Gadgetory

welcome back to hard room box you've all been asking for this one we're back today to talk about ray tracing once again this is of course because a new update for Battlefield 5 was made available yesterday along with the new GPU driver from Nvidia they claimed to improve DirectX ray tracing or DXR performance by up to 50% in some situations as you all know by now ray tracing in battlefield 5 was a bit of a disaster launched the implementation was plagued by technical issues including poor reflection resolution things being incorrectly reflected and loads of noise on top of this enabling ray tracing on even the lowest settings cut the frame rate in half or even into a third depending on the GPU and resolution at hand this made the ITX 20 atti the only card suitable for ray tracing and that was using the low setting at 1080p the artex 2080 was barely able to deliver 60 FPS and the r-tx 20 70 was seriously not impressive in the performance it delivered however with this new combination of a game update and Driver update Nvidia is claiming that our TX 20 attr owners will be able to enjoy ray tracing at 1440p 60 FPS on ultra our TX 2080 owners should be able to do 1440p 60 FPS on medium and our TX 2070 owners a set for 1080p 60 FPS using medium as well going on our past results that would mean around the 50% improvement they're claiming and of course work performance numbers for you a little later the big question is how did EA dice and Nvidia improve ray tracing performance and specifically did they downgrade visual quality to achieve this well Invidia has a video up on their YouTube channel that explains some of the changes they've made not gonna list all of them here but some of the biggest ones include optimizing variable rate ray tracing adjusting the diene noiser and fixing ray traced foliage variable rate ray tracing is the major change this allows dice to prioritize ray tracing on areas of the game world that will benefit the most from the effects such as reflective or shiny surfaces essentially the game increases the quality of ray tracing on these surfaces at the expense of low-quality effects in other areas considering many surfaces really don't need ray tracing at all this has the potential to speed everything up the follow Chester was also a big performance hog with dice saying a bug caused too many rays to be cast from foliage elements and that's now been fixed as well so let's get into some quality comparisons to see if anything has changed starting with some of the area's we tested in the last video we're looking at the ultra DXi setting in the previous version compared to the latest patch really there's no visual difference at all it seems when the area's diced hasn't been able to improve this the quality of reflections on more matte surfaces like the gun let's do a bit of pixelation to the effect there the same could be said for comparing low in the latest patch to low when d XR was first released there's no real difference in this scene there's also no significant difference in visual quality between low and medium or between high and ultra though you can spot that the higher to settings produce raytrace reflections on more surfaces just like last time in this scene that features a large water puddle again there's not a large difference between all four decks our modes and some of the issues with God Ray's being incorrectly reflected appears to still be present in this latest patch however there is a visual quality downgrade that I spotted in this area this new patch has introduced some artifacting to the wave ray tracing reflections are handled previously everything that was supposed to be reflected was reflected so you've got these nice clean for the most part supremely accurate reflections that blew away screen space reflections for visual quality however with the latest patch some screen space reflection like artifacts have crept back into ray traced surfaces if you look closely at the water surface at times an object will move across the reflected area like an AI character or a falling leaf and for a brief moment you'll spot the classic screen space reflection like streak caused by that object obstructing the reflections path my guess here is that dice have chosen to more aggressively curl rays from objects not in view which has improved performance significantly but it's at the cost of occasional artifacts where something that should still be in view is getting cold erroneously it makes the reflections slightly more ugly but it's still significant upgrade on basic screen space reflections where this issue is much more widespread yet the change seems to be a widespread modification to the particle system which makes leaves much less likely to float over or land on reflected surfaces I wasn't a hundred percent sure whether this has happened but I've looked in a variety of scenes and noticed that while the same number of particles are visible in the air and on mat surfaces in general leaves just don't obscure puddles of water as often as they used to and this is the case where the DXi is on or off I even spotted some leaves landing on puddles randomly but then quickly disappearing this change does affect how the game looks with that ray tracing enabled but I actually think it's a positive overall because particles caused lots of artifacts in screen space reflections as well so turning down one area of that effect is good and I'm not sure he would have noticed this if I didn't point it out anyway as for noise there is still a fair bit of noise to dxi reflections depending on the surface in particular it seems the dice haven't been able to solve the extreme noise present on larger water surfaces the rippling waves are just too much for the D noise at handling what you're left with is a ton of ugly noise however noise has been improved for clearer surfaces like Windows gamers Nexus showed in their video this tramcar window that had a ton of noise in its reflection when you move around with the latest patch you can still spot noise when moving about but the denoiser is much faster to respond so there's less noise ghosting in this image in other areas you might spot noise only for reflected trees while static objects remain nice and sharp again I suspect the issue with foliage noise is down to some of the changes they've made to improve performance with ray tracing foliage in my previous video I also found it hard to spot the difference between the four different DXi modes and came to the conclusion that there are really only two modes but looking more closely that does appear to be subtle differences between the four modes in terms of reflection resolution and draw distance the higher the setting the cleaner the reflections will look and the more draw distance you'll get very subtle changes though which leaves medium looking almost identical to low for the most part and similarly high looks very close to Ultra overall I'd say the patch has for the most part resulted in no change in the XR quality though some aspects are improved and some aspects are degraded depending on the area most of the work seems to have just been focused on making sure ray-tracing isn't unnecessarily applied and that's where the performance improvements have come from though there are still some notable issues that need work like reflection noise so let's talk performance the first thing to note is that to get improved DXR performance you need both the latest battlefield 5 game patch and in videos new for 1722 driver the driver alone seems to provide a 6 to 8 percent performance improvement to rate racing with the pre patched version of the game so Nvidia definitely has done some driver side work to improve our Tech's performance for this video Steve has tested battlefield 5 with driver for 1722 before and after the game patch so we're only measuring the performance impact of the patch itself but do note hour before numbers for RTX on are about 6 to 8 percent higher than what we showed in that initial r-tx video due to the new driver the driver did not impact our TX off performance which is identical or there abouts to our first DX our video our testing this time around is much more comprehensive we've tested the RT X 20 atti the RT x 2080 and our TX 2070 at 1080p and 1440p on our core i7 8700 k test rig overclocked to 5 gigahertz post patch we've tested all four DXi presets so you can see how the performance differences stack up there we'll be mostly focused on ultra and low we've also tested two areas instead of just one the first is the taro your area which we used in our initial video which is a bit of a rate racing stress test and showed the worst performance in the game but we've also included performance in the Nord --less area which is a snowy map that has virtually no ray-tracing and honestly looks very similar whether you have DXR on or off first up we're going to look at our TX 20 atti performance in the intensive to your map at 1080p the good news here first up is 1% low performance is improved for the Ultra DX Isle mode it's now consistently sitting above 60 FPS post patch were also looking at a 57% improvement to average frame rates with the ultra d XR mode and a 21% improvement for the low mode however despite a small reduction to frame rate for DX our off post patch the mode is still 75 percent fast of an ultra DXi and 53 percent faster than load DXR previously this there was more than a 2x difference but this performance penalty is still pretty brutal and 1440p it's a similar story a 51 percent improvement to ultra performance and a 29 percent improvement to low performance DXR off is more than twice as fast as ultra while there's a 53% advantage over low unfortunately the situation is worse in the Northland app yes there is a performance improvement at 1080p but Ultra is only 18% faster and low is just 5% faster comparing the pre and post patch performance on top of this DX our off is still 56 percent faster than DX our low and in our test area there is essentially no visual difference between these two modes due to the general lack of DXR effects in this area the game still needs to cast rays though even if it has no effect on the visuals which causes this massive drop to performance and 1440p again similar story the performance improvement is slightly higher but DXi off is still much faster I guess the good news we're looking at these are TX 20 atti results is that invidious claims about performance are generally correct you can play using the ultra DXR mode at 1440p and expect 60fps you could also get 90 FPS using DX I'll low at 1080p but in both situations turning off DXi delivers well over a hundred fps especially at 1080p so ray tracing is still a huge performance hog time to look at the RT x 2080 interieur at 1080p the improvements for ultra and low is 64% and 30% respectively when compared to the pregame patch however the game is still more than 50% faster with DX are disabled compared to DX are low and 1440p NVIDIA is correct in saying the RT X 2080 can deliver a 60 FPS experience using the medium DX our mode performance improvements are similar to what we've already been discussing but again performance is more than 50% faster with DX are off in the less intensive knotless at 1080p games are modest like with the RT X 20 80 TI at below 20% for both the ultra and lo modes and once again in what's a repeating theme here performance is improved by more than 50 percent with the effect disabled compared to it enabled on the low mode and it's a similar story at 1440p as well in this map the ITX 2080 is a GPU we basically called useless for ray tracing last time because it couldn't even achieve 60fps at 1080p with the low DXR mode post patch in the terior area we're looking games of 79% using the ultra mode compared to the pre patch version and 33% with a low mode this now makes the low mode suitable for 1080p 60fps as invidious States however and yes you guessed it performance is roughly 50% higher with DX are disabled compared to on the low mode it's probably not worth talking about 1440p d XR with the RT x 2070 too much because the GPU struggles stretch 60fps with DX r on low though this is a big improvement over what we saw previously performance here is around 42% higher with DX i disabled and finally we have the nord las' map at 1080p we're seeing gains of 22% comparing the low mode before and after the patch while ultra gets a 25 percent boost again there's essentially no visual difference between DX are low and darks are off yet off delivers 44% more performance then we get to 1440p on the same map and against all a very similar story so there's a lot to break down here firstly nvidia is i guess right on the money with their performance claims a 50% uplifted performance is fairly typical between the pre and post patch versions of the game and what they say is possible with their various r-tx GPUs is indeed possible and in the more intensive areas of the game no less we're now in the situation where the r-tx 20/80 TI can use d XR ultra at 1440p the ITX 20/80 is suitable for DX are low at 1440p or ultra at 1080p and the RT x 2070 is now able to handle 1080p with DX i'll low that's significant especially for the RT x 2070 which was previously a bit hopeless but there's a lot of caveats to those claims you'll only see 50% performance games comparing the ultra mode before and after the patch gains are much lower comparing the low mode it's more around the 30% mark and these improvements are only in areas where there are lots of DX our reflection effects in areas where there are no visible reflections you only see modest performance gains of 25% or lower and this is kind of where the problems continue to exist for ray tracing and battlefield 5 in the North listeria we tested and other areas with few decks are effects the patch doesn't improve performance all that much and that's a big deal because we're still in a position where turning decks are off in these areas provides upwards of 50% more performance for practically identical visuals having this effect enabled in these areas is just wasting processing power reducing frame rates from say 130 fps down to 80 FPS for no quality improvement then in areas where you can see a visual improvement the performance difference between DX are on and off is still enormous in an absolute best case scenario you're looking at 50% more performance from DX are off compared to DX I'll low but if you want to use the high or ultra modes that gap grows to over a 2x performance improvement depending on your GPU and resolution sure we did see up to a 3x difference before this latest patch but getting half the framerate with DX are on is still a massive penalty to pay for what amounts to a small improvement of visuals in general I still don't think battlefield 5 is a suitable game for ray-tracing this is a fast-paced shooter that you want to run at high frame rates why would someone with say an RT X 2070 choose to play at 1080p 60fps with DX r low compared to 1440p 80 FPS with DX r off why would an RT x 28 ET Iona lock themselves into 1440p 60 FPS when you could run the game at 4k with higher frame rates than that or at 120 + FPS at 1440p it's really not a sensible choice for this sort of game and to make matters worse it's almost impossible to tell where the DXi is on or off when you're actually playing a multiplayer match we've shown a lot of static comparisons in this video nice you know slow close-ups and that sort of thing but the reality is when playing the game you're not looking at the nice reflections you're focused on enemies and objectives delivering 50% better DXi performance with this patch doesn't change the fact the effect only has a mine impact of visuals when you're playing and by enabling the effect you're missing out on plenty of performance that can have a significant impact on how the game is run in fact for the multiplayer modes we not only recommend disabling DXR but turning down a bunch of other quality sayings as well for maximum performance the question now becomes whether ray-tracing will be worth it in other games particularly single-player tiles like shadow of the Tomb Raider where you have more time to appreciate the visuals while in video and dice of Cree worked hard to improve ray-tracing performance in battlefield 5 and we're no longer left with half to a third of the performances of baseline the performance it is still going to be brutal in other games if in the very best case scenarios you can increase your frame rate by 50% when disabling DXR reflections I really hate to think what the performance it will be when games integrate other DXR effects shadow of the Tomb Raider for example was set to use DXi lighting and shadows which is only going to tank performance further and what if a game doesn't use the optimizations dices achieved in battlefield 5 well we could see more performance losses again and this is without even considering the noise and other issues with ray tracing at the moment I do genuinely hope NVIDIA can continue to work on an optimized ray tracing to get more performance at no cost of visuals because at the moment the technology still isn't ready even after this patch they've made significant steps towards improving how the intensive technology performs but we're far from the point where we'd recommend to play games with it enabled especially battlefield 5 and really it still can't be considered a key selling point for invidious RT X cards a luxury bonus sure but not something you should base a purchasing decision on that's basically it for this revisit of battlefield 5s DXR implementation with the latest patch again both Steve and I spent a lot of time on this video together out as soon as possible so we hope you appreciate it because it is subscribing to get more coverage like this support us on patreon to get access to our exclusive discord chat and monthly live streams and I'll catch you in the next one