Gadgetory

every one today we're looking at the Metro Exodus r-tx implementation this was one of the initial titles announced for RTX when nvidia pushed the cards last year end of last year so Metro Exodus has the global illumination implementation and this is the first time we've seen this in a real game for RTX the trick is to look at well is it actually better than what you can typically do with global illumination through the faked means and is it worth any potential performance hits so today I'm joined by Andrew Coleman he's a 3d artist who works for us on the video team and we're gonna be looking at the actual the quality so there's a qualitative analysis of what r-tx is doing in Metro Exodus if it's any good and then we'll have a separate video on the benchmark performance to look at how the different cards compare versus each other so you'll want to subscribe for that but let's get into the qualitative look at Metro Exodus and the r-tx global illumination implementation before that this 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to anyone but we'll talk about that as we go through this and then there's also the benchmark the benchmark we have a separate performance review coming up that you should check out but we talked about how the benchmark is unrealistically heavy so it is not a fair representation of how the game actually performs in game and actual gameplay but that's a separate topic so this first scene is in the overworld on top of the Train and the two side the two demos we've got r-tx on where it is a bit I suppose brighter where there's more definition to the character especially the color of the character's clothes things like that and then it off is going to be where he's silhouetted so Andrew what are we looking at here so when our TX is off the game is only calculating direct lighting so you can see that since no light rays from the Sun is able to hit him since they're being occluded by the Train he's just completely black and silhouetted but with our TX on the light rays are able to bounce off of the snow and that lightens up that half of his face and body but you can also see that the other half of his face that's closer to the Train is also darker because it's kind of like an effect of ambient occlusion how objects closer to other unlit surfaces become darker right just because they eat the energy of light from each other the trees have some effect as well you can see that they're being lit from underneath from the snow also as opposed to just on top and having the dark shadows underneath the rice yeah this is all because we're casting the the Sun is the single source of light I guess so so it would behave how you would assume a Sun single source of light above everything would behave this next scene before we get into some of the ones where it's just sort of disappointing I guess the difference that we saw her our initial impression of this game was disappointing implementation but as we played through it more some of the cutscenes were actually pretty big impact so in this one what we're looking at is a scene inside of the train car we've got the the female character in front of us in the ground there's a duct that goes down to where they shovel the coal into the engine so that's a very bright area and has some interesting properties and as we switch between these I guess RTX on in this instance is actually going to be the darker of the two right where it looks like there's a lot more contrast or at least darker blacks I guess is really what we're looking at Petric was saying like the other day like the are ticks off to someone who plays games looks more natural just because that's how it games usually look and you're able to see more of the environment and also from a gameplay standpoint you want to be able to see typically more of the environment right well I should go in super immersion so that's kind of a preference question to what are the the main change is that in between these two scenes obviously it's everyone can see in the video it's darker but we have some differences outside the window too normally these effects target a specific thing like normally like in video game work kind of hair works or whatever towards yeah would affect like a certain area or certain like a small section of something but you can see that it's just just affecting everything in the level all the time yeah it's just really interesting it's also a bit of an explanation of why we have the performance impact we do because it's everything so the highlights will stay that like as you can see here but like on other parts where it's very bright they stayed basically the same brightness between the two even though the shadows get much darker right so that highlight on the object near the character's chest in the side of the screen oh that's a gun or something remains about the same between both yeah so another note for this scene line is because of the things there's some dynamic elements to like breathe in for my character the lights kind of changed that makes it a bit hard to compare but that seems pretty interesting because I had a lot of differences so this scene has a lot of small changes he pointed most of these out but probably one of the bigger ones I'm seeing right away is on the left side there's I don't know what that is gold object of some kind yeah it's a gold thing okay that's very technical thank you so there's a golden thing effect ever seen some differences here what is this is this RTX on on or is it off it's off off so this that's off okay so then on where does all that lighting detail you know it's interesting with it on and that's high an ultra-right also on I I mean I guess maybe there's no source of light back towards the character to create that reflection we're seeing on the surface yeah so that goes away and we end up with a much flatter surface which to me honestly looks worse but again is probably less accurate this is the one that I showed this at Patrick and he was talking about how as a gamer you would prefer having it off here because it just seems like what a game should look like right you're playing it yeah because we've been playing games like this forever yeah and then with our TX turned on I like it's hard for me to even judge right I think it's more physically accurate all the windows have a whole lot more they're much harder to see out of yeah there's a lot more bloom all the windows yeah but there are little things like and the crevices up in the corner they receive more shadow and right with our TX off it's kind of like oh yeah why is this part of this light so bright why is the top of the solid light fixture right bright yeah when the lights are under the fixture and then you have some examples here where light coming in from this window is able to brighten up the ceiling closest to it right like that yeah that does make a lot more sense when you start pointing out those really small details yeah for sure this next clip answers the question of what's the difference between our TX off our TX ultra and our TX high because this is the only and video wouldn't want to dirty their brand with an RT XL oh so there's only high an ultra so what is the difference then what are we looking at right now so this is our TX off and yes I guess pretty apparent the difference between that and your base reference so the next one you can see that there's a side of the building gets a little more illumination in the back right in some hundred under the tank as well got some more illumination from from that bounce lading office now and this could be done with voxel to vxa oh but it never really got any widespread but here we're doing this with a global illumination what about the next scene is this r-tx ultra ultra ok so you can see that difference is very minimal some some dark things get slightly darker darker some bright things get slightly brighter right and there's gonna be a lot of mouse clicks picking up on the mic potentially right now because I'm trying to figure out what the differences are haha so like this building right here it gets slightly brighter with ultra ok so building in the backgrounds a bit brighter the performance hit here is a couple percent by the way we have some numbers on this as well that we can share in the future video but the performance impact is it's anywhere from a single digit percentages like 10% kind of depending on the scene actually would I take that back this side of the building it's slightly darker darker with ultra so the side of the building slightly darker with ultra so the question is from a technology or a realism standpoint does go in from high to ultra impress you at all I mean is it can you appreciate what's being done here or what is you know what's what's really the value just more I think there's definitely a diminishing return from either altra alright so it's like I assume that what they're doing is just increasing the amount of times that the light is able to bounce off of a surface before it is terminated so it's is it sort of like each ray has a number of I guess bounces yeah the clean the engine that it's allowed before and then once it it hits that number of bounces it just stops right because if you have a hundred thousand Ray's bouncing for an infinite amount of times you have reality yeah right which is difficult to render so okay so yeah I guess not a huge difference between a high and ultra definitely an appreciable difference between off and and any of them I think that difference is noticeable now is it worth it I guess we'll leave that up to you but it's noticeable okay so this one they've got some flashlights they're looking down to the great and with off I guess our baseline versus high what are the main differences and then claim to say there are none but one of the differences is in the top left it is slightly darker underneath the great section yeah you might have to zoom in pretty hard and post for them to even appreciate that yeah there's not much of a difference you know top left a slice lightly change brightness not super useful all of the differences here are very small and from ultra die I think are also very small so we could probably move on from this one and in this one so we have again your notes here say this is slightly darker which is not particularly compelling that specific section it's okay so that so let's take a some post let's just do them really hard on that specific section it's slightly darker there's a new lighting on the chain link to you say as well yes so that's interesting I don't really know that is pretty interesting that's the first time we've I think we've seen that on an object like I guess those are made out of geometry then normally those kind of assets would be alpha textures right since they're so dense yeah you weren't wouldn't really want to burn geometry on on all those chain links I guess yeah but I guess also if they're using an alpha texture and a normal map mm maybe that would be enough for them to pick up lighting in that way but it is very subtle right so potentially some tricks could be played there but again pretty limited differences between and just as a note as we're playing this footage back you're gonna see some changes that aren't a result of the settings or the graphics changes it's just a result of like pulsing lights and changing light sources in the game it's alright it's very dynamic game this next scene so now we're flipping back so we're gonna we we gave you the the downside of r-tx starting to show you the upside there's a bigger impact here than the previous see and it's actually quite apparent what would you point out as the the most prevalent change and this instance could be the lighting on the character for sure so this is again next to the Train some of the same stuff applies as previously we've got presumably light bounces off of the snow I guess right and there's a single light source above I don't know is this what about that train in the background the lighting changes in the background there like on the ridge as well yeah there's a lot of lighting changes all across scene even like things that are way off in the back that are Glary that you can hardly see the lighting so changes on them sorry yeah yeah when I first all I said I kind of just thought that the game had some kind of dynamic time-of-day system or whatever in that that was what's happening between he's like capturing artifact right but as you can see in the shadows the light source remains the same and is in the same position so you have a shadow on the train wall right isn't exactly it's like from the character right you can see shadows cast on the character by equipment that's worn by the character like this sort of whatever that thing is in the middle of her suit oh yeah I didn't notice that is casting shadows onto the I guess the best so that's pretty cool well the interesting thing is that normally global illumination has a tendency to kind of wash out shadow contrast because it'll fill it in with additional lighting from the rest of the scene but here it looks like it's actually increasing shadow contrast there in making new shadows in places that didn't exist before either yes it does the game and see the light being cast like bounced off of the other objects and services does it see that as does your light source it would see that yes yet see that as a new place to cast a shadow from right understand so next one is the Train side by side what is this scene what are we looking at here so for this one you can see a lot more I guess it's a reiteration of what we said earlier of the light bouncing off of the snow which will be hitting the shadow on the train which illuminates it much more than if it was just direct lighting right yes so we've got a much darker scene and I'm that as r-tx off yes with it a bit lighter more limited you can see what's going on that's our TX on so trains got more bounce like motion blur again increasing with our TX the background light changes significantly you can kind of look at some of the trees in the background and the buildings in the background this next one this is one of the first scenes in the game and we were both looking at it at this point when you were playing and I think I believe you were almost exact words were I'm just disappointed I think it was worse than disappointed I might let it work yeah this the the first part of the game is not a good example of how our txg I will play it through the rest of the game for sure right so in this tunnel there's like no difference almost it just gets darker it just is Carter to see what's going on right which is not I like even from a even if it's a little more accurate and it might be I don't know I guess let's get somewhat subjective but even if it's a little more accurate at some point it's just making the experience worse yeah and making a pitch-black tunnel even pitch or black this is not having your framelit framerate at the same time yes cutting it in half is not beneficial so we don't need to talk about this much there's no real difference this was one of the earliest scenes and I would imagine some other scenes that are similar to this you might see the same but not all of the tunnel scenes are bad though we have some other examples you might come by later so this next one this comes from the benchmark and this so there's a pretty noticeable impact again and just sort of the general brightness or exposure I guess yeah the scene where I mean the way we're playing it back here for me the scene on without remembering exactly which one is which the scene on the right is what I would hands down prefer that's because I can actually like see what's happening I can see the color on the rat for example but I don't think that's the right choice because I think the one on the left is r-tx yes so what's going on in this scene so this one's really weird because we've been talking about how bounce lighting from the ground will make things much brighter than they would be with r-tx off right but and there is still bounce lighting from the ground here yes it's still happening but like as you can see that the rabbit is almost completely silhouetted against the sky correctly right going into the building and the benchmark scene this area has got a lot of fires this is actually one of the heaviest impactors we'll talk about this in the performance review but a lot of fire in here is there any meaningful global illumination chantrey that you can point out yeah so once we get inside there really is not any difference via the bounced lighting inside of the house does not seem to be affected very much by the light coming in through the windows so we're back outside now we're getting close to an interesting bug with r-tx that we found and that's how the doc so the doc what happens is as you kind of go past this pole on the ground the that there's a time of day change and with r-tx on I believe it is with r-tx on there's clearly a sliver of daytime to the right of the pole even though the rest of the scene is night and this is not I would venture to say this is not realistic so we're not I don't think we really have any idea of why this is happening specifically I really don't know unless they they're doing some like a scripted sequence involving that pole specifically because it does kind of it takes up the whole camera so maybe they thought they could do it need effect there or whatever and you can see past the pole actually if he from the sort of the the sheer side angle you can see that it's still daytime yeah in front of it to the left too so it does look like the poles being a divider today there's just a weird bug we found so next one here we have a demo of as I guess there's a light source in the back from the fire and I don't know that we have many light sources that looks like there might be one right behind us unknown light source you've marked yeah so I marked that there because it is interesting how that like if you look at if you're just playing this as a game I guess which it is nice it goes with like a normal virtual world mind set our TX off looks fine but then we turn our tix on it's like oh yeah there is not a light by that door so why is it so bright anything going on so I guess it gets down to like subjectiveness of yeah some subjectivity of do you actually I mean for me I've always this is a break into the subject of our unit per second I am a a competitive player so I only care about RTS and fps and FPS has frame rate as well so if a setting makes it harder for me to see the guy I'm trying to kill then I don't like that setting if you're an immersion player I think there's maybe an argument for this though it's the last couple examples here in this one we're looking at a scene down a stairwell I guess in the Train there's actually a pretty big difference here on that door so with our TX off I guess the door is lit in a way which is unrealistic yeah it seems like it's hard to describe but yeah it does seem like it's getting light from a place it doesn't exist it looks like there's a light dead center in front of the door yeah it is like defused yeah and the only light source down there than the one we can see above it is there is a light source about 10 feet where we're standing except underneath us from the fire but that would not have that effect on the door right and it would be probably colored light too so another interesting thing about this is how there's a lot of light in this little crevice with our TX off that kind of it almost implies that there's a window in the wall up there and then we turn our TX on it just turns clearly black black like it makes more sense that that's just a little hole in the wall right yes there is is there Oh up there I don't think so yeah so this next scene we're looking now at the worker shoveling the coal into the Train what is what is interesting about this one so this goes back kind of like what we're saying about the door word the light source seems like it is receiving lighting from someplace that doesn't exist and that's the same thing for that pipe on the side right where it kind of it's like it's almost acting like an emissive object but that takes off yeah it's like radiating light yes and then with Arctic sonic it it I guess I like places it and that's to the scene better that's kind of what I've noticed with r-tx on for all of these I suppose objects feel more in place with were they are on the scene in terms of like the shadow gradient yeah yeah to some extent so this guy stand outside it's a lot of the same stuff as for getting more snow bounce the front end of the Train you noted here is a little more uniformly yeah with r-tx on right and another thing that is happening in this scene that I don't think we've talked about yet and any other scenes is that the GI is making all the shadows much brighter right so they are receiving additional light from other directions other than the Sun yeah and you can actually see good examples on his chest or midsection where he's got all that gear with our TX off it's completely blacked out or almost completely blacked out yeah with the shadow I will note I the shadow of the player in the scene kind of unrelated as terrible let me see that it's creepy I need to capture more footage of that they put that in here like it's a player's shadow has absolutely no life it just translates across the surface his legs move barely but hey like like as if they're I don't know sluggish but yeah his uh his shoulders and arms are taped to the side of his body as arms are also the width of sticks if you look at the shadow cast on the snow in the background yeah I know because I've been trying seen a hundred times so yeah and this one I'm actually is this this is our TX off right here and that's on yes I to be fully honest prefer our TX off I think the Train looks better I do think the and also the characters clothing I think that the I think that the detail in the front of the Train is increased with our TX off just because it's a I said this earlier how global illumination tends to wash out some lighting details since it decreases some contrast in the shadows but I do think that with our tix on in this scene even though it's not actually happening it gives his skin the feel of subsurface scattering because of how uh how much softer the shadows are on on his face right so last scene we have is again the front of the Train except the face in a different direction do you want to explain what's going on here it looks almost looks like we have a light source coming from the front like not that's not just the Sun but yeah I guess it is just the Sun that's bouncing yeah this one I showed this at Patrick and he thought the trees looked almost broken without the Exxon because they don't receive any shadow underneath them anymore but they also seem broken or Authority X off because they don't seem lit at all all right either with our Terrace off they definitely look broken they look like the kind of trees you're not supposed to see when you're out of bounds yeah like low-poly no detail but the interesting thing that I thought for this one was that the guy on the right the bounce lighting from the snow is so extreme that it changes the color bleed changes the perceived color of his outfit yes it goes from like a silver medal to almost like a brown the his face changes quite a bit too yeah so I think that's because he's receiving more shadow from the helmet so it's occluding a lot more light that makes sense interesting but the guy in the far left both r-tx off this the shadows stopped like halfway down his midsection that's not right the shadow stopped halfway through his midsection right now Authority X on it almost carried it all the way through to his shoulder though lighting does so it's like the LSS is in this game it is sort of defective in the pre-launch build so we don't have anything on it today but we'll look at that separately it does the same thing as previously it's sort of super samples it's it's a bit better than video we Matt if I call it super sampling but the isn't super sampling in the name well if you only cook if you drop the DL he'll be mad it's not super sampling it's deep learned super sampling but it's super sampling so I mean with that you get some FPS back you drop the real resolution you fake increase the resolution and then the result is that it looks blurry err with a higher fake resolution so that's a separate topic but this will be your walkthrough of GI global illumination via RT X in Metro Exodus and as always you can check out the rest of our coverage going up on the F gas benchmarks things like that make sure you subscribe for all that you can support us be a store that gamers nexus net and pick up the new medium mod matte that we just announced or patreon.com slash gamers nexus thank you for watching we'll see you all next time