Can Unreal Engine 5 Lumen completely replace Ray-Tracing
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- Опубликовано: 23 янв 2023
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Lumen is purely an approach for handling two things: 1) Epic wanted to provide real-time GI to games regardless of hardware accelerated ray tracing availability. 2) Nanite breaks traditional raytracing through its dynamic HLOD geometry processing, where the meshes are rendered as contiguous swaths of geometry cards that, together, represent the original geometry provided to Unreal. While you can't see or discern this with the naked eye, a ray can even though the space between these cards are sub-pixel. As a result, if using traditional raytracing, you will incur shadow artifacts that aren't really artifacts, but unwanted side-effects of how the nanite geometry is rendered.
Lumen provides extra assistance to make the shadows appear as the unaltered geometry the artist originally created. This isn't a change to the Monte-Carlo simulation that is used in today's graphics. It's just additional processing steps to prevent that system from failing on an edge case that is Nanite.
I suspect the question was ACTUALLY about software RT vs hardware RT. But I do think some people are missing that SW Lumen and HW Lumen aren't doing equivalent work in FN 5.1. I just hope devs keep shipping with RT levels, because the highest settings often aren't worth it outside of photo mode.
Hardware accelerated Lumen performs ray-tracing against the actual geometry in the scene, which gives really high quality results and mirror like reflections. Software Lumen creates a low resolution interpretation of the scene and performs ray tracing against that. It’s generally faster and can be done on GPUs that don’t support hardware ray-tracing, however it’s always slightly lower fidelity and you don’t get proper mirror reflections. Both solutions technically do a form of screen tracing first, where they ray trace in a sort of 2.5D space directly out from camera into the depth buffer, a texture in memory that’s created as part of a normal deferred rendering pipeline. Because of this they generally look very similar. They can perform very similarly too, but that varies on a scene by scene basis. Scenes with lots of overlapping geometry generally perform worse on hardware Lumen. Because of how software Lumen simplifies the scene, it can ignore a lot of the challenges that come with overlapping geometry. It seems like software Lumen closes the gap a little bit between AMD and NVIDIA cards, but NVIDIA cards still perform better with Lumen.
@@Zach_Films , where is it that you are seeing NVIDIA doing better than AMD RX series in pure shader-core performance in which is how software RT is handled? NVIDIA gets dominated by AMD RDNA when DirectX 12 comes into play so I'm not sure where you are getting that NVIDIA does better than AMD RX using Lumen (DX12 only feature). NVIDIA cant use "drivers" to compensate for their underwhelming shared-core performance when under any advanced low-level API. I work in the same building as Ubisoft Red (Raleigh) and from my talks with Ubisoft employees, NVIDIA seems to have a problem listening to what developers ask for but AMD is all ears. Otherwise, AMD could have easily just added dedicated cores for RT but that would be defeating the main purpose of DirectX 12 Engines in general (eliminating driver overhead and making it easier on developers). Also, my brother is more a programmer but admits that NVIDIA should just do away with "dedicated cores" outside of workstation cards because the expense is not work it. NVIDIA should just improve their shader-cores and its nothing new that AMD is has always been faster on paper but gimped by dated APIs designed for NVIDIA.
@@captureinsidethesound From what I can see, you're both wrong and right. If we want to talk about exclusively on paper results, Intel's new Alchemist series of Graphics cards seem to blast both Nvidia and AMD out of the waters.
However reality is much more complex than who has the best hardware on paper.
It just makes sense also that a company that can get away with changing little to nothing, while maintaining a majority market share, will always opt to do so. Until AMD presents a value option for both developers and consumers, the only question is: Do you want the best graphics card (nvidia prices) or do you want the 3rd best graphics card (also nvidia prices, for AMD cards).
@@captureinsidethesound I based it off some performance testing by Daniel Owen in Fortnite season 4. He was getting around 40-45 fps with the 7900XTX using software lumen at 4K max settings and 55-60 on the 4090
As far as I know, Red Dead Redemption 2 doesn't use ray-tracing, but holy crap if that game doesn't look stunningly realistic. Reflections, water, mirrors, shadows. When somebody says rasterisation isn't enough for realism, I point to RDR2.
Yeah, RT isn't actually needed. I played "It Takes Two" and in many places I was just thinking that this game looks so good without RT. And then there is Plague Tale Requiem, it doesn't have RT, only screen space reflections. But IMO, that game looks better than anything else out there.
Yep , just look at elden ring , it is so gorgeus even without RT.
@@gunturbayu6779 nah elden ring looks dated in many areas. Love the game but it doesn't look great.
RDR2 looks incredible but the thing is. If it had RT it would look much better so I wouldn't say RT is useless at all. It's something that will eventually take over as it also makes it easier for Devs. Us adopting it now is crazy to even think and it will only get better.
Except I can point out thousands of very common scenarios that would look dramatically better with raytraced lighting with multiple bounces. Things are frequently oddly lit, or have odd ambient occlusion coverage, or just look strangely flat. And remember, it took the better part of a decade to make that game. If that's how long it takes to make a raster-only game look that good, it's not viable.
@@RicochetForce It was also made for PS4 hardware so your argument is a bit far fetched.
Thanks for answering the question reasonably. The question itself is confused. Lumen uses ray tracing. It uses either SW or HW for ray tracing, but it uses it either way.
HWRT is incorporated into lumen as the high end, high performance option. Given that all modern hardware has HWRT built in, SW lumen will be less relevant over time.
Similar to raster, if it keeps being faster than HW RT, it's going to keep being relevant.
Ehh, SW RT will continue to improve over time. It's more likely EPIC will continue to improve the structure and approach of how Lumen works so it works better alongside hardware RT.
@@RicochetForce this is true. I’m just saying, all modern hardware is HWRT. And all modern consoles and gpus prioritize it. It’s not slowing down.
@@LucidStrike it’s actually not though, and HWRT is doing things now that aren’t possible in raster.
@@LucidStrike It's completely impossible for software RT to achieve the perfomance of hardware RT.
GPUs can have THOUSANDS of cores for vector math used for the light rays, CPUs don't.
UE's Lumen showcase site states, "Lumen can also use hardware ray tracing ... more accurate but more expensive ... Hardware ray tracing is **required** for mirror reflections."
It's impressive tech, and I believe if they can figure out a hybrid approach, eg. sw rt for GI and hw rt for reflections only, (if it doesn't already work that way), we could get the best of both worlds.
Agreed
There's a bunch of different ways to render reflections that have been used since long before hardware ray traced acceleration was a thing, so it seems like there must be some good hybrid approaches which can be used.
Does anybody remember that area in Mario 64 with the mirror? This game ran on a console made in 1996, long before real time ray tracing was even close to feasible. The reflection in the mirror was flawless, but I don't think it involved using a light rendering system at all. The "reflection" in the mirror wasn't an animated texture, it was a fully rendered area of the game with an invisible wall where the "mirror" was, and a copy of the player character model moving around in mirrored unison. The effect was extremely convincing, and there was a clever puzzle which you could solve by noticing a discrepancy between what was in the mirror, and what was on the "real" side. Ever since then, I have wondered why reflections in much more modern and recent games for PC have tended not to achieve anywhere near that level of accuracy and precision in reflections.
When it comes to PC games, you often see mirrors in bathrooms, and in such small enclosed areas, it seems likely that rendering everything twice is not going to be overly costly for performance.
Clearly a good LOD is better, being able to see a massive realistic forest or mountains in the distance is very immersive. One of the best examples is Minecraft actually! (LOD mod)
And ray-tracing as in global illumination is an ok feature, but what is really important is screen space reflections (edit: or ray-traced reflections if you have the GPU) in my opinion.
Agree in some games it can absolutly change the gameplay btw, as example ARMA developers tryed to go for max detailed realistic distance two decades. it was the reason why games were often so Poorly optimized...unless their never truly achieved their plans, this tech. can change finaly. It feels very realistic and its helping even with players choices... your eyes with it just sees what their couldnt before;)
Screen space reflections aren't real reflections.
I kinda agree, although LOD causing pop-in is far away from being an issue in every game. It's really only an issue in some games that feature large 3D environments, with large vistas. Obviously pop-in really isn't any issue in say a 2D Platformer, a Beat em' up, CRPG or a RTS game. Obviously Nanite & Lumen in retrospect, is ideal for a game engine like UE5 that is mostly used for games with 3D environments.
@@saricubra2867 Actually no they are closer to "real" reflections (i.e. full 3D scene) than you imagine, they're just using the available screen space instead of all the geometry surrounding the reflective materials. In other words, with SSR the information used to calculate reflections is limited to what is visible on the screen. It's perfectly good enough for most situations.
@@Julzaa What?
Screen space is not how the real world works. It's like light sources don't exist outside of your field of vision with your own eyes.
It's far away from an aproximation. It's like Reshade RTGI shader or screen space ray tracing which looks ugly AF.
Early tests i have seen with UE5.1 Lumen and nVidia vs AMD shows AMD is much closer performance wise. Lumen seems to be way better optimized for AMD hardware or does not go completely overboard in the amount of ray's cast to get good image quality. It does look promising.
Because these games are optimized for consoles which is AMD turf.
@@evalangley3985 Software lumen works really well on Nvidia GPUs too though.
I owned an RTX 3080 for a while, and I messed around a lot with ray tracing settings in Cyberpunk, Control, and Fortnite, as well as in some other games and tech demos, to a lesser extent, as well, and I've also seen a lot of benchmark videos from this channel as well as others.
Based on my experience and knowledge on this subject, I can confidently say that software Lumen is so good that the image quality you get relative to the performance it costs absolutely does rival what has been achieved with hardware RT on Nvidia GPUs in other games, and it beats the crap out of what has been achieved with hardware ray tracing on AMD GPUs, especially the 6000 series.
The problem with Nvidia's hardware RT, and even more so with AMD's hardware RT, is that the performance cost of achieving significantly better image quality than software lumen is extremely high, and often not worth using, so you end up having to set ray tracing settings to a quality level which is either about the same, or worse than the image quality that you get with lumen. Of course, lumen isn't actually available in other game engines, but the fact that it works as well as it does really does still call into question just how useful Nvidia's hardware ray tracing currently is, especially if lumen, or something as efficient as lumen, can be implemented in non Unreal Engine games. However, it does seem somewhat likely that this could eventually change. The RTX 4090 is the best example of a card which can already handle fairly heavy ray tracing workloads which do offer significant visual quality improvements over software lumen, but even the 4090 still takes a massive performance hit from running heavier ray traced workloads, it's just that it has enough horsepower to spare that it can still achieve good frame-rates. If we imagine a game which is designed to make the most efficient use of the 4090 as possible, I don't know if it would still be worth using full path tracing.
Lumen can also be very useful for CG artists doing non-gaming work in UE5. It is considered the most efficient form of ray tracing to use in terms of the quality you get for the performance it costs in UE5, but there are two other forms of ray tracing which are also available for use in UE5, which each have a variety of pros and cons which come along with them.
Big improvement in RT option is global illumination its night and day and change drasticaly the game visual, the others rt option ( réflection, shadow and AO) are a nice to have.
The most obvious one is reflection. Global illumination is extremely taxing and add nothing. These features are there for lazy devs. Compare any game Global Illumination with the latest God of War Ragnarok visuals and dare tell me Global Illumination matter... a good dev is a good dev and they can do wonder without any tricks that doesn't bring anything new to the table beside a feature set.
@@evalangley3985 i don't need rt reflections but global illumination important for me, it makes image much more realistic and 3d than simple methods, just check digital foundry review on fortnight with lumen update, without lumen it looks bland
@@evalangley3985 GI is better than reflections because colour is better, lighter areas are cleaner, area's in shadow looks nicer, colour bounces off surfaces. Reflections are only good when you have very reflective surfaces.
Also Ragnarok is a linear stage type game, but any dynamic lighting and open world(like with time of day, weather and different lighting conditions) it wouldnt look that good.
@@evalangley3985 add nothing? GI is the most visually impressive RT implementation. With dynamic time of day nothing can beat GI.
@@evalangley3985 It's a linear game which makes it possible to basically prebake global illumination. It wouldn't surprise me if they used raytracing to create the global illumination. This would be impossible if the game has dynamic time of day.
History is full of these scenarios. Betamax vs VHS, Blueray vs DVD, Optical media vs Streaming/Home NAS storage. And most tragically EVGA quality cards and customer service vs whatever the f*** you call the rest of the GPU market.
In this case it's more like RTX is UV lasers while Lumen is Blueray players. One is a raw hardware component and the other is a packaged product which utilizes the technology in part of its functionality.
service vs profit customer support
Pixar definitely shows you can push lighting alone really far alongside stylized art to amazing effect
got an rx 6800 2 weeks ago for 539 euros here in Europe ! card is a beast
Underrated Gpu.
Yea great gpu it felt so bad, when it was released and then..... well aged gpu.
The 6800 non XT was just so difficult to find for the first two years it was almost a unicorn. Glad you are enjoying it tho. I'm also enjoying my 7900 XTX
just dont use 2 monitors with it, it will use a lot of power in idle
@@wishwewere1256 it's fine but we don't get ray-tracing for high-refresh rate monitors or 4K, neither DLSS 3, G-Sync (I have a mildly bad experience with FreeSync Premium Pro), Tensor Cores for AI and NVENC.
I have a RX 6800 XT, I know.. we always have to rely on alternatives, the only feature without one at the moment being DLSS 3.
Lumen is limited to UE....
Also:
The Unreal Engine 5.1 release includes cutting-edge advancements that make it easier to incorporate realistic lighting and accelerate graphics workflows. Using the NVIDIA RTX branch of Unreal Engine (NvRTX), you can significantly increase hardware ray-traced and path-traced operations by up to 40%.
I’m not sure “limited to UE” is substantial. There’s a large class of games reaching for AAA quality that can’t develop their own engine, and 90% of those will use UE.
RTX is limited to, welll RTX series. Where it's capability isn't even consistent across generations and different models.
@@ryosuketakahashi7185 Welcome to new technologies edging their way into consumer hardware. Hardware transform and lighting support was the same, as well as programmable shaders. It'll be a few generations on all sides before things settle down some, since there's still numerous kinks that need to be ironed out.
3:49 Nice shot, Steve.😂
Developer here, so, short version, NVIDIA worked with Microsoft to make a standard API (DXR) for ray tracing which any hardware vendor can use (including AMD and Intel). So your question around whether Lumen can replace NVIDIA RTX doesn't really make sense. I'm going to assume you meant can Lumen replace hardware ray tracing. If so, the short answer to your question is: no.
When Lumen runs without hardware ray tracing, it works by creating a very rough approximation of the world's geometry which it can then use for things like reflections and global illumination. Hardware ray tracing still provides superior reflections and better global illumination. But hardware RT is expensive, so it's important to have a cheaper alternative that doesn't hit the graphics hardware as hard. In short, software-based Lumen provides an approximation which doesn't require RT hardware, at the expense of graphical quality. Hardware RT still provides the better/more accurate image.
But global illumination and reflections is only a subset of what you can do with ray tracing. Games up to this point have been using a technique called rasterization to draw 3D graphics. You basically map each triangle to screen coordinates and then fill each pixel of the triangle based on things like the texture and the angle/distance to the light source etc. None of this reflects how things work in the real world. It's just a series of hacks and tricks that try to approximate the real world.
Ray tracing actually mirrors the way we perceive the world, and as a result, it is capable of reproducing any effect or feature that we see in the real world. This is why ray tracing is used for rendering movies in hollywood, it can produce very realistic results. The only limitation is how many rays we're able to trace into the 3D world per frame. This is a very computationally expensive process, but it is considered the holy grail of 3D graphics because it can solve any problem in a very simple way. As a simple example, if you have a mirror, you simply bounce a ray from your eye to the mirror, then from the mirror back into the 3D world. Problem solved.
With rasterization, there isn't really a good solution. If the reflection is on the floor, you can render the scene upside-down and have a semi-transparent floor to fake the reflection. Or you can do screen-space reflections, where you reuse the pixels you've already rendered and project them onto the geometry, but the problem there is, you can only reflect what you've already rendered on screen. Or if the reflection is for a smallish mirror, you can render the scene twice, once from the perspective of the mirror and then map that as a texture onto the mirror when you render the scene a second time... The point is, there is no solution that is elegant, every solution is a hack, and they all have their own drawbacks and limitations. Whereas, with ray tracing, it just works exactly the same way it does in the real world.
Long story short, Lumen's not going to stop ray tracing hardware from being a thing... hardware-based ray tracing was always going to happen, it was just a matter of when, and how many rays we'd be able to trace once it does happen. GPUs will keep becoming more powerful in this area and at some point, games will likely switch over to pure path tracing, where everything is rendered using the ray tracing hardware (with minor exceptions, like perhaps it would still make more sense to render the in-game menus using the rasterization hardware).
Thank you. A lot of gamers can't really comprehend what RT entails, especially for the devs who are making these games. It saves so much time for them to use this instead of all these raster techniques.
hey just fyi your floatplane link in the description is broken
that gameplay looking fire, steve! pro level
Description links only go up to 11th gen Intel and 5000 Ryzen?
Followed your steps, but for some reason if i go in to my rect light "cast ray traced shadows" is still grey marked form me under lights. I can't turn it on. I got a Ndvidia GTX 1080 TI, so ray tracing should not be a problem right?
Lumen and nanite still have issues with RTX hardware, you basically need to disable it for shadows. Nanite, I think bang for buck is one of the best features Epic has added to the engine. Nanite, enables greater variety of ground cover etc. Large background assets like cliffs etc tend to be easier create for the artists using nanite as they can be made of many small meshes and that is more efficient than combining the meshes. Lumen raytraced and shadows is probably not as good, but the GI is nice. Other benefit of Nanite (when landscape works fully) is large worlds, highly detailed worlds. Still a while away to have it fully done, but we love UE5.1.
Yeah I use UE5 for ArchViz mostly and Lumen helps a lot for previz stuff, but there's no way I can ship a build without doing lightbaking, the FPS toll with Lumen is too much even for the best GPU's.
Software Lumen is extremely impressive though too. The level of image quality you get with it, relative to the performance cost, actually does rival what has been achieved on Nvidia GPUs with hardware ray tracing in other games, at least in terms of subjective image quality, and they've done it without even needing any specialized RT accelerating hardware, allowing cards like the 6800 XT to actually achieve a level of image quality and performance with ray traced lighting, which rivals what can be achieved with cards like the RTX 4070 and RTX 3080. Furthermore, it performs so well on Nvidia GPUs that it seems likely to often be worth using instead of using Nvidia's hardware accelerated ray tracing.
Hardware RT definitely can achieve a much higher level of precision in terms of modelling the behavior of real light, and can look better than software Lumen, especially in certain specific situations, but the performance cost is always really high whenever hardware RT is offering a significant improvement in image quality over more traditional light rendering options, such that it's often not worth using unless you have a lot of extra performance to spare, OR you have to use it so sparingly that it doesn't give a very significant improvement to actual image quality anyway. When hardware ray tracing does provide a significant, noticeable improvement in image quality, you very often just aren't going to get acceptable performance, or you're going to need to lower image quality significantly in other ways, such as by lowering the resolution, or lowering the quality of upscaling, to the point where the trade-off is of debatable value.
Is there a hybrid option or way to use hardware to accelerate Lumen? No tanked frame rates and exceptional quality.
Do your own research. This channel is full of BS, and most in the comment section are willfully ignorant.
Yes. Unreal 5 supports hardware lumen, which was also used in the matrix awakens demo on consoles.
What the hell he even means by RTX? Its brand of nvidia cards.
If he means ray tracing, lumen can and will continue to use it.
If he means nvidia lighting library (Metro Exodus, Dying Light 2), its completely fine alternative for engines other than UE.
Lumen Software RT has quite good performnace `cos its based on Distance fields which makes it basicaly Sphere Tracing technique, but theres no hardware support for Signed Distance Field. ALso it would be the best if we could turn on Hardware and software at the same time. Software RT is the best in everything except surface reflections.
Software or hardware ray-tracing ...
You WILL need a GPU to do the heavy lifting either way.
Hopefully it does
Is a better way of thinking about Lumen Vs RTX rather being hardware Vs software but more like API Vs API? like Vulkan Vs OpenGL Vs DirectX?
Yes. There are three APIs to access RT features. OptiX (NVIDIA), DXR and Vulkan. If you use OptiX it is NVIDIA only, but sometimes can have more features or better performance as it is directly designed for NVIDIA cards. DXR and VULKAN is a general purpose API for every Graphics Card and works with AMD, NVIDIA and Intel or other cards that just support these APIs. Most games using DLSS/RTX actually use the NVIDIA APIs.
So Lumen just uses DXR and they integrate it into their Engine for easy use. Never worked with Unreal, but this package is just called Lumen. Other game engines or developers still must implement RayTracing themself by using one of the APIs and the performance still can be better or worse. That's also what you see in general with every game. Just because a game uses Vulkan/DX12 doesn't mean it run good.
The same exists with CUDA and OpenCL. CUDA = NVIDIA only. OpenCL is a general purpose language for every graphics card.
Minecraft raytracing is actually one of the best visual examples of raytracing out there that i have seen. its also one of the most taxing on your system. but if you want to see actual full raytracing and none of this only shadows or only reflections bs but full raytracing look at minecraft. every lightsource is raytraced, every reflection is ray traced etc. but that means you need a beast of a system to run it.
Let's hope so. The main question is can we have sensibly priced GFX cards please?
Why? Idiots still buy them regardless
So just wondering.
AFAIK, Lumen can either be used with software RT or hardware accelerated RT.
But from what I've seen the software Rt always performs significantly better than the hardware accelerated version, even if it looks worse when looking at it in detail.
Now this begs the question, wouldn't it be possible to get the same look as with software RT when using hardware RT and get better performance out of it?
Maybe if you built hardware RT's acceleration structure with low poly geometry, but even then you'd still have the overhead of tracing against the bounding boxes and navigating the acceleration structure to deal with. Software RT's signed distance fields are probably the best solution for raw performance since you know at all times how close you are to the nearest surface, so it'd be hard to beat them if all you care about is performance.
From what I've seen, software base Lumen seems good enough for most gamers and seems to perform better than hardware base Lumen, which is odd because you would expect hardware base Lumen to perform better, but the main advantage of software base Lumen is that the performance and visual results are a lot closer on none Nvidia hardware.
I do agree with him on Nanite, that for me is a bigger game changer then ray tracing is as lighting in games is already good enough for most and software based Lumen is likely enough for most developers to simplify the process of creating lighting for games over baked lighting.
Longer term, ray tracing is the future of gaming but hardware based ray tracing is still too demanding and expensive, that I think software based Lumen is a better option for now, especially as developers have to take into account consoles, which are the baseline that most games are designed for, whereas I think real hardware based ray tracing will really take off with the PS6 and Xbox 2 or whatever they call it, by then, the hardware should be cheap enough on the PC and consoles will be able to do it justice, for now, ray tracing just isn't worth it for most gamers on the PC and on consoles, most gamers will pick performance mode at 60fps over ray tracing mode at 30fps.
The visual quality you get, relative to the performance cost of Lumen, does seem to actually rival what can be achieved with hardware ray tracing on Nvidia GPUs, to the point where it makes me wonder whether having some parts of the GPU dedicated specifically to ray tracing acceleration is even worth it, especially for anything other than high-end graphics cards or workstation cards. Sure, the ray tracing isn't as precise as what can be achieved with hardware ray tracing, but what matters is how good it looks relative to how well it performs, at least for most people, because most people can't justify buying an ultra high-end card like the RTX 4090, and most people aren't going to be willing to sacrifice 50% of their FPS if the subjective improvement to image quality is too subtle.
Tim is fair and honest meanwhile Steeve is a blatant AMD fanboy
We can hope it does
As history is concerned hardware accelerated things tend to move to software acceleration
I think you have that backwards. I.e. We had software z-buffers before we had hardware z-buffers. We had a software stencil buffers before we had hardware stencil buffers.
The lumen is absolutley amazing and it can be an alternative nvidia ray tracing but there is a problem. You can use RT with all supported games. But the lumen is only for UE5 games. But i dont know the other game engines can use lumen or not.
Lumen is just a name for the RT implementation in Unreal. Other game engine have to implement RT themself.
you can use custom maps
RTX is an Nvidia proprietary branding to define a feature set. It is not RT or DXR. RTX is the NVIDIA proprietary implementation and they do everything to make the competition look bad, even at the cost of theirs.
i think we should have something like rtx addon card that only has rt stuff
Not possible due to latency.
Waiting for an affordable new GPU
rtx4070ti
should be pretty affordable if you live in a 1st world country
@@basshead. an $800 GPU is not even remotely affordable for the vast majority of people.
@@basshead. lol why even recommend this utterly insane priced gpu? xD really bad value
@@wouterbloemerts1723 he just said 4070ti affordable lul
@@basshead. please be quiet. If you're a 4070 ti fan nobody cares. It's not "affordable" in any country.
As a game developer, I firmly believe that Luminen is set to replace Ray tracing in the near future. The capabilities of Luminen far surpass those of Ray tracing, making it a revolutionary technology. In fact, Unreal Engine itself, with its integration of Luminen, is at the forefront of this revolution. The industry has taken notice, as evident from companies like Project CD Red switching over to Unreal Engine. The power and potential of Unreal Engine are unmatched by any other engine. Personally, I find Luminen to be so impressive that I no longer rely on Ray tracing for any of my projects.
I have heard from a (non gaming) CG artist (on his RUclips channel) that Lumen is by far the most efficient for what he does, and that it's often worth using, even though it's often thought of as something which was made for games.
In my own experience with gaming, as someone who owned an RTX 3080, and who plays Cyberpunk and Control, two games regarded as having among the very best implementations of ray tracing, it's amazing what level of image quality is achieved with Lumen, relative to the performance cost it comes with, because it actually rivals the image quality (relative to performance) of hardware ray tracing on Nvidia GPUs in non UE5 games, and without relying on any specialized ray tracing accelerator hardware!
In UE5 games, I would have thought that there would have been an option to achieve better performance with the same level of image quality, or the same level of performance with better image quality, by using RT hardware acceleration on an Nvidia GPU, but currently, there isn't, making software lumen a competitive choice even on Nvidia GPUs, and making it the obvious choice on RX 6000 series GPUs like the RX 6800 XT. I never thought that a 6800 XT would ever be able to rival an RTX 3080 in ray tracing performance.
A UE5 developer not far above you said the opposite, that they compliment each other. RT looks better, and Lumin is faster. So which one is it? Developers saying entirely different things now as well. Sounds like there is too many biases to get an accurate result to the question. Can they work together? If so, why would one replace the other if both have pros/cons that can be used together to create a better experience?
How would be Lumen able to replace RTX when all different kinds of engines use RTX while Lumen is only featured in Unreal? The question doesn´t even make any sense
It does makes sence thus most engines has been just killed by Unreal engine capabilities in the near future. Halo infinite engine will probably be replaced by Unreal 5.1 same as many Microsoft titles, Cyberpunk and Witcher 3 engine is already replaced by Unreal engine 5 for next CDP projects which is hilarious they just bought Unreal licence after the milions of dolars investments to their on own technology before, and so on and so on. Lot of games still runs on Unreal engine 4 which doesnt perform well compare to unreal 5 especialy in sandbox titles its day and night performance difference. Unreal engine 5 and how it performs on your hardware is what metters the most in the future. Its exceptionaly well optimized technology btw i was shocked how smoothly it runs even on potato GPUs like gtx 1660 with lower but still beutifull graphics 60+fps easyly achievable with compromises. With my 7900xtx hardwared accelarated ray tracing/lumen drops my frame by 4 up too 5fps, literally (ray traced shadows in PT Requiem alone costs me 30 to 50fps). Non developer wants decrease the performance of his own game and get worse visuals combine for it. Its not profitable. The fact lumen and Nanite together are optimized for 60fps in upcoming consoles with RDNA3 speaks for itself and trust me if you have too choose rtx or lumen+ nanite, you will most likely choose lumen + nanite becouse of how great it looks compare to rtx alone. While these techs toghether costs less performance at last on my gpu. Only bad thing about these is how vram demanding they are, it takes a lot of vram (almost 10gb at 1080p)obviously which is not very promising for many Nvidia owners and it was also reason why i bought 7900xtx over the 4070ti, price was only 175euro difference here in czech.
Is UE5 lumen actually accelerated by RT core? Are you sure? Can you talk about this more in depth?
Yes it is, you can check digital foundry fortnight review with lumen update to see how it works with hardware rt and without it.
i want to see lumen (software rt) vs rtx gpus (hardware rt) benchmarks
Американская версия канала iXBT?
"Nvidia's RTX"? What the hell does that even mean lol.
as far as i remember i watched a video where HUB tested fortnite with lumen... comparing AMD 7900 xtx and RTX 4080 GPUs....
Do you remember the result ? There are not that many videos comparing these results , so for the person that wants to learn 3d is a important and deciding factor when buying a Gpu.
@@jhonbells - They were really close.
Lumen uses software RT only as a fallback when HW RT isn't available. To see the difference try an rx590 and a an rx 6500xt for example. similar in raster, but the 6500xt has HW RT.
@@jhonbells it is in the "Radeon RX 7900 XTX vs. GeForce RTX 4080, 50+ Game Benchmark @ 1440p & 4K" video from 3 weeks ago
@@shaneeslick i will check it out. Thank you
Raytracing has even really started yet.
Steve is a beast at Fortnite
Didn't know this channel existed 🤣
Eliminating pop-in for open world games is WAY more game changing than light reflections. Nothing more jarring and immersion breaking that objects popping in.
Did you mean Lumen vs NVIDIA own solution for Global Illumination (RTXGI)?
There is an i missing in NVIDIA in the title.
Im an unreal engine developer for years now, lumen is not meant to replace ray tracing, they compliment each other, lumen has in it support for ray tracing (if proper gpu is available), lumen is faster but ray tracing is better looking, so its a dance of available hardware\performance
Ray tracing is nice but i do not use nvidia graphics cards because i use 12+ gb graphics cards, its not like the 3060 is the meatiest thing, in the future it will be the 1080p machine, the xtx cards can be resold and were designed with high clock speeds in mind making them resellable, the 3080 is yours for life lol
Well I mean its definitely an option, but replacement doubt it. Nvidia has dedicated hardware for it I don't foresee them back tracking all that process for a lesser option.
Why not use raytracing it has dedicated Cores on the gpu, not using it only takes more resources away for the main Gpu cores
RTX isn't really the branding for just ray tracing. It's also used for the DLSS related things. Nvidia used the RTX-ON/RTX-OFF in the frame generation context, In a way that RTX couldn't be synonymous with ray tracing.
Here is an official image from dlss 3 promotion, showing that RTX-OFF can mean DLSS of with RT on. And this was consistent between all of the DLSS 3 promotions.
cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/SrFKFb3MShtNsLbFCoMcq3-1920-80.jpg.webp
@@youluvana Which is stupid because DLSS 3 is terrible.
@@afriendofafriend5766 dlss3 is amazing. U must be an amd user
When I turn on rtx on my rtx 3070ti the cards struggles at 4k. It won't even cross 30 fps even with dlss. But if rtx is turned off it's buttery smooth. I don't need dlss to achieve high fps. I feel rtx feature is just bogus.
Yeah, the phrasing of the question definitely shows how much confusion has been created by all those (relatively) useless branding terms... but fortunately, they explained it correctly: RTX is Nvidias version of hardware raytracing, while Lumen is Epics version of both software and hardware raytracing. And the point of software raytracing is simply to have a decent-quality fallback option, if your GPU has bad hardware raytracing support.
just you wait as see the new Samsung $80000 nano second refresh rates. temps might rise eh?
ahh Steve I thought you would a no-builds man like myself
removing pop ins > ray tracing.
It will replace it, soon all games engines will have software raytracing. Future games won't even need dedicated hardware, history repeats itself gamers!
These days nobody seems to remember those dead physX cards and the fact that after source engine added software physics simulation, all the games started to have that without the need of dedicated hardware. PhysX GPUs died and the same fate will happen to RTX cards... Maybe two more generation and GTX comes back, that day AMD Intel and Nvidia will have GPUs so powerful that dlss and fsr will be useless tech.
Not the same. Look at the difference between HW rt and Software. Lumen uses HW whenever possible. Try an rx 580/590 vs a 6500XT. Also HW physics was tried to soon (rt nearly was), wouldn't be surprised to see it return one day.
gpu PhysX still exisit it only works on GPU in DX11 games. No games in DX12 can use GPU physX & only works on cpu, because of way mGPU works. Also it's nvidia exclusive feature. The best way for it work would be to implimented like DXR is in DX12 were it should work regaurdless of brand. Except that would require Microsfot to buy it from nvidia.
Each comment stupider than the last. This is total nonsense.
ray tracing is not comparable to things like PhysX. the issue with GPU accelerated physics is game developer are not interested with it even when open source version (Bullet Physics) are there to compete with nvidia solution. rather than wasting GPU resource to process some overkill physics it is better to use that resource to improve graphic fidelity. in case of RT the so called "software RT" will run purely on shaders. while the "hardware RT" will have it's ray tracing calculation being speed up dedicated hardware inside GPU that have the hardware. going forward all GPU will have this dedicated hardware. so if you're developer will you use the slow "software" version of RT or one that will be accelerated by dedicated core?
what you say it like saying since modern game can still run on two CPU cores future games will not going to need more than 2. that extra CPU core won't even needed going forward because it is proven 2 CPU cores the only thing needed to run games.
@@arenzricodexd4409 everyting you posted is false information.
See DX11 & Tessaltion for comparison an microsoft open A.P.I standard for hardware tesslation enabling features. "Graphics fedielity" is fine currently. Their is marginal differences for bake lighting shadows, & reflection. You don't need x16 AF & 16x AA on a 4,096 x 2160 resoluton or D.L.S.S/ FSR. If you do your probably killing eyes & sitting too close to the screen.
How are you going to call speeding up physic useless, but then claim speeding up raytracing with gpu hardware is justicfiable in the same paragraph, you releaize you're a hypocrite for that entire connotation right ?
Their is no open source for "GPU physic calualtion" enabled it's only "CPU physic calculations" & it's much slower than a GPU still.
no software RT doesn't work on all shader units. Not all raytracing features come sole from the Gpu either, so the context that GPU hardware does it all is false. See games like Marvels Spiderman for an example. CPU requires goes up from 5600x to 5800x just when enabling Raytracing.
Pop-in and screen space reflection artifacts are both the worst. Lumen and Nanite and similar technologies can massively help here.
Yes, it can
Lumen is an Unreal Engine 5.1 thing. Any games not made with UE 5.1 naturally won’t have Lumen.
William Faucer explains the pros and cons of Lumen and RT hardware ruclips.net/video/1e6oOiKh91U/видео.html
For me personally I like Lumen very much, because 4.x version of UE, I had to rebuild lights when I’ve done changes or added for example new buildings etc. with Lumen the direct and indirect lights are done in real-time.
Thats like asking will beer replace cider in the future? They are their own thing, lumen is only available on unreal engine and there are A LOT of different game engines. So the answer is: NO :)
path tracing will replace everything when the rtx 9000 arive
No, because Lumen uses RTX to speed up calculations.
Lumen detailed reflections completely disappear, on Pascals graphics cards.
Well I guess , the real question is is Lumen Raytracing?
I would love Fallout 4 without the terrible shadow pop in
Unfortunately. Lumen won't replace rtx. Because not all games use unreal engine. But all games can use rtx because it's hardware based. But if more developers make their own raytracing engines nvidia would fall flat.
Ray tracing is another fool's gold.
Lumen = Free
RT= $200+
...I like what Epic has done with Unreal over the years, but what about unfinished game like Star Citizen, it is really heavy on basically everything PC has to offer, CPU, GPU, RAM speeds, SSD speeds, did you consider adding that "game" in your testing loop. I know there are some YTbers that do that, like @tenpoundfortytwo
Also, there is ongoing debate on SC forums, and many times in game etc, if the "game" would be better of if CiG (company that is doing the game) would have used some other engine, like UE (currently with it's really good 5.x revision) instead of old CryTek, now custom made Lumberyard engine...
Cheers and keep it up...
No point using an unstable product as a benchmark.
Lumen *is* ray tracing, just a hardware-agnostic implementation of it.
6:30 Lumen isn't just reflections. Bounced lighting adds an incredible amount of realism to the textures and dynamic element into the games. Right now games has to have static lighting and insane baked tricks for it to look good (i.e. what Naughty Dog does). With RT lighting we get a much more immersive and dynamic game like what Fortnite is doing. Can always count on you guys to downplay ray tracing or just shovel out bad info.
Yeah, this is unbelievably bad reporting, even by youtube standards, just to cater to an anti-Nvidia echo chamber. Disgusting.
wait, I always thought steave play Fortnite is a meme.
Hey, Minecraft RTX is pretty cool..
Whats the point? Lumen is raytracing!
I want games to look more like Plague Tale Requiem. But yeah, flight simulator is also made by the same studio that made PTR.
I’m happy a game engine is taking over branding for this feature because the game engine will make decisions on what achieves best visual fidelity rather than exploiting and overusing RT hardware that not everyone has. Also, lacking said hardware shouldn’t result in visuals that are rendered drastically differently.
I would guess that over time, Lumen + Nanite games that get optimized for most hardware configurations will stop seeing nVidia pull so far ahead, if at all. Only if you graphics configure the game for super quality RT stuff that you’d have to pixel peep to call one better than the other would RTX graphics cards start to pull ahead noticeably. Otherwise, a good GPU across AMD or nVidia will produce similar results. I’m a 4090 owner, ex hobby game dev, and I’m excited for that. Please please please eliminate nVidia’s exploitative hold with RTX.
Not gonna happen anytime soon considering this is how low quality Lumen's software RT mode is:
ruclips.net/video/QdV_e-U7_pQ/видео.html
ruclips.net/video/QdV_e-U7_pQ/видео.html
@@jcm2606 this is what happens when a non devs interpret technical content.
I'm sorry to say, you're just not able to interpret what they are calling limits and how that might relate to rendering output quality versus capability. I've written a ray tracer, ported it to the PS3's processor; I've been a game dev by hobby myself using DirectX7-11 with some OpenGL dabbling. What Lumen + Nanite are is more of a paradigm shift in real time rendering engine implementation so no one can say that "more RT(X) speed will result in much bettter (overall) visuals" with unless you were one of the rendering engine devs. For a given rendering feature implementation, where it is available, hardware acceleration is generally going be faster. But many techniques reach limits for how much they can improve a scene. And more importantly, some techniques aren't accelerated by hardware, because it just work to be done on the CPU.
Don't let nVidia convince you that RT hardware needs to be as prevalent as it is for all games to look "decent" moving forward. Ray traced reflections can only make a game look better to a point, and it's easy to see their limits. Reflections and reflective surfaces. And in my opinion, games are already over sampling (too much detail) reflections and are moving away from a realistic, or even artistically good, look. Games out here pretending wet streets are almost like a mirror, reflecting everything above it with accuracy when in reality it takes a substantially large and very still surface of water to see a reasonably clean reflection. The non-RT techniques to show reflective surfaces that have been around and cheap for over 10 years are plenty accurate for a detail you really don't look at unless you pixel peep a screenshot. Games do the same RT on dumb stuff for cars. Unless you're very close to a car you can't pick out details in reflections -- especially not while driving.
Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 with RT ON turned to max both look worse than Red Dead Redemption 2 which is years older. RT on is as silly as it was when it launched and I'm a 4090 owner, so I'm not justifying some rational AMD GPU purchase either.
@@EbonySeraphim I never said that RT was necessary to make games look decent. Don't put words into my mouth. I said that Lumen won't "stop NVIDIA from pulling ahead" (which is a stupid statement to say regardless, since "RTX" is still necessary with Lumen if you want an accurate result, for reasons I'll get into in a minute), and showed snippets from Epic's own deep dive into Lumen to point out exactly why: Lumen's software RT mode suffers from massive quality/accuracy problems which can sometimes cause issues with GI and make any form of specular on smoother surfaces look like mud.
You're also wrong about me being a "non-dev", as I'm also a graphics developer by hobby (recently semi-professional in a small business) who's modded in a full path tracer into Minecraft, written numerous shaders for Minecraft, wrote a custom OpenGL renderer extension for Minecraft and am currently writing a from-scratch Vulkan graphics backend/engine. I fully understand what was said in that video, and I fully understand that the reason why that was a stupid statement is because this is an inherent limitation with the way that Lumen's software RT mode works that would require significant advancements in both video memory and texture capabilities on graphics cards, because the SDF and surface cache used for Lumen's software RT mode is likely already reaching the practical limits within current APIs.
"RTX" is going to remain a thing moving forward because you cannot reasonably tackle all problems via software. Tracing against and traversing a BVH structure is inherently a costly operation, and gets even more costly the more complex the geometry becomes. Modern graphics cards cannot do so purely in software with the amount of polygons that modern games are pushing, which is why the industry has moved to accelerating it with dedicated hardware units that are specifically designed to do these two operations. Raytracing is going to remain a thing moving forward due to how quick and easy it makes the development process for the lighting quality and accuracy it can produce, and since those two operations cannot reasonably be done in software, "RTX" will also remain a thing moving forward.
And no, modern techniques are not good enough to just skip on raytracing. Modern diffuse lighting techniques almost entirely rely on baked lighting with the dynamic alternatives suffering from numerous problems (light leaking, significant quality/accuracy tradeoffs, etc), and modern specular lighting techniques are woefully inadequate with the best dynamic specular technique being screen-space reflections which are, well, _screen-space,_ with a cubemap/probe fallback that suffers from the same problems as dynamic diffuse techniques (leaking, quality/accuracy tradeoffs, etc).
Nvidia is doing same with Ray Tracing as with tessellation in Crysis 2.That game was "optimised" totally for Nvidia to a point that even R9 290 and rx 470 can use only one tesselator.And they both have 4.Amd Ray Tracing in neutral titles and now Unreal 5.1 shows they are very close to geforce RT.
... "AMD Raytracing" was just gimping as much of it as possible while technically looking slightly better than good rasterised alternatives...
Lumen is a smart hybrid approach that works most of the time, but lacks the visual consistency of a full on light simulation.
The difference is very clearly visible when you know what you're supposed to be looking for (pop-in / missing objects in reflections, light leaking through geometry even though there's solid walls that should occlude light, surfaces having this glowing appearance even though there shouldn't be any direct light influencing those surfaces.
It's fine if you don't know WHAT to look for, but don't assume that because some developers choose not to cut corners when utilising RT while others decide to very much cut as much corners as possible that the latter "does RT better".
Wtf this comment section. RTX is hardware.
You realise that there's no such thing as "GeForce RT", right? "RTX" is just NVIDIA's hardware acceleration for raytracing. That hardware acceleration can be used for a variety of things, including Lumen (see Lumen's hardware RT mode) and will give a significantly higher quality and higher accuracy result than a software fallback:
ruclips.net/video/QdV_e-U7_pQ/видео.html
ruclips.net/video/QdV_e-U7_pQ/видео.html
@@MLWJ1993 and still title with lumen and nanite will look much better then game with rtx , while it will be not so demanding. I quite hate this nvidia strategy push one thing over the TOP again and again, its shock effect marketing and forget about the rest , look at physics in games, it was often better in many cases then its now. Why ? 4 years long Ray tracing hoax. This is what Epic does the best and Nvidia cant compete with them with their software. Complex, Balanced gaming expyrience step by step which is not forcing people to sell their own kidney ( they have even new physics destruction futures ready). I like Ray tracing, but its too inefficent for what it actualy does and its not some huge Nvidias discover its old as heck early 90ties actualy. Nobody else wanted to implement it to the gaming industry before, becouse its just demanding and after years its still way to much demanding even for the majority of nvidias cards.
@@jankratochvil9779 You can do raytracing (RTX) on top of nanite. Lumen is a hybrid RT/rasterisation approach which by all means is imperfect by design, but has less visual breakup than pure rasterisation.
There's no such thing as real-time software ready tracing. If it's not a slide show, then it's hardware accelerated.
Ray tracing is market gimmick i dont even use it sometimes it makes game look better however most of the time its hit and miss
Brace yourselves, armchair software engineers, technical analysis comments incoming 😂
for the record assassins creed doesn't use unreal and it probably never will
It seems Nvidia's Trump card is slowly losing. Serves them right for being greedy.
nvidia was 100x more popular than amd even when ray tracing wasn't a thing
@@basshead. Nvidia was the OG no doubt. But all good things come to an end. I always had Nvidia myself, but this time I went with Amd because Nvidia got too greedy. Amd is still at a tolerable level of greed.
@@wishwewere1256 amd is as greedy as nvidia. you get more bang for your buck with the 4070ti than the 7900xt
@@basshead. Nah
@@basshead. But 4080 and 4090 is still overpriced😂
you guys are not really into tech details behind Lumen and Nvidia RTX. Those are quite different techs, using different core principles.
Hi gents. I was a little dissapointed that you chocked ray tracing up to being just "More realistic reflections". This is disappointing because reflections are the least impactful thing that ray tracing is capable of. The truly transformative thing is fully ray traced global illumination. Which completely overhauls a game's lighting.
We know that most games are throwing rtx reflections into games because it's easy and they can check the "we have ray tracing in our game" box, but it's a cheap trick, not the transformative vision of ray tracing.
*Talks about LUMEN raytraced lighting*
*Proceeds to use Fortnite's lowest quality settings to show off sKiLlZ rather than showing the game's next-gen lighting*
Fortnite looks like a wii game, why would you benchmark with that?
LUMEN has a future, RTX doesn't. It's as simple as g-sync.
Nanite is cool, Lumen is worse than RT
Tim, once again, is talking out of his ass. He probably forgot that RT and RTX implementation, as GAMEWORK, are not using the same processing.
If it was the case, DXR games would just tank AMD's performance and it is not the case in many console ports. RTX is the NVIDIA proprietary implementation and they do everything to make the competition look bad, even at the cost of theirs. We are back at the PHYSx time but on a much greater scale and unfortunately, Nvidia got traction on this. If RT was so good, Sony would use it in games like God of War Ragnarok, Uncharted or the Last of Us... but they don't and it is telling everything. It will be EPIC and other studio developers that will implement RT the proper way, the API devs, not Nvidia. Nvidia will just be left with all these RT and tensors cores while devs will found a proper solution to minimize impacts on performances.
Why not both Use Lumen and RTX together? Have Lumen cover the weaknesses of RTX and RTX cover the weaknesses of Lumen
More like Lumen should have hardware support just like RT.
Nope, not gonna happen, hardware will always trump software, lumen doesn't even look the same. You people are so anti nvidia its funny 😂
Greedy Nvidia 😠
I played FN with Nvidia RTX, and now again with Lumen ... The Lumen Ray Tracing does not look anywhere as good as the Nvidia Ray RTX, hardware or software.
They both fundamentally function different and have a different visual effect.
You don't actually see better performance when hardware mode is enabled in lumen you see worse performance. Comon guys get your facts right or do some proper testing first.
Can you timestamp the part of the conversation you have an issue with?
@@hubclipschannel 3:04 Gpu with hardware acceleration
Ohh right, yeah you've just misunderstood Tim. He was generalizing, having hardware support is obviously superior. In the case of Fortnite the software approach would be much slower, but to mitigate that there's simply less RT effects.
@@hubclipschannel in fortnite there is an option to enable hardware ray tracing. When you click that option the fps drops even lower than the software mode.
@@anthbobo2783 yep that's what I'm trying to tell you. The software mode and hardware mode don't look the same, the hardware mode looks significantly better.
AMD fanbois are delusional 😂
You both are an awesome gay couple
😂
Both unbox each other's hardware every night.
Why did I laugh at this so much
@@jal.ajeera 🤣🤣🤣