Gadgetory

welcome back too hard wrong box it's time for us to once again talk about ray-tracing everyone's favorite technology to talk about this time in Metro Exodus which is the latest game to integrate support for invidious r-tx technology last time we checked out ray-tracing in battlefield 5 and we were bit disappointed with implementation news ray-tracing reflections didn't add a whole lot visually there were issues with noise and the performance it was pretty severe considering the game is reasonably fast patience competitive shooter all that sort of thing rate racing in that game it just really isn't worth it but things are pretty different when it comes to Metro Exodus this isn't a competitive online shooter instead it's a slower paced open-world single player survival shooter rate racing is implemented as global illumination not reflections and the game is launching with optimized rate racing and do SS from day one in this video we'll be looking at both the quality differences between RT X on and off for this title as well as the performance hit across all four NVIDIA GeForce RT X and graphics cards at a range of resolutions I'll spend a brief bit of time talking about how do SS can be added to the mixer you'll get a usual comprehensive coverage of RT X in this game today so what is global illumination to answer that I'll start by talking about how lighting works without global illumination as is the case in well pretty much a lot of games without GI you're left with just direct illumination so if there's a light source anything that falls in the path of that sources lighting will be illuminated and will cast shadows but this sort of lighting is limited and it lacks realism and depth the reason why it lacks realism is because this sort of lighting does not include indirect illumination in real life light doesn't just emit from surfaces hit something and then just disappear instead light reflects off surfaces onto other surfaces this is what global illumination provides with this lighting system enabled light bounces off surfaces creating greater depth and if light interacts with cold surfaces along the way this can lead to coloured reflections caustic effects are also possible so overall the lighting system becomes better and more realistic global illumination is also not new to ray tracing is something that has been possible previously with other techniques however ray tracing allows the effect to be more accurate more realistic and more comprehensive across a given scene in Metro Exodus ray traced global illumination is available in two modes there's a high mode and an ultra mode there's no low mode here is straight too high for the base implementation and then ultra I believe it adds further reflection steps to the computer to global elimination paths we're not sure on that one and you do also need direct x12 to be enabled to gain access to ray tracing this isn't a big deal because in our initial testing there's been no performance difference between D X 11 and D X 12 and you can also enable and disable ray tracing at any time without restarting the games that's nice to see in terms of the visual difference ray-traced global illumination can be subtle it can be obvious it all depends on the scene and what you're looking for however in general the improvements ray tracing makes to Metro X's are far greater than the improvements decks are reflections brought to Battlefield 5 in this scene you can immediately see the differences between RT x on and RT X off the scene has more depth and realism to the lighting system it may not be obvious at first but with global illumination disabled some areas of the scene are illuminated where really they shouldn't be for example with our TX off the boxes under the desk are illuminated by pretty much a non-existent light source here with our TX on these areas are correctly presented in shadow it's a similar situation with the back of the lamp on the desk and the ceiling light realistically very little light should be hitting these areas and with global illumination enabled that's what you're getting it's a similar situation in this scene with our TX off it looks a bit weird having the bright wall and the dark pipes with the lighting present here you might not have ever noticed an issue until you turned on our TX where the lighting is better interacting with these two elements yes it is darker but it's more realistic and then answer the atmosphere the effect is more subtle in this scene but again the areas that shouldn't be illuminated and illuminate have visible the changes are I guess it depends on the lighting the objects in at the angry viewing and so on this is one of the scenes where you won't see as drastic of a change but when you step into the above ground areas of the game particularly during the day RT access some of the biggest changes I've spotted here it has almost the opposite effect of the darker underground sections rather than removing light from surfaces that shouldn't have it global illumination outdoors tends to add light to where it should be this scene for example has lots of points of reflection including the snow and several walls behind the camera so again it makes sense that it's brighter with less shadowed areas and better surface interactions another interesting note to make about this scene is the tone the r-tx soft environment has a slight yellow tone due to the color of the Sun but with r-tx off is whiter thanks to the light reflecting off white and gray walls and snow this is one of the other advantages to global illumination this is another scene where there is a significant difference between r-tx on and off ITX off feels like it has a general ambient light from a non-existent source whereas the r-tx on footage says it's light comes solely from the windows and overhead lights which creates a darker though more natural-looking presentation look at the soldiers on the right in particular with our Tiff's on they are more illuminated than the two central characters as they're standing directly under a light whereas the central characters are not so when you turn RTX off the scene is lit more evenly the central characters are roughly as bright as the soldiers on the right which really doesn't make sense given the position of the light sources most of the other scenes I captured just continue to show off the aspects I've already mentioned throughout most of the game these are fairly significant and visually obvious changes to the lighting system from what I've seen the lighting appears more realistic and more in line with what you'd expect when considering where light sources are placed and so on to me there is greater depth and a more natural look but it's also no definitive case of r-tx on being better with reflections aside from the noise issues it was clear that raytrace reflections were superior to screen space reflections from a visual standpoint with ray-traced global illumination while I feel the lighting is more realistic and has more depth it is a bit more of an artistic change some people may like the RCX off presentation more if they prefer brighter scenes in dark areas and more shadowing and bright outdoor lighting there are a few more points I want to make on the visuals before diving into performance I found it very difficult to spot any changes between the high and ultra mode sometimes I thought there was a small difference only to discover the differences were more down to the games dynamic slightly changing lighting system rather than the jump from high to ultra r-tx so without looking at performance it's pretty safe to say that high is the way to go here there is no noise present anywhere with raytrace global illumination at least that I could see this was a big issue with reflections but it's not visible in Metro Exodus that's well it's quite clearly a fantastic thing because in some scenes the noise and battlefield fires of raytrace reflection was extremely noticeable and could look worse than with ray-tracing disabled in Metro it's pretty much a non-issue it's also important to note that the game doesn't feel like something is missing from the lighting system when r-tx is disabled it's not a situation where the developers have removed an effect from the non r-tx version of the game only to bring it back through ray tracing the game still looks phenomenal with r-tx off it's just at least in my opinion looks even better and more accurate with RT x on then is the question could for a games the developer of Metro Exodus have achieved the same global elimination effect with that race race this is it's quite tricky to answer because there's no switch to simply enable a non ray-traced global illumination in this game to make a nice comparison I haven't looked extensively into its implementation other games but my feel is that Metro Exodus is r-tx based gob elimination is more accurate and more comprehensive it definitely looks pretty good here it's probably the most accurate lighting system I've seen also global illumination through other techniques already tends to be a fairly computationally intensive effect turning ray tracing on does come with a sizable performance hit as we'll see in a moment however this has tended to be the case with other games that use global illumination as well the r-tx penalty it is most likely going to be larger however it's also a better implementation so I'm not as concerned with this being a pointless reengineering of global illumination as I was with reflections if we remember we saw a reflection is done really well without ray tracing in a much lower performance cost in hitman 2 examples of global illumination done as well as Metro Exodus with a much lower performance cost well that's a lot of rare-earth not not possible and there's a chance that using ray tracing is easier for developers than other technique which could mean better visuals from fewer development resources so moving into performance probably should go over the test setup before I get into the numbers I've tested all the r-tx GPUs using my Intel Core oh nine ninety nine hundred K test rig although the CPU it really doesn't matter here because the game is very cheap you demanding latest drivers will be used so that's in videos for 1891 the day one drivers for Metro Exodus I also tested with both the pre-release and day one versions of the game and I found no difference in performance there the performance data is from Metro Exodus --is built-in benchmark tool this really helps to simplify the testing process and make it highly repeatable but I want to put a big warning sign somewhere here on the screen because there's a very important few things to note about metros benchmark tool I've played a few hours of the game as well and so far the benchmark tool represents performance in the most intensive areas of the game in fact if anything the benchmark is more intensive than the game itself throughout most of the game you can expect performance better than the benchmark tool shows however in those really intense areas the benchmark is I guess a reasonable reflection of in-game performance if anything I feel the benchmark does a better job of showing performance with r-tx on while under representing r-tx off performance somewhat I'll elaborate this a little bit after the charts but the margins between our techs on and off in the benchmark are usually slightly smaller than the margins you'll see in the game itself however the tool also tests areas in the game I haven't personally gotten up to yet so I'm not sure whether there are more intensive scenes to come I simply have no time to you know play the game to actually get to any more sections all of the settings with her to ultra in the benchmark the only setting I changed was rate racing there is an extreme preset above ultra but I felt ultra was the better balanced several settings are not encompassed in the main preset I guess you'd have to say and these are all enabled with motion blur set to normal tessellation on full and both physics and hair works enabled yes both those features are included here DLS s-works disables so we'll start with the 1080p dot here immediately from the r-tx off data you can see the game is very intensive in its worst case scenarios Steve will go into more detail on this in his full metric this GPU benchmarking at coming days but at least you get a little bit of a sneak preview of some of the results here an ITX 2070 is required for a 60 FPS average in the benchmark at just 1080p while the most intensive parts of the tool see that performance dip to near 30 FPS so yeah it's a bit painful but again throughout most of the game I've played you'll see performance higher than this a good example is the ITX 2080 TI which averages 90 FPS here but for many sections of the game this is up more around 120 fps aside from some of the most intense scenes the good news is enabling ray-traced global illumination doesn't tank performance to anywhere near the degree of raytrace reflections in battlefield 5 looking at the RT x high results we only saw a 17% increase in performance from disabling our techs at 1080p for the r-tx 2080 TI this grows slightly to 21% for both the RT x 2080 and RT x 2070 and 24% for the RT x 2060 and the margins are smaller again we're looking at 1% lows so it's clear that in the very most intensive areas of metrics it's not ray tracing that is causing that extra performance drop the ultra setting is more intensive again there's around a 10% gap between the two modes so for the Arctic's 20 a DTI turning ray tracing down from ultra to off sees a 26 percent performance improvement rather than 17% from height off considering there's almost no visual change between high and ultra I really don't see why you would use the ultra mode here with battlefield 5 the performance you gain from turning DX are reflections from just the low mode to off hovered between 50 and 60 percent for most GPUs at 1080p with metro Exodus going from high to off it's more like 20 percent so it's clear the performance impact here is nowhere near the level of battlefield 5 however with the RT X 2060 hovering around 41 FPS on average with ultra settings at 1080p and using the high r-tx mode I feel that rate rating still isn't well suited to invidious lowest level card capable of raytrace again it is a worst case scenario but that level of performance is quite low especially with the 1% lowest below 30 FPS at 1440p the margins do grow a bit compared to 1080p here the ITX 20 ATT is a 25% uplift switching from high to off that margin is up around 28% for the 2070 and 2080 while between 60 sees a 36% performance gain the ITX 2060 does not perform well at 1440p with ray-tracing here so it's not something I'd recommend even the ITX 2070 is a bit borderline in the benchmark meanwhile the are chunks of 2080 and r-tx 20 atti are at acceptable levels of performance moving to 4k and this is a resolution that simply wasn't worth using with ray-tracing battlefield 5 with Metro Exodus it's borderline the ITEX 2080 I see is a 38 percent uplifting performance at this resolution with r-tx disabled so much higher than 1440p and 1080p this shows once again that rate racing doesn't scale nicely with a resolution the performance impact is higher with each resolution jump especially when going all the way to 4k the 2080 and 2070 get hit harder again but both cards aren't great for 4k gaming in this title to begin with especially the 2070 meanwhile the art x20 atti is really the only GPU I'd consider using for high rate racing in this game at 4k and even then I'd feel the performance impact is probably too large for most gamers going from a 47 FPS average which isn't amazing but playable for this sort of game to a mid-30s framerate is not great with that said you will get better frame rates with r-tx on at 1440p then you will with r-tx off at 4k so again unlike with battlefield 5 there's not the same level of trade off between resolution and rate racing as I mentioned earlier the benchmark is a bit of a worst case scenario for performance in general but it's also typically a best-case scenario for the margin between our techs on an RT X off it's a bit weird in that regard I find the opening few sequences of the game twice with both our techs on and our techs off and the margins between the two playthroughs at 4k was sort of 35% on the low end but as high as 60% or more in some areas it can vary a bit between scenes and level so it's hard to nail down an exact figure that's representative of the game however the benchmark delivered a 38% margin which typically was on their better end of the performance impact scale with that said typical in-game margins looks more reasonable at 1440p at 1080 with the benchmark showed a 17 to 25 percent gain from disabling ray-tracing where is in the game itself up to a 30 percent gap is what you can expect in the worst cases for ray-tracing aside from playing at 4k you won't see 50 percent margins which was a key issue with battlefield 5s ray-traced reflections will deal SS improve upon these performance numbers well yes and no yes in the sense that enabling DSS with RT X on takes performance back up to around the level of RT X off in fact RT X on with the high mode plus DSS was around 8% faster at 4k than RT X off although performance was 12 percent lower than just running the game at 1440p with RT X on DSS at 1440p with RT x on was actually a little slower than RT x off though but it's also not an improvement because the visual quality is not equivalent the 4k DLS s presentation is noticeably softer and blurrier than native 4k I have more thoughts on DL s s in a separate video looking at battlefield fires implementation as well but to me if I'm playing in 4k I want the native sharp image which is especially nice in Metro Exodus and you simply won't get that with DL SS enabled all right so that's another ray tracing investigation complete you might have noticed there's a bit of a different tone to this video compared to the last one in battlefield 5 there this really hasn't been another video where I guess we take a dump on RT X from a great height it's actually genuinely quite different in Metro Exodus so I wanted to come at this one with a fresh perspective the big question here is should you turn on RT X and the answer is well it depends it's not a universal recommendation but that is an improvement from where things were out with RT X in battlefield 5 with DXi reflections I really could not recommend anyone use the feature and it really didn't do a good job of selling the benefits of ray tracing but with Metro Exodus there are some cases where actually makes sense to turn RT X on one of the key differences is the game itself Metro is a slower single-player game yeah you'll still want good performance but part of the games experience is in the breathtaking visuals there's not as much to gain from playing Metro Exodus at above 100 FPS compared to a competitive multiplayer shooter like battlefield then there are 2d small factors that make this implementation better than battlefield 5 firstly the visual changes larger may not be subjectively better for every person your opinion on how it looks may vary even depending on the scene but I found the differences were more noticeable throughout the game on the whole with reflections it was only some areas where you couldn't spot the effects of ray tracing and in some instances it was horribly noisy but with ray traced global illumination almost every environment in the game is lit differently and in my opinion more accurately to me art exon looked better most of the time sometimes substantially so and then there's the performance it's not as bad as DXi reflections either the hit is still there especially at 4k but it doesn't feel like we're in crazy territory anymore a 20 to 30 percent improvement from disabling the effect is still one of the larger hits for any individual graphics effect but it's not fifty to sixty percent clear it was with reflections it's also in line with some of the larger performance hits we've seen from non r-tx effects in games over the last few years so again nothing crazy when you combine all of these factors RTX global illumination in Metro Exodus is looking a lot more favorable it's a game that benefits from stunning visuals r-tx on looks better most of the time and the performance hit is manageable this is really how our techs should have launched to the public if this is what gamers got the first time they saw ray-tracing in person I think people's impressions would have been a lot more positive but again it does depend on your situation as to whether r-tx is a feature worth enabling in the game at 4k the higher than usual performance it makes RT X not worth even with an RT X xx atti you're only going to get a 60 FPS experience with RT X off at 4k within videos flagship GPU cutting into that performance significantly is really not a choice I'd make I'd also tend to earn the side of not using RT X for any configuration where you're not already hitting a 60 fps or there abouts especially if you don't have an adaptive sync motor so this would include the RT X tween 60 at 1080p or the RT x 2070 at 1440p I feel the experience with our techs off at 60fps is better than our techs on it maybe 45 to 50 FPS or so in both instances but if there's Headroom to spare and you're a gamer that loves improved visuals then yeah there is something to be gained from playing with RT X enabled what would be the r-tx 2080 at 1440p from what I've experienced that card runs metro comfortably above 60fps at that resolution aside from the most intensive situations you turn on ray tracing and the game is still 60 FPS experience with improved visuals if you love graphics I don't see how that's a bad theme when you're still achieving strong performance in this title I do hope though that one day we're in a situation where using ITX can be a recommendation in all situations but from a first-generation product with the second game to include the feature it really is a lot more promising than I originally thought it still shouldn't be used as a factor in buying a new graphics card because there are still so Hugh came even announced to support the tech but those that get a good deal on an RT X GPU can enjoy this as a little bonus and that's it for my thoughts on Metro X's ray tracing I think the game comes out today for the general public it looks seriously good so this is one of those tiles I think that PC gamers will be loving aside from the whole epic game store thing which yeah it's a bit disappointing that happened around the launch of this game but yeah the game itself seems to be really good we'll have a few follow-up pieces in the next few days that are definitely worth subscribing fault will have a full GPU benchmark from Steve there's also an optimization guide in the works and a further look into DL SS along with DSS and battlefield 5 which also launched recently so stay tuned as we work on those consider supporting us on patreon it takes a long time and many extra hours to produce these sorts of videos in a timely manner so we really appreciate all the support we get from our patrons that makes all of this possible and I'll catch you in the next one