Gadgetory

everyone today we're talking about RTX tectum demos and the purpose of this is to talk about how graphics are cheated so we'll be looking at it's some of the technology that Nvidia showed and then I've brought with me Andrew a your 3d artist he does the video production and editing for the channel yes a lot of film work but also has significant experience with 3d modeling 3d art and game graphics so we're going to be analyzing the technology shown in those demos but also we'll be talking about can you do these things with traditional graphics methods and if so what's the benefit so that's what we're like if there is one that's what we're looking at today well we looking at battlefield 5 and the global illumination demo in Metro Exodus a couple of other games as well and hopefully provide some insight as to whether these things are actually impressive or not before that this video is brought to you by the Corsair strafe RGB mark 2 mechanical gaming keyboard the strafe mark 2 uses Cherry MX which is available in MX red and MX Island and uses the elevated key cap design that has become part of course there's keyboard identity elevated key caps make the keyboard much easier to clean with a blast of compressed air and limit dirt build up the keyboard use a metal body design of have received praise from us in the past in old reviews for high build quality learn more about the Corsair strafe mark 2 at the link in the description below ok so for our first one this is a global illumination room demo at the Nvidia event the launch event at Gamescom Jensen's on stage and what we have is what they're calling traditional graphics r-tx off and before actually know what let's just let's just show the next frame just before I even get into why this is not a great representation here's what they go from this our TX off to this so what we different what fuck it's like it's a cement look at the look at the objects first of all there's some transition there too from the slides changing so I mean what do we where do we start with his Andrea the object starting the same materials yeah so he claims that or for right now he claims that the red ball whether the white ball of cement and the green and video ball is like metallic with a clear coat on it okay and Johnson says that on stage yes something about how the white one is supposed to be cement material Reds leather leather ish and material if you're not familiar matters a lot for reflections just like it does in real life so that's important and then the next frame and he compares it with a ball that's made out of glass and while it's made of metal and adds two more lights into the scene in which kind of destroys the point of global illumination in the scene and adds an area light to the top yes so these two are effectively non-comparable at this point yes they are it's not a fair comparison so everything changed you all have seen our benchmarking videos when you compare things you keep as many things the same except for the one aspect you are comparing which here is supposed to be global illumination and I mean that first all the the material changes probably most egregious change because you're going from leather to glass which now is involving caustics faked or otherwise I feel like the lighting change might be the most egregious change because it's you can't do they have a point light or an area light before they had a white one panel so they have a 60 watt bulb in the ceiling and then they coat you six fluorescent tubes for some reason so this is called the point light up here yes okay and the other one is called an area light yes and what is the distinction why do we you can see point lights on the stage too so why do we why do we call so point light it would just be a singing their source of light and an area light would I guess you can't see any of the lights it's like our diffused lights that we have on the set I guess right an area light is at least when we try to calculate it digitally it's it's a lot of point lights crammed into a space so this area light is a lot of point lights and and they added two more colored ones on the side yes so what is why what what are they trying to show I'm really not sure they're trying to show to be completely honest because what you should be trying to show is the light bouncing off of the walls onto the objects that would be global illumination but since there's lights on the wall that kind of overrides any of the bouncer that beat coming off of them right because instead of having the light bounce so the lights coming from the ceiling light comes down hits the wall isn't a typical gie demonstration the light hits the wall bounces off the wall in the color that the wall is because I guess the idea is the wall absorbs every other color right in the spectrum so that red should be reflecting onto the object which is now no longer red leather it's glass but whatever and that light is no longer red because there's a blue light in front of the red wall so it just makes everything in that area blue there's nothing really between them that you can specifically point out and be like give it that does look better it's just oh these are two different images that I'm looking at and they also call this traditional graphics oh yeah that is a big problem as well and I guess the questions of the audience is when have you played a game with quote traditional graphics that looked this bad when's the last time you played a game make it like a triple-a game making it an honest effort to put in realistic graphics when have they looked this bad yeah everything is bad I feel like the shadows are the worst part to be honest right there's even reflection and shadow anti-aliasing at this point - and there's post-processing filters you can apply to stuff right so and then the next one I think is just jumps into the different I think the next one he they make the cement ball in - oh wait that's super weird so now we have multiple area lights what do they do this first then we go from multiple area lights to reflection so now we're changing the surface material it's really kind of a shy stayed away to try and make it look like the material change and light changes were all completely just a consequence of demonstrating everything else and not at all intentional then we have the final refraction demonstration we have another set of images that is actually much better at representing this where they have the Quadro card in the same room right that one didn't I couldn't be used that comparison for this actually I think they did show that one of the press day but not on stage I don't think and videos big thing with this was showing flame reflecting in the car here and I don't know does this have to do with screen space and plane or reflections or what's going on yes the thing is that this could technically be possible with plane of reflections if you had a large plane like right in front of this car here that it can sample from but otherwise if most games just use screen space reflections because they're a lot cheaper to calculate and you get a bit better frame rate that way and if they turn r-tx off and you can see that once it's turned off anything behind the tread gets hidden away from what the car can see and it's your collection just to give everyone a primer here so planar and screen space reflections they're not new it's not like part of our TX or ray tracing or anything like that it's just different ways to reflections screen space correct me if I'm wrong I think the primary thing there is that what you can see on the screen through the view frustum is what is reflected yeah that's accurate so if you start and I if you look at for example an object or a character in a mirror and the camera is pointing towards the mirror but the objects back is to the mirror you might see the front of the object reflected in that mirror instead of the back of the object whereas planar reflections would would sample the I guess it's got another camera in it right it's yeah that's the way that that plane thinks but anyway so it's almost as if there's another camera inside of the plane rendering the entire scene again a second time and then when you look at that plane it looks at what that camera would see from that perspective so that's a plane of reflections work but there are a few limitations with planet reflection so that they can't be mapped onto curved surfaces and also you would have to place a plane in front of everything that you want to have that reflection for ya and they're very expensive to render to in terms of hardware requirement also Patrick brought up an interesting point about the windows reflection as well because we also saw in the comments section some people are saying like this grand theft auto had this why is this impressive but really if you look at grand theft auto as Windows it's just a it's just a cube map mapped onto all of the windows in the game so if you so if you stand in front of one window and look at the reflection you'll see a building and if you drive two miles down the road and look into Wonder you'll see the same building just because it's using one image texture for all of the reflections in all the windows but which goes into how you can fake and cheat the graphics right but that also goes into if someone thought that GTA had that then it's like well it's like is it really even a point to putting in the real or Frek reflections if no one even notices that they're fake yes if everyone is fooled by it and thanks GTA had this and whatever other games in the past had this I was just a cube map yeah and no one knows any better than I don't know what does it matter or entering a point of just complete diminishing returns when they show an example of the plane and the cars reflection I've well looking through the comments on this video saw a lot of people talking about how the car looks too shiny to be realistic like they feel like r-tx is making V is making it less realistic than it used to be but I think by making it look perfectly glassy right yeah and I think that is the problem that it is too perfectly glossy but I don't think that's RTX is fault it's more of the fault of the textures because it has its roughness is too uniform so it just looks like so it's not a roughness map or is it the texture I guess I'd be the same thing okay did the roughness map would be a texture at it so that might not be an RTX thing the shininess but you can see that it has some like some ripples in the surface that would be more of like I guess would be a normal map that they'd put in there distort the reflections in that way and it's possible too that they made it overly shiny to illustrate our TX yeah that's true until the games really out actually I saw it one of the developers on this game on battlefield 5 so that they turned down the RT X for more realism which doesn't really make any sense because real life is 100% rate race but whatever I'll just I thought of a weird analogy in my head and I don't know if it'll sound right but it's imagine if nobody washed their clothes they all took their clothes to a laundromat okay and all the laundromats wash their clothes by hand yes I feel like Nvidia made a tool for developers and they're trying to sell it to gamers so it's like they made the world's first washing machine but no one washes their clothes so they don't need it but the laundromats are very excited right okay so in other terms Nvidia has made a business-to-business development tool and they are trying to figure out how to market that to gamers but we're probably unexcited or don't understand why they need it but you also the new washing machines don't work with your old clothes so you have to buy new clothes why yes that is a common problem with graphics hardware and with clothes yes often often clothes and washing machines are incompatible this is something we need to check every time we write a washing machine review doesn't work the old clothes yes I feel like for the end-user it's like like my clothes are clean both ways so is it then is this demo impressive it's impressive from the standpoint of the things that you don't have to do when setting up light sources now so this demo is kind of weird because it's kind of it's it's like what I said before it's difficult to quantify really what's different about about this and how it was before this is the the biggest problem I have with all these demos but to developers I feel like this is this is like it's like a new world or they don't have to wash clothes with their hands anymore so you can see this is a good example like this route this short one second part you can see right here the corner behind the bookshelf right kind of lights up it you can see the light bouncing like in between both of the walls here like back and forth and makes a whole corner bit brighter than it normally would be for a second but you can also see that it's pretty noisy from various disease er yeah so let's try to work out what's going on with only one sample per pixel right yeah and that is in an video limitation - so how much back it up so we're gonna play this one back again and if you look closely in that corner you'll see a decent amount of noise and just grain and we can pop it up on the screen and editing but and that is from we think probably the denoiser and the limitations how many samples it's taken because if you played very even if you've seen trailers of something like the last of us even you'll have already seen environments that look pretty close to this so it's it's difficult to tell really what the difference is but we even in the previous metro games they've done lighting effects like this yeah like time of day lighting is right time of day lighting is not new right and like coming in through windows and God raised they're also not næss also in the editors day they showed it off so they did Andris off and the off demo didn't really have any effects whatsoever so there's kind of our TX global illumination or flat no lighting effects which isn't really fair right because you can all these things with our TX you can cheat them so to not even atleast show like a good faith effort of here's what we would normally do versus here's toggle switch and boom our TX is Han right which I feel like is what they did also for that global illumination demo in that green in Red Room it was just everything off or everything RTX yeah and yeah and when we say everything off it's like including everything developers would previously do to achieve an effect as close as they can to what our TX is showing so it's not the most fair comparison it's not a fair comparison it is not a fair comparison okay so next one is control this is another game at Nvidia showed at their press day and has posted online so control I mean is this how does this compare to the metro demo does this feel like it's a more more convincing way to show r-tx yeah also the metro demo didn't really have reflections it was just trying global illumination and a very wide environment which and all the just as a total side note most the developers had fewer than two or three days to work on these implementations I didn't know that yeah no one knew that so there you go I was told by one of the developers privately and I won't say which one it was but one of them told us that they had the hardware for a fewer than 70 hours I guess that speaks to how quickly can be implemented although we don't know how many hours they worked on it it could have been 70 times 10 artists we don't we don't know but anyway so they don't have a lot of time to implement this stuff which means that who knows how this will change in the future but this is control so control what are we what do we want to focus on first year there's reflections obviously right one thing they don't want to point out that we briefly mentioned in battlefields 5 about how its roughness is too uniform here they do a good job of varying the roughness which is why it looks more realistic even though it's just as shiny as the car was before right yes it's very glossy but it has but it has a lot more texture to it imperfect detail right Oh kisses I thought that this is pretty interesting there's a lot of I don't know if you can but you can see it in this monitor there's a lot of noise happening like everywhere in this image yes in these frames yeah a lot of lumber floor there's a lot near the top which would you rather have with what the noise drive you crazy while gaming that's a good question yeah I don't know it's kind of like if we blast the body so on our camera or something okay this is the water noise right here as well I've been thinking about this I don't know since in videos denoiser is all deep learned in AI based it I guess it can only get better as it learns how to properly interpolate from its low sample counter to what it should be in theory yeah so this one is called project Sol this is the one Nvidia did their cutesy dancing robot with the music at the end and then again at GTCC Japan and at least two other times and it was hilarious every time as all of the demos and jokes they make at every event are the same ones this is project so this one I think we see some retraced reflections in this if I remember correctly right yeah there's the why the thing that that was interesting for this one is that I think they deliberately tried to hide their subsurface scattering they never get too close to the human and even when they do you can see that there's no subsurface scattering even though I know that it's possible with in RTX they've had other examples of it right but for this for whatever reason they decided that it was either too expensive or they had to cut it out for some reason yeah and so subsurface scattering if you're not familiar you could kind of take like a flashlight for example and just shine it against your skin you'll see like the red light bouncing around underneath and so that would be an example of subsurface scattering where the light is entering the surface in this case the character on the screen their hand or ear or something like that those are typical places for subsurface scattering where you have really thin skin the light can get in and bounce around and change the color is how it was typically it describes me and called duty has had that for a long time so it's not that's not new either but it's all about the method of how you do it I guess and they they don't do it at all here so for some reason they made the visor completely opaque maybe they're just trying to show off flexions yeah they're retracing and they're reflections but I do feel like that no I guess some space visors are completely opaque like when they put on that protection from it would it would be more interesting though to see it semi-transparent right I think it would be more impressive they showed off glass earlier right so so as a tech time it would be more impressive if it were semi-transparent so we're not sure why it's it's opaque if that was a design choice or if it was to hide capabilities so in this scene you can see an example of Ray traced reflections you see the lights in the background as it reflects off of the armor it's my question then can you do that with traditional graphics technology do you have to do this with our TX you really do have to do it with our TX be honest it's I feel like it's something that games either heaven like a special way of faking or just try to avoid altogether like if if you really want to do a scene similar to this you could set up an environment map with all of those lights and then use that environment map as a texture in your shader to say what it should be reflecting but not actually be reflecting the environment right and that's a lot of manual work or you pre render something and shove it in as a video file - which then you might have a cut to load or something like that so neither way of doing this in the past has been optimal so it looks like this is actually something that our TX benefits the developers with and then coming up next there's a decent example of global illumination with the red light that turns on towards the end of the elevator ride I'll be right here so you can see that is that is that GI or is that a reflection it's it's kind of both yes like you could like these this sharp reflection would just be a reflection but the light around it would be global global illumination coming out from the walls okay the light is shining on - and you that you can't see the lights anywhere in this shot so they'd be do it very difficult to pull off with traditional rendering tech as well so those are the demos that NVIDIA has at their event and elsewhere we talked a lot about so we criticize decent honest stuff we showed some of the upsides just to be fair to Nvidia here make sure we cover all angles of this what aspects of our TX on versus off are the most impressive in these demos and what what actually brings value to the industry at this moment or what's the most immediate value I think the most immediate value is like what we said earlier is to developers being able to save time not having to manually incorporate these lighting techniques like Jensen said it just works it just works except definitely not there's definitely some work involved but it works I suppose more readily or easily there's not quite as much tuning like you said for that one demo project Sol if you wanted to get those lights to reflect off of the character's armor without having them in the scene that would require it sounds like an environment map and then you have to screw around with that manually map it for that specific environment so that does not apply anywhere else in that instance only in that environment and doing it with ray tracing would be significantly easier in that I guess you could have any environment like that and the lights should just reflect once it's implemented so in that regard I suppose it just works even though I hate that phrase because it sounds like he's trying to be like Steve Jobs a little bit too much it's definitely where they're going with it but the idea remains so what's what's another upside what's something metro it's I don't think we were really either of us were really impressed by Metro yeah Metro is Metro is weird Metro is weird there's one corner where he could CGI working I was very noisy it would be easier to tell the difference if if they did flip on and off in this demonstration but like Patrick said earlier if you can't tell a difference without having a side-by-side comparison then what's even the point yeah yes and if they're going for the Apple audience then everyone's just going to be amazing regardless like wow that does look really good not not wow that looks better but wow that looks good so yeah Metro not super impressive the battlefield 5 demo so that will feel 5 I guess first commentary too shiny to be real comments that we saw on YouTube and elsewhere that's we think not our TXS fault that's probably just how I feel like it's the materials fault rather than what exs fault be dice whoever the developers so that would be the material which is not an RT X thing and it might just be shinier than necessary it's a illustrate the difference but battlefield does have a tendency of they have a lot of materials in the game and a lot of them do look bad in previous games so especially cars and objects like that that aren't really important and post battlefield and I made this point a couple a week or two ago in a video that'll build a competitive game and I mean I get what they're trying to do as a high fidelity game but in reality you're trying to kill the other players and at some point like the the reflections not really something I pay attention to but it's still an okay demo I guess they did bring up some interesting points out if you wanted to peek behind a corner if you want to look at a reflection to see a player coming up to your location then I guess that would be an advantage competitively RT ik and that is definitely something that would be banned and turn on and play unless everyone had it I guess unless they have it in which case yeah I mean it's that gets that's been a discussion for a long time to like I mean I remember the original CS 1.6 or CSS 1.6 I think had smoke grenades that were sprites oh and if you lowered the graphics settings enough you could start turning off some of the density of those sprites or something to that effect that's cool it's been like two decades almost but and and that was just a graphics options debate and all that stuff is controlled in tournament play so right but it is a potential advantage I guess into Pub matching and then a GI Dan what we didn't like so think that recaps all of them will be talking about this a lot more soon we might do some of our own demos with Unreal Engine or something like that in the future so check back for that stuff as always subscribe for more page on complex commands exit stops I directly go to store documents access net to pick up some of our merch I'll see you all next time