Hi, Philip not from Digital Foundry here. Quake 2 has been available with raytracing
for a few months now, but yesterday Nvidia released their own version, with numerous
optimisations and new features thrown in. The only downside is that you need a Geforce
2000 series to run it. I’m using a Geforce 2080 TI. You can get Quake 2 RTX on steam.
Raytracing -also path tracing- it’s the holy grail of computer graphics. Throw enough
power at it and in return, it will give you perfect lighting and reflections- 2 things
that are notoriously difficult to do in computer graphics.
But we’re talking about a LOT of power here. I didn’t expect it to be a thing for at
least several more years. But it’s arrived a bit sooner than expected, thanks to a clever
denoiser that can turn THIS… into this. And I can’t help but be impressed with what
it can achieve with such a limited amount of information to go off of. Even in ‘bright’
scenes, the noise is a horrible mess. But in dark areas such as this one I don’t know
how it’s able to piece together a coherent image. That poor denoiser is working overtime
to interpret a room from like, 3 dots of light. If you stand completely still, you can sometimes
make out slight shimmering around the edges of objects. And it takes a moment or so for
your shadow to fade into its proper position. These are all a result of limited rays being
cast. I hope for optimisations as time goes on but ultimately, we’ll probably have to
wait for more powerful hardware to reduce this effect further. But even in its current
state, it’s certainly not enough to be a nuisance.
The Geforce 2000 series is the first to have a bit of it dedicated to being able to do
this. It’s not like you can’t do it on AMD or older Nvidia cards, it’s just that
it would be dog-slow. So, here in Quake 2, I’ll show you some
of the bits I liked the most. In case you’re wondering why the baddies
aren’t shooting at me, it’s because I’ve disabled AI. I’m effectively invisible to
them, allowing me to study them in their natural habitat! Bastard.
I love this translucent glassy material that lets you see your reflection a bit. Staring
at an ugly marine in a broken glass window might seem like a waste of £1,000, but for
anybody with experience of how wrong or ‘botched’ reflections have been in games up until now,
this is kind of a big thing. And there’s an even better place to go if
you want to stare at yourself! A few rooms on is this data server thing and it reflects
things better still, and I think is the best example of the reflections that raytracing
can pull off. Look at that bad guy walking about in the background!
Just ignore how your camera view seems to come from the marine’s crotch.
And they’ve added reflections to the BFG because why not.
Oh and of course there’s water as well. I guess this isn’t quite as impressive to
me, since water is one thing that games have already gotten quite good at imitating since
back in 2004 with games such as Far Cry and Half Life 2. And then more recently with screenspace
reflections. But it’s still nice to see it done ‘properly’ and to know that it
can handle whatever it needs to reflect without being limited to tricks or what’s visible
on-screen at the time. Although reflections are normally what’s
used to showcase raytracing, I find it often feels forced because most things in real life
aren’t reflective enough to warrant it. Simple cubemaps or screen-space reflections
are usually enough to suffice. I expect the first games with raytracing to be wayyy too
reflective in order to justify the effect, with every window and metallic surface polished
to perfection, and every person’s face coated in a thick grease, and for explosions to be
shown in close-ups of eyeballs and so on. I personally prefer what raytracing means
for lighting. Again, it’s something that games have gotten good at faking, but there
are still some simple things- like when there are 2 shadows cast from the same object, when
a light-source is BIG, or when you being stood in a light source makes the whole scene darker-
that we haven’t properly seen until now. This will be something that future generations
will take for granted- and I pity them. For they won’t know how awesome it is to run
into a room and to think ‘HMM I wonder if it will get dark if I stand in front of that
light over there’, and then to get excited when it works, as though you thinking that
up is like you figuring out some elaborate puzzle or something. Somewhat strangely, it’s
made me appreciate it more in real-life as well and I’ve found myself doing all sorts
of weird stuff today as a result of this demo. The flare gun was an excellent idea and I
enjoyed throwing several of them around to cast diffused shadows and dancing lights.
And I found it surprisingly hard to cast dark shadows. It turns out your average videogame
room is lit by dozens of different light sources! I messed about with the mundane in Quake 2
for far too long, as I used to do with new graphics technologies. It reminded me of when
I played Devastation- the first game I remember with physics on barrels- and how long I spent
knocking them about the level. As cool as it is, is raytracing worth it?
For a tech demo like this, absolutely. For anybody interested in seeing what raytracing-
or pathtracing- can do, yes. However, I haven’t seen it used in any proper games that warrants
the performance impact. The truth is, today’s games are extremely good at faking lighting
and reflections without requiring full blown raytracing. And for 99% of the time, I think
more FPS benefits it more than accurate reflections in a nearby puddle do.
I like the idea of it being handled by a separate part of the graphics card. I almost feel like
I might as well enable it, since it’s not stealing resources from the rest of the card
and is instead something detached and separate. It still equates to lower fps, I guess because
even with dedicated hardware, the effect still slows that bit down and makes it the bottleneck.
I guess we’ll have to wait for AMD’s DXR-optimised cards before we can tell how good Nvidia’s
implementation of it is. But I do see real-time raytracing having its
uses in games- especially those that are dynamically changing. Fallout 76 would be a good example
of this- thanks to the crappy engine, indoor areas look flat and poorly lit. The interiors
of fallout 76 would benefit from raytracing of some kind, especially when they’re continually
being built up and changed by the player in real-time.
But I think Minecraft is the best game for it. It’s bright, colourful and simple, so
the effect would be easy to see. And it’s also a world full of stuff that can change
and move, with miles of dark caves, hundreds of torch lights and pools of lava… yeah,
that’s currently the worst-case scenario for traditional rendering techniques to light.
Having seen Digital Foundry’s raytraced video on minecraft, I can say it looks incredible.
Having had a 4K screen for years, the biggest benefit of using a high resolution isn’t
in games, but in Microsoft word. Text looks so crisp and clean at 4K! And likewise, I
think the main benefit of raytracing isn’t in complex looking games, but in simpler titles,
like Minecraft, where there’s less to disguise the effect.
Textures almost get in the way of it! Disabling them in Quake 2 shows the changing lighting
far more clearly. You can really make out the fainter shadows cast by the dimmer light
sources, and how a simple bullet can change the lighting throughout the entire room.
I am using the Geforce 2080 TI. What sort of performance am I getting?
This is some footage of 1080p. 1440p…
…And this is 4K. Which I wouldn’t recommend. In fact while I could play at 1440p, I’d
rather stick to 1080p and get buttery smooth performance. I already know from comments
I’ve seen on other videos what a lot of you are thinking. You’re thinking that it’s
unacceptable for a £1,000, 2080 TI to only get smooth performance at 1080p. But you’re
missing the point here. It’s not about the resolution- we’re talking about RAYTRACING!
Something we shouldn’t even be able to have yet. Just a year ago, I wouldn’t have believed
we’d soon have graphics cards capable of this level of raytracing performance and quality
- let alone at proper resolutions like 1080p! The fact that gaming with raytracing at 1440p
is even a viable option is crazy to think about.
I feel that criticising performance shows that you don’t understand what it is that
you’re seeing. And this Quake 2 demonstration is a wonderful thing, clearly developed by
people with a real passion for graphics technology. I like to think it’s a pet project of a
few enthusiastic people over at Nvidia. I may not agree with their pricing and branding-
but I do appreciate that they’ve taken the initiative here and have made raytracing playable.
I mean yeah, it’s based on DXR which anybody can use- they’ve simply gone and called
their implementation of it ‘RTX’ to try and get raytracing only associated with their
graphics cards. As much as I like AMD, I don’t see them creating hardware optimised for it
or tech-demos to showcase this. You could argue that it’s pointless to support it
so early on- but I don’t see that as a reason to criticise Nvidia for doing so.
It’s obviously early days for this. The technology will be restricted to tech demos
and optional graphics options for a number of years. Nvidia themselves are still selling
new graphics cards without support for this kind of tech! But even in this early state,
raytracing is already impressive, and can only get better. Like I said, to achieve such
impressive results in realtime from such a noisy image is an incredible feat, and as
hardware gets more powerful, it’s only going to get better and clearer.
If you want to know, I wasn’t going to get a Geforce 2080 TI. Late one night when browsing
the internet, I saw one, from a major retailer, for a considerable discount. It sounded too
good to be true, but I thought I had nothing to lose from taking a chance on it. Sure enough,
it was an open-box card that refused to work, so I returned it and got my money back.
Turns out, I did have something to lose from doing this! Because the excitement of receiving
and installing it, followed by the disappointment of it not working, made me rebound and buy
it full price from another retailer because I felt I was SO CLOSE to having had it. And
at least now I have a 3 year warranty should anything go wrong. I’ll get my money’s
worth. You want some speculation? I’m going to
do some now, even though you might hate me for it and the future might prove me wrong.
Here we go: Normally, lack of competition means that progress slows down- but I think
this is an odd situation where AMD being uncompetitive made Nvidia launch this technology sooner
than they would have otherwise! Bear with me here.
This RTX stuff takes up a lot of the graphics card. The 2080 TI is only 30% faster than
the 1080 TI, despite being 60% bigger, and being 12 nm instead of 16. I think this could
have been a problem for Nvidia. Since AMD’s cards don’t have a bit dedicated to ‘RTX’,
AMD kind of have an advantage in that they have more space on their cards to make them
faster than Nvidia’s in normal games. So, the question for Nvidia was: how could they
launch a flagship card WITH RTX, without letting AMD steal the performance crown in the meantime?
Since I’m free to speculate here, had AMD’s Vega been faster than the 1080 ti, I think
that Nvidia’s 2000 series would simply have been a faster version of the 1000 cards in
order to reclaim the performance crown. They wouldn’t have bothered with RTX, they’d
just have focused on producing the fastest cards possible. I think the 1650 and 1660
cards are remnants of that plan. I reckon Nvidia initially had even faster cards like
the 1670, 1680 and 1680 ti, and these were originally going to be branded the ‘2000’
series. And in this original plan, I think RTX was reserved for the jump to 7 nm, which
would allow them to produce the cards at cheaper and smaller die sizes.
But as it was, AMD not being competitive in the high-end meant Nvidia could launch them
at 12 nm, at prices high enough to warrant their massive size and cost to produce, knowing
that if anybody wanted RTX or flagship performance, they’d have no choice but to pay top dollar
for it. In a way, the transition to RTX was the most
vulnerable Nvidia had been for a long time- but they got away with it because AMD is weak.
And now they’ve made the jump, unless Navi is a bigger hit than anybody’s expecting,
Nvidia is only going to get stronger. Because now it’s here, AMD’s in serious
trouble. It doesn’t matter if raytracing effects are limited for now- they’re still
something. In the past, AMD have struggled enough to sell cards even when at the same
performance and price as Nvidia’s. But while this used to be just down to mindshare (and
poorer efficiency), RTX now brings about a real reason to prefer an otherwise equal Nvidia
card at a particular price point. AMD have their work cut out to make their cards appealing
without resorting to discounted prices. If you must know, all this is why I bought
the 2080 TI. I don’t see anything to rival it coming out from AMD anytime soon, so don’t
expect the price-point for this level of performance to drop that much in the foreseeable future.
What WILL change is the price of any card that AMD’s Navi series competes with. I
fully expect a price-war further down, with the Geforce 2060 and 2070 getting TI editions,
or SUPER editions, or whatever else Nvidia chooses to do to ruin Navi’s launch and
to prevent AMD from reclaiming any market share.
But as far as the 2080 TI is concerned, I think we’ll have to wait for AMD’s NEXT-next
gen cards before we see competition at this performance level, by which time I’ll have
gotten my money’s worth out of whatever price premium I’ve had to pay for the privilege-
as well as a sneak peek at raytracing as a bonus extra. Looking back at past generations,
it’s not like owners of the 980ti or 1080ti have regretted their purchases.
But yeah, had I not taken a chance on an open-box 2080 TI I’d probably have stuck to my 1080
until AMD’s next-next gen series came out as I think waiting until the first generation
of proper 7nm cards is about as future-proof as you can get. I am not normally a gambling
man, but with this graphics card purchase I believe I am. It will be interesting to
see if I’ve made a big mistake. Only time will tell.
Apologies to anybody expecting the Odgrub video. A bit like Destruction Darius 2, it’s
finished and could be released now, but it seems a shame for so much effort to go to
waste because I didn’t invest that little bit of extra time into making it as good as
it could have been. As it stands, the first half of the video is perfect, but the second
suffers from pacing issues and I’ve found a way of making the storyline simpler and
more coherent, so I’m in the process of redoing that. It won’t be long, and to tide
you over for now, here’s a new clip. No raytracing.