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Cyberpunk 2077’s Path Tracing Update
- mastax 3y agoPresumably the WGPs are working on rays which start close to each other in space, which causes the potential occupancy problems mentioned. I wonder if you could shuffle the rays around a bit to help occupancy at the possible expense of cache hit rate.
- d_tr 3y agoWhy would shuffling the rays around help with occupancy? I 'd also guess that worse locality could easily obliterate any other benefits, but you never know unless you test...
- mastax 3y agoI'm working off the hypothesis in the article: > I wonder if RT work is a lot less predictable than rasterization workloads, making workload distribution harder. For example, some rays might hit a matte, opaque surface and terminate early. If one shader engine casts a batch of rays that all terminate early, it could end up with a lot less work even if it’s given the same number of rays to start with.
- d_tr 3y agoYou would end up with shader engines working for longer on average but with more "dead lanes" then, with no real benefit, right? Sounds like more flexible scheduling would ultimately be needed.
- asynchronous 3y agoSad to not see DLSS thrown into the upscaling test section, as I’ve seen the best quality to performance ratio running that over FSR or others.
- kevingadd 3y agoIt seems like they stuck with AMD and Intel's upscaling here because they were able to use the superior AMD debugging/instrumentation to examine what was going on in each frame. Nsight definitely provides less detail.
- waboremo 3y agoLoved reading this! What a fantastic dive into the update, and the visualizations are easy to grasp (also the VRAM ones reminded me of original Doom corridors). Generally impressed with XeSS given the lack of real world execution from Intel on this front, compared to the likes of DLSS v1. Also a great overview of the general state of ray tracing, I feel similarly in that some might be placing far too much emphasis on Nvidia's perspective: that raytracing the holy grail of gaming right now, when we are forced to give up quite a lot for playable experiences.
- Dalewyn 3y agoI'm surprised XeSS is seeing adoption at all, given Intel ARC's stillborn state of affairs. Now granted, Intel ARC is facing a chicken-egg problem so it needs someone to adopt XeSS first to hopefully drive customer sales, but even as an Intel fanboi I would tell any gamedev that adopting ARC is a waste of time and resources right now.
- Hamuko 3y agoDoesn't XeSS work on non-Intel GPUs as well?
- eek2121 3y agoARC is hardly stillborn. This may surprise you, but Intel has no issue moving GPUs. They are targeting low->mid end, which is an unpopular segment for hardcore gamers, but it is actually the largest segment. The whole reason they didn't kill ARC to begin with is the volume + margin. Arc isn't profitable overall due to development costs, and margins aren't great, but on a per unit cost Intel is making money. Similar situation to when AMD started getting hot and heavy into console development.
- jeron 3y agoIt’s so crazy how this game continues to get significantly better and better but since they botched the release, these updates go mostly ignored
- endorphine 3y agoDo these updates apply to PS4 as well?
- nikodunk 3y agoI bought it recently at half the launch price, played through this (now) flawlessly working game, and had a blast. It must suck to be a games publisher/developer, and have all of your users incentivized to wait.
- LegitShady 3y agoCan't blame the users when the publisher screwed up the launch. Publishers have normalized releasing broken games on launch day instead of pushing back launches to finish games. That's 100% in the publisher.
- delta_p_delta_x 3y agoThe game was published by CD Projekt S. A., and developed by its own subsidiary, CD Projekt Red. The two companies are more closely linked than any other publisher-developer subsidiary pair. The game was hyped up for almost a decade, with a trailer released in 2012, barely after The Witcher 2, and well before The Witcher 3 was released. CP2077 just spent far too much money on marketing and not enough on actually developing the game. Compared to TW3, CP2077 feels empty; the story was obviously rushed, and they had to change a lot to fit in Johnny Silverhand and Keanu Reeves. There are a lot of empty spots, the story is still rather... pointless, and there's honestly nothing to do. The game has been patched, but these have been mostly to do with bugs, balancing, graphics, and performance. It is still fundamentally broken, in my opinion, and still offers very few of the promises initially made by CDPR.
- pyuser583 3y agoRay tracing in this game is laughable. There’s a portion of the city where gigantic, nuclear-sized explosions happen at night. Its not combat, but street light reflecting the rain!
- ehnto 3y agoThis is a recent, as in last week, graphics pipeline overhaul for raytracing. Not saying your issue won't still happen, I haven't tested it, but if your basing your impressions off of the old hybrid raytracing modes, might be worth checking the new stuff out.
- pyuser583 3y agoI will check it out, but my experience is from within the last few days.
- ehnto 3y agoI think you need a 3090+ to have the right compatability, and you need to manually enable "Overdrive" raytracing mode in the settings. I also went and tested the rain thing in the old psycho hybrid mode and yeah, that's hilarious. I have had weird "ghosting" with hybrid mode and this felt like the same thing but x100
- bakugo 3y agoVery cool and all, but when is the "make the game good" update coming? I'm more interested in that.
- sp332 3y agoWell, it did get better. Recent reviews: Very Positive (80% of 7,171) https://store.steampowered.com/app/1091500/Cyberpunk_2077/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1091500/Cyberpunk_2077/ 7.6 User score https://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-series-x/cyberpunk-2077 https://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-series-x/cyberpunk-2077
- xwdv 3y agoUnfortunately this isn’t enough to bump it to the top of my steam games backlog when sorted by review scores.
- speedgoose 3y agoAre these also the movies you want to watch? https://www.metacritic.com/browse/movies/score/metascore/all/filtered?sort=desc https://www.metacritic.com/browse/movies/score/metascore/all...
- AB1908 3y agoI get the point but as a counterpoint, why wouldn't they be?
- bakugo 3y agoUser reviews improving somewhat due to an aggressive post-release marketing campaign (mostly revolving around the anime) doesn't really change the fact that the game is still missing many of the features promised before launch.
- bloqs 3y agoPeople are getting more and more blinded by this. This game was doomed by marketing in the first place, they clearly have a huge amount invested in their marketing vehicle. Of course they are going to use it to push anything at all. Also, anime fangirling seems to be hitting new, previously unreached heights via Gen Z, and the steam reviews are full of quotez from it.
- eek2121 3y agoI feel like AMD could optimized future architectures around this (very poorly optimized) game and they'd probably have a fantastic GPU.
- MikusR 3y agoIt runs on steamdeck
- kevingadd 3y agoCP2077 isn't really that poorly optimized at this point. People are usually judging the performance based on the launch version on consoles (very bad, but because it was unfinished) or PC with the settings turned up.
- smcl 3y agoYeah I finished the game within the first month on a Radeon RX580 before many of the optimisations were released. Performance at low/medium was fine, not wonderful but perfectly usable so long as I didn't raise the settings too high. I saw videos of the PS4 and Xbox One performance and it was gruesome, I can completely understand why Sony pulled the PS4 version.
- redox99 3y agoPlaying Cyberpunk Path Tracing on a friend's 4090 was incredible. Over 100fps (with all the upscaling/framegen trickery). The visual jump is significant enough that I find it worth to power through the 40-60fps I get on my 3090 (although I often disable it for combat sections). As soon as the average gaming PC and console has the power of a 4080/4090, rasterization is dead.
- anonylizard 3y agoCyberpunk path tracing is the first time I felt there was a true graphical leap since Crysis from 15 years ago. Its obvious, even from youtube videos, how drastic the difference is. In contrast, the previous ray tracing comparison videos of Cyberpunk did not move me at all. I bought a 4090 based PC last week, this is the future for video games. It also helps 4090 is dual use for AI, its like 20x faster for stable diffusion than a RTX2000s card.
- Baeocystin 3y agoI just got (as a trade from a client) a NiB 3090Ti. I haven't opened it yet. Is the 4090 really that much better? Honest question. Although I do game, I'm mostly interested in AI work. My current baseline 3080 has been just fine, although to be fair I haven't yet experienced path tracing.
- Washuu 3y agoYou would be best to look up reviews comparing them for your needs. For my needs the 4090 cuts ray tracing rendering times in half for what I do in Blender compared to the 3090 I have right now. I can't justify buying a 4090 right now so I will get the speed upgrade in a couple years.
- byyyy 3y agoIn my opinion. No. Watch comparison videos as well, you can barely tell the difference.
- redox99 3y ago
- User23 3y agoIt’s always been turboweird to me how hard the gaming press dunked on cd projekt. I assume they got marching orders because obviously, but from where?
- bloqs 3y agoYou clearly did not play the console release. They followed the huge cohort of memes and fan anger and amplifed it, Thats what the media does
- red-iron-pine 3y ago> I assume they got marching orders because obviously, but from where? Ads. They need clicks to get ad money. Reasonable, balanced commentary doesn't get attention, and no attention == no clicks. This isn't a monstrous conspiracy, it's been a thing since well before Hearst make up phony headlines to sell newspapers. Plus the team making the game hyped it up greatly and released a sub-standard product, all the more disappointing given that their previous games, like the Witcher 3, were excellent.
- shmerl 3y ago> The image is rendered at a lower resolution, and then scaled up to native resolution, hopefully without noticeable artifacts or image quality degradation That's what makes ray tracing not an attractive proposition at the moment. Once it will become usable without upscaling, then it will be interesting.
- pparanoidd 3y agoWhy? DLSS Quality is virtually indistinguishable from native. No reason to not turn it on when available
- shmerl 3y agoI don't buy this "indistinguishable" claim. Especially in any general case. At most it would be not too annoying. It's always about paying with one quality for another.
- Dylan16807 3y agoArguably native rendering wouldn't have antialiasing, because that would be downscaling, so DLSS would have both some disadvantages and some advantages. So the best case is better than "not too annoying", it has the potential to beat pure native rendering.
- pixelpoet 3y ago> Arguably native rendering wouldn't have antialiasing, because that would be downscaling If you're unfamiliar with computer graphics it's unhelpful to try to nitpick and just end up being incorrect. Antialiasing is not downscaling, and less data is never going to beat more data for visual fidelity.
- Dylan16807 3y agoI said 'arguably' for a reason, not out of ignorance. Parts of the pipeline are still per-pixel, and parts are effectively rendering at a higher resolution. > less data is never going to beat more data for visual fidelity It has less data but better processing. That can look better sometimes. Except it doesn't strictly have less data. It has multiple frames and other information to work with.
- tgtweak 3y agoI maintain that cyberpunk has one of the best non-RT reflections and rendering of most AAA titles... Just a beautiful game. Too bad they didn't put more time into making the game itself outside of the campaign more fun.
- dusted 3y agoFor all the hype, I don't think it looks very much better.. In many of the screenshots, I prefer the "no ray tracing" variant anyhow..
- cubefox 3y agoIt does seem more realistic in motion. https://youtube.com/watch?v=1K8Br6jHkcs&pp=ygURZGYgY3liZXJwdW5rIDIwNzc%3D https://youtube.com/watch?v=1K8Br6jHkcs&pp=ygURZGYgY3liZXJwd...
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y agoI wonder if we can expect to be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 at 4k 144hz on the next gen of GPUs. It took me so little to get used to gaming at high frame rates and high res, it feels like a jump that took almost no time.
- consp 3y agoAt this time it more looks like a money question. 4k 144hz mainstream for reasonable money? Not in this decade. Console platforms have a lifespan of about a decade, give or take a few years. Maybe we will see 4k 60fps PT next gen, so around 2030ish.
- redox99 3y ago4090 with DLSS upscaling + framegen is almost there, so next gen for sure.
- MaxikCZ 3y agoOne of the biggest drives (for me at least) behind 144Hz is reduced latency. Framegen obliterates that.
- cubefox 3y agoI think this "dumb" brute force approach to ray tracing won't have a lot of success for global illumination in the foreseeable future, it is simply to costly, and GPU price-performance progress is slow nowadays. The new Unreal Engine 5 ray tracing solution (Lumen) is a much smarter, more optimized approach based on light accumulation and SDF dummies. It doesn't require outsized hardware, although it probably can't quite match the quality of brute force ray tracing.
- redox99 3y agoThere's nothing brute force about getting this level of quality with just 2 samples per pixel. It is pretty magical actually, only possible thanks to ReSTIR, AI denoising, AI upsampling, AI frame generation and strong hardware acceleration for all these steps. Lumen is very impressive, but definitely not "much smarter" than all those technologies I mentioned. Anyway, Lumen is basically targeting PS5, while path tracing is "PS6" territory. Path tracing is without a doubt the future, basically the holy grail of rendering. Lumen an intermediate step before the HW is strong enough.
- cubefox 3y agoWell, Lumen must be smarter, otherwise it wouldn't run on significantly weaker hardware. Here is a SIGGRAPH talk with the technical details: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2GYXuM10riw https://youtube.com/watch?v=2GYXuM10riw https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2022/SIGGRAPH2022-Advances-Lumen-Wright%20et%20al.pdf https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2022/SIGGRAPH2022-Ad...
- redox99 3y agoBy that logic, Doom must be smarter, otherwise it wouldn't run on significantly weaker hardware.
- cubefox 3y agoWell, Lumen does have lower quality, but it also uses advanced tricks, like the SDF dummies, which safe a lot of performance. It runs even on GPUs without RT hardware acceleration, in software.
- hiidrew 3y agoI just want third person...so much more enjoyable to see your character in the world, was a bit disappointed CDPR didn't include this option
- red-iron-pine 3y agoesp. after they went through so much effort to model your body and clothes.
- healbadbad 3y agoWhen I think of ray tracing, my mind immediately assumes that it is equivalent to path tracing, and I have been a bit disappointed by many games' raytracing implementation. My biggest qualm with games out there, is that reflections are still always screenspace. I want to be able to use a reflective surface like water, glass, or mirrors to get a glimpse of what is around a corner, or to watch behind myself. (There is the occasional exceptionally well implemented mirror or portal, but most reflections only handle static scene geometry outside the camera's field of view.) Does Cyberpunk's path tracing finally allow this, or are the paths still limited to what is in view? Personally, I feel like proper reflections would be more useful and visually impressive for games than trying to render things as realistically as possible. I know that is a lot to ask with the current hybrid rendering approach, but I felt like ray/path tracing would address those issues from the start. If it does work well, I will probably buy and play through it again. (Steam family sharing is a wonderful thing)