Wednesday, September 5th 2018
DICE to Dial Back Ray-tracing Eye-candy in Battlefield V to Favor Performance
EA-DICE, in an interview with Tom's Hardware, put out some juicy under-the-hood details about the PC release of "Battlefield V." The most prominent of these would be that the commercial release of the game will slightly dial back on the ray-tracing eye-candy we saw at NVIDIA's GeForce RTX launch event demo. DICE is rather conservative about its implementation of ray-tracing, and seems to assure players that the lack of it won't make a tangible difference to the game's production design, and will certainly not affect gameplay (eg: you won't be at a competitive disadvantage just because a squeaky clean car in the middle of a warzone won't reflect an enemy sniper's glint accurately).
"What I think that we will do is take a pass on the levels and see if there is something that sticks out," said Christian Holmquist, technical director at DICE. "Because the materials are not tweaked for ray tracing, but sometimes they may show off something that's too strong or something that was not directly intended. But otherwise we won't change the levels-they'll be as they are. And then we might need to change some parameters in the ray tracing engine itself to maybe tone something down a little bit," he added. Throughout the game's levels and maps, DICE identified objects and elements that could hit framerates hard when ray-tracing is enabled, and "dialed-down" ray-tracing for those assets. For example, a wall located in some level (probably a glass mosaic wall), hit performance too hard, and the developers had to tone down its level of detail.
At this time, only GeForce RTX series users have access to the ray-tracing features in Battlefield V, and can turn them off to improve performance. There are no DXR fallbacks for people with other graphics cards (GeForce GTX or Radeon). "…we only talk with DXR. Because we have been running only NVIDIA hardware, we know that we have optimized for that hardware. We're also using certain features in the compiler with intrinsics, so there is a dependency. That can be resolved as we get hardware from another potential manufacturer. But as we tune for a specific piece of hardware, dependencies do start to go in, and we'd need another piece of hardware in order to re-tune." DICE appears to be open to AMD sending hardware with its own DXR feature-set implementation, so it could add it to Battlefield V at a later stage. The RTX features themselves will only make it via a day-zero patch when the game releases in October, and won't feature in tomorrow's open-beta. There's also no support for NVIDIA SLI. The interview also reveals that Battlefield V has been optimized for processors with up to 6 cores and 12 threads.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
"What I think that we will do is take a pass on the levels and see if there is something that sticks out," said Christian Holmquist, technical director at DICE. "Because the materials are not tweaked for ray tracing, but sometimes they may show off something that's too strong or something that was not directly intended. But otherwise we won't change the levels-they'll be as they are. And then we might need to change some parameters in the ray tracing engine itself to maybe tone something down a little bit," he added. Throughout the game's levels and maps, DICE identified objects and elements that could hit framerates hard when ray-tracing is enabled, and "dialed-down" ray-tracing for those assets. For example, a wall located in some level (probably a glass mosaic wall), hit performance too hard, and the developers had to tone down its level of detail.
62 Comments on DICE to Dial Back Ray-tracing Eye-candy in Battlefield V to Favor Performance
A perfectly reasonable thing to do. But it highlights the price of the initial cards. It's a lot of cash for minimal return on effects.
www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2018-inside-battlefield-5s-stunning-rtx-ray-tracing-tech
The demo and videos that were shown are quite unoptimized, dialing it back does not necessarily affect visuals too much while bringing considerably better performance.That is an artistic rather than technical question. They obviously can and will play around with how reflective materials are but considering it was an RT tech showcase, everything being reflective is pretty much expected :)There have been a bunch of interviews with game devs who explain how (and why they actually like raytrracing approach). Cubemaps, some objects specially added to reflections, screen space reflections, art department working thing around problems etc.
What DICE has said in interviews:
- RT reflections are running at full res (compared to old reflections being half-res)
- They have custom filtering for RT, not using Nvidia's DLSS (and Tensor cores)
- BFV RT demo runs at 60 fps on 1080p, 40-50fps on 1440p, sub-30fps on 4K (and DICE was surprised it worked on 4K at all)
- DICE developed RT stuff on Titan V-s, got Turings less that 2 weeks before show
- They were/are considering configuring RT resolution separately from rendering resolution and upscaling the results.
- There are several optimization thoughts already: Geometry does not affect RT performance, instances do (and they hope to gain 30% performance from there), they also intend to get RT to the earlier point in rendering pipeline (currently starts after G-buffer).
The whole thing is rather unoptimized. They are dialong back the reflections, optimizing performance and making it usable as a whole on resolutions suitable for high-end cards, not dropping RT.Here's CryEngine from 2014 doing actual realistic real-time reflections:
There is nothing pre-computed or fixed for doing this. Engine simply has to do it in real-time because you can actually see individual items from the world inside the reflections. FOUR YEARS AGO (at least video was made then, which means it can be even older). Four years in gaming industry is like eternity. So, there's that... Sure ray tracing looks more precise, but do we really need that kind of precision NOW when they clearly can't deliver good enough performance? Frankly, no.
Another one...
...from 5 years ago.
Skyrim engine from 4 years ago (with some mods I'm assuming)...
Perspective and distance correct reflections.
Holmquist clarifies, “…we only talk with DXR.
Continues to say they do optimize for Nvidia hardware but that's simply because they are the only ones there. That should address some concerns about RT technology being proprietary.Lazy is a subjective term. When the "lazy" approach is viable and looks more accurate with less work from several teams, why would you not want to use that?What do you mean by actual realistic real-time reflections?
Most of your videos are clearly doing cubemaps and screen-space reflections and probably not much more. Resolution and some distortions are pretty telling.
Now try to add dynamic objects (and a bunch of them) plus some particle effects and see how these fare?
Renders at a lower/higher resolution and then scaled to display resolution.
Lol, you can't cubemap entire world. Cubemaps are when you slam a prerendered "reflection" of the world on a reflective surface. Usually you see those on windows reflections or marble floor where room reflection roughly looks like the room itself. Here, all the rocks, grass, wooden railing is reflecting where it should be reflecting. It's not a rough approximation to give a sensation it's a real reflection, it is a real reflection on the surface. Brushing at its accuracy, come on dude, the video is from 2014. And game for sure wasn't made in 2014. Complaining over precision in a game from 4+ years ago, of course it's not as accurate as it could be today on 3x faster graphic cards.
Ray-tracing is fundamental rendering technology. It's how renders are being made. It wasn't invented by Nvidia to sell you RTX.
RTRT is very demanding from hardware, so other methods had to be created for gaming. Some are approximate (they give a result close to realistic in simple scenarios) and some are just fake.
Being able to do ray-tracing in real time was the ultimate target and really a big topic in the last 5 or so years. And we're finally getting close.I'd say flashy... maybe attractive in a game. Far from realistic.
Go out sometimes. Check if cars really look like in the first video...
RT is the correct approach. All methods you've mentioned earlier are heavy simplifications of the problem.
Also, 60fps is perfectly playable to majority of gamers. It's not our problem that you can't live without 144Hz.
Nvidia's done a good job on marketing for you it seems. TEN GIGA RAYS people!
Gullible fools...
I don't know what will happen to the first gen RTX cards. I expected an icy welcome on gaming hardware forums/sites because of a strong bias towards performance figures (and AMD fans overrepresentation ;-)).
As for the whole market - it's way to early to say anything.
I'm glad to see that not all RTX critics are against the idea full-stop. Maybe you'll see the
raylight some day. :-DAs for @RejZoR... well... he's specific. But who am I to judge, seriously. ;-)
It seems the preorder is a success. It's definitely going well in 2 largest stores in Poland.Actually I've been using ray tracing since before I've started to care what Nvidia is. And I've been into casual 3D rendering for a decade or so afterwards.
It's very unlikely that Nvidia had any impact on me being a (proud) ray-tracing fanboy. :-D