Gadgetory

welcome back to hadron box time back again for another investigation into ray tracing on NVIDIA SAR TX cards this time with shadow of the Tomb Raider which has finally been updated to support both DirectX ray tracing shadows and invidious DSS upscaling technology it's been several months since ray tracing was first shown off in this game and a good six months since the game was released but hey the feature was added in eventually the inclusion of ray tracing in shadow of the Tomb Raider marks the implementation of the third and final ray tracing technique we currently have at our disposal battlefield 5 used ray traced reflections Metro Exodus used Ray traced global illumination and shadow of the Tomb Raider uses ray traced shadows hopefully in the future we'll see games use a combination of these techniques but right now each game is choosing one of the three and after today we should have a good idea at how each technique can improve visuals before we get to that though this video is 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shadow Maps start getting replaced in favor of more ray tracing from spot and directional lights including the Sun and then with ultra you get more shadows and additional Ray's DSS has its own setting that can be activated as well for the following tests and comparisons we've set the game to use the maximum quality settings so that's a level but the highest preset with everything enabled after all if you're using ray-tracing you're pretty much going to be after premium graphics so you already have all the things cranked up to the highest all testing was done on my standard core oh nine ninety nine hundred k test rig with game footage captured using the RT x 20 80 TI at 4k but also performance data for all RT X GPUs at different resolutions as well which I'll get to later the first thing to note is that the medium ray tracing setting doesn't affect the quality of shadows in most situations because it only road traces point light shadows so this would be a light from a fire or lamp for example when outdoors the medium mode uses standard ultra quality shadow Maps because shadows from the Sun are not prey traced here this is why in a lot of these comparisons there's no appreciable difference between DX are off and darks are on medium what you start to notice a difference is with the high and ultra modes depending on the area the difference is quite huge with rate where shadows looking softer in general thanks to its more accurate distance based shadowing ultra shadows in this game look pretty good they're sharp across most elements but ray tracing is an upgrade if accuracy is what you like in this scene for example shadows cast from overhead Foley adjust soft due to the large distance between the foliage and the ground while la razón shadow is much sharp as its closer to the shadowed surface well I like the ray tracer shadow presentation I believe it looks more accurate like with other ray traced techniques the change might not be something everyone likes as most games use sharp or shadow if this distance based system might be a bit jarring or look worse if you prefer that standard sharper shadow look one thing is quite clear though the high shadow mode is not good in fact it looks worse than the ultra non ray ray shadow mode in my opinion due to a lack of shadow density for some reason the high mode just seems to remove a lot of shadows particularly from overhead foliage which is obviously not the intended presentation looking at both ultra regular shadows and ultra Ray Ray shadows the Ray count limitation here is too tight and while the shadows that are cast look better and more accurate removing shadows to get this effect I feel is not really a good compromise ray traced shadows have a number of other advantages the game already is to use distance based shadowing for some dynamically generated shadows without ray tracing but there's a fair bit of aliasing present even using the ultra mode when switching ray tracing on this aliasing disappears and you get a much cleaner presentation with better distance calculations it's with these shadows including la razón shadow which suffers from the same issue the ray tracing is the biggest upgrade in many areas ray tracing also delivers more depth to the scene with better and more accurate shadowing of objects such as handrails rocks tables and so on again without ray tracing the scene still looks excellent but ray tracing steps it up a notch and then here we can see where point lights come into play which is an effect you get with the medium mode enabled beside this fire there are actually no shadows cast with ray tracing off but when switch need to medium Lara immediately casts an accurate shadow onto the wall behind it there's not much to be gained from higher modes with point light shadows and there are plenty of other point lights throughout the game that do car shadows even with ray tracing off but this was one of the best examples I could find yeah the developers probably could have implemented regular shadows first light but even then it wouldn't look as good as ray tracing while I have been talking a lot about the visual upgrades that ray tracing provides there are also a decent amount of issues I noticed again looking at the high ray tracing mode here there is a serious shadow draw distance issue when you roam around large environments there is an obvious flat line transition between ray traced shadows and regular shadows that is extremely visible and quite jarring it's another reason I wouldn't consider using the high mode at all not only are there fewer shadows in general the transition line is just awful this obvious transition point isn't a problem on the ultra ray tracing mode but there is another issue at play here and that's shadow pop in as you roam around you can spot shadows magically appearing for some objects with no fading they're just popping out of thin air in the distance in contrast with ray tracing disabled there is still a limit to how far shadows are drawn but there is a nice fade in transition to these shadows as you move around rather than a giant pop in I'd say shadow draw distance with the ultra mode is similar to off in general but the off mode clearly handles the transition more gracefully then there are some instances where Ray Ray shadows don't work correctly in seen the roofing on the left should be shadowing the wall with the pattern similar to the leafing on the roof that's what you get with regular shadows but with a ray tracing it seems like the Alpha texture is not being traced correctly so what we get is a large outline of presumably where the geometry is it doesn't look right and doesn't really make sense although in other areas of the game this sort of alpha channel does seem to be handled properly with that said I did spot some other artifacting in the game with ray tracing again on roofing in this scene the shadowing present on the rocks on the left is a lot better with ray tracing on but ray tracing also introduces these weird patterns into the roof that don't really look quite right looking at the overall quality my thoughts are here that Ray traced shadows do look good in general but only if you use the ultra mode there are too many issues with the high mode including reduced shadow density and a horrible transition point that makes this mode look worse than ray tracing disabled the ultra mode does have its issues including weird artifacts and popping but to me it looks better than ray tracing disabled and definitely more accurate the medium mode is okay when there are point lights around but the upgrade is basically non-existent in many outdoor environments the good thing is well with this game is it's a slower paced game with an emphasis on stunning visuals so there's more time to appreciate the improved shadow quality and in most cases it's not just a subtle change its a decent upgrade that I'm sure most of you will have noticed in the comparisons so far the major problem with ray chase shadows in shadow of the Tomb Raider is again the performance though the developers have clearly put in a lot of time to make sure the game doesn't run as poorly as the original demos but the performance still isn't great I'll start here with the RT X 20 atti results with performance captured using the in-game benchmark tool which is fairly representative of the scenes I've showed in this video across all three resolutions the hit moving from off to ultra is pretty significant at 1080p performance drops by 39% on average with an even larger 57% hit to 1% lows then at both 1440p and 4k you're getting a 41% drop on average when factoring in 1% lows which show performance in the most intensive areas of the benchmark is typical to see your framerate cut in half when using the ultra ray tracing mode and that is usually what I found in general gameplay in intensive areas at 4k it was common to sit around 60fps with ray tracing off while a touch under 30 FPS with ultra ray traced shadows it's pretty painful the medium mode doesn't see as much of a drop of mere 14% of all K on average but it also doesn't provide much of a visual improvement outside of select scenes in fact the performance it is higher than 14% in these specific scenes where point lights come into play with the benchmark tool going through a number of different areas with that said the drop isn't significant in outdoor areas with no point lights you only see maybe 2 to 3 FPS shaved off so the good news is you won't be punished when the effect isn't visible like is sort of a case with battlefield 5 there's also not much of a difference between the high and ultra modes again usually about 2 to 3 FPS at most as the high mode looks awful there's no way I'd use it over this slightly more intensive ultra mode with the ITX 2080 we're seeing similar margins a 43% reduction in framerate at 1080p moving from off to ultra 41% at 1440p and 41% as well at 4k the ITX 2080 is definitely not powerful enough for ray tracing at 4k and it's only borderline at 1440p dropping from an ATF PS average to below 50 FPS at this resolution you'll want an adaptive sync monitor for the our TX 2070 I only tested two resolutions because it's quite obvious this card along with the RT X 2060 can't handle the game at 4k again we're looking at around a 42% drop at 1440p and 41% at 1080p the our TX 2070 is good for a 60 FPS experience at 1440p with ray tracing disabled but enabling ray tracing seeds 1% lowest dip below 30 FPS which isn't great I'd say the card is probably just not quite powerful enough or 1440p with ray tracing although as it delivers 60 FPS at 1080p it is fine there as for the RT X 2060 well no surprises that it can't handle ray tracing at 1440p it sees a 45 percent drop in framerate which takes a card that is fine at 1440p without being amazing to a car that simply can't play the game at a reasonable frame rate at 1080p though it's a better situation you will see that 41% drop in a frame rate but around 50 FPS I'd still say the game is playable so not a total disaster I guess my main problem here with ray tracing and shadow of the Tomb Raider is once again the performance the visuals are good so it's not like a battlefield 5 situation where you get both awful performance and noisy ray-traced effects but we're still talking about having your framerate significantly reduced when ray tracing is enabled the performance hit is a lot higher than in Metro Exodus although for a larger visual improvement as well considering the regular ngon ray-traced ultra shadows already look very good and the game in general looks amazing on maximum settings I just don't think it's worth turning ray-tracing on in most situations having your frame rate is a huge hit to take we're talking at least a 30fps reduction which just isn't going to work the most people the situations where I could see this hit being worthwhile where you could have excess performance at your native resolution so that's really with the Arctic's 2080 and our TX 20 atti 1080p and the ITX 2080 TI and 1440p with those GPUs you can run the game at over a hundred FPS with ray tracing off so turning it on only brings you down to around 50 fps or so in those worst case environments it's a big hit but we're not in console performance territory with other combinations we're looking at performance near 30 FPS at times take the r-tx 2070 for example would you rather play the game at 60 FPS at 1440p with ray tracing off or 1080p at below 60 FPS with ray tracing on to me the higher resolution is a much bigger improvement in visual quality especially those resolutions provided you ever capable monitor of course so I wouldn't want a downgrade resolution to use ray tracing shadow of the Tomb Raider does have DL SS but we've already shown this technology to be unnecessary at best in our examinations in other games from what I've seen in two Maitre D' LSS is not as good as the implementation in Metro Exodus but better than battlefield 5d Ellis this is definitely not as sharp as the native presentation it's blurry in some areas and doesn't let the fine texture work in the game shine I stick to experimenting with standard resolution scaling here where you can't achieve better performance and all better visuals all up it's hard to put into a 6 synced word how I feel about ray-tracing in shadow of the Tomb Raider on the one hand the visual upgrade is decent and the game can look good using the ultra mode and on the other hand that comes at a huge performance cost it's not outright mediocre like in battlefield 5 I wouldn't say it's disappointing either I wouldn't say it's fine or good because of the performance cost it's maybe just a bit meh we're the sort of technology will shine is when the performance hit can be reduced significantly if the framerate dropped was maybe 15 to 20 percent rather than 40% it would be easy to justify turning it on for that would need much more powerful ray tracing Hardware so more arty cause faster acceleration and just more power in general unfortunately that's probably several generations down the line of all the ray-traced implementations I've seen so far I'd probably still lean towards Metro Exodus being the best balance of visual upgrades with performance cost but we're still not in a situation with any of the r-tx games so far where I could easily recommend using ray tracing or buying a card that can do it it's far too early to think of this as a technology there's anything other than a cool tech demo that's I guess a bonus for owners of r-tx graphics cards that's it for this investigation into ray tracing in shadow of the Tomb Raider I'm interested to hear your thoughts on r-tx in this game if you have played it so chuck them down in the comments below if you like these sorts of investigations consider subscribing and supporting us on patreon and I'll catch you in the next one you