**Testing DLSS Technology: A Technical Deep Dive**

But we'll maybe look at that later a dlss the next question is if I have to turn it on what am I losing there we looked a little bit and uh in this instance it didn't really affect the lighting that much we thought it would have a bigger impact on the results of path tracing because Nvidia noted to us explicitly that the pixel count influences the path tracing quality and so if you have a lower input resolution or even lower output resolution it should be affected negatively but for the lighting elements we didn't see that much of a downside to dlss.

The team's thoughts on DLSS technology are mixed, with image quality being highly dependent on the scene being viewed. "It's a mixed bag," says one team member. "You'll get different results in different scenes." While some scenes may benefit from the use of DLSS, others may not be as well-suited for it. This variability is to be expected, given the complex nature of path tracing and the nuances involved in rendering realistic images.

One positive aspect of DLSS technology is its ability to provide a more natural look in certain situations. "Path tracing lends itself to a more natural look," says another team member. This is particularly evident in scenes where there are many interacting elements, such as light sources and reflective surfaces. In these cases, DLSS can help to create a more accurate representation of the scene.

However, there are also some unexpected side effects of using DLSS technology. For example, in one scene viewed by our team, the reflection from the right-hand side of distant solar panels appeared less realistic than it did in other scenes. This is an interesting phenomenon, and one that highlights the challenges involved in optimizing path tracing for real-world scenarios.

In some cases, DLSS technology can also introduce unintended visual effects. For instance, when looking closely at a scene viewed with DLSS, our team noticed that certain elements seemed overexposed or excessively bloomed. This was particularly evident in scenes where multiple bright elements were present, which made the image appear "sterile" and lacking in detail.

Ultimately, whether or not DLSS technology is effective depends on the specific use case and the level of detail desired. While it may provide some benefits, such as improved lighting and more realistic reflections, it also introduces challenges related to performance and optimization.

**Performance Considerations**

One of the most significant drawbacks of DLSS technology is its impact on system performance. "The frame rate is by far the more encumbrant thing to deal with overall," says one team member. This is because path tracing requires a significant amount of computational power, which can lead to slower frame rates and reduced performance.

To mitigate these issues, developers will need to carefully optimize their games for DLSS technology. This may involve adjusting parameters such as resolution, anti-aliasing, and other visual effects to ensure that the game runs smoothly while still delivering an accurate representation of the scene.

**Subjective Experience**

While our team is focused on providing objective technical analysis, we also recognize that image quality is ultimately a subjective experience. The way an image looks can be influenced by many factors, including personal taste, artistic intent, and even cultural context.

In some cases, DLSS technology may introduce visual effects that are perceived as "beautiful" or "impressive," while others may see them as distracting or overly bright. This subjectivity is inherent in the creative process, and it's up to individual players to decide whether they prefer the results of path tracing versus traditional rendering methods.

**The Future of Path Tracing**

Despite the challenges and limitations associated with DLSS technology, our team believes that it represents an important step forward for the field of real-time path tracing. "Being able to trace or bounce more Rays while also being able to render a theoretical unlimited amount of Lights in a scene while still being technically playable is a pretty good starting point," says one team member.

However, this technology is still in its early stages, and significant work will be required to refine it and make it more accessible to a wider audience. As the field continues to evolve, we can expect to see improvements in performance, image quality, and overall usability.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, DLSS technology represents an exciting development in the field of real-time path tracing. While it has its limitations and challenges, it also offers many benefits and opportunities for creative expression. Our team is committed to providing objective technical analysis and subjective feedback on this emerging technology, with the goal of helping players and developers alike navigate the complexities of DLSS and unlock its full potential.

As we move forward in our exploration of DLSS technology, we encourage readers to share their thoughts and experiences with this innovative technology. What do you think about DLSS? Have you tried it out yourself? How does it affect your gaming experience?

Join the conversation and stay tuned for more articles on the latest developments in path tracing and real-time rendering technology.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe cyberpunk got path racing today or full Ray tracing or RT overdrive it has three names but they all mean the same thing and that update is what brings an RTX 4090 down to 20 FPS average in our testing when running at 4K with path tracing without the help of dlss and for reasons that makes sense CD proact thread and Nvidia are both very sensitive about the fact that this is a technology preview at first we weren't sure why specifically cdpr was so sensitive about being a technology preview but then my testing team started vandalizing our task batches with this but it is actually a pretty big move because previously the only games that have been fully Ray traced fully passed raised have been Quake 2 which is from 1997. we just looked at it for a 3dfx Voodoo Card review go watch it if you haven't seen it but Quake 2 not quite the same caliber as cyberpunk graphically Minecraft same then very low poly the lowest poly in fact and additionally portal the Remake and they don't really count When comparing a cyberpunk here so the graphics in those games extremely basic dlss here is basically necessary and so is frame generation to make cyberpunk with path tracing work but it is in fact a really cool Tech preview So today we're benchmarking full path racing or Ray Tracer RT overdrive whatever they call it and we'll also be looking at dlss frame gen and image quality all on an RTX 49. before that this video is brought to you by thermaltake and the new series 500 TG argb mid tower case the thermaltake series case is perforated all on the front panel and the power supply shroud including perforations on the cable side of the case for further ventilation to the PSU and hard drive chamber of the case a separate access door for hard drives makes the case easy to work with for three and a half inch storage or the door can be swapped out for a separate LCD panel kit that displays system information other features include a GPU support kit vertical mounting and a hinged glass panel learn more at the link in the description below this piece should be pretty fun for everyone because we've included a lot of Recaps and explainers for things like frame John dlss DLS S3 what exactly that means and of course path tracing array tracing we have some quotes in here as well from nvidia's staff so should be educational in that regard now Sarah Punk already had Ray tracing so cdpr notes that the primary areas you should expect to see this update impact things will be opaque surfaces and shadows specifically and it also doesn't affect everything which we'll get to that later so previously opaque Services as we understand it only had one traced Ray and cdpr still had to fetch GI probes and they still had to fetch reflection probes but now cdpr is able to bounce once and then another time to reduce the requirement of fetching probe data the end result is that only opaques end up in the G buffer whereas transparencies render later in the pipeline but first in its purest definition path tracing is defined just simply via Wikipedia as the following quote path racing is a computer Graphics Monte Carlo method of rendering images of three-dimensional scenes such that the global illumination is faithful to reality when combined with physically accurate models of surfaces accurate models of real light sources and optically correct cameras path tracing can produce still images that are indistinguishable from photograph path tracing naturally simulates many effects that have to be specifically added to other methods conventional Ray tracing or scan line rendering such as soft Shadows depth of field motion blur caustics ambient occlusion and indirect lighting so main things here this is a step towards more bounces for one which means in theory more accuracy but also a lot more load and additionally it's a step towards a theoretical infinite amount of lights that can not just be rendered in but have effect on the surrounding elements within the scene or the view frustum of the player so that's what's receiving the ray tracing treatment here rather than a maybe limited number of lights or a limited type of materials within the scene but in the case of this one path tracing doesn't change everything so particles and glass surfaces still use the previous methods those you shouldn't look for changes there there are none there's also still a lot of manual work involved in integrating the path Racing update with cyberpunk because bolted on after the fact and the result of that is that you already have artists who have spent countless hours manually tuning the scene with traditional rendering methods not Ray tracing or path raising and so the game in some areas may look better without path racing or Ray tracing than with them and that's because of the manual tuning this stuff would work better if it were from the start but this game entered development a long time ago so Nvidia specifically said on a hardware level it is now relying heavily on Ser or Shader execution reordering this is something we talked about with Ada Lovelace architecture launch but to bring it back up in combination with dlss scr is what's making this full Ray tracing possible on the 40 90 then basically nothing else but the company said this to us quote in compute the GPU is its most effective if all the threads in that group execute the same code if not we have to serialize them if half the threads execute Shader a and half execute Shader B it takes a time of execution of a plus b to complete the workload thinking of path tracing and tracing rays in different directions there's a high likelihood of them hitting different materials subsurface foliage and reflective Services if you hit different materials then you multiply the direction time by the number of materials you hit and the number of threads in the group this conversation continued for a while but they then said instead right when you execute the closest hit Shader you sort the entire screen so that all the threads that hit a standard material are in one group all that hit another material are in another group then we process it all at once and this by the way was an awesome discussion to have because it gets into more of the engineering of like we heard about scr Jensen talked about it on stage this is kind of a real world use case and that's always cool to hear about and cyberpunk the areas of most impact are going to be sun moon local lights emissives and skylights that's where you'll see it there's affecting the things we talked about earlier but enough of the introductory information and as a reminder uh cdpr was very clear in publicizing everywhere on their channels like YouTube whatever that this is a technology preview and because they are so heavy-handed and saying that we want to make sure everyone else is aware because fair enough they're not selling the update so uh we'll look at it from a technology standpoint time to get onto the benchmarks we'll start with just path tracing benchmarks across all three major resolutions this chart won't include normal Ray tracing but the next one will here we're just going to look at path tracing's impact on frame rate for 1080 1440 and 4K and here's the chart this one contains one result without path tracing that's tested at 4K and that result ends up outperforming every other result on this chart but it makes sense there's no path tracing at 76 FPS average and with lows at 56 and 49 the 4K test is an acceptable territory on the 4090 enabling path tracing at 4K without the help of dlss pushes it down to 20 FPS average with lows proportionally but objectively low it's truly an unplayable experience moving around at this frame rate you can't really see anything it's just a big blurry mess and it feels pretty awful to play dlss is basically required and that's one of the next charts but if you were adamantly against dlss and frame generation then 1440p or 1080p would be the next most obvious options 1440p increases the average to 41 FPS with lows at 34 and 32. 1080p with again path tracing on allows the path Trace rendition of cyberpunk to climb to 65 FPS average it's not bad and it's back in playable territory certainly but it's still below 4K without any RT features whatsoever and of course this is 1080p on an RTX 4090 so that just feels kind of bad anyway next up is a frame time plot these plots give us an empirical frame to frame look at performance in the most representative way possible with numbers for the gaming experience first we're plotting the path tracing results without any help from the LSS this is a worst case scenario this line runs extremely hot it's unplayable with frame times of about 50 milliseconds plus or minus 10. the most important thing though and what we're actually looking for is that it doesn't have any massive spikes away from the previous frame or the mean and this is actually impressive we're not seeing anything Skyrocket to say 120 milliseconds so while the experience is bad it's at least consistently bad and that is a good thing 10 oddly enough it's still unplayable though getting rid of path racing and moving to the older Ray tracing implementation on Ultra we saw frame times closer to 25 milliseconds and this with all other Graphics settings controlled they're still extremely consistent with no major spikes up or down finally turning dlss quality on with frame generation enabled and using the New Path tracing option gives us a line closer to the 60fps Mark or about 16.7 milliseconds once again there are no major frame time excursions so at least in this one aspect cyberpunk and Nvidia for their part they're doing well to keep the frame times consistent and that's the most important part our next bar chart is with variations on Ray tracing and path tracing all tested at 4K resolution here as a baseline with dlss still off we'll enable it for the next chart though these conditions control for all variables at this point except for the lighting rendering mode which is the main thing under test and here's the chart of course dlss off and RT off post the best results on this chart the next is with rt set to ultra producing a 40 FPS average result that allows the RT off result and 89 improvement over the RT Ultra result switching RT to ultra using psycho Ray trace the lighting we drop another four FPS from the average and about the same amount from the one percent point one percent lows switching default path raising though the result is that 20 FPS number we talked about for the average with lows at 17 for one percent and 16 for 0.1 percent that means that enabling path racing costs about 50 percent of the performance against just Ray tracing or 74 percent of the performance of the like for like task without Ray tracing at 76 FPS average to phrase that another way the dlss and Ray tracing off result the one at 76 FPS average is 283 percent faster than the path Trace results in a like for like scenario the next chart will enable dlss but we want to do some explanation here because there are a few important factors that people frequently Overlook and also DLS S3 is still kind of new so in addition to DLS has on versus off Ray tracing and path tracing variables we also have the new dlss frame generation variable within cyberpunk this will be represented in charts as FG on or FG off all of the tests are at 4K Baseline but dlss changes the actual base resolution so let's go over that dlss has five primary modes Ultra Quality quality balanced performance and custom not every mode will be in every game so for example some games like cyberpunk have an ultra performance mode as well all modes except custom behave the same way between games this simple table shows the scale factor for NVIDIA dlss modes Nvidia defines quality as a 66.7 scaling factor which means that of 14 140p input resolution becomes a 4K output resolution similarly a 1706 by 960 input becomes 2560 by 1440 and 1280x720 becomes 1920 by 1080. balanced is a 59 scale which means that 4K output becomes 22.59 by 1271 and sort of real so to speaks pixels drawn performance is at a 50 scale so 4K now actually becomes 1920 by 1080 input resolution that's because as a reminder 4K isn't 2 times 1080 but rather 4 times 1080. now to spend some time explaining the new frame generation this is important to understand anyway whether or not you're using it in cyberpunk this relatively new feature is what cdpr and Nvidia were both extremely touchy about they seem aware that the game is functionally unplayable without it and they really wanted to make sure that everyone understands its present but here's how it works DLS S3 is is it capable of generating new frames entirely independently of the CPU and the game engine Itself by totally synthesizing the frames on the GPU alone this is achieved by analyzing the rendered frames with the Ada Optical flow accelerator so we'll start by explaining a simplified version of the standard Graphics pipeline canonically the game engine establishes the required operations for the frame so things like physics and draw calls then the CPU executes those operations and once it has the draw calls ready it places them in the render queue which acts as a buffer between the CPU and the GPU while this is happening the GPU is constantly taking the oldest draw call data in the render queue rendering it as a completed frame to pass on to the display and getting more draw call data from the render queue necessary to DLS S3's operation is removal of the standard render queue from the pipeline as leaving it in place would result in too much latency while adding the process of generating new frames if you were to simply remove the render queue wait and see would go down but the GPU would spend time waiting without work as the CPU does other things like physics before getting to draw calls CPU and GPU work isn't inherently synchronized and since demand varies from frame to frame the frame times could be very inconsistent now that we've explained how dlss3 is in theory streamlining the graphics pipeline we can talk about the frame generation that takes place between each rendered frame frame analysis is performed as a joint effort between Ada's tensor cores and Optical flow accelerator which run multiple AI models per frame to examine both game geometry vectors and Optical flow vectors Optical flow is a search to find how pixels in one image correlate to pixels in a subsequent image Nvidia previously said this is an ill posed problem and the answer is not clearly defined it's from their original announcement because they say not all pixels will be correlated between the images and we can see a visual representation of the that flow in this set of images from cyberpunk note how the motorcycle and the rider aren't moving relative to the camera but the scenery especially at the edges is moving a great deal if you were to only use motion vectors from the game engine you end up with bad artifacts like what Nvidia showed in this set of images the rider's Shadow for example jumping around on the road as the player moves forward this is because the game geometry vectors tell us that ground is moving backwards relative to the camera and therefore anything on it should be as well in order to avoid this Optical flow analysis is necessary especially for Ray traced effects game geometry vectors and Optical flow vectors are different and they sometimes disagree but both are correct in their own ways the data is Blended in the DLS S3 AI models to reconstruct and generate the final inserted frames and while this sounds great generating new frames by referencing actually rendered frames could theoretically result in the lower image quality you're faking stuff at some level so of course that's the possible outcome and video is essentially though sidestepping both CPU and engine bottlenecks to throw all of this work onto the GPU by the time all this Frame generation is done dlss3 is generating up to 87.5 of the displayed pixels in an extreme case dlss3 is a combination of super resolution reflex and frame generation and that combination is only able to work on the 40 series because the 40 series is the only one with the optical flow physical hardware for frame generation it's new to Ada Lovelace gpus and off of the explainer let's move forward to that chart here's the full chart with everything we tested in the last day finally so with dlss set to Quality and with frame generation on with Ray tracing set to ultra we landed at 106 FPS average when the game was configured to 4K but remember that dlss changes how this resolution really behaves Ultra performance with path tracing yielded a 93 FPS average with frame generation off but Ultra performance looks terrible you'd be better off with almost any other option path tracing on dlss quality and frame generation on got us to a playable 66 FPS average it's not bad the lows were fine here as well if you really hated frame generation though you could go to dlss balanced with path tracing and still hit 50 FPS average in our test scenario but it's starting to dip into unpleasant territory in terms of game feel and path racing in particular starts to feel especially bad when there are heavier drops and frame rate the rest of the results are on here as well but you get the idea frame generation really is kind of needed for this particular game and even DLS has quality without frame gen only lands you at 40 FPS average all right for comparison we chose some specific scenes and took screenshots with different variations of Rage Trace in Psycho Ray tracing Ultra no Ray tracing whatever and we locked all the other settings in with preset values specifically we used a a high Ultra combination our first image comparison will find us into club bottle full above look at a I got RTX if you entered tracing race but before we reveal which shot is which we're going to do a blind test so you can sort of calibrate yourself for biases currently we're showing a split screen with three different images one of them is without Ray tracing or path tracing one is with path raising and one is with the more traditional Ray tracing solution with only this image try to decide which is which will show them each full screen briefly as well but take a look and come to a conclusion on which one you think is path traced specifically so now that you've got idea for which one you think is path raised we're going to go back to the three-way split screen and reveal them Post in the comments and let us know if you got it right no shame in being wrong here it's just a fun task to identify what your own expectations are so you can adjust them for the technology with that done here's the comparison proper starting with this club interior there's a huge difference between the Baseline screenshot with no RT versus the one with rt Ultra without indirect lighting bouncing off of the floor the white pillars throughout the room appear black as actually does the rear wall above the reflective window Ray tracing also allows for Sharp Reflections on that window as well as more subtle Reflections under the chairs at the bar without streaky screen space effect artifact type images this is all stuff we've seen before though RT psycho is mostly indistinguishable from Ultra in the scene although there are some changes in the lighting for example of the ceiling mounted decorations with path tracing enabled though the scene is overall brighter when compared to RT Ultra whether or not that's better is kind of a different discussion but that's the main effect the Shadows under the wall mounted AC almost completely disappear here and the round seats and vending machines are lit From Below by light reflected from the floor at least that part makes sense it's brighter but again it's hard to objectively judge if that means better in the same way sharpness doesn't necessarily mean better this is especially true and considering the lighting in the original non-ray Trace screenshot which we'll show again was probably already manually tuned by artists to look the way they wanted it to we would say it's an improvement on the surface of the bar though at the very least where both the drinks and the man sitting at the bar are lit From Below note also that there's no change in the reflective glass window as the particles and glass are still handled the same way that they were previously next image this Plaza provides a ton of lighting variety with half the scene covered in sunlight and the other half in Shadow with illuminated signs with psycho RT the ncart sign to the right and the Triangular M logo Above It cast a glow on the walls behind them and the Reflections in the glass windows across the street are accurate to the objects they mirror moving the path tracing the sidewalk across the street becomes brighter and reflects light back up onto the trash cans and benches above the most dramatic change is the shadow cast across the center of the screen by the buildings on the right side of the street the row of buildings facing us is much darker here next up neon signs over wet streets are an obvious go-to but a really bright and sunny outdoor scene gives us a totally different test case starting with a comparison between no Ray tracing and Ray tracing on Ultra there are several Shadows on the surface of the satellite dishes that don't exist at all without Ray tracing the Shadows that do exist like the one on the lowermost dish are far sharper with rt and dark areas like the underside of the uppermost dishes are indirectly lit adding RT psycho to the comparison against RT Ultra we see once again that RT psycho is nearly into englishable and moving from RT psycho to path racing isn't a massive change here but the undersides of all the objects so the solar panels the Joshua trees the Triangular platform the center of the tower all of those are lit From Below by Reflections from the desert surface but if there's any scene where extra light bounces look appropriate it's midday in the desert next up is the parade scene Ray tracing has less of an effect on this set piece than we expected here this is clearly a scene that artists spent a lot of manual effort on specifically and as a result the main differences between no RT and RT Psycho end up being the reflective surface of the barge the building in the background also gained some definition with lighting from the dragon the brightness of the building in the background is also the main difference when moving from RT psycho to the New Path racing while the bird at the front of the bar just darker with path tracing this is a scene we hand-picked from memory as one that should have some really incredible path tracing but instead it served as a demonstration registration educationally that the artists have already done a good job with traditional light placement and manually tuned scenes where they want a specific effect it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that dlss is required at this point to make the game playable with path tracing at 4K as confirmed by Nvidia the costs of path racing and rtxgi are directly proportional to the input resolution of the LSS path tracing becomes more expensive for every pixel rendered and Doss renders fewer pixels in theory enabling dlss directly hurts the quality of path tracing but let's look at whether it's noticeable here's a comparison image the loss of overall detail is noticeable in some areas most significantly with the more patterns on the illuminated sleeve of the woman leaning against the support beam to the left some other fine details like the stripes on the front of the barricade are muddied in terms of lighting though there's no appreachable difference we know for a fact that the lighting on the neon signs in the back background and the Shadows which cover the pedestrians on the right are strongly affected by RT settings but the LSS doesn't make those aspects look any worse even when stepping down from quality to bounced which we also captured or even all the way down to Performance there are other losses with the LSS like Flicker and fences and wires but that's unrelated to the path tracing here recapping the benchmarks then this was pretty simple path racing still requires dlss if you're going to play at higher resolution so 4K not happening uh on the 40 90 at least 20 FPS average is what you're going to get with higher graphic settings and you start tweaking the graphics settings down or the resolution down too much at some point it's it's kind of like okay so you've path traced it and it's playable but at what cost and it becomes a little silly so dlss is effectively required here for this update if you have anything that's not a 40 90 uh that's definitely required on it even then it still might not really work we'd have to test it separately but we'll maybe look at that later a dlss the next question is if I have to turn it on what am I losing there we looked a little bit and uh in this instance it didn't really affect the lighting that much we thought it would have a bigger impact on the results of path tracing because Nvidia noted to us explicitly that the pixel count influences the path tracing quality and so if you have a lower input resolution or even lower output resolution it should be affected negatively but for the lighting elements we didn't see that much of a downside to dlss the Places You'll see it are in similar places to Final Fantasy 15 back in the day where you have maybe flickering with something like a fence or a really thin object where you get sort of the jagged edges or the jaggies that don't play well with uh when you're trying to recreate more information from basically no information so that's where we saw the downsides ultimately though in terms of what they're actually doing here it's a big change from Quake too so there's some subjectivity involved here we try to stay as objective as we can we point out the differences to you and then it's kind of up to you to decide but we've got a couple thoughts and uh I'll share the the team's Thoughts with you all so where image quality is concerned it's a mixed bag highly dependent on the scene that you're looking at not a big surprise and the elements in that scene so sometimes for example path racing lends a more natural look versus all the other settings like on the underside of the distant solar panels in that outdoor Tower scene another positive I'll be extremely subtle is the roll-off of the Reflection from the right to the left and the glass panels to the left of the blue karaoke sign in the plaza scene on the other hand there are some strange changes that we read as unintentional side effects of CD prolex Red having to tweak all the lights for the new mode if we look back at the same Plaza scene the vertical red sign near the center of the screen is much more intense than in other modes and it sort of blooms profusely you can see that changes to the intensity of light all over the place in path rating mode when you look hard enough and so comes the subjective side that we won't get too deep into but to raise the question it's basically what was the General mood or the original intent of the artists and if they were building the game without Ray tracing at all at the beginning probably they made it look the way they want that doesn't mean Ray tracing can't improve it but it does mean that there has to be on the opposite end manual tuning of RT or path racing to again get that desired result so back in the club scene the AC unit and the surrounding wall on the right of the image is by far the brightest in path racing mode multiple brighter elements here make it give off a Vibe much more sterile than the darker details of the RT off scene so sometimes you get that blown out look almost like an overexposure or excessive Bloom but not everywhere it it really is seen the scene and the frame rate is by far the more encumbrant thing to have to deal with overall then I think sometimes with this kind of stuff people expect us to write with all this glowing and Flowery adjectives and praise and talking about how beautiful it is or something it's not really our style we look at the technology and technologically this is a really impressive early implementation of path tracing on something that is much more complex than the prior implementations of real-time path tracing for a video game there are downsides to Performance it's playable with dlss and there are times that it doesn't look good or it doesn't really work right we explained a few of those but overall this is considered a preview and they're not selling it so fair play to that on the image quality side we never get into subjectives too much it's not really what we're here for why people like us however once again technologically being able to trace or bounce more Rays while also being able to render a theoretical unlimited amount of Lights in a scene while still being technically playable with say dlss that's a pretty good starting point but you basically need an RTX 40 card to get to a place where it's playable and even then our 4090 was struggling and when you retroactively add that to the game it's going to require a lot more work to get it looking good so hence the careful use of the terminology technology preview we thought we'd look at it do some testing and check it out that's it for this one thanks as always for watching subscribe for more you can go to store.gamersaccess.net if you'd like to grab one of our projects and solder mats and we'll see you all next timethe cyberpunk got path racing today or full Ray tracing or RT overdrive it has three names but they all mean the same thing and that update is what brings an RTX 4090 down to 20 FPS average in our testing when running at 4K with path tracing without the help of dlss and for reasons that makes sense CD proact thread and Nvidia are both very sensitive about the fact that this is a technology preview at first we weren't sure why specifically cdpr was so sensitive about being a technology preview but then my testing team started vandalizing our task batches with this but it is actually a pretty big move because previously the only games that have been fully Ray traced fully passed raised have been Quake 2 which is from 1997. we just looked at it for a 3dfx Voodoo Card review go watch it if you haven't seen it but Quake 2 not quite the same caliber as cyberpunk graphically Minecraft same then very low poly the lowest poly in fact and additionally portal the Remake and they don't really count When comparing a cyberpunk here so the graphics in those games extremely basic dlss here is basically necessary and so is frame generation to make cyberpunk with path tracing work but it is in fact a really cool Tech preview So today we're benchmarking full path racing or Ray Tracer RT overdrive whatever they call it and we'll also be looking at dlss frame gen and image quality all on an RTX 49. before that this video is brought to you by thermaltake and the new series 500 TG argb mid tower case the thermaltake series case is perforated all on the front panel and the power supply shroud including perforations on the cable side of the case for further ventilation to the PSU and hard drive chamber of the case a separate access door for hard drives makes the case easy to work with for three and a half inch storage or the door can be swapped out for a separate LCD panel kit that displays system information other features include a GPU support kit vertical mounting and a hinged glass panel learn more at the link in the description below this piece should be pretty fun for everyone because we've included a lot of Recaps and explainers for things like frame John dlss DLS S3 what exactly that means and of course path tracing array tracing we have some quotes in here as well from nvidia's staff so should be educational in that regard now Sarah Punk already had Ray tracing so cdpr notes that the primary areas you should expect to see this update impact things will be opaque surfaces and shadows specifically and it also doesn't affect everything which we'll get to that later so previously opaque Services as we understand it only had one traced Ray and cdpr still had to fetch GI probes and they still had to fetch reflection probes but now cdpr is able to bounce once and then another time to reduce the requirement of fetching probe data the end result is that only opaques end up in the G buffer whereas transparencies render later in the pipeline but first in its purest definition path tracing is defined just simply via Wikipedia as the following quote path racing is a computer Graphics Monte Carlo method of rendering images of three-dimensional scenes such that the global illumination is faithful to reality when combined with physically accurate models of surfaces accurate models of real light sources and optically correct cameras path tracing can produce still images that are indistinguishable from photograph path tracing naturally simulates many effects that have to be specifically added to other methods conventional Ray tracing or scan line rendering such as soft Shadows depth of field motion blur caustics ambient occlusion and indirect lighting so main things here this is a step towards more bounces for one which means in theory more accuracy but also a lot more load and additionally it's a step towards a theoretical infinite amount of lights that can not just be rendered in but have effect on the surrounding elements within the scene or the view frustum of the player so that's what's receiving the ray tracing treatment here rather than a maybe limited number of lights or a limited type of materials within the scene but in the case of this one path tracing doesn't change everything so particles and glass surfaces still use the previous methods those you shouldn't look for changes there there are none there's also still a lot of manual work involved in integrating the path Racing update with cyberpunk because bolted on after the fact and the result of that is that you already have artists who have spent countless hours manually tuning the scene with traditional rendering methods not Ray tracing or path raising and so the game in some areas may look better without path racing or Ray tracing than with them and that's because of the manual tuning this stuff would work better if it were from the start but this game entered development a long time ago so Nvidia specifically said on a hardware level it is now relying heavily on Ser or Shader execution reordering this is something we talked about with Ada Lovelace architecture launch but to bring it back up in combination with dlss scr is what's making this full Ray tracing possible on the 40 90 then basically nothing else but the company said this to us quote in compute the GPU is its most effective if all the threads in that group execute the same code if not we have to serialize them if half the threads execute Shader a and half execute Shader B it takes a time of execution of a plus b to complete the workload thinking of path tracing and tracing rays in different directions there's a high likelihood of them hitting different materials subsurface foliage and reflective Services if you hit different materials then you multiply the direction time by the number of materials you hit and the number of threads in the group this conversation continued for a while but they then said instead right when you execute the closest hit Shader you sort the entire screen so that all the threads that hit a standard material are in one group all that hit another material are in another group then we process it all at once and this by the way was an awesome discussion to have because it gets into more of the engineering of like we heard about scr Jensen talked about it on stage this is kind of a real world use case and that's always cool to hear about and cyberpunk the areas of most impact are going to be sun moon local lights emissives and skylights that's where you'll see it there's affecting the things we talked about earlier but enough of the introductory information and as a reminder uh cdpr was very clear in publicizing everywhere on their channels like YouTube whatever that this is a technology preview and because they are so heavy-handed and saying that we want to make sure everyone else is aware because fair enough they're not selling the update so uh we'll look at it from a technology standpoint time to get onto the benchmarks we'll start with just path tracing benchmarks across all three major resolutions this chart won't include normal Ray tracing but the next one will here we're just going to look at path tracing's impact on frame rate for 1080 1440 and 4K and here's the chart this one contains one result without path tracing that's tested at 4K and that result ends up outperforming every other result on this chart but it makes sense there's no path tracing at 76 FPS average and with lows at 56 and 49 the 4K test is an acceptable territory on the 4090 enabling path tracing at 4K without the help of dlss pushes it down to 20 FPS average with lows proportionally but objectively low it's truly an unplayable experience moving around at this frame rate you can't really see anything it's just a big blurry mess and it feels pretty awful to play dlss is basically required and that's one of the next charts but if you were adamantly against dlss and frame generation then 1440p or 1080p would be the next most obvious options 1440p increases the average to 41 FPS with lows at 34 and 32. 1080p with again path tracing on allows the path Trace rendition of cyberpunk to climb to 65 FPS average it's not bad and it's back in playable territory certainly but it's still below 4K without any RT features whatsoever and of course this is 1080p on an RTX 4090 so that just feels kind of bad anyway next up is a frame time plot these plots give us an empirical frame to frame look at performance in the most representative way possible with numbers for the gaming experience first we're plotting the path tracing results without any help from the LSS this is a worst case scenario this line runs extremely hot it's unplayable with frame times of about 50 milliseconds plus or minus 10. the most important thing though and what we're actually looking for is that it doesn't have any massive spikes away from the previous frame or the mean and this is actually impressive we're not seeing anything Skyrocket to say 120 milliseconds so while the experience is bad it's at least consistently bad and that is a good thing 10 oddly enough it's still unplayable though getting rid of path racing and moving to the older Ray tracing implementation on Ultra we saw frame times closer to 25 milliseconds and this with all other Graphics settings controlled they're still extremely consistent with no major spikes up or down finally turning dlss quality on with frame generation enabled and using the New Path tracing option gives us a line closer to the 60fps Mark or about 16.7 milliseconds once again there are no major frame time excursions so at least in this one aspect cyberpunk and Nvidia for their part they're doing well to keep the frame times consistent and that's the most important part our next bar chart is with variations on Ray tracing and path tracing all tested at 4K resolution here as a baseline with dlss still off we'll enable it for the next chart though these conditions control for all variables at this point except for the lighting rendering mode which is the main thing under test and here's the chart of course dlss off and RT off post the best results on this chart the next is with rt set to ultra producing a 40 FPS average result that allows the RT off result and 89 improvement over the RT Ultra result switching RT to ultra using psycho Ray trace the lighting we drop another four FPS from the average and about the same amount from the one percent point one percent lows switching default path raising though the result is that 20 FPS number we talked about for the average with lows at 17 for one percent and 16 for 0.1 percent that means that enabling path racing costs about 50 percent of the performance against just Ray tracing or 74 percent of the performance of the like for like task without Ray tracing at 76 FPS average to phrase that another way the dlss and Ray tracing off result the one at 76 FPS average is 283 percent faster than the path Trace results in a like for like scenario the next chart will enable dlss but we want to do some explanation here because there are a few important factors that people frequently Overlook and also DLS S3 is still kind of new so in addition to DLS has on versus off Ray tracing and path tracing variables we also have the new dlss frame generation variable within cyberpunk this will be represented in charts as FG on or FG off all of the tests are at 4K Baseline but dlss changes the actual base resolution so let's go over that dlss has five primary modes Ultra Quality quality balanced performance and custom not every mode will be in every game so for example some games like cyberpunk have an ultra performance mode as well all modes except custom behave the same way between games this simple table shows the scale factor for NVIDIA dlss modes Nvidia defines quality as a 66.7 scaling factor which means that of 14 140p input resolution becomes a 4K output resolution similarly a 1706 by 960 input becomes 2560 by 1440 and 1280x720 becomes 1920 by 1080. balanced is a 59 scale which means that 4K output becomes 22.59 by 1271 and sort of real so to speaks pixels drawn performance is at a 50 scale so 4K now actually becomes 1920 by 1080 input resolution that's because as a reminder 4K isn't 2 times 1080 but rather 4 times 1080. now to spend some time explaining the new frame generation this is important to understand anyway whether or not you're using it in cyberpunk this relatively new feature is what cdpr and Nvidia were both extremely touchy about they seem aware that the game is functionally unplayable without it and they really wanted to make sure that everyone understands its present but here's how it works DLS S3 is is it capable of generating new frames entirely independently of the CPU and the game engine Itself by totally synthesizing the frames on the GPU alone this is achieved by analyzing the rendered frames with the Ada Optical flow accelerator so we'll start by explaining a simplified version of the standard Graphics pipeline canonically the game engine establishes the required operations for the frame so things like physics and draw calls then the CPU executes those operations and once it has the draw calls ready it places them in the render queue which acts as a buffer between the CPU and the GPU while this is happening the GPU is constantly taking the oldest draw call data in the render queue rendering it as a completed frame to pass on to the display and getting more draw call data from the render queue necessary to DLS S3's operation is removal of the standard render queue from the pipeline as leaving it in place would result in too much latency while adding the process of generating new frames if you were to simply remove the render queue wait and see would go down but the GPU would spend time waiting without work as the CPU does other things like physics before getting to draw calls CPU and GPU work isn't inherently synchronized and since demand varies from frame to frame the frame times could be very inconsistent now that we've explained how dlss3 is in theory streamlining the graphics pipeline we can talk about the frame generation that takes place between each rendered frame frame analysis is performed as a joint effort between Ada's tensor cores and Optical flow accelerator which run multiple AI models per frame to examine both game geometry vectors and Optical flow vectors Optical flow is a search to find how pixels in one image correlate to pixels in a subsequent image Nvidia previously said this is an ill posed problem and the answer is not clearly defined it's from their original announcement because they say not all pixels will be correlated between the images and we can see a visual representation of the that flow in this set of images from cyberpunk note how the motorcycle and the rider aren't moving relative to the camera but the scenery especially at the edges is moving a great deal if you were to only use motion vectors from the game engine you end up with bad artifacts like what Nvidia showed in this set of images the rider's Shadow for example jumping around on the road as the player moves forward this is because the game geometry vectors tell us that ground is moving backwards relative to the camera and therefore anything on it should be as well in order to avoid this Optical flow analysis is necessary especially for Ray traced effects game geometry vectors and Optical flow vectors are different and they sometimes disagree but both are correct in their own ways the data is Blended in the DLS S3 AI models to reconstruct and generate the final inserted frames and while this sounds great generating new frames by referencing actually rendered frames could theoretically result in the lower image quality you're faking stuff at some level so of course that's the possible outcome and video is essentially though sidestepping both CPU and engine bottlenecks to throw all of this work onto the GPU by the time all this Frame generation is done dlss3 is generating up to 87.5 of the displayed pixels in an extreme case dlss3 is a combination of super resolution reflex and frame generation and that combination is only able to work on the 40 series because the 40 series is the only one with the optical flow physical hardware for frame generation it's new to Ada Lovelace gpus and off of the explainer let's move forward to that chart here's the full chart with everything we tested in the last day finally so with dlss set to Quality and with frame generation on with Ray tracing set to ultra we landed at 106 FPS average when the game was configured to 4K but remember that dlss changes how this resolution really behaves Ultra performance with path tracing yielded a 93 FPS average with frame generation off but Ultra performance looks terrible you'd be better off with almost any other option path tracing on dlss quality and frame generation on got us to a playable 66 FPS average it's not bad the lows were fine here as well if you really hated frame generation though you could go to dlss balanced with path tracing and still hit 50 FPS average in our test scenario but it's starting to dip into unpleasant territory in terms of game feel and path racing in particular starts to feel especially bad when there are heavier drops and frame rate the rest of the results are on here as well but you get the idea frame generation really is kind of needed for this particular game and even DLS has quality without frame gen only lands you at 40 FPS average all right for comparison we chose some specific scenes and took screenshots with different variations of Rage Trace in Psycho Ray tracing Ultra no Ray tracing whatever and we locked all the other settings in with preset values specifically we used a a high Ultra combination our first image comparison will find us into club bottle full above look at a I got RTX if you entered tracing race but before we reveal which shot is which we're going to do a blind test so you can sort of calibrate yourself for biases currently we're showing a split screen with three different images one of them is without Ray tracing or path tracing one is with path raising and one is with the more traditional Ray tracing solution with only this image try to decide which is which will show them each full screen briefly as well but take a look and come to a conclusion on which one you think is path traced specifically so now that you've got idea for which one you think is path raised we're going to go back to the three-way split screen and reveal them Post in the comments and let us know if you got it right no shame in being wrong here it's just a fun task to identify what your own expectations are so you can adjust them for the technology with that done here's the comparison proper starting with this club interior there's a huge difference between the Baseline screenshot with no RT versus the one with rt Ultra without indirect lighting bouncing off of the floor the white pillars throughout the room appear black as actually does the rear wall above the reflective window Ray tracing also allows for Sharp Reflections on that window as well as more subtle Reflections under the chairs at the bar without streaky screen space effect artifact type images this is all stuff we've seen before though RT psycho is mostly indistinguishable from Ultra in the scene although there are some changes in the lighting for example of the ceiling mounted decorations with path tracing enabled though the scene is overall brighter when compared to RT Ultra whether or not that's better is kind of a different discussion but that's the main effect the Shadows under the wall mounted AC almost completely disappear here and the round seats and vending machines are lit From Below by light reflected from the floor at least that part makes sense it's brighter but again it's hard to objectively judge if that means better in the same way sharpness doesn't necessarily mean better this is especially true and considering the lighting in the original non-ray Trace screenshot which we'll show again was probably already manually tuned by artists to look the way they wanted it to we would say it's an improvement on the surface of the bar though at the very least where both the drinks and the man sitting at the bar are lit From Below note also that there's no change in the reflective glass window as the particles and glass are still handled the same way that they were previously next image this Plaza provides a ton of lighting variety with half the scene covered in sunlight and the other half in Shadow with illuminated signs with psycho RT the ncart sign to the right and the Triangular M logo Above It cast a glow on the walls behind them and the Reflections in the glass windows across the street are accurate to the objects they mirror moving the path tracing the sidewalk across the street becomes brighter and reflects light back up onto the trash cans and benches above the most dramatic change is the shadow cast across the center of the screen by the buildings on the right side of the street the row of buildings facing us is much darker here next up neon signs over wet streets are an obvious go-to but a really bright and sunny outdoor scene gives us a totally different test case starting with a comparison between no Ray tracing and Ray tracing on Ultra there are several Shadows on the surface of the satellite dishes that don't exist at all without Ray tracing the Shadows that do exist like the one on the lowermost dish are far sharper with rt and dark areas like the underside of the uppermost dishes are indirectly lit adding RT psycho to the comparison against RT Ultra we see once again that RT psycho is nearly into englishable and moving from RT psycho to path racing isn't a massive change here but the undersides of all the objects so the solar panels the Joshua trees the Triangular platform the center of the tower all of those are lit From Below by Reflections from the desert surface but if there's any scene where extra light bounces look appropriate it's midday in the desert next up is the parade scene Ray tracing has less of an effect on this set piece than we expected here this is clearly a scene that artists spent a lot of manual effort on specifically and as a result the main differences between no RT and RT Psycho end up being the reflective surface of the barge the building in the background also gained some definition with lighting from the dragon the brightness of the building in the background is also the main difference when moving from RT psycho to the New Path racing while the bird at the front of the bar just darker with path tracing this is a scene we hand-picked from memory as one that should have some really incredible path tracing but instead it served as a demonstration registration educationally that the artists have already done a good job with traditional light placement and manually tuned scenes where they want a specific effect it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that dlss is required at this point to make the game playable with path tracing at 4K as confirmed by Nvidia the costs of path racing and rtxgi are directly proportional to the input resolution of the LSS path tracing becomes more expensive for every pixel rendered and Doss renders fewer pixels in theory enabling dlss directly hurts the quality of path tracing but let's look at whether it's noticeable here's a comparison image the loss of overall detail is noticeable in some areas most significantly with the more patterns on the illuminated sleeve of the woman leaning against the support beam to the left some other fine details like the stripes on the front of the barricade are muddied in terms of lighting though there's no appreachable difference we know for a fact that the lighting on the neon signs in the back background and the Shadows which cover the pedestrians on the right are strongly affected by RT settings but the LSS doesn't make those aspects look any worse even when stepping down from quality to bounced which we also captured or even all the way down to Performance there are other losses with the LSS like Flicker and fences and wires but that's unrelated to the path tracing here recapping the benchmarks then this was pretty simple path racing still requires dlss if you're going to play at higher resolution so 4K not happening uh on the 40 90 at least 20 FPS average is what you're going to get with higher graphic settings and you start tweaking the graphics settings down or the resolution down too much at some point it's it's kind of like okay so you've path traced it and it's playable but at what cost and it becomes a little silly so dlss is effectively required here for this update if you have anything that's not a 40 90 uh that's definitely required on it even then it still might not really work we'd have to test it separately but we'll maybe look at that later a dlss the next question is if I have to turn it on what am I losing there we looked a little bit and uh in this instance it didn't really affect the lighting that much we thought it would have a bigger impact on the results of path tracing because Nvidia noted to us explicitly that the pixel count influences the path tracing quality and so if you have a lower input resolution or even lower output resolution it should be affected negatively but for the lighting elements we didn't see that much of a downside to dlss the Places You'll see it are in similar places to Final Fantasy 15 back in the day where you have maybe flickering with something like a fence or a really thin object where you get sort of the jagged edges or the jaggies that don't play well with uh when you're trying to recreate more information from basically no information so that's where we saw the downsides ultimately though in terms of what they're actually doing here it's a big change from Quake too so there's some subjectivity involved here we try to stay as objective as we can we point out the differences to you and then it's kind of up to you to decide but we've got a couple thoughts and uh I'll share the the team's Thoughts with you all so where image quality is concerned it's a mixed bag highly dependent on the scene that you're looking at not a big surprise and the elements in that scene so sometimes for example path racing lends a more natural look versus all the other settings like on the underside of the distant solar panels in that outdoor Tower scene another positive I'll be extremely subtle is the roll-off of the Reflection from the right to the left and the glass panels to the left of the blue karaoke sign in the plaza scene on the other hand there are some strange changes that we read as unintentional side effects of CD prolex Red having to tweak all the lights for the new mode if we look back at the same Plaza scene the vertical red sign near the center of the screen is much more intense than in other modes and it sort of blooms profusely you can see that changes to the intensity of light all over the place in path rating mode when you look hard enough and so comes the subjective side that we won't get too deep into but to raise the question it's basically what was the General mood or the original intent of the artists and if they were building the game without Ray tracing at all at the beginning probably they made it look the way they want that doesn't mean Ray tracing can't improve it but it does mean that there has to be on the opposite end manual tuning of RT or path racing to again get that desired result so back in the club scene the AC unit and the surrounding wall on the right of the image is by far the brightest in path racing mode multiple brighter elements here make it give off a Vibe much more sterile than the darker details of the RT off scene so sometimes you get that blown out look almost like an overexposure or excessive Bloom but not everywhere it it really is seen the scene and the frame rate is by far the more encumbrant thing to have to deal with overall then I think sometimes with this kind of stuff people expect us to write with all this glowing and Flowery adjectives and praise and talking about how beautiful it is or something it's not really our style we look at the technology and technologically this is a really impressive early implementation of path tracing on something that is much more complex than the prior implementations of real-time path tracing for a video game there are downsides to Performance it's playable with dlss and there are times that it doesn't look good or it doesn't really work right we explained a few of those but overall this is considered a preview and they're not selling it so fair play to that on the image quality side we never get into subjectives too much it's not really what we're here for why people like us however once again technologically being able to trace or bounce more Rays while also being able to render a theoretical unlimited amount of Lights in a scene while still being technically playable with say dlss that's a pretty good starting point but you basically need an RTX 40 card to get to a place where it's playable and even then our 4090 was struggling and when you retroactively add that to the game it's going to require a lot more work to get it looking good so hence the careful use of the terminology technology preview we thought we'd look at it do some testing and check it out that's it for this one thanks as always for watching subscribe for more you can go to store.gamersaccess.net if you'd like to grab one of our projects and solder mats and we'll see you all next time\n"