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Digital Foundry - Alan Wake 2 PC Path Tracing: The Next Level In Visual Fidelity?
- Thread starter Gaiff
- Start date
If the topic they are covering is detailes as it is, then it's a good idea to split it. You don't need to watch it all. You have PS5?, go watch that. 4090? Watch path tracing one.
rofif
Banned
As I expected. The game uses baked lighting with PATH TRACING overlayed on top.
So low shadowmaps from non rt mode, are still visible with path tracing.
This brings the question... if the game is fully static (which it is), why in the world didn't they bake higher quality gi and shadow maps?
In a completely static game like this, if everything was baked correctly, Path tracing would only change dynamic scenes and lights and reflections.
edit: but maybe they are not baking anything but have their software rt-like solution running in real time... but then it's a waste of resources by not baking it.
So low shadowmaps from non rt mode, are still visible with path tracing.
This brings the question... if the game is fully static (which it is), why in the world didn't they bake higher quality gi and shadow maps?
In a completely static game like this, if everything was baked correctly, Path tracing would only change dynamic scenes and lights and reflections.
edit: but maybe they are not baking anything but have their software rt-like solution running in real time... but then it's a waste of resources by not baking it.
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its one of the best looking games ever, of course they will.... its the whole premise of the site and theres so much to cover in the game.
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Senua
Member
adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
Gaiff
SBI’s Resident Gaslighter
On PC, maybe. They really didn't do a good enough work with rasterization. The game is unacceptably noisy.
On console and lower-end to mid-spec PCs, it has more noise and artifacts than a KISS concert inside the Louvre. Image quality is ass on most machines. Next-gen rendering with worse image quality than PS360 titles.
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analog_future
Banned
As Alex hammers over and over again in the video, the differences are far more apparent in motion than in screenshots. You have so, so much more image stability/clarity/consistency with RT/PT on.
With that said, even in screenshots it's oftentimes really impressive:
With that said, even in screenshots it's oftentimes really impressive:
Where are you getting baked lighting from. "Other GI solution" doesn't neccesarily mean baked lighting.
Also the mixing is a problem. I think its mainly to allow the ability to toggle between Non path tracing / PT.
I think they should make a Path tracing only build.
Denton
Member
Interesting that in the Alan "Dark Place NY" setting, I can run RT and PT enabled and get 60fps (3080Ti). Just played that portion, three hours, no framerate drops.
Then I get to play as Saga in Bright Falls and immediately get drops below 60.
I guess it is due to NY being at night, there is lot less bounced light so it is less demanding?
Then I get to play as Saga in Bright Falls and immediately get drops below 60.
I guess it is due to NY being at night, there is lot less bounced light so it is less demanding?
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DeaconOfTheDank
Member
Like you point out, baking only really works in environments with mostly static lighting conditions and time-of-day. For this reason, baked lighting is used as a way to achieve high quality lighting that historically would have been way too expensive to perform in real-time; we perform the lighting calculations offline and package the results directly with the geometry (i.e. "baking"). We're now at a place where we can deliver extremely high-fidelity lighting in real-time.
The end result is mostly the same, but why would we want to shift from offline rendering towards real-time? There are quite a few reasons:
- We can drastically cut down on the amount of data we include with level geometry by simply excluding baked lighting data. In an age where game sizes are ballooning, this is something that I'm sure consumers would welcome.
- Any time the level geometry changes, we don't have to worry about having to re-bake all the lighting again. This results in quite a bit of time-savings for artists/designers, so now the studios can allocate those resources towards much more important things (like increasing the fidelity of level geometry and textures).
- Don't have to worry about how dynamic lighting will interact with static lighting and produce weird results; no more time spent manually tweaking lighting to get just the right look. Of course, in areas where we want the lighting to mostly be artist driven, manually placed lights will still be a thing.
- Resolution of lighting information is limited to what was captured in the baking process. Unless it's extremely low resolution, this is something people wouldn't really notice unless they zoom in really close with photo mode. With real-time lighting, we could theoretically have infinite resolution of lighting and eliminate all "jaggies" that you might see. Baked shadow maps are a good example of this.
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DeaconOfTheDank
Member
Nah, I would think it mostly has to do with the heavy use of transparencies when rendering foliage like trees, bushes, etc.
daninthemix
Member
Man those RT off pictures look like ass.
BennyBlanco
aka IMurRIVAL69
Been playing this and Cyberpunk with pathtracing on a 4090 and an OLED, can't decide which looks nicer. Hope Nvidia secures more partnerships with big games next year because the tech is crazy.
analog_future
Banned
PC players are playing next-gen games 5-6 years early.
Pretty cool.
Pretty cool.
RaidenJTr7
Member
Mithos
Member
Ray-tracing looks better then non ray-tracing in a game where the developer doesn't give a rats ass about the non ray-trace mode.
How about comparing in a game that have a non ray-tracing mode where the developer actual gave a damn and used all and every trick in the book to make it look good, and then compared it to the ray-tracing mode in the same game...
How about comparing in a game that have a non ray-tracing mode where the developer actual gave a damn and used all and every trick in the book to make it look good, and then compared it to the ray-tracing mode in the same game...
Bojji
Gold Member
Ray-tracing looks better then non ray-tracing in a game where the developer doesn't give a rats ass about the non ray-trace mode.
How about comparing in a game that have a non ray-tracing mode where the developer actual gave a damn and used all and every trick in the book to make it look good, and then compared it to the ray-tracing mode in the same game...
So what game is that? Every raster game ever released has problems with shadows, reflections and lighting quality, only RT can fix them.
AW2 actually is that game, it looks very good for raster game and only trick that is missing are planar reflections for mirrors but those are very expensive (maybe not as expensive as RT but still...).
Low Moral Fibre
Member
The gulf between console and PC in this game isn't so much the pathtracing itself it's the IQ difference it creates (well with DLSS too as FSR is shit). It looks really bad on console with all the shimmering and pixelated effects but looks clean on PC.
The RT does make a big difference but it's more subtle than having super high fidelity assets or bombastic particle effects or something. The problem is when you go to another game without RT lighting straight from playing this as the lighting just doesn't look right unless it is faked really well. I went straight from this to Spider-Man 2 and SM2 looked 5 years out of date in comparison just because the lighting looked so basic but if I'd played them the other way around I probably would have been happy enough with the graphics in SM.
The RT does make a big difference but it's more subtle than having super high fidelity assets or bombastic particle effects or something. The problem is when you go to another game without RT lighting straight from playing this as the lighting just doesn't look right unless it is faked really well. I went straight from this to Spider-Man 2 and SM2 looked 5 years out of date in comparison just because the lighting looked so basic but if I'd played them the other way around I probably would have been happy enough with the graphics in SM.
Hugare
Member
Path tracing is much more impressive in Cyberpunk 'cause AW 2 uses a really good form of baked lighting
Changes are noticeable, of course, but not as game changing as in Cyberpunk
Linear games should always, always use baked lighting instead of realtime GI.
Even open world games. Fuck realtime time of day if that means a worse looking game.
Changes are noticeable, of course, but not as game changing as in Cyberpunk
Linear games should always, always use baked lighting instead of realtime GI.
Even open world games. Fuck realtime time of day if that means a worse looking game.
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Bojji
Gold Member
Yeah, I'm completely fine with what AC Unity did with baked lighting for each time of day (morning, noon etc.) and switched them between missions. Real time TOD often looks shit when you can see aliased shadows moving in but with x100 speed of real day.
Denton
Member
Nah. Games like Witcher 3 or Kingdom Come Deliverance would suffer immensely without realtime time of day.
And KCD still manages to look fantastic lighting-wise (SVOGI?), and Witcher 3 received RTGI to help out.
I do like well baked GI, but not in every game.
daninthemix
Member
PS5 isn't relevant to this thread.
rofif
Banned
ah sorry. i mistook this for one of other threads
Buggy Loop
Member
Shame the default GI is interpolating and fucking up the path tracing.
Otherwise it's quite good and Alex made a good guide on performance here.
Otherwise it's quite good and Alex made a good guide on performance here.
ChiefDada
Gold Member
FFXVI, as it relates to shadows. It was excellent enough to fool DF into suggesting they were RT shadows on multiple occasions.
Bojji
Gold Member
Yeah, they were wrong. Shadows in FFXVI are also nothing special, you can see that only main character shadow has contact hardening, rest is just very soft.
We also have something like PCSS (and AMD equivalent later) since 2005, but it was also always super heavy on hardware - it simulates what RT shadows are doing:
FFXVI also has very basic lighting, low poly assets, unstable framerate and low resolution for 30FPS game. Some sections and cutscenes are impressive but mostly thanks to art.
Personally I don't think this game is very impressive, it doesn't look much better than PS4 games.
Silver Wattle
Member
I hope the developer adds higher RT/PT modes in the future.
Hugare
Member
Saying that KCD with a pre-RT solution and Witcher 3 with RT look fantastic is my whole point. Without RT they look very meh.
AC Unity has much better lighting than both games (when they are not using RT) due to baked lighting
And I dont agree that TW3 would suffer without realtime time of day. You still have to medidate a lot to change time of day during gameplay, 'cause lots of missions and contracts had their own time of day.
Same thing with Cyberpunk and many other open world games
Denton
Member
Well, let's agree to disagree. When I am playing baked game, I always notice that time is static. In linear games it can be ok, but in open world, it breaks immersion heavily. Even if yes, AC Unity looks stunning. But AC Unity is a mission based game that's not focused on immersion too much, due to its Animus nonsense. In Witcher 3 or KCD not being able to see transitions from daytime to sunset and night time would suck ass.
And god damn, Gothic/Gothic 2 from 20 years ago had dynamic ToD with rudimentary graphics of the day and amazing atmosphere thanks to its living world.
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UnrealEck
Member
I got an RTX 4090 yesterday. An upgrade from my already pretty solid RTX 3080. But the performance of this card is amazing.
Regarding AW2 being the best looking game of all time, I still think Cyberpunk 2077 is better looking overall. I think some of the forest areas of AW2 look great but not incredible. The parts where the materials and lighting are shown working with path tracing are where it shines, which are mostly the city and towns.
Regarding AW2 being the best looking game of all time, I still think Cyberpunk 2077 is better looking overall. I think some of the forest areas of AW2 look great but not incredible. The parts where the materials and lighting are shown working with path tracing are where it shines, which are mostly the city and towns.
Nah, just is some scenes.
Switching on RTX and Path Tracing usually change shadows dramatically, both in quality and behaviour.
Yah it sucks. Control's non-RT mode is just as much a noisy low rez fest.On PC, maybe. They really didn't do a good enough work with rasterization. The game is unacceptably noisy.
On console and lower-end to mid-spec PCs, it has more noise and artifacts than a KISS concert inside the Louvre. Image quality is ass on most machines. Next-gen rendering with worse image quality than PS360 titles.
Id imagine its the Alpha effects of Bright Falls Trees.
Feel Like I'm On 42
Member
Nope
Mister Wolf
Member
On PC Kingdom Come uses SVOGI which is raytracing with Voxels.
Looks like Allan Wake 2 is heavily relying on streaming .
Over 2 GB a sec at points, almost 3 Gb/s for the mindplace, which I guess is a room somewhere under the map/level. But what is being streamed Mesh shader Culling ? Light maps? Textures ? objects ? The average is about the same as the UE5 tech demos. And how much of the Gpu memory bandwidth is used ?
Over 2 GB a sec at points, almost 3 Gb/s for the mindplace, which I guess is a room somewhere under the map/level. But what is being streamed Mesh shader Culling ? Light maps? Textures ? objects ? The average is about the same as the UE5 tech demos. And how much of the Gpu memory bandwidth is used ?
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Negotiator101
Member
So it wouldn't be feasible on last gen consoles?
Looks like it.
Kenpachii
Member
Exactly how i feel, once u play with pathtracing on and go back towards games without pathtracing u feel like the game is just dated entirely.
The Cockatrice
I'm retarded?
Just started playing it and Im not getting wowed as much as anyone else. The lighting and object models are great but character models around town are rofl, animations are average, hell your bullets dont even leave a fucking impact on stuff you shoot. It's all very static. Like it's a great-looking picture, but dynamically it's a mess. Also the path-tracing is way too messy/bugged/demanding for what it offers. The draw distances of the shadows with PT are too fucked up to leave it on esepcially when they just vanish and appear 1 feet in front of you. Direct lighting is good to have tho. Overall not as amazing as DF keeps sucking the balls of these devs and some of you are making it out to be. Cyberpunk 2077 is far superior in every aspect, and HFW is still the graphics king on consoles.