Using the "Control" location card font and sounds for your text introducing the name of the effect was such a wonderful and intelligent way to shout out your appreciation of Remedy's ongoing commitment to graphical excellence. Great work.
Control introduced those texts, but Alan Wake II uses them as well for every single chapter introduction. So it's more to stay in theme with the game that referencing other games.
It's really funny that the noise from the software RT gives the illusion of additional surface details. It reminds me of when Id Software, after demands for a "high-res texture patch" from fans, added a noise grain filter to the virtual texturing system in RAGE and called it "detail texturing".
@@marrow94 Sometimes! I think it looks AWFUL in RAGE though. You can actually tweak the size and intensity of the noise pattern with console variables. Reducing the intensity helps, but personally I think the game still looks great even today without it. Plus, it runs in 8K at 120 FPS locked even on RTX 2080!
I walk around Bright Falls and I feel like im in 2030 with how good some things look. Then I see two NPCs talking to each other with super low quality faces, both wearing identical outfits. And then Im instantly snapped back to 2010.
Remedy’s art direction is just stunning. Agree that the technical aspect of the visuals is incredible as well, but the artistic aspect is even more striking. This game will look great even after 10 years.
It will look better because then we can afford a gpu that will max everything out but 10 years is a lot! And tech is growing exponential so we will have games that look so much better. Just compare this game with something that looked great from 10 years ago
@@HappyDude1 I agree but my point is tech could be outdated but art design can’t. This game’s graphical design has a lot of artistic flavours, it’s highly stylistic. Same thing with Control. Same thing with Red Dead 2. Another game with outstanding art direction is Dirt 3 which is 10 years old but looks beautiful, even today. Creating realistic graphics is easy today as there is always references available in real life. But those realistic graphics will look like shit 5 years down if they lack any artistic flavour. Games devs need to go the extra mile to give a unique look to the game to make it stand the test of time. Graphics will always feel outdated after some time but graphics with strong art direction will remain timeless. GTAV was praised on how realistic it looked in 2015. Then, only 4 years later, I saw comparisons to other technically superior games mentioning how unrealistic the lighting is. But there’s a huge factor which contributed in the way GTA V looked and will look. That’s ART DIRECTION. GTAV still looks beautiful and extremely unique in terms of its colour palate which gives an impression that it looks better than the new saints row technically, the reason being shitty art direction on Saints Row. Skyrim is technically the worst game ever made. But that dint stop it from being as iconic as it is, a massive contributor is amazing Art Direction. Uncharted 4, TLoU2, Dragon Age Inquisition, etc are more examples. In simpler words, art makes technology timeless. (My own words btw lol)
@@akshaydabhadkarofficial5104 Ow yes its like like A BMW M3 E46, which is technically a disaster, but it looks timeless. 😁 i think the art of bioshock still looks amazing and thats very old now
I am okay with what you say under circumstance that this game will be a very rare exception for at least next 5 years, it is good to push boundaries and improve on visuals, but not if most devs will try to take advantage of it and we will have to play upscaled games with 30FPS on average. I'd rather play on low settings, but native 4k. I have no problem with others seeing it differently as long as I'm given the option to play at native resolution even at the exepnse of details.
One thing I noticed is that the CRT monitors in the game do not emit light. They don't illuminate the room they're in and they aren't even visible in darkness
I expected a great looking game with Path Tracing after all I heard and how good control was back in the day, but the thing which impressed me the most is how good it looks when RT is off, I mean wow Remedy really hit the nail in both classes, fantastic.
It's a shame about the screen space reflections. Unreal engine has solved those issues by applying additional trickery through Lumen. You can have those mirror effects and have reflections of occluded objects. You can even have a fake umbra to make shadows softer the further they are from the object. It's all doable without raytracing, it's just a matter of devs implementing it properly by accounting for all the errors instead of just using one blanket solution.
@@ThunderingRoar I don’t think you know what the word paradoxical means, yes many games have been made, and many more are on the way, all with poor CPU utilisation bottlenecking performance.
Tbh AW2 is IMO one of the best examples of how amazing games can look.... without hardware RT. Unlike some titles where RT is complete game changer I feel in AW2 RT and PT is more of a "cherry on top" effect and game looks outstanding even without those effects.
Completely agree. And if we could have separate settings to toggle RT reflections only, like in Control, i think it would be an improvement. Path tracing is too expensive, while SSR mixed with the software RT is both expensive and gives an even worse result. for now, my 3070 is perfectly adequate for everything 1440p, but playing with RT in 2 games this entire year, so i can't justify upgrading to 40s cards. Remedy has to improve on animating faces and expressions however. I feel like they are stil lacking in that department. Need to consult with Naughty Dog :)
Doesn't look better than Tlou2, Forbidden west, Forza Horizon 5, Hivebusters, Mortal Kombat 1 etc. without the raytracing and image quality is horrible let's be honest.
Actually, ray traced shadows are on unattainable level compared with rasterization. But indirect lighting indeed can be simulated quite good without hardware RT
@@gabber_I think disabling RT and enabling the transparency setting gets you RT reflections only, that’s what I did with my 7900 XT where path tracing is just too expensive
@@vandammage1747 Disagree. Lightning and models alone look better than TLOU2. Models in ND games only look amazing in cutscenes but look at them in photo mode and you'll see how much detail is lost.
I love how the pattern on the curtains in the diner actually have clear shadows with RT because the thicker fabric of the embroidery would block the light.
Back in the mid 90s I was in college learning about ray tracing and how it will change things, it's so nice to see it finally available. But still a shame that 99% of players will miss these details. DF you are doing such a service to all the devs out there who make this work.
@@davemeredith6964You're right, but you also need to remember that the art team and design teams are separate. Upping visual quality doesn't take away from gameplay unless we're talking about shifting funds around. Ultimately, visuals in games all come down to the proficiency of the artists and programmers working on the art team.
Yep, that's the problem. You loose so much performance, but what you get nearly unnoticeable without close inspection. Like when I am switching full RT\PT on in this game I am just getting same good quality picture but can't say if there is any difference. Remember that empty house in AW2 first location, I got inside with full PT on and was like "wow outside light gets inside very realistically and flashlight also looks pretty nice. I walked around paying attention to all the small detail, then I switched RT off and... it's all look the same! Like I know there got to be some changes but it looks so good without RT that I have to look at direct comparison picture by picture to notice all this stuff. So I am just keeping it off cause of the framerates. So yeah, from my perspective it would be much better if all this computational power would be used somehow to actually improve gameplay, not just small details that are left unnoticed mostly.
@@xerxeslv Boring gameplay has nothing to do with too little computing power because of RT. AAA developers are simply usually not willing to experiment. You have to look into the indie scene for that. And if graphics aren't that important to you anyway, you'll probably be happier there.
Edit: update 12 fixed the issue described below: Enabling frame generation introduces hitching whenever the game transitions from pre-rendered cinematics to real-time rendered graphics, similar to what The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk used to have before Nvidia released Streamline 1.5.6.
@@maximefraisier1010 these transitions are used for jumpscares and they often occur a dozen times in the span of 5 seconds, so it's pretty jarring. Not to mention it ruins the dev's artistic vision for the game as well as the player's immersion. Love frame gen, needs fixed tho'.
This is an interesting point. How do you know it is due to FG? Also worth noting to run it maxed even with dlss quality, you need FG on to run it at a good framerate. 80-100
@@ervinfakas3973 I have same issue and it disappears as soon as you turn off frame gen. Checkout Hollows’a gameplay part 1 video in the starting couple of minutes during jump scares, he also has these stutters.
I have a theory. I bet on transition you're just losing the FG frame because for obvious reasons it can't interpolate. This may not be fixable, or at least not without getting REALLY creative. Turn on a frametime meter. I bet the hitch is about double the normal frametime. I don't have RTX 4000 so I'd love to hear results if someone tests this.
I wanna mention something about transparency in the "Ray Tracing Optimised Settings" section of the video. Yes the low setting for transparency overall looks fine, but there are major graphical issues in some scenarios with crazy blocking effects and flickering which ruins the entire presentation of the scene. I get this issue looking at the lake from the main street of Bright Falls, with a very off angle. Switching to high seems for now to be the only solution...
Yes, same here. Also there are a lot of mirrors in the game that straight up dont have a reflection at all, even with all path tracing maxxed.. He didnt mention that for some reason
@@jackhanma376 Same here, specifically the Police Station on first visit. The glass dividers between the cubical offices was causing like a sparkling flicker.
@@zeroskaterz92 yeah, that Mary Sue character was SOOOO well written! Loved how she was able to solve so many mysteries by making shit up in her “mind palace”. I especially like the part where she knew that a person has a necklace on her with no evidence to support it! And when the person with the necklace is about to ask Saga how she knew, the game cuts her off because they know it is bullshit. I like how you claim I haven’t played other games to make it sound like I’m wrong. If I have to play a game outside of Alan Wake 1 to understand your story, you have failed as a writer!
I wonder if the compromise rendering indoors was due to issues with insufficient ray counts / bounces for illuminating indoor scenes that are lit primarily by indirect sun lighting.
probably done to keep the art style of scenes consistent unlike in a game like cyberpunk, where many story scenes were completely different which wasn’t what the developers intended. i do like how cyberpunk does things better though, as the whole point of path tracing to me is lost in this game due to it sacrificing accurate and perfect lighting for the art style
Art style is much more preferable. Accurate lighting is nice but creators intent is better. I don't want games to look bland like most of the real world. Still this game has great art style as is in cyberpunk even though they are going for realistic lighting.
@@mikkokoponen8464 if they would be able to keep the art style similar but also let full path tracing do it's thing it would be wonderful. in cyberpunk's case its true the scenes change a lot but the vibe is mostly intact.
That definitely seems like it. Nvidia's Path Tracer only does 2 bounces which makes many indoor areas and corners pitch black in Cyberpunk, it makes sense they're relying on signed distance fields as a fallback.
It looks like Remedy is using a technique I was hoping devs would use when ray tracing was first introduced back in 2018. Use it as a visual guide for the non-ray traced counterpart. In art, thinking of it as tracing the source image. So many scenes are pretty close.
You make it sound like RT is a new thing. 😉 GPU-accelerated RT was introduced to consumer graphics cards in 2018, but RT's been a thing since the 70s, has been used in movies /artworks for decades and the first real-time RT demo I've seen was Quake 3 RT (part of Daniel Pohl's bachelor's thesis AFAIR; later, he used to work for Intel for a couple of years and did a couple projects on Larrabee - but we all know how that GPU turned out. 😔).
@@rockapartie Yeah, to emphasise: the new thing that's now available is real-time raytracing. Having to render 30+ times per second is a vastly different problem to waiting even a minute to get a static render which you could use to recreate with less resource intensive lighting tech.
This game is SO ahead of it's time. I can't wait to see it in 10 years. I just played Quantum Break and now that it actually runs right it looks SO GOOD.
@@brianfunt2619 If I gave even two shits about Remedy anymore, I too would like to know how their game engines differ from game to game, and how easy/difficult it would be to implement later improvements to older games.
Outstanding video as always Alex. Your attention to detail is second to none and in this case really rewards the Remedy devs' attention to detail too! 👏
Alan Wake 2 indeed looks gorgeous. All Remedy games have their own & tailored look ( that for me personally works 100 % ) that differentiates them from other AAA titles and that's why even Max Payne 1 looks good to me all those years later. I showed screenshots from my playthrough to my colleagues to illustrate how Remedy applies the right amount of restraint when placing assets in the environments so that the assets, materials & overall composition can shine without unnecessary visual clutter. The only small nitpick i have with the PT & RT reflections is that they really did the mirrors in this game dirty by having this awesome tech and still making the surfaces look rather bumpy and producing really weird reflections. Other than that, looking at the extremely noisy reflections on the ground in Robocop :Rogue City i realized how much better Northlight engine ( and RED engine, for that matter , after playing through Phantom Liberty with PT on ) look when implementing those techniques than UE5 right now. P.S using music from the first Max Payne game here brought a smile on my face :)
Now this is some top quality coverage guys. Really keen on this one, especially showcasing the different RT effects and how they work both in still images and in motion. Keep it up!
I've been looking forward to this. For the first time in a long time, asset quality is now the limiting factor in realism. Lighting is effectively a solved problem.
nah pathtracing as the way its used in these games still as problems mainly beacuse its using previous frame information to construct a good looking image and low sample and bounce counts not to mention its not simulating light asif it was a wave/partical but just a partical what is not entirely acurate and breaks some effects that work in real life nvidia released a paper on a wave/partical tracer that would be more acurate but its 10x slower so not viable for games
@@ImplyDoods sample counts are an easy fix. As time goes on you can run these games at higher internal resolutions which will increase the amount of samples. Ideally, you'd have better anti aliasing options including the ability to disable TAA for this future hardware, but any time that subject is brought up, DF gets strangely defensive. But regardless, higher resolutions are all you really need. My point isn't that this game looks perfect, it's that all the tech is now available to reach a level of perfect photorealism that we've seen in movie CGI for just over a decade now. As for wave/particle stuff. Stuff like spectral rendering is neat for edge cases, but if you avoid using complex materials you can render photorealistic images without it and even a lot of photoreal CGI rendered offline doesn't use it.
Clearly not solved as pointed out in the video, but were much much closer. I will never understand people who dismiss lighting as not matters and its the biggest thing that gets us close to photo realism.
We should praise Remedy for making small and relatively insigificant cuts to ray tracing in order for the game to run well. That is how you optimize a game. They made cuts that no one would notice in game to give most systems a chance to hit 60fps. Well Done!
PC games have settings that you can change for lower end systems. Of course they can do this for lower settings but the highest available settings should be uncompromised.
Why is barely anyone talking about the mouse stutter, its such a major issue. This game also has traversal stutter here and there. But I guess its not unreal engine so its not cool to complain about stutter
To be fair, this is why most gamers don't care about RT, because in 2:37 there is a great demonstration where in that picture, the difference shown could just be as if light was emitted towards that plant object from another type of perspective, which diminishes the added effects of realism from the RT respective since it becomes a matter of perspective at that point and not a matter of accuracy of how light actually interacts with objects irl. Most people don't even think about that fact. TLDR when something it's so good, and the difference seem to be just a matter of perspective + the performance of one perspective which provides so little costs so much, becomes a major issue. Thus, most people won't buy a 4090 to play AW2 but great analysis as always.
On my 3080, with PT at medium settings 1440p DLSS balanced, I only had 30FPS experience in the forest segments in Saga's story, the rest of the game, and all of Alan's story, it was smooth
Same for me. Seemingly all the scenes in Bright Falls have way more stuttering. I have to turn off RT entirely to get it to run well. Then I turn it back on when I get to Alan/Dark Place/'indoor' portions
Such a joy to watch your videos, guys! So proficiently crafted. Beautiful speeches, such insanely deep dives into all these amazing technologies. Highly appreciated!
Im definitely a bit jealous of how clean the PC version looks..The only issue i have with console versions is the horrible implementation of FSR2..It's seriously horrible looking I haven't seen so much aliasing since the 360 Ps3 era...Other games that use FSR2 definitely still have aliasing but not even close to the same level as AW2...It really really takes away from the otherwise sublime visuals..
@RonniSchmidt-mi7pd Thats not what I'm saying...DLSS is a much better upscaling solution but FSR2 is used in Starfield and Immortals of aveum and cyberpunk 2077 and like I originally stated they all have aliasing and shimmering issues but not even close to how badly it looks in AW2...Capcom updated RE4 remake on series x to use FSR2 and looked like a shimmering mess and a week later updated it again to go back to its original upscaling solution because it looked so much better....They can use other anti aliasing techniques on top of FSR2 to help lesson the horrible aliasing..
@vandammage1747 in quality mode it's about 1280p native...Immortals of Aveum is 1080p native upscale and still looks cleaner with less aliasing and shimmering.
Would be nice if customers had an option to buy nvidia sku hardware for home consoles, but thats not cost effective for either nvidia or sony/xbox. However... Nintendo will likely be your best bet, though their power budget on switch 2 will be pathetic, i am going to be stoked to see how DLSS creates relatively sharp as hell imagines for the tiny tablet screen... Wish my steamdeck could use an nvidia SOC like Nintendo's upcoming Switch 2. Im very jealous. Fack FSR.
I kinda wonder how it would look like if something similar to AI ray reconstruction would be used on rasterization. like training a AI model to detect the parts that are wrong in a cascaded shadow and improving it to make it more realistic or improving the screenspace reflections. Sure it would never look like pathtracing but it would basically be a free upgrade i think?
I like this idea, but it seems like something that would take a lot of computational power just to do what ray tracing already does, but with a worse outcome. I think Nvidia’s making the correct choice by offloading ray tracing denoising to AI, and that will lead to better visual outcomes for the performance cost rather than training AI to fix up screen-space errors
@@DMPLAYER1000 I don't know, if you already have made 2 versions of the game (raster and pathtracing) the AI could be trained on the pathtraced version of the game to get a better idea how something is supposed to look like and more or less use that data to more accurately recognize the parts where rasterization is failing and improve on it.
It does not make sense to enhance rasterization per a.i. because you always want to train a.i. on the most accurate light and shadow calculations possible as a solid basis. A.I. RT and even PT does already exist by the way and can even run on a GTX 1050 or even intel iGPUs, no joke.
Hmm and i was thinking looking at faces in AW2 that rather weirdly there seems to be no SS which looked kinda bad. It does stand out in a bad way. But it turns out it's a byproduct of RR doing it's work. Also the fact that game seems to be using mix of GI solutions explains why Oliver in his video thought that there's much less difference in game's visuals on consoles compared to PC presentation than he was expecting. Excellent video Alex, thank you.
This took a lot of time to make. There are at least 3 changes in Alex's intonation so it feels like the video was done in 3 segments. The final result may be half an hour long but this a lot more time and a lot of work to accomplish.
I found out using DLSS tweaks that Alan Wake 2 for some reason uses the 'C' DLSS model preset by default instead of the Nvidia recommended default 'D' preset, causing far more temporal instability and aliasing in the image than you'd usually see compared to other recent big titles. For example in this video at 26:18, both the middle and especially the left video have tons of temporal instability in and around foliage, and this is *massively* improved by switching to the 'D' preset using DLSS tweaks. It's not as good as ray reconstruction because you'll still see subtle "splotching" effects, but the C preset is giving the hand tuned denoisers a huge disadvantage in that comparison. This improvement is visible with RT direct lighting turned off as well, and a lot more visible at lower internal resolutions. The C preset, as far as I remember, is only supposed to be used in older games or in games bad or broken motion vectors where the D preset will cause massive amounts of ghosting everywhere. This is not the case with Alan Wake 2 (the D preset works wonderfully, as expected from a modern game with good motion vectors), so it's puzzling that they'd pick that preset as the default, against what Nvidia recommends. The game also seems to be using a bad custom exposure value for DLSS, since turning on DLSS's 'AutoExposure' feature reduces ghosting massively in some specific situations I found. I _was_ playing the game in HDR when I tested this, so maybe the custom exposure value set by Remedy works fine only when in playing in SDR, but it's worth a shot.
Having RT on with max settings does increase the fright factor a lot more. Many a times I find some gleaming light or shadow and realize after getting scared that it was only my character’s reflection.
that happened to me in control dozens of times, way more often than in alan wake 2. rt changes atmosphere to varying degrees but that was one of the most game changing side effects.
Once I go out of the forest sections, I was really able to take advantage of RT/Path Tracing on low, with all other settings on High/Ultra on a 3090 with a pretty solid framerate in the 80-90s. That forest section is just an absolute beating with RT/PT on.
New PC user here with a 3090 too. Do you recommend DLSS performance or balanced? I still don’t understand what this technology actually does. I feel if I use performance I’m doing it wrong so I put it on balanced.
@@PedroNWO DLSS you should either use quality or not at all. Because otherwise youre massively losing imagine clarity, while getting a lot more artifacts. Especially on a GPU like a 4090 you should never use balanced/performance. Otherwise why even have a high end GPU, if you just look at a blury image like that?
in graphics perhaps the gameplay is the same a any other game out there. i prefer better ai, physics and intereaction with enviroment than a game that you can t do almost anything.
2077 with path tracing is still king. It's also a massive open world, making it more impressive. People may think AW2 looks better due to being more realistic looking while 2077 is a fantasy setting which can come off almost cartoony.
Alex, I think your PC monitor may have its brightness set too high. A lot of your videos include really dark shots that can't be seen well unless I watch with the lights out. I have my C2 calibrated to 175 nits in SDR mode, optimized around my lighting conditions.
I have this on my PC (4090) & Played the trial on my PS5. PC is obviously a lot better, but when your engaged in the game you dont notice all the differences. Its great how well optimised it is.
I would have assumed that they are 'blending' path-tracing with the software GI system at least in part in order to preserve the artistic intent in certain scenes where full path-tracing may otherwise lead to a different/undesirable aesthetic outcome. Still a gorgeous game, but the overall technical impression is somehow a little less impressive than Cyberpunk's path tracing implementation (art aside, of course). Either way, really exciting to see developers embracing new technology in this way, especially in a game which seemingly does require such precise artistic lighting of scenes. Perhaps an unblended and improved path tracing mode would be a good addition for a potential rerelease some years down the line, as with Control's Ultimate edition/patched in ray tracing enhancements on PC. Thank you for the ever enlightening content!
20:00 looks extra fantastic?... bro, this is the perfect example of diminishing returns, no worth it at all. You could use all that extra computing horsepower to put better looking trees, super detailed complex parallax, better and more models, characters that don't look made of paper, etc, etc.
Yeah, can we talk about the PRICE for all that vidual glory? Getting a GPU that can handle all that is not cheap and by not cheap I mean extremely expensive. I'm not talking about a GPU where you can set RT to ON and play at about 50-60 frames, I'm talking about playing the game in 4k with REALLY good quality settings... A GPU that can handle that would cost at least about 900-1000 bucks!
Its the best looking game I've ever seen. I just beat it a couple days ago. It is a feast for the eyes and imagination. The way they handle shadow rendering is just the best I've ever seen. Even more fitting that shadows are a main theme in this game. Truly just floored me multiple times because of how well things look and are rendered. I got butterflies in my stomach creeping around eerily quiet, dark rooms in that game. I dont think any game has made me feel that in ages. Such a special game and triumphant technical showcase. I am in awe.
Optimized settings: PS5 performance settings// indirect path trac = low // transparency setting = low // denoise = low or RTX ray reconstruction // (some other but no idea what he is talking about will edit later when I have the game menu in front of me.)
Love how you emphasized the increased fidelity while the game is in motion, still image comparisons don't do rt effects justice a lot of the time atm. It's while the camera is moving that they just look and feel completely surreal
actually playing 1440p dlss performance with low indirect path tracing at around 30 fps in saga sections and 40-60 in alan ones, plays really good and is a bit blurry but still better than most dlss games, this on a rtx 2080
@@flexplodin DLSSp has always been the best for 1440p Ill die on that hill. If 1080p DLSSq looks acceptable, then 1440p DLSSp, which has the same base resolution, will not ever look worse than 1080p DLSSq. It is also the integer resolution (720x2=1440) when 1080p DLSSq is NOT. There are always inherent benefits to scaling from an integer resolution, and its no different here. *I sit 10 inches away from a 32inch monitor. It is in line with my face perfectly with an arm. You will never convince me that, in something like Witcher 3, there is a major difference between DLSS modes at 1440p and that its not worth using P just for the gains.
I am so grateful that I lived to see what full pathtracing looks like on an OLED ultrawide monitor. Thank you God, for gracing me with such privilege and thank you DF for your coverage. Yours truly, a fellow graphics engineer.
15:48 Recently saw Nintendo's GDC presentation about building the physics and sound engines for TotK and the Full RT/PT vs Baked lighting details here remind me a lot of that. Fascinating stuff and really excited to see path tracing become more economical and broadly implemented.
I noticed that turning on ray tracing claims it will disabled a couple of settings, but they are still listed as on ( such as SSAO) and I had to manually turn the settings off... Not sure if that actually made a difference, but I figured I would mention such.
One annotation. If you focus the flashlight to a mirror you don't see the reflection of the flashlight on the near walls or objects. With RTX on or off.
I've been playing with RT on and suffering the decrease in frames. Worth it tho. Game is pretty stable. When you first enter the overlap and the red light is shining thru the leaves I just had to keep it on.
I just realized that the implantation of raytracing is probably even more of a nightmare than I thought because now you can't simply cull everything outside of the frustum. Nuts.
Thanks for calling out the ray reconstruction/sub surface scattering point. I was trying to figure out why the game still had areas where you could see sss working, and others where it looked completely gone. Very weird and had me thinking the game looked like a downgrade from Control visually in many areas
I was waiting for you to point out that the two red ketchup squeeze bottles in in the diner scene were entirely omitted from the RT shadow and RT reflection.
There are certain SSR algorithms that caches the current frame and reprojects to fill in the missing data caused due to dis-occlusion , but these algorithms are very niche and very performance intensive.. These algorithms doesn't completely removes the dis-occlusion artifacts, it just reduces them... But still I wonder how the game would look, if they used real time cubemaps and planer reflections for the reflections along with baked GI for primary light bounces and screen space global illumination for secondary bounces for the diffuse lighting... and instead of cascade shadow maps, how about, resolution independent contact hardening virtual shadow maps...
These errors that persist even with PT are exactly the kind of things you want to get rid of when turning PT on. I hope they can fix it and provide an option with uncompromised PT
It seems that the visual errors might be due to the fact that this is more of a hybrid path tracing mode than anything else. An accurate path tracer shoots a lot of rays per pixel at the same location which then bounce off into different paths to get an average of the pixel color each time it hits something else. Advertising these games as using path tracing can be a bit strange because there are areas which dont look path traced at all.
22:35 from what I understand, reflection bounces are expensive. If you've ever put two mirrors up against each other, you know that you get a rather infinite effect. The problem with path tracing is that you need to do that for every single reflection. It's as expensive as grab passes, if not more expensive. This same problem exists in blender, and an optimization you can do is to limit transparency and certain reflections to 3 or 4 bounces to improve the speed of the render, at the slight cost of realism. So what you're seeing in that shot is likely just 1 bounce for mirror reflections being calculated, and no more. I.E: 2 bounces total into the camera for certain surfaces. It amazing though. As I've come to learn how shaders work, you do often have infinite freedom in how you can calculate things. So especially if effort is put into tagging/marking objects to do certain things, you can save a lot of performance without sacrificing that much noticeable quality.
I know DF is really blown away by this game's graphics, and I agree the lighting is probably the best out there, but the character models and animations still look stiff and video game like to me. I don't think they did nearly as well with animation and characters as some other games out there.
Yeah I agree, models look like wax replicas of celebrities u see in those museums in la to take selfies with, Alex Casey also has horrible lip syncing bc it’s Sam lakes face and not his voice, why not just scan the voice actor like in max Payne 3 bc his facial animations in that are better from 2012
This is more about artistic choices imho. CP2077 has it’s world which is a world of year 2077. This game is taking place in woods and dark nighmarish NYC with a an aim to have that True Detective, s7ven, Ozark feeling to it. It’s not that northlight engine couldn’t do what CP2077 but like I have said…two completely different scenarios. I like AW2 more personaly but I do play it on 4080. I’m curious what would be Alexes opinion how the visuals scale between AW2 and CP2077 Overdrive.
I don't think the fact that it's open world matters when it comes to path tracing because you're still rendering the same number of pixels and firing the same number of paths. Alan Wake 2 seems to have more realistic surfaces in some cases but overall cyberpunk seems to use the results of full path tracing better. Edit: Of course it's more difficult to control the look of global illumination in an open world so in that sense it's definitely more impressive what they were able to do with cyberpunk especially since it wasn't originally designed around path tracing.
@@RCmies could be interesting to see if Nvidia use Northlight engine as it’s showcase for RT graphics and will patch AW2 to use full path tracing in the future. It seems to me that it’s matter of a few tweaks.
Absolutely loved the video and how it really outlined the difference between scene specific RT on and RT off representation of that scene. However, one critique must be that it's never a great idea to compare an Nvidia series x of generation a with a series y of generation b (3080 vs 4070). That simply can't end well, and the comparison should be between either gen a series x vs Gen a series y, or Gen a series x vs Gen b series x... And so on, especially when talking about fps/throughput alone. Anyhow, I'm rambling... Awesome video!
I keep investing more in my gaming PC to have enough power to do games like this justice. Cyberpunk was a game changer - AW2 is taking it to the next level. DF 2 bringing quality content too - great job
13:44 Left side is how this scene would look like IRL. In pitch darkness shining a flashlight at an object so close will cast a dark shadow on the other side of the object. In all other scenes it's the same. Ray tracing is exaggerating reflections soooooooooo much just to make it more obvious but more often than not, it's not more realistic than turning it off. If they make it more subtle, it will be unnoticeable even in stills like that and no1 will use it because of the HUGE performance drop.
Man, reminds me of how 20 years ago, I experimented with path tracing renderers at university and had conversations around whether that could ever be done in real time... especially because to get the noise to acceptable levels, you had to render for a really long time.
I know RT is the future, mostly due to how much work time is saved from letting RT do the heavy lifting instead of spending so much time faking it. However I find that in AW2 just like Metro Exodus, a good looking game just looks good. And RT is just a horizontal visual alternative to me not a next level game changer. And honestly not worth the performance hit, until you can RT at a small enough cost to performance I dont see the benefit for consumers at all. That said good looking games are good looking. The only true upgrade of RT is in reflections, SSR artifacts and limitations being replaced by RT reflections is a game changer. Light and shadows tho you can fake it well enough to basicly be no difference at the cost of more dev work.
You are right, its not game changer, but it does look better in RT. You can activate frame gen for those lost fps, and obviously they develop those technologies knowing that its impossible to hit 60+fps with fully raytraced scenarios without a huge performance hit I think is wrong keep blaming the RT tech because of his inherent computational needs. Cheers from Argentina
Absolutely love your PC analysis. There's a lot more that can be said and compared on PC (due to the high configurability) than on console. Looking forward to more of this!
I'm really happy to see where frame generation can shine. FG is something I've wanted for a decade. Obviously TVs use a more rudimentary version of it, often just interpolating frames. But in games where latency is not a huge factor, frame generation can drastically improve the experience.
Using the "Control" location card font and sounds for your text introducing the name of the effect was such a wonderful and intelligent way to shout out your appreciation of Remedy's ongoing commitment to graphical excellence. Great work.
...and the Max Payne BGM
Control introduced those texts, but Alan Wake II uses them as well for every single chapter introduction. So it's more to stay in theme with the game that referencing other games.
It's really funny that the noise from the software RT gives the illusion of additional surface details. It reminds me of when Id Software, after demands for a "high-res texture patch" from fans, added a noise grain filter to the virtual texturing system in RAGE and called it "detail texturing".
Well to be honest noise (grain) adds “detail” that might be fake, but still looks great.
@@marrow94 Sometimes! I think it looks AWFUL in RAGE though. You can actually tweak the size and intensity of the noise pattern with console variables. Reducing the intensity helps, but personally I think the game still looks great even today without it. Plus, it runs in 8K at 120 FPS locked even on RTX 2080!
@@azazelleblackRage was designed for 720p, just like how Doom 3 was designed for 480p
@@marrow94 You think so? I found it super distracting. Enough on some materials that I wanted to play with RT on just to eliminate that issue.
Hmm, that's got to be resolution-dependent, right? Because at 1080p it really is just noise.
I walk around Bright Falls and I feel like im in 2030 with how good some things look. Then I see two NPCs talking to each other with super low quality faces, both wearing identical outfits. And then Im instantly snapped back to 2010.
yes i think they scrimped a bit on the npcs. Most of them are static and repeat their actions. I wish it was more spontaneous like GTA.
Also the foliage pop-in is attrocious in some areas, takes me right out of it and is super unfortunate.
Remedy’s art direction is just stunning. Agree that the technical aspect of the visuals is incredible as well, but the artistic aspect is even more striking. This game will look great even after 10 years.
It will look better because then we can afford a gpu that will max everything out but 10 years is a lot!
And tech is growing exponential so we will have games that look so much better. Just compare this game with something that looked great from 10 years ago
@@HappyDude1 I agree but my point is tech could be outdated but art design can’t. This game’s graphical design has a lot of artistic flavours, it’s highly stylistic. Same thing with Control. Same thing with Red Dead 2. Another game with outstanding art direction is Dirt 3 which is 10 years old but looks beautiful, even today. Creating realistic graphics is easy today as there is always references available in real life. But those realistic graphics will look like shit 5 years down if they lack any artistic flavour. Games devs need to go the extra mile to give a unique look to the game to make it stand the test of time. Graphics will always feel outdated after some time but graphics with strong art direction will remain timeless. GTAV was praised on how realistic it looked in 2015. Then, only 4 years later, I saw comparisons to other technically superior games mentioning how unrealistic the lighting is. But there’s a huge factor which contributed in the way GTA V looked and will look. That’s ART DIRECTION. GTAV still looks beautiful and extremely unique in terms of its colour palate which gives an impression that it looks better than the new saints row technically, the reason being shitty art direction on Saints Row. Skyrim is technically the worst game ever made. But that dint stop it from being as iconic as it is, a massive contributor is amazing Art Direction. Uncharted 4, TLoU2, Dragon Age Inquisition, etc are more examples. In simpler words, art makes technology timeless. (My own words btw lol)
@@akshaydabhadkarofficial5104
Ow yes its like like A BMW M3 E46, which is technically a disaster, but it looks timeless. 😁 i think the art of bioshock still looks amazing and thats very old now
@@HappyDude1 yup. Exactly.
I am okay with what you say under circumstance that this game will be a very rare exception for at least next 5 years, it is good to push boundaries and improve on visuals, but not if most devs will try to take advantage of it and we will have to play upscaled games with 30FPS on average. I'd rather play on low settings, but native 4k. I have no problem with others seeing it differently as long as I'm given the option to play at native resolution even at the exepnse of details.
One thing I noticed is that the CRT monitors in the game do not emit light. They don't illuminate the room they're in and they aren't even visible in darkness
I think we are looking at what technology is being used rather than how fun a game is to play...a guarantee for failure for gamers at least.
@@munkeymajic Sir, this is a Wendy's.
(aka, this channel's whole point is to examine the visual tech behind games, so not sure what you expect)
@@munkeymajicHuh???
@@munkeymajicMan's bitching that we focus too much on the technology on a channel that's dedicated on the technology.
They do emit light
I expected a great looking game with Path Tracing after all I heard and how good control was back in the day, but the thing which impressed me the most is how good it looks when RT is off, I mean wow Remedy really hit the nail in both classes, fantastic.
It's a shame about the screen space reflections. Unreal engine has solved those issues by applying additional trickery through Lumen. You can have those mirror effects and have reflections of occluded objects. You can even have a fake umbra to make shadows softer the further they are from the object. It's all doable without raytracing, it's just a matter of devs implementing it properly by accounting for all the errors instead of just using one blanket solution.
@@Emucratic Lumen uses ray tracing so no, it's not doable without ray tarcing.
UE is still completely unfit for games, can’t even use CPUs properly, maybe next decade.
@@George-um2vcYour statement is paradoxical considering how many games were made in UE and how many more have been announced
@@ThunderingRoar I don’t think you know what the word paradoxical means, yes many games have been made, and many more are on the way, all with poor CPU utilisation bottlenecking performance.
Tbh AW2 is IMO one of the best examples of how amazing games can look.... without hardware RT.
Unlike some titles where RT is complete game changer I feel in AW2 RT and PT is more of a "cherry on top" effect and game looks outstanding even without those effects.
Completely agree. And if we could have separate settings to toggle RT reflections only, like in Control, i think it would be an improvement. Path tracing is too expensive, while SSR mixed with the software RT is both expensive and gives an even worse result. for now, my 3070 is perfectly adequate for everything 1440p, but playing with RT in 2 games this entire year, so i can't justify upgrading to 40s cards. Remedy has to improve on animating faces and expressions however. I feel like they are stil lacking in that department. Need to consult with Naughty Dog :)
Doesn't look better than Tlou2, Forbidden west, Forza Horizon 5, Hivebusters, Mortal Kombat 1 etc. without the raytracing and image quality is horrible let's be honest.
Actually, ray traced shadows are on unattainable level compared with rasterization. But indirect lighting indeed can be simulated quite good without hardware RT
@@gabber_I think disabling RT and enabling the transparency setting gets you RT reflections only, that’s what I did with my 7900 XT where path tracing is just too expensive
@@vandammage1747 Disagree. Lightning and models alone look better than TLOU2. Models in ND games only look amazing in cutscenes but look at them in photo mode and you'll see how much detail is lost.
I love how the pattern on the curtains in the diner actually have clear shadows with RT because the thicker fabric of the embroidery would block the light.
FYI, I wrote this before he went back and pointed out this detail more directly
Back in the mid 90s I was in college learning about ray tracing and how it will change things, it's so nice to see it finally available. But still a shame that 99% of players will miss these details. DF you are doing such a service to all the devs out there who make this work.
In 1980's it took up to hours to render a Ray Tracing image on AMIGA 500, but a lot faster with 68030.
They are but games should be gameplay first...visuals are one thing but gameplay is key.
@@davemeredith6964You're right, but you also need to remember that the art team and design teams are separate. Upping visual quality doesn't take away from gameplay unless we're talking about shifting funds around. Ultimately, visuals in games all come down to the proficiency of the artists and programmers working on the art team.
Yep, that's the problem. You loose so much performance, but what you get nearly unnoticeable without close inspection. Like when I am switching full RT\PT on in this game I am just getting same good quality picture but can't say if there is any difference. Remember that empty house in AW2 first location, I got inside with full PT on and was like "wow outside light gets inside very realistically and flashlight also looks pretty nice. I walked around paying attention to all the small detail, then I switched RT off and... it's all look the same! Like I know there got to be some changes but it looks so good without RT that I have to look at direct comparison picture by picture to notice all this stuff. So I am just keeping it off cause of the framerates. So yeah, from my perspective it would be much better if all this computational power would be used somehow to actually improve gameplay, not just small details that are left unnoticed mostly.
@@xerxeslv Boring gameplay has nothing to do with too little computing power because of RT. AAA developers are simply usually not willing to experiment. You have to look into the indie scene for that. And if graphics aren't that important to you anyway, you'll probably be happier there.
Edit: update 12 fixed the issue described below:
Enabling frame generation introduces hitching whenever the game transitions from pre-rendered cinematics to real-time rendered graphics, similar to what The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk used to have before Nvidia released Streamline 1.5.6.
Yeah and so what its a little inconvenience (that should be fixed I concede) compare to getting double FPS
@@maximefraisier1010 these transitions are used for jumpscares and they often occur a dozen times in the span of 5 seconds, so it's pretty jarring. Not to mention it ruins the dev's artistic vision for the game as well as the player's immersion. Love frame gen, needs fixed tho'.
This is an interesting point. How do you know it is due to FG? Also worth noting to run it maxed even with dlss quality, you need FG on to run it at a good framerate. 80-100
@@ervinfakas3973 I have same issue and it disappears as soon as you turn off frame gen. Checkout Hollows’a gameplay part 1 video in the starting couple of minutes during jump scares, he also has these stutters.
I have a theory.
I bet on transition you're just losing the FG frame because for obvious reasons it can't interpolate. This may not be fixable, or at least not without getting REALLY creative.
Turn on a frametime meter. I bet the hitch is about double the normal frametime.
I don't have RTX 4000 so I'd love to hear results if someone tests this.
I wanna mention something about transparency in the "Ray Tracing Optimised Settings" section of the video. Yes the low setting for transparency overall looks fine, but there are major graphical issues in some scenarios with crazy blocking effects and flickering which ruins the entire presentation of the scene. I get this issue looking at the lake from the main street of Bright Falls, with a very off angle. Switching to high seems for now to be the only solution...
Yes, same here.
Also there are a lot of mirrors in the game that straight up dont have a reflection at all, even with all path tracing maxxed.. He didnt mention that for some reason
I get this also with the high setting, I think it's a bug
@@jackhanma376 It has to be a bug, but I haven't noticed any major issue since I switched to high
@@loutrepolemique5951 I've only noticed it when playing as Saga (very minor spoiler>>>>>> at the Valhalla nursing home rehabilitation center
@@jackhanma376 Same here, specifically the Police Station on first visit. The glass dividers between the cubical offices was causing like a sparkling flicker.
Pathtraced shadows and those soft contact shadows are sooo delicious.
It really is an absolutely staggering technical achievement in so many ways. I loved just about every second with this weird, wonderful, game.
Now if only the writing could have matched the graphics.
@@nhagan001 🤡
@@nhagan001 The writing was amazing. What are you even on about? Clearly you didn't even play the first game nor Control.
@@nhagan001 Much meta, very wow! :D
@@zeroskaterz92 yeah, that Mary Sue character was SOOOO well written! Loved how she was able to solve so many mysteries by making shit up in her “mind palace”. I especially like the part where she knew that a person has a necklace on her with no evidence to support it!
And when the person with the necklace is about to ask Saga how she knew, the game cuts her off because they know it is bullshit.
I like how you claim I haven’t played other games to make it sound like I’m wrong.
If I have to play a game outside of Alan Wake 1 to understand your story, you have failed as a writer!
I wonder if the compromise rendering indoors was due to issues with insufficient ray counts / bounces for illuminating indoor scenes that are lit primarily by indirect sun lighting.
probably done to keep the art style of scenes consistent unlike in a game like cyberpunk, where many story scenes were completely different which wasn’t what the developers intended. i do like how cyberpunk does things better though, as the whole point of path tracing to me is lost in this game due to it sacrificing accurate and perfect lighting for the art style
Art style is much more preferable. Accurate lighting is nice but creators intent is better. I don't want games to look bland like most of the real world.
Still this game has great art style as is in cyberpunk even though they are going for realistic lighting.
@@mikkokoponen8464 if they would be able to keep the art style similar but also let full path tracing do it's thing it would be wonderful. in cyberpunk's case its true the scenes change a lot but the vibe is mostly intact.
I think the scenes in AW2 change very much and vibe is definitely there. Comparing Alan and Saga scenes are already quite different.
That definitely seems like it. Nvidia's Path Tracer only does 2 bounces which makes many indoor areas and corners pitch black in Cyberpunk, it makes sense they're relying on signed distance fields as a fallback.
It looks like Remedy is using a technique I was hoping devs would use when ray tracing was first introduced back in 2018. Use it as a visual guide for the non-ray traced counterpart. In art, thinking of it as tracing the source image. So many scenes are pretty close.
Nice!
PS5 games are better, Spider man 2 only has Ray tracing
You make it sound like RT is a new thing. 😉 GPU-accelerated RT was introduced to consumer graphics cards in 2018, but RT's been a thing since the 70s, has been used in movies /artworks for decades and the first real-time RT demo I've seen was Quake 3 RT (part of Daniel Pohl's bachelor's thesis AFAIR; later, he used to work for Intel for a couple of years and did a couple projects on Larrabee - but we all know how that GPU turned out. 😔).
Maybe i am wrong but i feel like this is how valorant textures are made, you can see color bounce on some maps but the game is rasterized
@@rockapartie Yeah, to emphasise: the new thing that's now available is real-time raytracing. Having to render 30+ times per second is a vastly different problem to waiting even a minute to get a static render which you could use to recreate with less resource intensive lighting tech.
This game is SO ahead of it's time. I can't wait to see it in 10 years. I just played Quantum Break and now that it actually runs right it looks SO GOOD.
Who else wants a path traced remaster of Quantum Break?
*its
@@brianfunt2619 If I gave even two shits about Remedy anymore, I too would like to know how their game engines differ from game to game, and how easy/difficult it would be to implement later improvements to older games.
Outstanding video as always Alex. Your attention to detail is second to none and in this case really rewards the Remedy devs' attention to detail too! 👏
Fantastic as always. This is the future I think.
i always get excited when alex talks about anything rt. Love his perspective
Alan Wake 2 indeed looks gorgeous. All Remedy games have their own & tailored look ( that for me personally works 100 % ) that differentiates them from other AAA titles and that's why even Max Payne 1 looks good to me all those years later. I showed screenshots from my playthrough to my colleagues to illustrate how Remedy applies the right amount of restraint when placing assets in the environments so that the assets, materials & overall composition can shine without unnecessary visual clutter. The only small nitpick i have with the PT & RT reflections is that they really did the mirrors in this game dirty by having this awesome tech and still making the surfaces look rather bumpy and producing really weird reflections. Other than that, looking at the extremely noisy reflections on the ground in Robocop :Rogue City i realized how much better Northlight engine ( and RED engine, for that matter , after playing through Phantom Liberty with PT on ) look when implementing those techniques than UE5 right now. P.S using music from the first Max Payne game here brought a smile on my face :)
Now this is some top quality coverage guys. Really keen on this one, especially showcasing the different RT effects and how they work both in still images and in motion. Keep it up!
100% agree
I love that you took the “When it’s done” approach with your analysis of this one. Cheers for staying true to yourselves. 🍻
I've been looking forward to this.
For the first time in a long time, asset quality is now the limiting factor in realism. Lighting is effectively a solved problem.
I'm hoping full ray tracing (aka path tracing) becomes the norm for AAA releases.
I'm not sure about that, there still seemed to be issues with the GI system. It's good but not mind blowing.
nah pathtracing as the way its used in these games still as problems mainly beacuse its using previous frame information to construct a good looking image and low sample and bounce counts not to mention its not simulating light asif it was a wave/partical but just a partical what is not entirely acurate and breaks some effects that work in real life nvidia released a paper on a wave/partical tracer that would be more acurate but its 10x slower so not viable for games
@@ImplyDoods sample counts are an easy fix. As time goes on you can run these games at higher internal resolutions which will increase the amount of samples. Ideally, you'd have better anti aliasing options including the ability to disable TAA for this future hardware, but any time that subject is brought up, DF gets strangely defensive. But regardless, higher resolutions are all you really need.
My point isn't that this game looks perfect, it's that all the tech is now available to reach a level of perfect photorealism that we've seen in movie CGI for just over a decade now.
As for wave/particle stuff. Stuff like spectral rendering is neat for edge cases, but if you avoid using complex materials you can render photorealistic images without it and even a lot of photoreal CGI rendered offline doesn't use it.
Clearly not solved as pointed out in the video, but were much much closer. I will never understand people who dismiss lighting as not matters and its the biggest thing that gets us close to photo realism.
@26:49 it seems the RTX 4070 SUPER came out early :D
Great video still !!
We should praise Remedy for making small and relatively insigificant cuts to ray tracing in order for the game to run well. That is how you optimize a game. They made cuts that no one would notice in game to give most systems a chance to hit 60fps. Well Done!
my 3090 can't run 4k/60fps constant with RT lowest setting enable lol
@@Kabodanki Alex literally provides optimized settings at the end of the video, you obviously need to use DLSS if you want to do 4K.
@@Kabodanki bro even a 4090 cant run pathtracing 4K60, not realistic to expect
PC games have settings that you can change for lower end systems. Of course they can do this for lower settings but the highest available settings should be uncompromised.
It's disappointing to see people praise this game for optimization when it brings the 4090 to 1080p with RT off. The game has some issues.
Great editing on this one, love the Remedy/AWII style title cards.
And the winner of DF's best graphics of the year is...
Spiderman 2
Gollum? I mean cyberpunk 2077 😂
@@majstorringono
@@majstorringo I think you mean Spiderman 1.5
@@Hexentric8 Ok, what is the best graphic game in your opinion? Open world game in first place.
The rounded surveillance mirror in the subway was really a wow moment for me
Between the hardware requirements and my backlog, cannot wait to play game in 5 years from now.
RTX 4070 Super? Labeled at 26:58
THANK YOU for calling out the mouse stutter. Drives me crazy.
Why is barely anyone talking about the mouse stutter, its such a major issue. This game also has traversal stutter here and there.
But I guess its not unreal engine so its not cool to complain about stutter
Ah! The video I've been waiting for hehe :) Time to find out how to optimize my RX 7900 XTX in AW2 but with keeping Raytracing (ideally path tracing).
The game works great on my 4070 just put FSR 2 on quality u be good .
To be fair, this is why most gamers don't care about RT, because in 2:37 there is a great demonstration where in that picture, the difference shown could just be as if light was emitted towards that plant object from another type of perspective, which diminishes the added effects of realism from the RT respective since it becomes a matter of perspective at that point and not a matter of accuracy of how light actually interacts with objects irl.
Most people don't even think about that fact.
TLDR when something it's so good, and the difference seem to be just a matter of perspective + the performance of one perspective which provides so little costs so much, becomes a major issue.
Thus, most people won't buy a 4090 to play AW2 but great analysis as always.
On my 3080, with PT at medium settings 1440p DLSS balanced, I only had 30FPS experience in the forest segments in Saga's story, the rest of the game, and all of Alan's story, it was smooth
Those Saga forest sections seem to be the most demanding parts of the game. Return 2 tanks performance on PS5 in both quality and performance mode.
rtx 4070 1440p,ultra,raytracing max with path tracing/dlss quality - minimum 50fps in the forest :)
@@api3dewith frame gen?
@@BigBoss-kk4sr yes,looks & runs great
Same for me. Seemingly all the scenes in Bright Falls have way more stuttering.
I have to turn off RT entirely to get it to run well.
Then I turn it back on when I get to Alan/Dark Place/'indoor' portions
Such a joy to watch your videos, guys! So proficiently crafted. Beautiful speeches, such insanely deep dives into all these amazing technologies. Highly appreciated!
19:00
Alex and his path traced toilets. Name a more iconic duo.
Fantastic video. I wish they would give us a "pure pathtracing" mode with GI taking over all lighting
What you guys do for the industry and for the consumers is invaluable.
Yup. Absolute champs. Only "commercially viable" Channel that actually calls out bullshit.
hahah sure pal
Im definitely a bit jealous of how clean the PC version looks..The only issue i have with console versions is the horrible implementation of FSR2..It's seriously horrible looking I haven't seen so much aliasing since the 360 Ps3 era...Other games that use FSR2 definitely still have aliasing but not even close to the same level as AW2...It really really takes away from the otherwise sublime visuals..
You are jealous of DLSS optimization, PC with FSR has shimmer too
This is a Nvidia optimized game
It's because native resolution is way too low. 850p on XSX/PS5 is basically ps3 output
@RonniSchmidt-mi7pd Thats not what I'm saying...DLSS is a much better upscaling solution but FSR2 is used in Starfield and Immortals of aveum and cyberpunk 2077 and like I originally stated they all have aliasing and shimmering issues but not even close to how badly it looks in AW2...Capcom updated RE4 remake on series x to use FSR2 and looked like a shimmering mess and a week later updated it again to go back to its original upscaling solution because it looked so much better....They can use other anti aliasing techniques on top of FSR2 to help lesson the horrible aliasing..
@vandammage1747 in quality mode it's about 1280p native...Immortals of Aveum is 1080p native upscale and still looks cleaner with less aliasing and shimmering.
Would be nice if customers had an option to buy nvidia sku hardware for home consoles, but thats not cost effective for either nvidia or sony/xbox.
However...
Nintendo will likely be your best bet, though their power budget on switch 2 will be pathetic, i am going to be stoked to see how DLSS creates relatively sharp as hell imagines for the tiny tablet screen...
Wish my steamdeck could use an nvidia SOC like Nintendo's upcoming Switch 2. Im very jealous. Fack FSR.
I kinda wonder how it would look like if something similar to AI ray reconstruction would be used on rasterization. like training a AI model to detect the parts that are wrong in a cascaded shadow and improving it to make it more realistic or improving the screenspace reflections. Sure it would never look like pathtracing but it would basically be a free upgrade i think?
Reminds me of the "real life ai filter" video I saw for Gta 5
You would need a model for each part of the render pipeline. With Ray reconstruction you only need one.
I like this idea, but it seems like something that would take a lot of computational power just to do what ray tracing already does, but with a worse outcome. I think Nvidia’s making the correct choice by offloading ray tracing denoising to AI, and that will lead to better visual outcomes for the performance cost rather than training AI to fix up screen-space errors
@@DMPLAYER1000 I don't know, if you already have made 2 versions of the game (raster and pathtracing) the AI could be trained on the pathtraced version of the game to get a better idea how something is supposed to look like and more or less use that data to more accurately recognize the parts where rasterization is failing and improve on it.
It does not make sense to enhance rasterization per a.i. because you always want to train a.i. on the most accurate light and shadow calculations possible as a solid basis. A.I. RT and even PT does already exist by the way and can even run on a GTX 1050 or even intel iGPUs, no joke.
4070 Super? Did the rumours already become reality or am i missing something? :D
3:42 just mind blowing shadow. Totally worth to enable RT at least to see this
Hmm and i was thinking looking at faces in AW2 that rather weirdly there seems to be no SS which looked kinda bad. It does stand out in a bad way. But it turns out it's a byproduct of RR doing it's work. Also the fact that game seems to be using mix of GI solutions explains why Oliver in his video thought that there's much less difference in game's visuals on consoles compared to PC presentation than he was expecting. Excellent video Alex, thank you.
This took a lot of time to make. There are at least 3 changes in Alex's intonation so it feels like the video was done in 3 segments. The final result may be half an hour long but this a lot more time and a lot of work to accomplish.
Thank you for doing this. I just cranked the settings to eleven and played the game, now i can appreciate every detail.
I found out using DLSS tweaks that Alan Wake 2 for some reason uses the 'C' DLSS model preset by default instead of the Nvidia recommended default 'D' preset, causing far more temporal instability and aliasing in the image than you'd usually see compared to other recent big titles. For example in this video at 26:18, both the middle and especially the left video have tons of temporal instability in and around foliage, and this is *massively* improved by switching to the 'D' preset using DLSS tweaks. It's not as good as ray reconstruction because you'll still see subtle "splotching" effects, but the C preset is giving the hand tuned denoisers a huge disadvantage in that comparison. This improvement is visible with RT direct lighting turned off as well, and a lot more visible at lower internal resolutions.
The C preset, as far as I remember, is only supposed to be used in older games or in games bad or broken motion vectors where the D preset will cause massive amounts of ghosting everywhere. This is not the case with Alan Wake 2 (the D preset works wonderfully, as expected from a modern game with good motion vectors), so it's puzzling that they'd pick that preset as the default, against what Nvidia recommends.
The game also seems to be using a bad custom exposure value for DLSS, since turning on DLSS's 'AutoExposure' feature reduces ghosting massively in some specific situations I found. I _was_ playing the game in HDR when I tested this, so maybe the custom exposure value set by Remedy works fine only when in playing in SDR, but it's worth a shot.
I will sell my 4090 and get a 7900 XTX because I dont use RT at all and dont need it!
Having RT on with max settings does increase the fright factor a lot more. Many a times I find some gleaming light or shadow and realize after getting scared that it was only my character’s reflection.
that happened to me in control dozens of times, way more often than in alan wake 2. rt changes atmosphere to varying degrees but that was one of the most game changing side effects.
Once I go out of the forest sections, I was really able to take advantage of RT/Path Tracing on low, with all other settings on High/Ultra on a 3090 with a pretty solid framerate in the 80-90s. That forest section is just an absolute beating with RT/PT on.
True. Like a ~60% drop in performance. I guess there's too much geometric detail.
New PC user here with a 3090 too. Do you recommend DLSS performance or balanced? I still don’t understand what this technology actually does. I feel if I use performance I’m doing it wrong so I put it on balanced.
@@PedroNWO DLSS you should either use quality or not at all. Because otherwise youre massively losing imagine clarity, while getting a lot more artifacts.
Especially on a GPU like a 4090 you should never use balanced/performance. Otherwise why even have a high end GPU, if you just look at a blury image like that?
Danke! Thanks for the great Work. Helps a Lot every time
This is probably the most technically advanced and impressive games ever. Excellent work by Remedy.
Nah, Cyberpunk still is the top dog
in graphics perhaps the gameplay is the same a any other game out there. i prefer better ai, physics and intereaction with enviroment than a game that you can t do almost anything.
2077 with path tracing is still king. It's also a massive open world, making it more impressive.
People may think AW2 looks better due to being more realistic looking while 2077 is a fantasy setting which can come off almost cartoony.
Thank you Alex for this, frankly, listening to you go in such detailed description of the graphical features of this game, it is really turning me on
Thank you Alex, this kind of analysis is second to none! Hope you’re having a great weekend.
Alex, I think your PC monitor may have its brightness set too high. A lot of your videos include really dark shots that can't be seen well unless I watch with the lights out. I have my C2 calibrated to 175 nits in SDR mode, optimized around my lighting conditions.
Watching this, I couldn't get out of my mind that the Max Payne 1&2 remake will be in this Northlight engine. That's going to be special indeed.
I have this on my PC (4090) & Played the trial on my PS5. PC is obviously a lot better, but when your engaged in the game you dont notice all the differences. Its great how well optimised it is.
I would have assumed that they are 'blending' path-tracing with the software GI system at least in part in order to preserve the artistic intent in certain scenes where full path-tracing may otherwise lead to a different/undesirable aesthetic outcome. Still a gorgeous game, but the overall technical impression is somehow a little less impressive than Cyberpunk's path tracing implementation (art aside, of course). Either way, really exciting to see developers embracing new technology in this way, especially in a game which seemingly does require such precise artistic lighting of scenes. Perhaps an unblended and improved path tracing mode would be a good addition for a potential rerelease some years down the line, as with Control's Ultimate edition/patched in ray tracing enhancements on PC. Thank you for the ever enlightening content!
Thank you, Alex. Was waiting for this video. Top notch work you do. Cheers!
20:00 looks extra fantastic?... bro, this is the perfect example of diminishing returns, no worth it at all. You could use all that extra computing horsepower to put better looking trees, super detailed complex parallax, better and more models, characters that don't look made of paper, etc, etc.
Yeah, can we talk about the PRICE for all that vidual glory? Getting a GPU that can handle all that is not cheap and by not cheap I mean extremely expensive. I'm not talking about a GPU where you can set RT to ON and play at about 50-60 frames, I'm talking about playing the game in 4k with REALLY good quality settings... A GPU that can handle that would cost at least about 900-1000 bucks!
Its the best looking game I've ever seen. I just beat it a couple days ago. It is a feast for the eyes and imagination. The way they handle shadow rendering is just the best I've ever seen. Even more fitting that shadows are a main theme in this game. Truly just floored me multiple times because of how well things look and are rendered. I got butterflies in my stomach creeping around eerily quiet, dark rooms in that game. I dont think any game has made me feel that in ages. Such a special game and triumphant technical showcase. I am in awe.
Optimized settings: PS5 performance settings// indirect path trac = low // transparency setting = low // denoise = low or RTX ray reconstruction // (some other but no idea what he is talking about will edit later when I have the game menu in front of me.)
Great analysis Alex, keep up the good work!
Love how you emphasized the increased fidelity while the game is in motion, still image comparisons don't do rt effects justice a lot of the time atm. It's while the camera is moving that they just look and feel completely surreal
actually playing 1440p dlss performance with low indirect path tracing at around 30 fps in saga sections and 40-60 in alan ones, plays really good and is a bit blurry but still better than most dlss games, this on a rtx 2080
how I feel having to use DLSS performance on my 2080 super just to get 25 FPS @ 3440x1440
I think that it is worth it. The 30% realism gain from full RT is just too good for me to pass up.
@@flexplodin DLSSp has always been the best for 1440p Ill die on that hill. If 1080p DLSSq looks acceptable, then 1440p DLSSp, which has the same base resolution, will not ever look worse than 1080p DLSSq. It is also the integer resolution (720x2=1440) when 1080p DLSSq is NOT. There are always inherent benefits to scaling from an integer resolution, and its no different here.
*I sit 10 inches away from a 32inch monitor. It is in line with my face perfectly with an arm. You will never convince me that, in something like Witcher 3, there is a major difference between DLSS modes at 1440p and that its not worth using P just for the gains.
Amazing video and attention to detail.
I wish every game had RT to remove SSR, gotta be the single most distracting effect in gaming history.
I am so grateful that I lived to see what full pathtracing looks like on an OLED ultrawide monitor. Thank you God, for gracing me with such privilege and thank you DF for your coverage. Yours truly, a fellow graphics engineer.
it really was all God's work, no one else's
The shadows with path tracing really sells the photorealistic look
Thank you for the hard work, well done.
15:48 Recently saw Nintendo's GDC presentation about building the physics and sound engines for TotK and the Full RT/PT vs Baked lighting details here remind me a lot of that. Fascinating stuff and really excited to see path tracing become more economical and broadly implemented.
I noticed that turning on ray tracing claims it will disabled a couple of settings, but they are still listed as on ( such as SSAO) and I had to manually turn the settings off... Not sure if that actually made a difference, but I figured I would mention such.
One annotation. If you focus the flashlight to a mirror you don't see the reflection of the flashlight on the near walls or objects. With RTX on or off.
26:53
RTX 4070 Super ? Does Alex knows something we don't ?
Word of advice play this game on a big screen. It looks nuts.
I've been playing with RT on and suffering the decrease in frames. Worth it tho. Game is pretty stable. When you first enter the overlap and the red light is shining thru the leaves I just had to keep it on.
I just realized that the implantation of raytracing is probably even more of a nightmare than I thought because now you can't simply cull everything outside of the frustum. Nuts.
Thanks for calling out the ray reconstruction/sub surface scattering point. I was trying to figure out why the game still had areas where you could see sss working, and others where it looked completely gone. Very weird and had me thinking the game looked like a downgrade from Control visually in many areas
Oh, I tought the stutters when moving camera with mouse was a problem on my end, but it turns out it's a bug from the game, thanks for mentioning that
I was waiting for you to point out that the two red ketchup squeeze bottles in in the diner scene were entirely omitted from the RT shadow and RT reflection.
Love that u use Remedy`s game ost like Control, Max Payne and Quantum Break and of course, great video !
There are certain SSR algorithms that caches the current frame and reprojects to fill in the missing data caused due to dis-occlusion , but these algorithms are very niche and very performance intensive.. These algorithms doesn't completely removes the dis-occlusion artifacts, it just reduces them...
But still I wonder how the game would look, if they used real time cubemaps and planer reflections for the reflections along with baked GI for primary light bounces and screen space global illumination for secondary bounces for the diffuse lighting... and instead of cascade shadow maps, how about, resolution independent contact hardening virtual shadow maps...
Did you guys just leak something? At 26:56 you listed the performance of a Nvidia RTX 4070 Super...🤔
These errors that persist even with PT are exactly the kind of things you want to get rid of when turning PT on. I hope they can fix it and provide an option with uncompromised PT
It seems that the visual errors might be due to the fact that this is more of a hybrid path tracing mode than anything else. An accurate path tracer shoots a lot of rays per pixel at the same location which then bounce off into different paths to get an average of the pixel color each time it hits something else. Advertising these games as using path tracing can be a bit strange because there are areas which dont look path traced at all.
22:35 from what I understand, reflection bounces are expensive. If you've ever put two mirrors up against each other, you know that you get a rather infinite effect. The problem with path tracing is that you need to do that for every single reflection. It's as expensive as grab passes, if not more expensive. This same problem exists in blender, and an optimization you can do is to limit transparency and certain reflections to 3 or 4 bounces to improve the speed of the render, at the slight cost of realism. So what you're seeing in that shot is likely just 1 bounce for mirror reflections being calculated, and no more. I.E: 2 bounces total into the camera for certain surfaces.
It amazing though. As I've come to learn how shaders work, you do often have infinite freedom in how you can calculate things. So especially if effort is put into tagging/marking objects to do certain things, you can save a lot of performance without sacrificing that much noticeable quality.
Even without Ray Tracing on the lighting alone in modern games make a comparable look which is still impressive. Still Great Job! :)
Having been waiting for this quite a bit!
I know DF is really blown away by this game's graphics, and I agree the lighting is probably the best out there, but the character models and animations still look stiff and video game like to me. I don't think they did nearly as well with animation and characters as some other games out there.
Yeah I agree, models look like wax replicas of celebrities u see in those museums in la to take selfies with, Alex Casey also has horrible lip syncing bc it’s Sam lakes face and not his voice, why not just scan the voice actor like in max Payne 3 bc his facial animations in that are better from 2012
chain link fences rarely fall off as much as they do in the ray tracing example and does make sense in the real world depending on the lighting.
I'm honestly more impressed by CP77 path tracing especially because of it being open world
cp 2.0 looks insane. thats true.
This is because Cyberpunk lighting in Raster is much worse than RT and path tracing. AW2 is wonderful in Raster and gorgeous on PT.
This is more about artistic choices imho. CP2077 has it’s world which is a world of year 2077. This game is taking place in woods and dark nighmarish NYC with a an aim to have that True Detective, s7ven, Ozark feeling to it. It’s not that northlight engine couldn’t do what CP2077 but like I have said…two completely different scenarios. I like AW2 more personaly but I do play it on 4080. I’m curious what would be Alexes opinion how the visuals scale between AW2 and CP2077 Overdrive.
I don't think the fact that it's open world matters when it comes to path tracing because you're still rendering the same number of pixels and firing the same number of paths. Alan Wake 2 seems to have more realistic surfaces in some cases but overall cyberpunk seems to use the results of full path tracing better.
Edit: Of course it's more difficult to control the look of global illumination in an open world so in that sense it's definitely more impressive what they were able to do with cyberpunk especially since it wasn't originally designed around path tracing.
@@RCmies could be interesting to see if Nvidia use Northlight engine as it’s showcase for RT graphics and will patch AW2 to use full path tracing in the future. It seems to me that it’s matter of a few tweaks.
Absolutely loved the video and how it really outlined the difference between scene specific RT on and RT off representation of that scene. However, one critique must be that it's never a great idea to compare an Nvidia series x of generation a with a series y of generation b (3080 vs 4070). That simply can't end well, and the comparison should be between either gen a series x vs Gen a series y, or Gen a series x vs Gen b series x... And so on, especially when talking about fps/throughput alone. Anyhow, I'm rambling... Awesome video!
I keep investing more in my gaming PC to have enough power to do games like this justice. Cyberpunk was a game changer - AW2 is taking it to the next level. DF 2 bringing quality content too - great job
26:50 RTX4070 Super? Just a typo or has DF already got the refresh cards lying around? :D
I hope Northlight won't have the same 'killed eventually by Unreal" fate like REDEngine.
13:44 Left side is how this scene would look like IRL. In pitch darkness shining a flashlight at an object so close will cast a dark shadow on the other side of the object. In all other scenes it's the same. Ray tracing is exaggerating reflections soooooooooo much just to make it more obvious but more often than not, it's not more realistic than turning it off. If they make it more subtle, it will be unnoticeable even in stills like that and no1 will use it because of the HUGE performance drop.
great in depth analysis and what a great game from the technical side if they fix the rest of the flaws :)
Man, reminds me of how 20 years ago, I experimented with path tracing renderers at university and had conversations around whether that could ever be done in real time... especially because to get the noise to acceptable levels, you had to render for a really long time.
I know RT is the future, mostly due to how much work time is saved from letting RT do the heavy lifting instead of spending so much time faking it. However I find that in AW2 just like Metro Exodus, a good looking game just looks good. And RT is just a horizontal visual alternative to me not a next level game changer. And honestly not worth the performance hit, until you can RT at a small enough cost to performance I dont see the benefit for consumers at all. That said good looking games are good looking. The only true upgrade of RT is in reflections, SSR artifacts and limitations being replaced by RT reflections is a game changer. Light and shadows tho you can fake it well enough to basicly be no difference at the cost of more dev work.
You are right, its not game changer, but it does look better in RT. You can activate frame gen for those lost fps, and obviously they develop those technologies knowing that its impossible to hit 60+fps with fully raytraced scenarios without a huge performance hit
I think is wrong keep blaming the RT tech because of his inherent computational needs.
Cheers from Argentina
Wow those shadows from the crochet curtains blew my mind. 🤯
Remedy, bring us pure path tracing in an update, I have the power to withstand it
Absolutely love your PC analysis. There's a lot more that can be said and compared on PC (due to the high configurability) than on console. Looking forward to more of this!
Am i seeing a 4070 SUPER at 26:56? So they are coming indeed.
I'm really happy to see where frame generation can shine. FG is something I've wanted for a decade. Obviously TVs use a more rudimentary version of it, often just interpolating frames. But in games where latency is not a huge factor, frame generation can drastically improve the experience.