will let you sample some ray-traced shadows–not the highly detailed reflections often associated with ray tracing, but rather a more accurate implementation to give shadows more depth
I wonder how my RTX 2070 will handle it (assuming it makes it into release) and how much difference we’ll actually see.
I’m very happy to see all the progress Intel and Nvidia have both been making. This all bodes well for a healthy and competitive marketplace!
Welp, that’ll be a hard ‘nope’. I just won’t pay that much considering how fast the technology is evolving. I don’t want a $2,000 GPU in my system when the 4090 or 4100 comes out in a year.
I tested this out on the Shadowlands beta and grabbed a few quick screenshots. All-in-all a subtle but notable improvement, albeit with a predictably massive performance hit.
Give or take, depending on the scene. There’s a lot of areas where it essentially cuts framerate in half. It’s pretty brutal for all three of the settings that enable RTX shadows.
I don’t think it’s going to be a realistic option to enable in most cases on current hardware. Hopefully Ampere GPUs can pump out some markedly better performance.
This is exactly why SL’s should have dlss 2.0 support. In the pic of the guard with RT shadows, that 71 fps could have been 101 if dlss 2.0 was supported & enabled.
RT on high just slaps my system silly.
8700k @ 5.1 ghz
2080 Ti
16gb DDR 3200 14-14-14-34-1t
At 1440p, max settings, RT knocks me from my frame cap of 85 down to the 20-35 range. Brutal. I know RT does create a performance loss, but this is huge. Other games with RT seem have a much smaller performance loss.
Hopefully Blizz has room for further optimization, like yeah dlss would rock
I think it’s probably healthy for us to look at this more as a “proof of concept” exercise rather than a practical real world application. There will be hardware improvements and software optimization - we’ll get there, it will just take some time. I’m pleased to see that it works at all.
I’m going to have some fun, turn it on with my RTX 2070, take some screenshots so I can ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ and then turn it off until it’s more practical.
Sometimes technological evolution takes place in giant leaps and bounds. Often it’s a series of smaller steps (particularly when it requires both hardware development and software optimization). I’m not worried whether it ‘will happen’, it’s just going to take some time because it needs to happen both effectively, and eventually: affordably.
Ray traced shadows seem to have a roughly static performance impact regardless of resolution. I can set renderScale to 0.1 and framerate won’t nudge too much in most scenes.
I’m still getting 60+ FPS in most locations on a 2080 Ti, and an RTX 3000 series card will invariably perform much better. I could imagine an RTX 3080 pumping out 60+ FPS at 4K or higher in complex environments without much difficulty.
I’m actually wildly impressed with how these shadows are looking and performing on retail right now. I figured the setting might be a bit of a novelty for a couple of years, but it’s actually perfectly usable right now on higher-end supported hardware.
if either company can offer 2060 super / 5700XT performance w/ ray tracing at 1660 super pricing then I’ll jump on it otherwise I’ll hold out for the next round. Like Kodiak stated, “subtle improvement for massive performance hits” is not something I’m interested in.
At first I was on board when it seemed you could get excellent performance and ray tracing for $699, but now that I know nvidia themselves are essentially killing off the $699 FE (BB USA Only, otherwise nada), and launching a 20gb model in a month, I am not interested.
Ampere cards are $1000 cards and were always meant to be. This whole $699 thing was just a scam. They’ll phase out the 10gb cards completely within the next few months and it will just be a marketing scam.
