh for reflections and other things, it would be more efficient to do GI with RT as well, and more expensive to add lumen. In fact, reflections require more detailed RT data, so getting GI as a byproduct of that is a lot better
Not true. Digital Foundry mentioned this in their videos a few time.
Lumen is a software RT. It can be improved by hardware enhancements, accelerated by RT cores. Not sure about other engines, but UE5 works exactly like this. Hardware RT just improves accuracy of RT effects.
Yes we need a 4090 for this. XDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD Very nice games in 2024. If need the max graphics buy a 3500$ PC for a 35$ game. This is the future of the PC gaming? RT Off, thanks.
Playing with lumen sometimes makes it seem like I'm playing the game in HDR when I have an SDR monitor.
Holy mother of....
At 3:15 and 3:56 the difference between the two is night & day. Lumen eliminates SO MUCH of the "gamey" lighting we've grown so used to when looking in dark/interior areas. Just look at the way everything blends together the more away it is from our view... Just... wow... And no texture detail is not gone, its the volumetrics at play naturally obstructing details/ sharpness based on camera distance (I think).
RT in this comparison, IMO is only worth it for the water realism. If the game gets updated to feature caustics tech in Lumen I really see no reason to use RT, it's also heavier to run.
Interesting how I have got so many comments of some people preferring Lumen, others ray tracing. Some have been very blunt about preferring one over the other.
excellent video brother!!!
Thanks man
5:00 that is a massive difference to me in the cave. I'd already be in my monitor settings to lift up those shadows because it's unplayable (for this genre, not creeping in the shadows in a horror game) with so much detail missing compared to the nV solution. Of course I'd like to hear what the devs have to say about artistic intention, because these two images are nothing alike.
IDK about the "not much difference" part, RT on low halves my FPS on 3080Ti
yes i agree with you, it does not halve my fps but it takes arround 20% away on a rtx4070. also i have alot of crashes because of out of memory errors, so i guess the game isnt really optimized.
@@DenizD-g4b maybe 4000 series is just that much better at RT, plus frame generation. But I had no game crashes, so at least I have that going for me 😁
@@DenizD-g4b out of memory error might from your CPU being degraded if you have an Intel i9, I have a 4070 Super and no crash at all, in fact the game doesn’t use that much memory, I never gone past 8GB of VRAM.
Lumen looks to be doing that thing cameras do where they adjust to surrounding light, making darker areas lighter when the entire area is dark. Admittedly that's accurate, but if you remember having to line up a shot with your phone against a light, it is indeed very annoying.
There is a mod on a nexus which turns on ue5 shadows in good quality
short answer :
Full RT = physic realistic
Lumen = visual realistic
Good video thank you!
There is a shocking truth. There is a channel called "Guille Ghemi" which is in spanish. He discovered that there is raytracing options that comes with a change of textures instead to be another way of redendering in the light by it self. So, we can't really know how deep goes raytracing. I think that raytracing could be a "competitive advantage" for some games where you need other ilumination.
You didn't have to be very apologetic about Lumens, but otherwise great video with good attention to details.
Yeah, I guess I didn't want to come across as bashing it because I think Lumen looks very good as well.
The Lumen look is the originally intended look! And it even feels that way in this very comparison.
Unfortunately, for technical reasons (early UE 5.0), the Lumen shadows are unstable and too low rez. Same for réflexions.
The RT is cleaner, but looses a lot of the original artistic intentions.
Even Digital Foundry didn't notice that, which seems so obvious to me.
Lumens Global Illumination is much better IMO, it adds so much depth to the scenes, giving it a grandiose feel to it. While RT seems more "gamified" to make easier to see. The RT shadows are too sharp also. In everything else, RT wins.
Good video!
Thanks
I got to say, water and shadow looks way better on RT. (Maybe a bit too much sharp sometime, that is not that much realistic)
Lumen is really good if you need some extra performance and i fell it even looks having a better ambiance in some case scenario.
If it can make me reach the 120fps or something stable, i would take it using Lumen.
At this level of details, I don't care that much about water and shadow over a smooth gameplay.
Lumen looks fantastic for games where realism is the rule like shooters
bro is quite clear that lumen got volumetric ilumination , is like nvidia is a 30 mm lens f8 and lumen is 30 mm f1.8 got depth got softer image out focus
For my eyes, Lumen is probably more accurate, the volumetric fog more visible.
Lumen is less accurate, hence there is less light bounce and scenes are darker. Its the same with path tracing, if you decrease light bounces it becomes darker. Also, lumen is the GI solution of UE5. Reflections, Shadows and other stuff is not 'lumen'
Awesome ❤
Regarding the shaows section and definition of the leaves:
For what reason do developers not record an animated loop of waving leaves and just run that over the ground texture?
Because they won't be in sync with the actual trees movement.
@@MLWJ1993 valid
Hopefully, Game Science devs just made truckloads of money. They release a patch for more graphical settings and, a sharpening slider. Also sucks the game doesn't have HDR.
Yes, I'd love to see HDR as the next thing and a sharpness slider.
@LoneStarEse777that actually sucks compared to real hdr. Rtx hdr works better but it also looks nothing like the real deal...
@@TerraWare WukongTweak_v0.8.1 (adjustable sharpness)
I play it with RTX HDR, in-game brightness at 20, and it looks gorgeous.
Lumen has the contrast turned up to 11.
Lumens do not bounce light, that's why.
I think lumen is prettier. I liked how the statue was shrouded in fog, it fits more a legendary tale
it's pretty cool that as simple humans, we can preceive difference in the behaviour of water waves and try to solve them on our head, in my case for some reason my brain keeps telling me that tha wukong is based on smaller animals, with like half a meter of height, that for somer reason corects the problem with waves, i thik they are too big and are moving too fast
the foggy look on the lumen does make it look realistic ngl 3:47
3:07 ... The thing I love most about Ray Tracing is the ray traced POP IN 10 meters from player , present on a 2000$ rtx 4090 with 600$ 7800x3d CPU system. It's so immersive, that I love to enable it just to get that sudden jump scare .I love it. (Witcher 3 looks better without Ray tracing for the same reason)
No, you do not, and that pop-in is a bug rather than norm (BVH set too low for certain shadows, it was fixed in later revisions of Witcher 3 NG).
And Witcher 3 looks insanely better with RT, especially in interiors, you need new glasses:
th-cam.com/video/_o59iS_4SHY/w-d-xo.html&pp=ygUgcmF5IHRyYWNpbmcgcmV2b2x1dGlvbiB3aXRjaGVyIDM%3D
@@frantavopicka5259 yeah... I will make sure to go to settings menu and change ray tracing settings every time I move into exteriors
@@soulsbourne You have obviously 0 idea what you're talking about and haven't played the game in ages. Try it on the latest build with ray tracing, and then talk shit, please.
RT has more detail, and Lumen has a more cinematic look to it. Down to the person playing, which they like more.
Lumen in this game has a very Shadow Of The Colossus vibe to it.
It's a fast paced game and RT is not there yet, people expect to be enjoying the game play on the hardware they've got and the devs did an great job of polishing the product while still being able to run on older hardware. Until Ray/Path Tracing at a decent level is not available in budget cards it's still only a nice PR. Does it look nice - yes it does, does you need RT to be able to enjoy yourself in a good game - no.
Yeah I agree. Next gen engine with great visuals that runs great on current hardware and has tech for high end and future hardware. Ideally this would be every PC version of every AAA game.
The difference actually IS big, but it remains perfectly playable at 100 fps.
imo as a 3d artist lumen looks better
it blends the volumentrics and environment assets really well
yea the RT looks more detailed if you only look at the individual assets, but if you actually look at the overall picture properly, lumen is better by far :)
Lumen does look really good. It's a bit too dark if I had to point out something that stands out. If I could choose I'd keep RT reflections, shadows and caustics
the full rt does look better but keeping it real....Lumen looks good enough....only thing I DON'T like is the extra haziness you see when lumen is used. I'd use whichever tech uses the lower resources for RT. I'm more interested in smooth gameplay than getting the very best visuals.
It’s a good alternative for AMD owners.
For most Nvidia owners too to be fair.
2:55 I DO say that the lumen solution looks bad. It literally makes everything harder to see and a lot of details are lost (quality details).
As far as I know ,lumen is not compatible with ray tracing, you can only choose one of the lighting method.
1. Both look overshapened
2. I prefer lumen for GI. It just looks artistically better, some areas should be dark...
3. I prefer the RT water and shadows, it's just better.
Lemen looks cinematic with volumetric lighting.
Strange, the Lumen version appears to be much more realistic - the reality is much less clear, defined, and high-res than we think it is.
Hey mate!
There is actually a game which already splits reflection, Shadow and GI RTX raytracing in its optons. Check Control from remedy which is still to this day one of the best showcase of what RTX raytrace can do. It aged well, looks a bit dated though for sure.
It's not an Nvidia solution. it's simply ray tracing. Great video.
Thanks. It uses the Nvidia branch of UE5 to implement these RT effects which is why I phrased it that way. I also get comments of people saying Lumen is ray tracing too which is technically true. So it makes it a bit challenging to separate both solutions which are at the end of the day ray tracing if that makes sense.
@@TerraWare np
Uh! i like the caustics you get on the water with full raytraced on =O
@Warm_Fireplace Yah me too, and it bounces on enemies and your character too. Wish I'd pointed that out a bit better.
От резкости в видео чуть глаз не лишился
13:24 Lumens shadow is more realistic like in real life. Nvidia shadows looks more cosmetic. You don't see those shadows in real life. UE5 Raytracing has another level of detail.
Take note that you need to restart the game to apply RTX, It was strange I didn't see any difference when I turn RT On but turn out I need reboot the game. RT look much better in person than what you see in comparison videos, although still might not worth it unless you have OCD with blurry and flickering shadows
Lumen looks like a console game blur fest. RT looks like a pc title.
why you doing testing with frame gen??
3:00 Hardware RT is brighter because it makes more bounces around the scene.
Not a fan of rtx. I have a RTX3080, but it is not enough to be able to run rayteacing smoothly on any game.
The only ways is to select low quality raytracing and use DLSL.
Or maybe Buy a 4090. But it is too expensive
@rasikrodriguez3962 I have a 3080ti which is practically the same thing. It's a very capable ray tracing gpu.