No idea what Viking City Builder is but noticed they have their own RTX comparison.
Pretty smart promo on their parts
Big Navi will probably have better ray tracing than Turing, but not as good as Ampere. But AMD’s solution will have wider game support simply because it’s going to be in the PS5 and Xbox Series.
AMD’s solution will likely be DXR (directX) and Vulkan RT, just like Nvidia. There really isn’t anything proprietary in there.
Nvidia does have “OptiX”, which helps developers optimize DXR for their hardware, and I’m sure AMD will have something similar.
I like how they had to explain what RTX does in the scene without any water, because they pretty much looked the same.
RT shadowing and ambient occlusion is often quite subtle. Fake shadows just somehow look wrong.
It isn’t a flashy feature like reflections, when I noticed a movie projected on the wall reflecting off a light fixture on the ceiling in Control, that was a real wowza moment.
Shadows aren’t flashy, but they do immensely improve immersion. Try turning RT shadows off and you can immediately tell the difference in any non pre-baked scene.
I remember reading a breathless Quake 2 review where the reviewer commented that as he edged round a pool of lava it was reflected on his weapon. Plus ca change!
Original Q2 that is, not the RTX one :)
Sure, it’s not like reflections are new, but those are screen-space reflections so they can only reflect stuff that’s already in your view. RT reflects everything, and it all looks like it should.
It wasn’t a noteworthy light fixture up on the ceiling, the developers didn’t call my attention to it in any way. Every room has them in some way or another. Every lightbulb in the game reflects everything. Every rocket, every enemy, every piece of debris-- and there’s a lot of debris in Control. It’s pervasive.
That’s what immersion is all about. Would most people even notice lightbulbs reflecting dynamic events? Probably not. But you still see it, and it makes the world seem more real. Immersion.
Right now I’m sitting at my glass desk, and my monitor is lightly reflecting off my aluminum mouse pad, and more clearly off the desk itself. My mouse shadows the mousepad from light emitting from my left and right monitor. These reflections are all around us, subtly, not like posing in front of a mirror in Duke 3D, but there. In most games you wouldn’t see dynamic reflections anywhere and you’d never consciously miss them. But they matter. Immersion.
Some Watch Dogs comparisons…
Not only do I not know what refresh rates above 60 look like, I think a puddle is pretty much a puddle :)
I didn’t find the Watch Dogs comparison as dramatic…
Maybe not, but it immediately made a huge difference to me from the very first scene. Especially when they go from split-screen into full screen fade/wipe - the RTX off looked good, and then the RTX on (especially on the cars and the background colors looking better for now being so washed out in the “light”) was just excellent.
Yep. It’s not that the scenes without RTX look bad. It’s that the scenes with it add just a little bump to the realism. And it might be that little bump which gets your brain past the uncanny valley.
Totally not related, but what an odd touch to the game that they give random license plates to the same set-piece cars.
Oh yeah, for sure - it’s a handsome game either way.
Very cool observation. It must add to replay value!
That’s exactly it.
Also it looks like WD3 doesn’t use RT for shadows, which is unfortunate given its dynamic time of day, meaning shadows can’t be prebaked to look perfect without RT.
That’s impressive.
Looking at that WDL video, it feels like we need video card makers to focus on technology that will make human skin and eyes look more realistic. The cars and water looked better watching a video, but you’re unlikely to notice that difference when you’re actually focusing on playing the game.
Yeah, skin tone is still way off. The texture nowadays is sharp enough to show pores but one look at a video game human and you can still see that is rendered not real.
There’s also a really weird situation in dialogue where they do a portrait mode kind of effect, but it only affects the non-speaking character, not the background, so they’re the only thing out of focus in the whole shot.