When Nvidia's all-new RTX "Turing" GPUs launched in September, they broke new technological ground by being the first GPUs capable of performing real-time ray tracing in games. However, there was just one problem; at the time of launch, and in the ensuing months, there were no games that we could actually play that supported the new technology, just games "coming soon." All that changed this week when both Nvidia, Microsoft, and Dice updated their platforms to allow for ray traced reflections in Battlefield 5. This allowed RTX GPU owners to see what this new technology looks like for the first time, and to see what kind of performance hit it would require. We've spent some time with it and want to share our results with you so you know what to expect.


Ray tracing has finally arrived - but in reflections only.

First off, right out of the gate there are a few issues with ray tracing in Battlefield 5. When you fire up the game you have a few options to tweak instead of it just being RTX On/RTX Off like the meme, and the main one is "DXR Raytraced Reflections Quality." Here's the description of this setting from Nvidia, "The DXR Reflections Quality settings control how many rays are used in the scene, as well as what object surfaces receive those rays. Visual differences between the presets will scale according to the number of objects needing rays. By altering these presets, performance and image quality can be tuned to the gamer’s taste."

Knowing that, Nvidia and Dice both recommend setting "DXR Raytraced Reflections Quality" to Low instead of Medium, High, or Ultra. This is due to a known issue, but it's not clear what the actual issue is really. Dice just says use the lowest setting "for the best experience" and that there are "bugs" in the implementation. You also have to run DX12 to enable DXR. Based on what we've seen, going from Low to Ultra/High just allows for there to be reflections on more surfaces, including your weapon, mud, etc.

If turning off all that ray traced goodness wasn't enough of a shame, Nvidia is also recommending disabling the following graphics settings:

Chromatic Aberration
Film Grain
Vignette
Lens Distortion
What you're basically left with, is the absolute bare minimum amount of ray tracing, especially since in Battlefield it's not ray tracing the whole scene, but just reflections. By going with the Low setting, you're reducing the amount of reflections as well as the number of rays.

We followed Nvidia and Dice's recommendations for testing, which seems to be designed for maximum performance. DXR reflection quality was set to Low, and graphics were set to Ultra. Our test system has a Skylake Core i7-7700K CPU, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, Asus Prime Z270 motherboard, and an Intel SSD. Here are our benchmarks using these settings:


As you can see from the benchmarks, the performance hit is substantial for ray tracing even at its lowest setting. You're basically seeing your framerate halved when DXR is enabled, which isn't exactly surprising, but is certainly disappointing.

If you haven't seen it in action yet, here's Eight minutes of gameplay with RTX enabled, so you can see for yourself.

https://www.ign.com/videos/2018/11/1...acing-4k-60fps

You also might be wondering what the performance penalty is when going from DXR "low" to DXR "ultra, so we tested that as well. The effect of making this change is reflections appear on more surfaces, the most noticeable of which is your weapon. On Low you'll have either no reflection or just a slight bit of light bouncing off it, but on Ultra you can definitely see the world reflecting on your gun.


Overall, it seems like ray tracing is one of those things that every RTX GPU owner will definitely want to check out, but will probably leave it disabled for multiplayer due to the performance penalty. We can see it being an attractive feature for slower-paced single-player games though, which are sadly becoming rare.

At this early stage of its lifecycle, ray tracing does look good, but the performance penalty makes it not worth it in most scenarios. It'll be much more interesting to see how its implemented in upcoming games like Atomic Heart, and for current games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider when it finally receives a patch for DXR. Overall there are 11 games in the pipeline that will support ray tracing.

https://www.ign.com/videos/2018/08/2...-gamescom-2018

Everyone expected this new technology to have a massive performance penalty, so none of this is really surprising. Plus, Nvidia had to start somewhere, and the notion that a GPU can even do real-time ray tracing at 60Hz is impressive. It'll be really interesting to see how this technology is implemented in future games, whether or not AMD adopts it for next-gen consoles, and what's to come with future hardware. In general, it's the kind of technology that might be able to deliver jaw-dropping visuals in a few years time, but for now it's pretty much a toe in the water that still needs a lot of optimization.

Source: IGN