Shadow of the Tomb Raider: A Ray Tracing Investigation

[Julio Franco]

Critically-acclaimed game Shadow of the Tomb Raider has been updated to receive support for both DirectX ray tracing shadows and Nvidia's DLSS upscaling technology. It's been seven months since ray tracing was shown off in this title and a good six months since the game was released, but hey, the feature was added in eventually and it's a very good game, we must add.

Read the full article here.

https://www.techspot.com/article/1814-sotr-ray-tracing/

 

[Vulcanproject]

It's not enough difference to justify the performance drop on this title. You virtually halve the framerate for small gains. The differences in the shadow setting from RTX off to RTX on are really rather small. This isn't like improving a setting from low to ultra, it's like taking a setting from high to ultra. The visual impact just isn't that big.

When you balance settings on a game you turn off the worst performing features that offer the least visual fidelity improvement and in this case, that's basically all the RTX effects lol

 

[ShadowDeath]

It's not enough difference to justify the performance drop on this title. You virtually halve the framerate for small gains. The differences in the shadow setting from RTX off to RTX on are really rather small. This isn't like improving a setting from low to ultra, it's like taking a setting from high to ultra. The visual impact just isn't that big.

When you balance settings on a game you turn off the worst performing features that offer the least visual fidelity improvement and in this case, that's basically all the RTX effects lol

I've seen non-raytraced shadows do this same exact thing in other games... I don't understand what the big deal is at this point...

 

[MrCus976]

Ray Traced Shadow of the Tomb Raider

 

[Evernessince]

It's not enough difference to justify the performance drop on this title. You virtually halve the framerate for small gains. The differences in the shadow setting from RTX off to RTX on are really rather small. This isn't like improving a setting from low to ultra, it's like taking a setting from high to ultra. The visual impact just isn't that big.

When you balance settings on a game you turn off the worst performing features that offer the least visual fidelity improvement and in this case, that's basically all the RTX effects lol

I've seen non-raytraced shadows do this same exact thing in other games... I don't understand what the big deal is at this point...

You can rasterize the effect of shadows appearing of different sharpness based on their distance from the surface they are casting on so there's a good chance you did indeed see this somewhere else.

Ray tracing is so resource intensive because it is simulating the light rays in real time. While this means it's very accurate and requires less work from the developers, it also means it requires a ton of horsepower.

Hopefully we get to know more about CryTek's voxel Ray Tracing as that seems to be much less resource intensive.

 

[YSignal]

Even looking at the high res photos I don't know what I'm supposed to be looking at. The ray traced shadows look softer? I guess.

 

[PEnnn]

Still can't see any perceptible difference. Still not worth the extra money.

 

[meric]

So why does the RT hurt performance so much if these cards have dedicated cores just for RT calculations?

 

[tkabou]

Ray tracing - still not convinced it's worth anything but marketing. If I'm to stop in the middle of the game to admire some special lighting on blades of weeds or walls, then it doesn't serve an actual purpose.

 

[Dimitrios]

LOL oh man.

 

[Mr Majestyk]

Man what an utter waste of time and effort. The results are usually so subtle (admittedly not in every case, but most) that unless you are standing there just looking closely you'll never notice this in normal gameplay for the most part. For the performance hit it would need to be night and day differences. 1st gen RTX is utterly useless for what few games even support the feature IMO. I'd buy Turing just for increased performance but not paying for useless cores (to me). Just give me GTX 1680 Ti or roll on Navi.

 

[Cryoburner]

I couldn't help but notice at 4:24 in the video that the raytraced shadows of those plants were completely stationary, while the standard shadows realistically followed the plants moving in the wind. Nothing seemed to be mentioned about that in the video though. Might this be an "optimization" for certain shadows to get the raytracing running at a semi-playable rate, or is there some other explanation? I did notice that some other similar shadows of plants in other scenes appeared to move.

While this means it's very accurate and requires less work from the developers, it also means it requires a ton of horsepower.

Less work from developers... Is that why it took them half a year from the game's release to get it mostly functional? Until everyone has cards that support hardware raytracing at a decent performance level, which won't be for a number of years, developers who support the feature will need to incorporate two separate lighting systems, creating more work, not less. Even then, I question how much easier it would be.

This video didn't do much to convince me that raytraced shadows are worth implementing for this first-generation hardware. Much like the other implementations, the differences are just too subtle to be worth taking a massive performance hit for. And as far as future hardware is concerned, I suspect it would take a much larger portion of the graphics chip to be dedicated to RT cores to make performance viable, and doing that will cut into increases in traditional graphics cores. Maybe they could start by getting rid of those Tensor cores in consumer parts though, as DLSS seems like a complete waste in its current form. Unless they can find some other use for them, or manage to make the feature look and perform better than other forms of upscaling, the Tensor cores are just taking up space and needlessly adding to the cost of their cards.

 

[oizoduck]

Guy who wrote this article are you sure you didn't mixed up pictures? Cause RTX OFF shows no difference or in some cases look much more natural, like this one:
http://puu.sh/D4Kse/86456a423b.jpg
With OFF shadows of leaf looks like shadows of leaf, but with ULTRA it's just big blur.

 

[Nightfire]

Guy who wrote this article are you sure you didn't mixed up pictures? Cause RTX OFF shows no difference or in some cases look much more natural, like this one:
http://puu.sh/D4Kse/86456a423b.jpg
With OFF shadows of leaf looks like shadows of leaf, but with ULTRA it's just big blur.

The giant blur is actually more accurately portrayed. Look at the shadows around you when out doors. Tr shadows that are further from the ground, like tall trees, are blurry, while close ones are sharper. Sharper does not always mean more life-like.

 

[Nobina]

Is that **** smeared all over my screen? Oh no, it's just ray tracing.

Seriously, even if rt didn't cost any fps at all I wouldn't use it in this game. What's next, ray traced Minecraft? Not only is it forgettable at best, you can only use it with specific cards that are more expensive because they have extra cores for ray tracing. What a meme.

I guess marketing works and makes id... I mean... "early adopters" give their money to Nvidia.

 

[Evernessince]

Less work from developers... Is that why it took them half a year from the game's release to get it mostly functional? Until everyone has cards that support hardware raytracing at a decent performance level, which won't be for a number of years, developers who support the feature will need to incorporate two separate lighting systems, creating more work, not less. Even then, I question how much easier it would be.

I can't deny that it took them longer then it should have. Other games averaged about 2 months. In both cases though, there is room for improvement. Especially considering that it is only handling a single effect at this point.

 

[Cycloid Torus]

I am unable to perceive a significant difference. I think I might want to do something else with all that horsepower.

 

[pcnthuziast]

It's all about physical accuracy which isn't actually needed to render a visually impressive and realistic image. So basically a fail and Crytek's team is to be commended for their work on the software side.

 

[elementalSG]

Just installed the ray tracing Shadow of the Tomb Raider patch and am running it on my RTX 2080 Ti. I'm walking through the Dia de Las Muertas beginning level of the game. The difference in the shadows are subtle, but can be perceived (unlike in the screenshots of this article): the difference is the real-world accuracy of the shadows. For example, with ray tracing ON, I'm walking towards the light from the "La Casa Mexicana" neon light. Lara's shadow becomes more diffused and fades away as I walk towards the light just like a shadow would in real life, since the neon light isn't a direct light source, like the sun, for example. With ray tracing turned OFF, shadows have a long, non-diffused shadow even as I get closer to the light.

With ray tracing ON, on the other side where people are dancing, you can watch the shadows diffuse and elongate as they spin each other around in front of the La Casa Mexicana neon light next to the stage. For the little boy with a sparkler around and around, there are shadows being cast correctly for the tables, metal pole filled with pinwheels, and boxes around him as he twirls the sparkler around and around. When ray tracing is turned OFF, I don't see any shadows, even as the boy twirls the sparkler around and around, which isn't how light and shadows work at all in the real world.

After Lara climbs the gate, with ray racing ON, the shadows cast from Lara's body off the lighting from the candles are super slight and very diffused, as it should be since candles don't have much luminance. But when ray tracing is OFF, the shadows are super deep and not diffused off Lara's body, almost as if the candles actually had a lot of luminance. The non-ray traced shadows are obviously not accurate in the real world.

These are subtle detailed touches to the game. I can't definitively can't say there is a huge improvement or a "super-WOW" factor with what Square Enix used ray tracing for, but it does at more realism to the game. The use of ray tracing for global lighting in Metro Exodus definitely was a much bigger deal, since it made the fear factor go up quite a bit for me since my brain no longer rejected the lighting as fake. The shadow ray tracing used of ray tracing in Shadow of the Tomb Raider is probably more on the "nice-to-have" feature list rather than a "must-have". But it definitely is a nice feature, making the game more realistic.

 

[Evernessince]

Just installed the ray tracing Shadow of the Tomb Raider patch and am running it on my RTX 2080 Ti. I'm walking through the Dia de Las Muertas beginning level of the game. The difference in the shadows are subtle, but can be perceived (unlike in the screenshots of this article): the difference is the real-world accuracy of the shadows. For example, with ray tracing ON, I'm walking towards the light from the "La Casa Mexicana" neon light. Lara's shadow becomes more diffused and fades away as I walk towards the light just like a shadow would in real life, since the neon light isn't a direct light source, like the sun, for example. With ray tracing turned OFF, shadows have a long, non-diffused shadow even as I get closer to the light.

With ray tracing ON, on the other side where people are dancing, you can watch the shadows diffuse and elongate as they spin each other around in front of the La Casa Mexicana neon light next to the stage. For the little boy with a sparkler around and around, there are shadows being cast correctly for the tables, metal pole filled with pinwheels, and boxes around him as he twirls the sparkler around and around. When ray tracing is turned OFF, I don't see any shadows, even as the boy twirls the sparkler around and around, which isn't how light and shadows work at all in the real world.

After Lara climbs the gate, with ray racing ON, the shadows cast from Lara's body off the lighting from the candles are super slight and very diffused, as it should be since candles don't have much luminance. But when ray tracing is OFF, the shadows are super deep and not diffused off Lara's body, almost as if the candles actually had a lot of luminance. The non-ray traced shadows are obviously not accurate in the real world.

These are subtle detailed touches to the game. I can't definitively can't say there is a huge improvement or a "super-WOW" factor with what Square Enix used ray tracing for, but it does at more realism to the game. The use of ray tracing for global lighting in Metro Exodus definitely was a much bigger deal, since it made the fear factor go up quite a bit for me since my brain no longer rejected the lighting as fake. The shadow ray tracing used of ray tracing in Shadow of the Tomb Raider is probably more on the "nice-to-have" feature list rather than a "must-have". But it definitely is a nice feature, making the game more realistic.

Your first paragraph is actually addressed in the article. Shadows can be dynamically drawn to appear less sharp using rasterization. In fact in the campfire scene the developers forgot to include a rasterized shadow at all casting from the fire. In this case it isn't a great display of what ray tracing does better. Other games have demonstrated that had they put that 6 month dev time into rasterization, they could have gotten the same effect with their shadows.

The rasterization equivalent of this is called soft shadows and companies like CryTek are already on their third iteration of the technology with SVO Ray-Traced shadows. Don't let the name fool you though, SVO Ray-Traced Shadows can be run on any video card, it doesn't require RT cores as it's voxel based. Every other major game engine uses soft shadows, which makes sense given that by now it's really nothing new at all. Here's a link to a 2009 tech document showing that CryEngine added Soft Shadows way back then.

http://www.klayge.org/material/4_1/SSR/S2011_SecretsCryENGINE3Tech_0.pdf

 

[elementalSG]

Your first paragraph is actually addressed in the article. Shadows can be dynamically drawn to appear less sharp using rasterization. In fact in the campfire scene the developers forgot to include a rasterized shadow at all casting from the fire. In this case it isn't a great display of what ray tracing does better. Other games have demonstrated that had they put that 6 month dev time into rasterization, they could have gotten the same effect with their shadows.

The rasterization equivalent of this is called soft shadows and companies like CryTek are already on their third iteration of the technology with SVO Ray-Traced shadows. Don't let the name fool you though, SVO Ray-Traced Shadows can be run on any video card, it doesn't require RT cores as it's voxel based. Every other major game engine uses soft shadows, which makes sense given that by now it's really nothing new at all. Here's a link to a 2009 tech document showing that CryEngine added Soft Shadows way back then.

http://www.klayge.org/material/4_1/SSR/S2011_SecretsCryENGINE3Tech_0.pdf

Yes, ray tracing is a really, really old algorithm. How old? Wikipedia says it was first used in rendering in 1968 by Arthur Appel (link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics)

I (and hopefully others) know that ray tracing isn't new. It has been attempted in software for a while now (since 1968, apparently). I haven't read any articles yet about the performance of a software based solution to ray tracing such as Crytek's which you have mentioned. How does this software based ray tracing actually perform is the question? Please do let me know if you see an article about actual performance.

NVidia didn't invent ray tracing. Far from it. But they are the first to attempt to bring about hardware to actually accelerate the ray tracing algorithms to the point where you can use them in real-time. No one else has done this yet.

Btw, my post isn't about "sharpness" or "less sharpness" or "Shadows can be dynamically drawn to appear less sharp using rasterization" as you said. My post is specifically about how accurate the shadows are. Not a single game that I've seen run 60FPS @ 1440p (or even 1080p) while I'm playing it has created shadows as accurate as the real-world diffused shadowing based on the light source I just saw in Shadow of the Tomb Raider using the RTX 2080 Ti. I caveat it with 60FPS, because I've definitely seen this accuracy before...in movies...but those are rendered at much, much less than 1FPS, let alone 60FPS.

 

[Evernessince]

Yes, ray tracing is a really, really old algorithm. How old? Wikipedia says it was first used in rendering in 1968 by Arthur Appel (link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics)

I (and hopefully others) know that ray tracing isn't new. It has been attempted in software for a while now (since 1968, apparently). I haven't read any articles yet about the performance of a software based solution to ray tracing such as Crytek's which you have mentioned. How does this software based ray tracing actually perform is the question? Please do let me know if you see an article about actual performance.

NVidia didn't invent ray tracing. Far from it. But they are the first to attempt to bring about hardware to actually accelerate the ray tracing algorithms to the point where you can use them in real-time. No one else has done this yet.

Btw, my post isn't about "sharpness" or "less sharpness" or "Shadows can be dynamically drawn to appear less sharp using rasterization" as you said. My post is specifically about how accurate the shadows are. Not a single game that I've seen run 60FPS @ 1440p (or even 1080p) while I'm playing it has created shadows as accurate as the real-world diffused shadowing based on the light source I just saw in Shadow of the Tomb Raider using the RTX 2080 Ti. I caveat it with 60FPS, because I've definitely seen this accuracy before...in movies...but those are rendered at much, much less than 1FPS, let alone 60FPS.

This demo has real-time ray traced shadows, reflections, and indirect lighting using only a Vega 56

https://www.techspot.com/community/...cing-demo-for-amd-and-nvidia-hardware.252640/

No the shadows displayed in shadow of the tomb raider are definitely not as accurate as movies. The Nvidia card is doing 1-2 samples per pixel and then applying denoising, which isn't producing anything nearly as accurate as movies. Just for comparison you'd be looking at more then 100 samples per pixel for a movie, and that number greatly increases with scene complexity. Nvidia is far away from movie quality and it's method requires special hardware for the Ray tracing and the AI enabled de-noising. I'm personally of the opinion that Nvidia should use those turning cores for in game AI instead of a fixed function like denoising.

 

[elementalSG]

This demo has real-time ray traced shadows, reflections, and indirect lighting using only a Vega 56

https://www.techspot.com/community/...cing-demo-for-amd-and-nvidia-hardware.252640/

No the shadows displayed in shadow of the tomb raider are definitely not as accurate as movies. The Nvidia card is doing 1-2 samples per pixel and then applying denoising, which isn't producing anything nearly as accurate as movies. Just for comparison you'd be looking at more then 100 samples per pixel for a movie, and that number greatly increases with scene complexity. Nvidia is far away from movie quality and it's method requires special hardware for the Ray tracing and the AI enabled de-noising. I'm personally of the opinion that Nvidia should use those turning cores for in game AI instead of a fixed function like denoising.

Yes, I saw that demo. But then Shadow of the Tomb Raider was also an NVida demo. Now it is no longer a demo, but a reality. The Crytek engine ray tracing is still...just a demo (even though you've sent me a link to an article from 2009 about how that engine already implemented software ray tracing).

Jen-Hsun Huang is probably the one you should talk to about the design of this generation of cards. He'll most likely tell you about his Tesla cards if you ask him about why he didn't use it for game AI and then mention something about how consumers continue to pay more and in quantities of millions for better visuals. Hell, I keep buying games each time they get remastered...even though they are just prettier with the same level of AI. Hell, I own The Matrix and Gladiator on DVD, Blu-ray and now 4K Blu-ray and Star Wars on VHS, DVD and Blu-ray even though it is the same movie, but just better visually.

But, then what do I know? Nothing I suppose. I just know that hardware accelerated ray tracing using NVidia RTX technology has made my gaming experience a bit more enjoyable for those few hours I have spent playing those three hardware accelerated ray tracing games. I have yet to experience a software based ray tracing that is playable (or pleasant in general), or that isn't a demo. Maybe you have, and can open my eyes to software based ray tracing in gaming. Either way I have, right now, in the present day, experienced hardware accelerated 60FPS+ ray traced reflections in Battlefield V, 60FPS+ ray traced lighting in Metro Exodus, and now 60FPS+ ray traced shadows in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I can firmly say that I like the improvement in visuals a lot.

 

[Do Mor3 G]

Why do I get a feeling people just can't accept that hardware acceleration of ray tracing is a good thing?

 

[Evernessince]

Why do I get a feeling people just can't accept that hardware acceleration of ray tracing is a good thing?

It is a good thing. Just not Nvidia's current implementation. As stated in the article, it cuts FPS in half with little visual benefit. It needs serious optimization or another approach.