Anyone else underwhelmed by RTX implementation in WoW beta?

Cuddleheart

No global illumination and it's still a 50% or more hit to frame rates.  Ouch.  Also, I would be hard pressed to tell the difference beyond slightly more diffused edges on shadows.  Really hope they plan to bake this feature more before release because I was really excited for this.

Link to images

https://www.wowhead.com/news=317555/ray-tracing-shadows-now-enabled-on-the-world-of-warcraft-shadowlands-beta#screenshots:317555:1

Nanfoodle

Is WoW optimized for Ray Tracing? And if it is, even with its updated graphics, is it really the game you want to see pumped up by new tech? Is there a better game to check this out with?

Cuddleheart

Nanfoodle said:

Is WoW optimized for Ray Tracing? And if it is, even with its updated graphics, is it really the game you want to see pumped up by new tech? Is there a better game to check this out with?

Well, nobody has mentioned much regarding RT implementation.  Blizz just kinda put the setting in options a few months ago and Nvidia put out a patch last week.  Never any detail as to how it was going to be implemented.  It's possible that Blizz is sitting on some texture sets that allow for light to bounce and have not implemented them.  Kinda like how you need RTX enabled tilesets for Minecraft RTX.  No idea.  Everyone has been mysterious about this feature.

There are definitely better games to display ray tracing in more of a tech demoish light.  Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a great example.  Given the improvements made to Quake and Minecraft using RTX, I had high hopes that RTX could be implemented into old games to kind of give them new life.  So, yeah, this was really the game I wanted to see with this tech. 

Quizzical

What you should do is to pick a place where the rasterized shadows are blatantly wrong.  If you look closely, there will probably be many such places in the game.  Turn on ray-tracing there and see if it fixes it.  That's what ray-tracing is supposed to do for shadows.

Without ray-tracing, games can draw an object and draw a shadow for the object that looks like a shadow if you don't look very closely.  But if you do look closely, the shadow is likely to be wildly wrong.  Well, maybe they can get it right in simple cases such as on flat, level ground.  But one moving, irregularly shaped object casting a shadow on another moving, irregularly shaped object will usually be wildly wrong, if the game even attempts to draw a shadow at all.  Ray-tracing can do it right.

Yeah, ray-tracing comes with a huge performance hit.  That's literally the only reason why games weren't commonly doing real-time ray-tracing twenty years ago.  As hardware gets more powerful, games might be able to use a lot more ray-tracing without killing your performance.  But it has a long, long way to go to get there.  Don't blame Blizzard or WoW for the nature of the technology.

Cuddleheart

Quizzical said:

Don't blame Blizzard or WoW for the nature of the technology.

Nobody is blaming anyone for anything, but it's not unreasonable to be disappointed.  They never mentioned how ray tracing would be implemented or even outright said that it 100% would other than implying it through adding it to settings and mentioning it in passing once that they were working on it.  It was my own expectations that I invented in my head, but that doesn't mean I still can't be let down - even if it's my own fault.

I expected a performance hit, but what I didn't expect was such a large performance hit for such small gains in visuals.  I get a roughly 50%ish dip using RTX in Minecraft, Quake, Battlefield 5, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider(more like 30% with DLSS) but I also get a much more noticeable bump in fidelity.  

It's also been out for a day, so I realize that it's way in the early stages.  I just kinda hoped for more and wanted to see how others felt...

Cuddleheart

Jean-Luc_Picard said:

Someone doesn't understand what "beta" means...

I acknowledge multiple times that it's early release and potentially could be improved upon.

Someone apparently can't read the word "beta"... 

learis1

I appreciate the images. I can definitely tell the difference from your images!

Overall, raytracing from a laymen's point of view (namely mine), seems to blur shadows to give them a more natural look. This is mostly good, however in some of those photos I actually preferred the non-raytraced shadows (namely the tree). But for cities, I definitely preferred the ray-traced. The other significant thing raytraced did for me was to add shadows to all the "grooves" within the walls of buildings. There's much more shadows in window frames and whatnot.

Your images alone show a difference for sure. Is it worth taking the hit to the framreate? Well, as long as your above 60fps, but that's my opinion. Overall it looks better to me. Is it a gigantic change? No, but better, yes.

achesoma

Are your drivers up-to-date? Nvidia just released new drivers, one was specifically for WoW: Shadowlands expansion. I didn't read details tho.

Quizzical

Cuddleheart said:

Quizzical said:

Don't blame Blizzard or WoW for the nature of the technology.

Nobody is blaming anyone for anything, but it's not unreasonable to be disappointed.  They never mentioned how ray tracing would be implemented or even outright said that it 100% would other than implying it through adding it to settings and mentioning it in passing once that they were working on it.  It was my own expectations that I invented in my head, but that doesn't mean I still can't be let down - even if it's my own fault.

I expected a performance hit, but what I didn't expect was such a large performance hit for such small gains in visuals.  I get a roughly 50%ish dip using RTX in Minecraft, Quake, Battlefield 5, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider(more like 30% with DLSS) but I also get a much more noticeable bump in fidelity.  

It's also been out for a day, so I realize that it's way in the early stages.  I just kinda hoped for more and wanted to see how others felt...

Here's a simple fix for you:  turn off DLSS.  If you want to run the game at a lower resolution for the sake of improved frame rates, then just do that directly and upscale in the traditional (and very cheap) manner.  Don't use DLSS to implicitly run the game at a lower resolution and then upscale it in a very convoluted and expensive manner.

Having more samples in the base image makes a big difference to image quality.  The algorithm used to upscale really doesn't affect image quality very much.  If a game engine is flexible about the base rendering resolution that it allows (and it's really dumb for a game to offer DLSS without such flexibility), then turning off DLSS can allow you to get the same frame rates at a higher base resolution, and hence higher image quality.

Quizzical

Jean-Luc_Picard said:

Here's a simple fix for you:  turn off DLSS.  If you want to run the game at a lower resolution for the sake of improved frame rates, then just do that directly and upscale in the traditional (and very cheap) manner. 

I'm sorry, but that must be one of the most stupid advices I've read recently.

This is ok for games without DLSS or even DLSS1.0, but DLSS2.0 gives a MUCH higher quality than simple rescaling.

I can't find any examples that makes DLSS 2.0 look good.  Screenshots that I've found make it look awful as used in Control.  Even at the "quality" setting, it had blatant artifacting.  Screenshots from both Control and MechWarrior 5 makes it look like DLSS 2.0 tries to compensate for the intrinsic blurring with a way too aggressive filter to increase contrast that makes it look all wrong.

Screenshots from Death Stranding made it look like DLSS 2.0 might be the least bad option, if only because the game doesn't offer any other way to get proper anti-aliasing.  But that's hardly a ringing endorsement of the approach.

It would be better if I could see it in action rather than just looking at screenshots, which I can't.  Sometimes things that look awful in screenshots are fine when animated or vice versa.  But the screenshots that I've been able to find make it look terrible.