Honestly the biggest improvement is more the material properties the Total RT Reflections add. Not just to metals and glass, but skin, eyes.etc everything feels a lot more realistically lit.
3:30 this is a great example how much better lighting and reflections add to the perceived realism of a scene. I could see this mod being used by people who take "cinematic"/artistic screenshots in games.
Agreed! I'd say that the first example at 1:32 also shows it off incredibly well. It also shows how better lighting leads to dramatically better looking materials.
@@blackops2001the only way ik able to run pathtracing in cyberpunk at 4k is with dlss quallity and frame gen on ... and sometimes i get under 60fps but i kinda blame my 64gb ddr5 that has cl40.. instead of cl30.. it is wh ie ies"
@@RicochetForce There's also software improvements to take into account. For instance, according to Epic, hardware Lumen performance is almost doubled in UE 5.4 (give or take, depending on the scene), and Microsoft is patenting an upcoming LoD solution for ray tracing. Combine that with the massive improvements in FSR and PSSR we'll likely be seeing in the "RDNA 5" generation (might be post-RDNA at that point) as well as AMD's track record of transitioning to a much more performant microarchitecture every console generation, and I don't think path traced 4K30 with an 1800p internal resolution would be far-fetched in next-gen consoles. Especially when you take into account that, although the current RDNA 2 in consoles does support RT, the architecture itself is not all that optimised for RT, so there's a huge potential waiting to be tapped on both the hardware and software sides.
Hey, little update on Path Tracing: Praydog has added a feature to the latest Nightly build of REFramework that enables you to layer 2 RT modes, letting you denoise a bit of the path tracing with the regular ASVGF RTGI (also helps illuminate some pitch black shadows where the PT isn't working quite right). In conjunction, I've added a sun fix to the Graphis Suite for path tracing that re-adds specular details and decreases the overall sun intensity. Together with these 2 aspects bringing the image contrast more in line, the noise is reduced quite a bit and you can even play with 0 bounces on the path tracing for 0 noise altogether, though you'll be relying on the RTGI for reflection light etc and only really have the path traced shadows.
Thanks for the coverage! Still working on adding more options to the mod as and when I can. Just found a way to make the clouds in the game render at the correct resolution, no more blurry pixellated clouds.
Alex was right to quadruple the number of samples per pixel to 4, but you can see that it only halfway solves the problem of speckling and weird shimmering and pixel noise. To totally solve the problem, we would likely need to quadruple it again to 16 samples per pixel. This would inevitably lead to even an RTX 4090 running the game around 10 FPS at 1080p, but at least we know what it will take!
@@MrSpinedukean even better result is to implement a better sampling technique for the path tracer like ReSTIR. denoising relies on input being good enough and if you have it bad like that torch at night example they showed in the video... it's gonna do nothing but a big blurry light
@@FaultyTable I guess it helps if you are only watching it on a phone, pausing the video to see the details, or they show the best case scenarios, but for the rest of us that have keen for details, you can see the noise for sure, especially when Alex zoom in a lot.
@@FaultyTabledo you mean the noise? Because I think the general improvements to lighting quality are massive. The denoising could be fixed through NRD or RR. As well as smarter sampling through ReSTIR. This would improve performance AND quality.
The noise can be fixed just by actually using a denoiser. Path tracing isn't using denoising at all here, even just routing the path tracer output through the A-SVGF denoiser would massively help at the cost of killing a bit of detail. That's where DLSS RR, NRD and ReSTIR would come in as the former is generally a better denoiser and the latter two help clean up noise before lighting even goes through the denoiser.
That engine has roots in the ps3era, it has been barely upgraded for the RE games but shows it's limits in open and dense environments. I wish they either picked another graphics engine or reworked the internals to scale better with more powerful hardware as it's very likely that the next Monster Hunter game will also have the same issues.
@@OshMMf Maybe an unpopular opinion but I think SSR is usually horrible unless it's backed up with a half decent cubemap. Seeing reflections gradually become occluded as the object casting them moves off-screen is just really distracting to me. And obviously the bigger the reflection is the worse that gets. Screen space ambient occlusion, shadows and global illumination are not so bad, their occlusion is usually less jarring imo.
Haven't had any issues with shadows, but then of course I have them maxed out. Using 4k interlaced makes them flicker like hell, FSR3 at balanced seems to fix them though.
One thing that would be nice to mention is that the mod also includes an optional tweak to standard RTGI to improve its performance somewhat by using heatmaps.
Ray reconstruction looks fucking terrible, a perfect example of this is the faces on cyberpunk 2077 with path tracing and ray reconstruction on it looks so bad
@@RicochetForcewrong.. I agree with the other guy path tracing / ray reconstruction in Cyberpunk literally looks horrible in some areas. Like PS2-grade shadows and fuzziness everywhere (I have an RTX 4090 btw). And no, its not because of DLSS or Frame Gen, I play all of my games in DLSS-Q or DLAA and I always turn on FG if a game supports FG. I cannot tell the difference between 4K native and 4K DLSS-Q in any game I play…So what makes CP2077 so blurry and soupy? Its either the path tracing itself, or the RR…
@@RicochetForceI don't think it looks terrible but I also wouldn't say it's an outright upgrade over the conventional denoiser. It does some things better, a lot of fine lighting detail is reconstructed more believably and reflections look a lot sharper, but it still has that oil painting look, buries a lot of detail, oversharpenening issues around edges and kinda falls apart in motion, even with the most recent DLLs. It is of course better than having no denoiser like in this mod and adding more options (within reason) is a good thing but it still has issues.
The key mode in DD2 is the one to increase RT resolution to full and turn denoiser off. Now you can enjoy the game with not much of a performance hit. Because the 0.4 original resolution and aggressive denoiser really makes for an unstable image that was annoying the hell out of me more than the poor performance on launch.
At 05:00 the stones that form the circular base are not occluding light, even with pathtracing. So there's more work to do to make it look even better.
Very cool but the added layer of fur on every object makes it unplayable. Hopefully modders can sort out the de-noising over time. I'd love an official update for pathtracing just for the materials alone though. The metal objects look incredible
That's simply not true. It may have been at launch, but I bought it on PC 3.5 weeks after launch, after putting in 110hrs on PS5, and it runs at 60fps on my i9-13900k/ 3080 PC in the towns in 4k with adjusted settings mixing low/med/high.
The slowdowns are because of a CPU bottleneck - your GPU is actually not even running at full utilization a lot of the time in DD2, so adding more load to it might not be as much of an issue as you'd think.
Probably could rather easily lock 60 fps with 3 samples instead of 4. Also, path tracing performance doesn't usually scale, either up nor down, as it casts rays indiscriminately. Performance impact should in theory be more or less the same everywhere. I think with some small tweaking and adding a denoising pass this could be very playable.
I wish more developers used baked lighting which is baked according to path traced lighting. I know its very labour intensive but could work in linear single player games and achieve similar results as path tracing + our gpus could actually run it.
Baked lighting is what makes old(er) games like the original The Last of Us and The Order 1886 look so beautiful even today. Most games that do not have a dynamic time of day/weather system could use baked lighting for static light sources. They'd still need to use proper shadow maps (or simple RT shadows) for dynamic objects (like the player character, for example). Also, baked lighting does not work well with specular surfaces, sadly - you need real time solutions for those.
Baked ligts and shadows looks great but the limitation is that they work well in static environments. The moment the light source is movable it wouldn't work.... sun changing position in the sky for example.
@@tyrus1235 Yeah The Order 1886 looks like it could be a PS5 game. Especially if you boosted it to 4k60. (And, you know, finish the rest of the game since it's basically a 4 hour tech demo).
It is not possible to bake an equivalent of path traced lighting. Particularly for materials that are both diffuse and specular there are no know algorithms to do that properly. For those you need to solve the rendering equation on the fly, for which path tracing is currently the most performant way.
it would be playable even on a 4080 if it had a denoiser and frame gen. The denoiser, as frame gen, on RTX is part of the optical flow and does not compete with reources on the GPU, and frame gen is good for these kinds of slower games even if the base framerate is under 60., And of course with dlss 3.5 they could use ray reconstruction to recoup some quality and get more performance. CP2077 does it with much more complex geometry and much more reflections, so why not dogma? Capcom doesnt want to spend resources on a few % of players that own high end gpus :P I guess we will see stuff like this only when Nvidia sponsors the game or when capable RTX gpus are the norm.
@@jose131991 I don't in cyberpunk. I use it there to get to 70-80FPS, with a base around 40 and something. WIthout it Path tracing is not playable on the 4080 even with agressive DLSS. But it might depend on the game and the implementation I guess. If you play with a controller it works much better I feel, since you cant do abrupt scene changes.
@@redtro8678really depends on the resolution. With dlss performance I'm always above base 60fps on a 4090 even in the most demanding areas like the Dogtown market. At least in the current version of the game. Though I prefer to play at 4k dlss balanced.
This is why lighting is so important to a game. It can transform what looks mediocre into something incredible. This is my main complain for games like FF7 Rebirth as it lacks this ambient lighting in many scenes making the game look worse. This stuff makes all the materials and model shine and look far better than what they do under poor lighting quality
@8:23 could also be perception. Our eyes pupils widen so a dark room is actually "lit". its not unrealistic for a candle lit room to be actually very dark through a fix model such as a game engine (unless it has build in light setting adaption parameters, have not installed the game yet)
I have spent so many hours in photomode, mainly because the mode itself is rather restrictive to use to it's fullest. To see the game being so much more beautiful with this mod really makes me want to get a new PC🤯
Now we're gonna need a DLSS RR mod for denoising & upscaling at once & we're set. DD2 looking better & since the performance is already bad in cities, it'll be bad everywhere for concistencies sake!
This review excellently confirms that path tracing is truly wave of the future feature which radically (also on the performance side) changes the visuals of the game.
I guess the next step in raytracing (or path tracing) is to remove the grain/noise effect. I wonder if that can be fixed with some clever blending effect.
There are already multiple steps that could be taken to reduce the noise. Importance sampling and ray guiding could be used to help guide rays towards the directions that contribute the most to lighting, an (ir)radiance cache could be used to provide a relatively noise-free baseline to sample against for deeper rays, and a denoiser could be used to clean up any remaining noise. What you're seeing is the raw output of the path tracer without any of these steps.
I'm hyped for the future of Path Tracing ngl. Imagine perfecting the look while not being so taxing on future cheaper gpus. Textures can screw it. The games could be stylized with simple textures for all I care. As long as the lighting is believable.
Jusant is a game that uses ray tracing to extremely beautiful results and its textures are more or less just base colors. It's really incredible! That said, proper textures do add to the realism of a scene - it's how you get granular detail like the sheen of wood or the relfectiveness of water and glass, for example.
@@RicochetForce Portal with RTX was a full remaster, though. All the assets were remade to be higher-fidelity and compatible with PBR. But yeah, Quake 2 RTX looks stunning.
@@tyrus1235 Dude I love Jusant's art direction. Combined with it's color palette it's really gorgeous to look at. And well if the game is aspiring for realism like Forbidden West or RDR2 then high-fidelity textures makes sense. But something stylized like Jusant or Lightyear Frontier benefits by embracing their simplified look and still manages to evoke the right materials/surfaces with the use of proper stylized textures and lighting.
There is plenty of both temporal and heuristic denoising going on with pure path-tracing enabled despite it being called "pure". I suppose, "pure" here means "only", without the raster part. Anything in the ballpark of single digit sample count looks like noise almost everywhere: rapidly shifting, compression destroying, eye scooping bunch of static noise. Image denoising is there and it's doing gods work for the given parameters, it's just that there is no amount of denoising that would be suffice to completely smooth out mere 4 spp.
Hopefully Capcom will officially add path tracing in the future. For the time being though I'm not sure if it's worth using unless you have a 4090 and are willing to play at sub 40fps if you don't want a crazy noisy image. In the future with the 50 or 60 series Nvidia GPUs and Core Ultra and Ryzen 8000 and 9000 CPUs this will probably be a much cooler mod to check out.
I remember been setting up for hours a reshade with path tracing in Kingdom Come Deliverance and Witcher 3. Resulting in amazing looking visuals. I even was more playing for these than actual gameplay lol
Path tracing makes it look like games back before ray tracing when devs actually gave a damn about graphics and how shadows interact with assets. This industry truly do be reinventing the wheel.
8:03 this is pretty much accurate and realistic if u ask me lol in order to lit up exactly like the left side, you need to places the candle right next to the wall and the floor
At least in cyberpunk path tracing is truly incredible and I think should be the future. The problem I have is I think in a lot of ways the ultra normal ray tracing lighting looks better for shadow detail etc. probably because the game was made with that type of lighting in mind is my guess. So putting path tracing on top of a game is beautiful but I don’t know if it truly looks great in all scenes. I can’t wait to see games made with only path tracing in mind.
Path tracing would be amazing but it’d pretty much have to be paired with frame gen tech to make it playable at current. I however would already be more than happy to see RT reflections & shadows added officially or modded in somehow.
It makes total sense that game devs are using pathtracing to work backwards and decide how lighting/shadows should look in their game. That is pretty brilliant. But why wouldn't they just release the pathtraced debug mode with a denoiser for PC users? I have a feeling that the answer is money
This makes a big difference. It doesn't look like path tracing will be much of a thing this gen, but I hope for next gen they can utilize this for more smaller scale games. I know the goal is for realism, but I would like to see this kind of lighting used for more stylized games. The raytracing already makes a HUGE difference for games like Minecraft and Fortnite.
@@RicochetForce I'm not sure if my comment got across correctly. I am familiar with current animation using PBR and path tracing as well as Blender being able to make all sorts of styles with advanced lighting. I was just saying, I hope the industry doesn't JUST try to make photorealistic games with path-tracing since I have already seen it done really well with stylized CG outside of gaming.
I remember being really impressed by Path Traycing in Cyberpunk 2077 until I notice horrible noise (film grain) on npc face, especially Judy. Hope they can better develop this tech because it truly look amazing when it works.
Nvidia should be all in on helping these developers get path tracing shipping in games. They will sell so many graphics cards if they can increase the amount of path tracing games / modes that are supported by the devs.
8:20 this is why Alan wake 2 isn't purely path traced. All of the huts in the woods would be way to noisy since almost no rays would hit the skylight. I wonder how cyberpunk solved this.
It would be significantly less than 10fps actually. A 2080 Super/i9-9900k at native 720p with path tracing in Portal RTX was getting me around 10fps. A PS5 with DD2? Yikes lol You really need a 30 Series or better and DLSS for this to be viable
This was never really intended to be in the game. It's a reference just like what you'd see in blender or other 3D modeling tools. It could be added just like most modern game engines
Seeing how dull that metal armour and those glass bottles look it almost feels like the path tracer was supposed to be the default at some point during the development, but then they couldn't get it to work right and changed their mind, leaving some assets looking worse than they should.
