Gadgetory

so as you can see the original tech time I was on the right and the actual game is on the left and if you look over at the train god damn you've seen the r-tx performance numbers for battlefield 5 but what we haven't seen a lot of yet is a deep dive graphics discussion and that's what we're doing today so we're to be talking about every single aspect of RDX in battlefield 5 how its implemented how it works and what the significant changes are that you need to pay attention to so that's this will cover low vs. ultra quality settings will be covering screen space versus non screen space reflections all different aspects and joining me is Andrew from our team who is also a 3d artist and has a lot of experience working with this type of graphics before that this video is brought to you by iy power and the rush delivery to you program the fresh rdy approach gets high-end gaming pcs shipped the same day you order them and is also one of the only places you can get a 99 hundred K for a reasonable price right now systems include the rdy enthusiast level game PC with a 20 80 TI 900 K and 16 gigabytes of 32 hundred megahertz memory available with same-day shipping or pickup locally these systems are built by people who are experienced builders and component choice that makes sense learn more at the link in the description below let's get this out of the way first in a tech demo the iconic demonstration that NVIDIA and dice had were the eyes on the characters where you saw fire reflections in the eyes and so just to answer that question of did it make it into the game and you can see the playback of the original demo now the answer is well sort of there is muzzle flash in the eyes of characters and multiplayer but and ER if we go back and look at the tech demo the first question here is are we seeing the same resolution you think of or same reflection quality as we see in the final product this is a really high yeah I was gonna say this as well it's definitely a lot higher fidelity than the final game has it's the final game looks a lot smaller than a lot noisier and the playback in the tech time I was really high frame rate as well in the eyes specifically which is just interesting it speaks to the quote level of quality being maintained throughout that demonstration but we're also seeing a whole lot of some kind of visual artifacting right and dice has acknowledged this as well and some of their bug release notes so they've actually noted that they because we're seeing the artifact in primarily around the cheekbone and on the bridge of the nose yeah and their patch notes they said art affecting on the face with r-tx on okay and did they fix it or did they have come in a fix okay so for quality of what we're seeing then in the eye is just a giant red orange flash yeah and there's no there's no real shape to it it is a different type of fire well no it's a muzzle flash so different perspective but it did make it into the game for the next clip let's compare it low versus ultra so there's been some discussion as to whether this has any actual visual impact or there any differences at all there are there are some differences so we have here a shot of the car but more importantly we have a shot of the puddles of water behind it between low and ultra and the main things that we noticed were some changes in the puddle on the road and some changes on top of the card right so the changes that you're seeing are around places where water is touching bricks like at the border of the puddle and we think that's because the roughness of those bricks would be a lot lower compared to the completely dry bricks okay so changing the roughness threshold then this is the the point at which the material reflects the environment via r-tx and changing the roughness threshold is something we're seeing here at Ultra we have some numbers here so you were suggesting anything probably below a zero point for roughness per an Nvidia engineers recommendation for optimal threshold is probably going to be shown on altra yes and then anything below probably 0.1 is going to be shown on low yes okay so then what does that mean so around 0.4 like 0.3 to 0.5 is around the roughness of an oily people not that oily but a regular human faces skin depending on their age in oiliness and wetness and then anything around point one would be someplace around like shiny like polished metals somewhere or like I ball so the scale for roughness is zero to one like a lot of things in graphics and zero is going to be the glossiest right and then one will be of the roughest and this scale is useful we have a well we have another example we can show actually that's pretty useful and this is a plane so this is a downed plane in the game and if you look closely at the top corner the left side of the plane you'll notice that there's some fire reflection between low and ultra and that reflection is a lot it's stretched out it's it's visible over a longer part of the plane with the ultra settings so then why is that and how does that relate back to what we're saying with roughness and glossiness so the painted part of the plane would be a lot rougher than the scratch metal surface of the plane where you can see underneath the paint and so when you turn it to low it's only focusing on the scratched shiny pieces of metal and that's because that that's reaching the threshold that's gonna be lower on the numerical scale so you're gonna be closer to zero with the scratch metal surface whereas with the painted surface you're gonna be closer to one not that close to one but your going towards maybe 0.4 or something like that so I think our conclusion on this then for the graphic settings between ultra-low and all the steps in between it's just it's changing the roughness threshold again the point at which the material is sort of reflecting the environment yes and anything below the threshold is is no longer being reflected which will conserve resources while still reflecting something somewhere it's just going to be primarily in the shinier surfaces okay let's talk about object kollene and reflection : next we have a series of examples for this starting with the train so for the train reflection this is with r-tx on and set to ultra and as we sort of step past the distance threshold you'll see that the sign in the back left corner of the shot is either reflected or not reflected so this is probably related to how objects are normally cold in games where they're distant space and the further away you get you get some pop in or pop out right the game decides that it's not necessary to take up resources for it so somehow they're also doing that within the reflections of raytrace objects I think the most interesting thing about this is that you can see what's behind the hotel sign when it's gone right yes it's not like it's it's it's information that's given to you up until the point that you're punished for having too high of a graphics setting so for the fire reflections we're looking at some screen space versus non screen space detail here and when you're pointing the camera down what's what's happening well so the weird thing is that this is still our TX on on ultra but it's acting as if it's a screen space reflection when the fire goes out of frame of the camera then it pops away as if there was a screen space reflection but it everything else is still being a ray traced so it's just it an oddity I suppose yes and we see a lot of this where we actually we have some other examples in here like talking about the boats in the water for example for screen space versus non screen space so what's what's going on here in terms of screen space reflections so here you can see as you dip the camera down to where the boats are at a frame then the reflections also get cut off at that exact point but the boats are still being rendered because their shadows are still there and that goes for everything in the entire game not even in this game just that's how screens waste reflections work in all games you can also see in some other clips where the reflection is occluded by another object there's some artifacting in the reflections as well and it's not just for large objects you see what paper - yeah just a tiny little specks that are causing very large streaks in the water that shouldn't be there yes and those streaks are because the object is including the water as it's moving over it and we have a bit of a latency on the update for where the object is versus what it's including so is this then if there's no traditional way to fix that is this something that RT X can solve I feel like this is basically what our DX is all about they're trying to get rid of these small artifacts that have been in games for decades now yeah it's just it's very expensive in terms of resources to do this right which is the downside that you all see so we have an example here from another what game is this this is a dragon quest 11 okay dragon quest so we have an example of screen space reflections in here and this is only we've talked about before you'll notice that the window is reflecting the front of the character when the character is facing the camera so why is that the reflection doesn't know anything besides what Sun screen so it doesn't know what the back of the character looks like when the back of the character is facing away from the camera yes hence hence the name screen space reflection so what we're showing here then is there's the window behind us right the player is crawling through the window are boarding it up or something and actually it ran past or it the player they ran past me to the right to go up to the window but this is I feel like this is an interesting thought for a competitive play yes so how so would it be unfair if you could see around corners or behind you in ways that other players yes unfair okay that's a definition of unfair I think this is something that will if there's any kind of competitive or eSports play emerging around this it'll have to be normalized for there'll have to be a set of rules for you know banning or allowing it I don't know I don't know that's the thing I don't know how it's beneficial here because I could see you camping in a corner just looking at the painting to try and figure out what's going on behind you or something around a corner right but at the same time that's probably not the most effective way to play the game either that's true probably more effective to be out completing objectives so maybe it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things but certainly in some games I could see like in camp happy games I could see this being an unfair advantage or like if you're hiding behind cover and there's a car on your side of the cover and you can look into the car to see like a wide-angle view right you can see in front of you and behind you that that's like that wouldn't really be necessary in third-person shooters but in a first-person shooter like this it would make a large difference potentially yeah so next item here we have some ice and this is a exam of where traditional screen-space reflections actually are not present when r-tx is off right so our TX on we get the reflections in in the ice and I don't know is there anything special about these are abnormal we want to point out or they they just reflections they're just reflections and then you turn off our TX and you get this which is just a flat surface right and I honestly don't have any explanation for why they wouldn't use screen spaced reflections here because they could maybe artistic choice or maybe they overlooked it I don't know there's a lot of things that could happen those wonders are interesting is that these buildings are like way out of average player map area so the fact that these windows have our TX on means that it's just like a blanket rule across all surfaces right and it doesn't just to be clear here if you're having a flashback to our Final Fantasy 15 coverage we're not saying that this is being rendered at all times right we're just saying that it's being rendered when you are near the object even if it's out of bounds of play so yeah just some kind of blanket rule across all windows or something I think it's across all services I don't think they're going through and saying like this building should have r-tx from this object show Parcheesi so just check all services for what roughness right yes so just do a roughness check against everything and see if it falls within the threshold for ultra low whatever your setting is all right this is RTX ultra but there's no reflections anywhere in the river of anything like we're looking straight down at the water we should be able to see the bridge that River right now that we should be able to see the bridge but anywhere that you look it's not reflecting on even screen space reflections there's just no reflections like the ice but this is our TX ultra so then why why is this I mean is it how how granular is the implementation I guess is it oh we missed that object that doesn't seem like a good way to implement it right like if those windows that were way out of bounds head right ray tracing then this probably should let's get back to the train that we had in the intro where the player on the tank my shot so this was shown heavily in Nvidia's tech demo and it came out looking a bit different so you disable RT acts completely and videos tech demo showed some extremely blurry kind of weird reflections yeah very blurry and very clear at the same time right well yeah clears in like very opaque ish reflections right yes yes very opaque so is you don't have as much transparency in these windows so the tech demo if you're going solely based off of that it does look like r-tx off is worse than it is in reality which is unfortunate now that doesn't mean that video did something evil the ice probably prepared most the demo it could also be that it was really enough in development that they hadn't finished it if you want to give them the benefit of the doubt but ultimately it's relevant it makes RT X off look worse than it is and that has happened several times over the course of promoting RT X where you get features you get gameplay showing games without even traditional faked lighting which is just disingenuous so all this noise is being caused because since the water surface keeps moving it's not having enough time to solve for the create what the correct reflection would be with only having one sample per pixel which is hardly anything yes that is very limited so when you go back to screen space reflections since it doesn't have to do any of that the water that the noise is completely gone the water it looks clear but there's nothing reflected in the water anymore yeah and depending on your perspective here off might look better than on if you really hate noise ion does have more reflections clearly but it's also just blasted with noise so that might be a quality-of-life thing to keep in mind I guess if you want to debate over whether or not you think that's worth it but r-tx overall then the implementation I mean what do we what do we think about it here it's clearly the performance impact is massive hopefully this video helps people understand why it's massive in some ways there are clearly also some anomalies like we don't understand why that bridge wasn't reflected or why there's no reflections and the ice with r-tx off right why there's no screen space reflection with the eyes or why in the tech demo of that train looked worse than it does in the endgame we can maybe give them the benefit of the doubt on that I feel like my conclusion of how RT X is implemented is that it is always very noisy still noisy and just to really be clear here that's what the film grain off yes if anyone wants to comment and say oh you guys are idiots you get film grain on no it's just noise from our G act so then is there first of all we're probably going to see similar noise I think in other games yeah I don't think this is battlefield specific and then is there a solution too because the noise to me is probably other than the performance is the worst part of the art current r-tx implementation what is is there a path to a solution I think NVIDIA is doing this also they need to improve their denoising technology I think that's where the source of most of this is because if you even if you just take start taking two samples per pixel which is still nothing now you're doubling the amount of resources yes you have to use for that specific function yeah for RTX processing right yes the and if if that's happening when your frame rates already drop in significantly like halved then asking for another another 100 percent increase in sampling is a large ask for Nvidia so that's our recap hopefully that helps you understand the graphics better and the technology behind it how it works why why the performances is bad but also you know what it is anybody needs to improve on because this is not a perfect implementation despite the performance cost speaking subjectively here does not seem necessarily worth the visuals especially because NVIDIA has been driving for K so hard I mean onstage Jensen said this is the first 4k 60fps GPU ever even though they launched their 1080i the same phrasing and you play any game with like a 1080 or something for k62 drop the settings enough but given all of that marketing now they've got our checks where you are basically playing 1080p at 60 not 4k definitely not 4k in this game so it's it's a step backwards in resolution and performance and so you're sacrificing resolution you're sacrificing anti-aliasing because you need to give up other graphics options in order to gain r-tx and that does not necessarily seem worth it depending on really what your end goal is for the game especially if it's just weird for a shooter anyway yeah something so high action high action and single-minded you're you know you your real goal is is competitive it's not like it's an RPG or something where the goal is immersion it's a bit a bit odd overall but there's what we think you can check out more coming up soon and subscribe for that as always go to store documents nexus net to help out directly and patreon.com/scishow cameras axes table out there that you were watching we'll see you all next time