6 ms·

Playing Cyberpunk Path Tracing on a friend's 4090 was incredible. Over 100fps (with all the upscaling/framegen trickery). The visual jump is significant enough

Playing 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 ago
Cyberpunk 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    You 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 ago
    In my opinion. No. Watch comparison videos as well, you can barely tell the difference.
  - redox99 3y ago
    For something like CP77 with path tracing: yes. The extra horsepower + DLSS frame generation will give you around double the FPS.
  - raihansaputra 3y ago
    For AI training 4090 is more efficient by quite a lot. Trade for a 4090 if you have the money for it and a good enough rig. Otherwise the 24GB VRAM of a 3090 is good and having more system RAM/disk helps more instead of a 4090. https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/hpc/nvidia-rtx4090-ml-ai-and-scientific-computing-performance-preliminary-2382/ https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/hpc/nvidia-rtx4090-ml-ai-a... https://lambdalabs.com/blog/nvidia-rtx-4090-vs-rtx-3090-deep-learning-benchmark https://lambdalabs.com/blog/nvidia-rtx-4090-vs-rtx-3090-deep...
  - Scene_Cast2 3y ago
    Something others haven't mentioned is the power consumption. On one hand, the stock 450W TDP is even higher than 3090's 350W. On the other, the 4090 barely loses any performance when you limit it to 70% (315W)
  - agloe_dreams 3y ago
    The big upside to the 40 series is DLSS 3 with frame generation. It is a wild tech that makes it possible to do things like path tracing in 4k. Not because the GPU is faster but because the AI adds smoothness. None of that has real meaning for AI. But the 4090 is just straight up 40% faster as well.
- aceazzameen 3y ago
  To be honest, I'm not a fan of the path tracing in Cyberpunk. It might be more technically accurate, but it feels less artistically accurate because artists didn't make the original game with path tracing in mind. Maybe a future update can blend the tech and artistry better. That was my first impression when I was testing various settings with my new 4090.
- alpaca128 3y ago
  For me that was the new SW Battlefront, which already used PBR. The game's demo blew me away. I haven't seen this Cyberpunk update but I can't imagine it being another huge step like that.
streakfix 3y ago
Games don't do full raytracing like blender or maya. Their raytracing works hand to hand with rasterization.
- NL807 3y ago
  Indeed it does. Most of the ray/path tracing happens in screen space.
- throwaway17_17 3y ago
  While I was tempted to make the same statement/assumption, the breakdown in the article/tech-tear-down seems to show a near-completely ray traced frame with only a very, very small portion of rasterization usage. If this update is indicative of the AAA spaces rendering proclivities I would say your statement just isn’t true any longer. I think one of the strong suits of game graphics is the results at any cost model of rendering tech, where the focus is on using whatever methods get the best results the fastest (and hopefully within frame budgets) wins out. Since the advent of polygon rendering rasterization has been the best solution for attempts at realism (be that hyper- or photo- realism). However, rasterization and the rendering ‘shortcuts’ used to achieve certain effects were also useful for other styles of rendering. However, if every bit of graphics silicon is going to be designed and optimized for a physically based, photorealistic rendering result it may be difficult to bend that functionality toward some non-photorealistic usage. I worry everything is going to end up having the same stamped out photorealistic appearance, in a similar way to the comments I’ve seen about the emerging Unreal 5 ‘look’. And that to get away from that look will require giving up a large chunk of GPU rendering horse power.
  - cma 3y ago
    Animated movies use pathtracing and don't have that problem. You can get a lot of looks out of it, and do things like tune the color saturation of bounces.
- redox99 3y ago
  Most games (including Cyberpunk without the path tracing mode) do use hybrid renderers indeed (so it's sprinkling ray tracing to specific parts of the traditional pipeline). The path tracing mode mentioned here however, does "full raytracing" like blender does (outside of a few exceptions such as particles). Same with Portal RTX, Quake RTX and a few others.
byyyy 3y ago
Tbh when compared with raytracing I couldn't tell if it was better when playing. Note that I could tell it was very different but I couldn't tell if it was "better". When watching direct comparison videos path tracing was slightly better when someone pointed out more accurate lighting details but not in a way that was noticeable if someone didn't point it out. What I found works for path tracing is objects that don't have strong textures or bump mapping. I've tried this when writing my own path tracer in a programming project (not cyberpunk) for simple monochrome spheres. Then in that case it makes it look very real, but in something as visually detailed as cyberpunk it's barely noticeable. I also think the lighting in cyberpunk is too urban and neon. It's not something our eyes evolved to interprete with extreme fidelity so our brains cant really see the difference. I think the effect is much more noticeable in environments with fewer light sources and light sources that aren't neon. For this reason I suspect red dead redemption 2 would benefit much more from path tracing. That's just my opinion. I have a 3090.
- redox99 3y ago
  To be fair, the fact that I worked in game development for a while makes the typical rasterization inaccuracies stick out like a sore thumb to me. Kind of like once you see it, you can't unsee it. And there's also a bit of knowing where to look at, what kind of scenes and weather types benefit the most, and so on. If you have someone point out the differences, on specific scenes, even the most casual observer will notice the huge improvements[1]. However if you boot up a random scene, it may look very similar. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-ORt8313Og https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-ORt8313Og
  - d_tr 3y ago
    Screen space reflections that are clipped depending on what is directly visible are at the top of my "hard to unsee" list.
    - tormeh 3y ago
      I wonder why there's no option to render a bit outside the screen just to make these artifacts disappear. Cheaper than RT, and would provide for me the most noticeable improvement of RT
operator-name 3y ago
DLSS is a big part of the magic here. Ordinary 1 ray per pixel would be barely enough, let alone 1 ray per 2/4 pixels. We're really got the "trickery" to thank as without it we'd be taking a large step back in terms of detail.
- newZWhoDis 3y ago
  Raster has decades of trickery built in. PT will catch up.
- cubefox 3y ago
  The main "trickery" comes before DLSS, namely via the heavy use of a denoiser. This reduces the required ray count to a small fraction, while still yielding acceptable quality.
- phatfish 3y ago
  I think the big gain came from "ReSTIR". The previous games released with RT "remasters" like Quake 2 have only a few lights that need to be traced per frame. ReSTIR apparently can optimize how rays are traced and allows for far more light sources to be visible. This is where the performance gain for the 100s of lights Cyberpunk might have in a single frame comes from. https://research.nvidia.com/publication/2021-06_restir-gi-path-resampling-real-time-path-tracing https://research.nvidia.com/publication/2021-06_restir-gi-pa... There is a "Digital Foundry" video which mentioned it.
girvo 3y ago
> As soon as the average gaming PC and console has the power of a 4080/4090, rasterization is dead. Yeah I think so too, but I do think that is a long way away. At least 5, maybe more, years. Because the sheer install base of non-path-tracing cards means a developer is silly to ignore it, and sadly the state of the GPU market means that that install base is going to stay as-is for quite a while, I think. I hope I'm wrong: path tracing with proper dev tooling around it means we get near-perfect lighting in our games, with less development and artist time needed to achieve it. It'll be an amazing day once it's path-tracing-only.
kevingadd 3y ago
This is still rasterized, though. They're just leveraging RT hardware for high-fidelity shading.
- cubefox 3y ago
  Is it? I thought they rendered everything with ray tracing.
  - MindSpunk 3y ago
    https://www.nvidia.com/en-au/geforce/news/cyberpunk-2077-ray-tracing-overdrive-update-launches-april-11/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-au/geforce/news/cyberpunk-2077-ray... The rasterizer is used to trace the primary rays to generate a G-buffer like any other deferred renderer that's been in use for decades by this point. What's unique is that all light transport is solved with path tracing.
automatic6131 3y ago
>As soon as the average gaming PC... has the power of a 4080/4090 So, a decade from now >As soon as the average gaming PC and console has the power of a 4080/4090 Ah, more like 15 years. Then, shortly after that, the mainstream won't be client compute, but cloud compute and game streaming. Although, I wonder if 20 years to build out full fiber for almost everyone in rich countries is realistic. I might be over optimistic here, actually. Maybe 30 for mainstream game streaming.
- terafo 3y ago
  I'm willing to bet that next gen consoles will at least match RTX 4090 PT performance. It will not take 15 years, it will take 4-5.
whizzter 3y ago
Even if you have path tracing, the "primary" rendering (ie seen triangles) will almost surely use classic rasterization because it's simply so much faster still w/o any real downsides. Secondary rays (GI, non-planaer reflections) though are quite hacky to accomplish with rasterization and benefits immensly more from the availability of raytracing extensions where your "only" problem is that you can't sample as much as you'd like so you need to converge a solution instead.

anonylizard 3y ago

Cyberpunk 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 ago
I 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 ago
  You 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 ago
  In my opinion. No. Watch comparison videos as well, you can barely tell the difference.
- redox99 3y ago
  For something like CP77 with path tracing: yes. The extra horsepower + DLSS frame generation will give you around double the FPS.
- raihansaputra 3y ago
  For AI training 4090 is more efficient by quite a lot. Trade for a 4090 if you have the money for it and a good enough rig. Otherwise the 24GB VRAM of a 3090 is good and having more system RAM/disk helps more instead of a 4090. https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/hpc/nvidia-rtx4090-ml-ai-and-scientific-computing-performance-preliminary-2382/ https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/hpc/nvidia-rtx4090-ml-ai-a... https://lambdalabs.com/blog/nvidia-rtx-4090-vs-rtx-3090-deep-learning-benchmark https://lambdalabs.com/blog/nvidia-rtx-4090-vs-rtx-3090-deep...
- Scene_Cast2 3y ago
  Something others haven't mentioned is the power consumption. On one hand, the stock 450W TDP is even higher than 3090's 350W. On the other, the 4090 barely loses any performance when you limit it to 70% (315W)
- agloe_dreams 3y ago
  The big upside to the 40 series is DLSS 3 with frame generation. It is a wild tech that makes it possible to do things like path tracing in 4k. Not because the GPU is faster but because the AI adds smoothness. None of that has real meaning for AI. But the 4090 is just straight up 40% faster as well.
aceazzameen 3y ago
To be honest, I'm not a fan of the path tracing in Cyberpunk. It might be more technically accurate, but it feels less artistically accurate because artists didn't make the original game with path tracing in mind. Maybe a future update can blend the tech and artistry better. That was my first impression when I was testing various settings with my new 4090.
alpaca128 3y ago
For me that was the new SW Battlefront, which already used PBR. The game's demo blew me away. I haven't seen this Cyberpunk update but I can't imagine it being another huge step like that.

streakfix 3y ago

Games don't do full raytracing like blender or maya. Their raytracing works hand to hand with rasterization.

NL807 3y ago
Indeed it does. Most of the ray/path tracing happens in screen space.
throwaway17_17 3y ago
While I was tempted to make the same statement/assumption, the breakdown in the article/tech-tear-down seems to show a near-completely ray traced frame with only a very, very small portion of rasterization usage. If this update is indicative of the AAA spaces rendering proclivities I would say your statement just isn’t true any longer. I think one of the strong suits of game graphics is the results at any cost model of rendering tech, where the focus is on using whatever methods get the best results the fastest (and hopefully within frame budgets) wins out. Since the advent of polygon rendering rasterization has been the best solution for attempts at realism (be that hyper- or photo- realism). However, rasterization and the rendering ‘shortcuts’ used to achieve certain effects were also useful for other styles of rendering. However, if every bit of graphics silicon is going to be designed and optimized for a physically based, photorealistic rendering result it may be difficult to bend that functionality toward some non-photorealistic usage. I worry everything is going to end up having the same stamped out photorealistic appearance, in a similar way to the comments I’ve seen about the emerging Unreal 5 ‘look’. And that to get away from that look will require giving up a large chunk of GPU rendering horse power.
- cma 3y ago
  Animated movies use pathtracing and don't have that problem. You can get a lot of looks out of it, and do things like tune the color saturation of bounces.
redox99 3y ago
Most games (including Cyberpunk without the path tracing mode) do use hybrid renderers indeed (so it's sprinkling ray tracing to specific parts of the traditional pipeline). The path tracing mode mentioned here however, does "full raytracing" like blender does (outside of a few exceptions such as particles). Same with Portal RTX, Quake RTX and a few others.

byyyy 3y ago

Tbh when compared with raytracing I couldn't tell if it was better when playing. Note that I could tell it was very different but I couldn't tell if it was "better". When watching direct comparison videos path tracing was slightly better when someone pointed out more accurate lighting details but not in a way that was noticeable if someone didn't point it out. What I found works for path tracing is objects that don't have strong textures or bump mapping. I've tried this when writing my own path tracer in a programming project (not cyberpunk) for simple monochrome spheres. Then in that case it makes it look very real, but in something as visually detailed as cyberpunk it's barely noticeable. I also think the lighting in cyberpunk is too urban and neon. It's not something our eyes evolved to interprete with extreme fidelity so our brains cant really see the difference. I think the effect is much more noticeable in environments with fewer light sources and light sources that aren't neon. For this reason I suspect red dead redemption 2 would benefit much more from path tracing. That's just my opinion. I have a 3090.

redox99 3y ago
To be fair, the fact that I worked in game development for a while makes the typical rasterization inaccuracies stick out like a sore thumb to me. Kind of like once you see it, you can't unsee it. And there's also a bit of knowing where to look at, what kind of scenes and weather types benefit the most, and so on. If you have someone point out the differences, on specific scenes, even the most casual observer will notice the huge improvements[1]. However if you boot up a random scene, it may look very similar. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-ORt8313Og https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-ORt8313Og
- d_tr 3y ago
  Screen space reflections that are clipped depending on what is directly visible are at the top of my "hard to unsee" list.
  - tormeh 3y ago
    I wonder why there's no option to render a bit outside the screen just to make these artifacts disappear. Cheaper than RT, and would provide for me the most noticeable improvement of RT

operator-name 3y ago

DLSS is a big part of the magic here. Ordinary 1 ray per pixel would be barely enough, let alone 1 ray per 2/4 pixels. We're really got the "trickery" to thank as without it we'd be taking a large step back in terms of detail.

newZWhoDis 3y ago
Raster has decades of trickery built in. PT will catch up.
cubefox 3y ago
The main "trickery" comes before DLSS, namely via the heavy use of a denoiser. This reduces the required ray count to a small fraction, while still yielding acceptable quality.
phatfish 3y ago
I think the big gain came from "ReSTIR". The previous games released with RT "remasters" like Quake 2 have only a few lights that need to be traced per frame. ReSTIR apparently can optimize how rays are traced and allows for far more light sources to be visible. This is where the performance gain for the 100s of lights Cyberpunk might have in a single frame comes from. https://research.nvidia.com/publication/2021-06_restir-gi-path-resampling-real-time-path-tracing https://research.nvidia.com/publication/2021-06_restir-gi-pa... There is a "Digital Foundry" video which mentioned it.

girvo 3y ago

> As soon as the average gaming PC and console has the power of a 4080/4090, rasterization is dead. Yeah I think so too, but I do think that is a long way away. At least 5, maybe more, years. Because the sheer install base of non-path-tracing cards means a developer is silly to ignore it, and sadly the state of the GPU market means that that install base is going to stay as-is for quite a while, I think. I hope I'm wrong: path tracing with proper dev tooling around it means we get near-perfect lighting in our games, with less development and artist time needed to achieve it. It'll be an amazing day once it's path-tracing-only.

kevingadd 3y ago

This is still rasterized, though. They're just leveraging RT hardware for high-fidelity shading.

cubefox 3y ago
Is it? I thought they rendered everything with ray tracing.
- MindSpunk 3y ago
  https://www.nvidia.com/en-au/geforce/news/cyberpunk-2077-ray-tracing-overdrive-update-launches-april-11/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-au/geforce/news/cyberpunk-2077-ray... The rasterizer is used to trace the primary rays to generate a G-buffer like any other deferred renderer that's been in use for decades by this point. What's unique is that all light transport is solved with path tracing.

automatic6131 3y ago

>As soon as the average gaming PC... has the power of a 4080/4090 So, a decade from now >As soon as the average gaming PC and console has the power of a 4080/4090 Ah, more like 15 years. Then, shortly after that, the mainstream won't be client compute, but cloud compute and game streaming. Although, I wonder if 20 years to build out full fiber for almost everyone in rich countries is realistic. I might be over optimistic here, actually. Maybe 30 for mainstream game streaming.

terafo 3y ago
I'm willing to bet that next gen consoles will at least match RTX 4090 PT performance. It will not take 15 years, it will take 4-5.

whizzter 3y ago

Even if you have path tracing, the "primary" rendering (ie seen triangles) will almost surely use classic rasterization because it's simply so much faster still w/o any real downsides. Secondary rays (GI, non-planaer reflections) though are quite hacky to accomplish with rasterization and benefits immensly more from the availability of raytracing extensions where your "only" problem is that you can't sample as much as you'd like so you need to converge a solution instead.