Note that the non RT shadows in the first scene might be bugged. I did some testing there as the difference was extremer than most areas, and it turns out non RT shadows appear there at a later point in the day as RT enabled shadows. That might be due to more accurate long distance shadow casting with RT or some bug, I'm not 100% sure yet. Might be something for @DigitalFoundry to investigate. Every other scene should be fine though.
Does the update have reflections? I was wondering how the swap looks and such, I saw it in raya in your last video it appeared to have raytraced reflections. Might be worth checking more reflective armor too.
I have noticed that HDR is finally fixed in Elden Ring, might have been in an earlier patch though as I haven't played the game in a couple months prior to the RT update. It's no longer washed out though!
@@sacb0y Elden Ring uses RT Shadows and RT Ambient Occlusion only, the reflections are still just normal Screen Space Reflections. Maybe one day when they've ironed out some of the kinks with the RT performance they might consider reflections as well? 🙏 Though, as a personal preference, I would much rather have RTGI, which gives the biggest graphical upgrade of any RT feature when the entire world is lit up by actual physical rays of light, like say your shiny knight armour will constantly reflect some of the light from the Erdtree wherever you are in the overworld, constantly giving off a faint golden glow thanks to just how bright and ever present that the Erdtree is.
Easily the clearest comparison I've seen! I'm not convinced the other folks making comparison videos even know what to look for. Hopefully other players see this and realise there actually is quite a difference in shadow quality.
That seems to be it, tho, isn't it? Shadow Quality. There's some occlusion too (which is kind of part of the shadow rendering I guess) but I didn't see much in terms of GI. Maybe it's about the light sources in DS games being scarce and unnatural (haven't played ER yet so not sure if it's an issue as well in this last entry). Also, it feels like the optimal level is "medium". The difference with high and max seems irrelevant.
Raytracing is far more noticeable with multiple light sources at night. Except for reflections the effect is minimal during the day. There are much better ways of showcasing raytracing...
It seems many people don't actually know what to look for when it comes to raytracing, probably because RT implementations in games vary a lot. But yeah, I know exactly what to look for and how to properly compare it. I've been interested in the gaming tech aspects since the NES days.
@@extrabenbuja And for that you got another well deserved sub. Also forgot to mention that the afterburner overlay is very much appreciated. Always nice to see how big of a performance/usage impact certain settings really are.
So far it seems like there are no raytraced reflections. And the regular ambient light is done well enough that its hard to tell it isnt already ray traced. Ive been playing around with it in many areas and its hard to spot any real diffrance between medium and max. Seems like it would be best for most people to leave it on medium setting imo. Unless you want the solid 60 fps. Then just turn it off. Not really worth it performance wise.
The only difference I noticed is that the distant trees don't look like paper anymore and have proper shadows. With higher the RT settings the more distant trees get their shadow, but I'm not seeing any difference between High and Max. But the game becomes choppy on my 3080 Ti, and VRR doesn't help somehow, so I just disabled RT and continued playing.
Thank you. First sane comment that isn't pretending like they see any significant differences. The only thing I noticed were softer tree shadows which isn't expressly objectively better than before. Shadows are soft or sharp based on the intensity of the sunlight, one isn't more realistic than the other lol. Also the railing shadows in Farum Azula looked better but nowhere near impressive enough to take the massive hit on performance for them, considering the game has always looked incredible before this update.
@@jackboneart It depends what you would say is "objectively better". If being more realistic is better, then RT shadows are supposed to be better. A shadow's sharpness is determined by how the light hits the subject, which is what RT is calculating in real time, although it's doing it in the opposite direction. The intensity of the light is also only part of the equation. Size, distance and angle all matter as well. If "objectively better" is how the artists intended it, then I think it's probable that neither options fit that criterion. It's definitely verifiable provided you can talk with them though. Personally, I'm arriving at the same conclusion though. Looks better, not by enough to be worth the performance hit. The environment is already very well shaded. If they add DLSS then I will consider using RT with it on. Otherwise, good for screenshots.
@@poipoi300 We can actually tell the intention of the artists: RT is objectively better as they added it to the game. Static light was a technical compromise, with RT they achieved what they wanted.
The main difference between modes is the "graininess" of ambient occlusion. With low values you can see more shimmering and artifacts when looking at ambient occlusion, while higher values clean up the image but comes with an fps cost. Low is a good quality IMO, still an improvement over default, without being too jarring.
@@Minmataro718That's because most games until recently have been using different techniques to mimmick ray tracing but now that path tracing is a thing it looks way better...look at Cyberpunk.
I wish the RT shadows would apply to interior lights and things like torches instead of just sun shadows. Interior spaces look flat because they have almost no shadow casting lights in Elden Ring.
What's the point of even having this update then? Those things you mentioned would get the biggest visual boost with them being raytraced. Also those things were done even before raytracing for the last 15 years.
I know this video shows that it doesn't make a huge difference for Elden Ring, but I'm just happy that they bothered to do this patch because it means they have no gotten some experience with it. From Soft's best trait is how well they iterate. They continue to take what they know, reshape it, and then form it anew and improve each time. They build upon their knowledge.
I know it's technically less realistic looking in terms of lighting & shadows but I prefer the non RT in almost every scene. RT Shadows in this case are definitely not gonna be worth the performance hit IMO
I hopped back into the game yesterday on a whim and had no idea they added raytracing. Spent a little bit of time trying to figure out why my game was getting so much lower performance than usual. Noticed the setting and turned it off...much better.
@@XOB89 that’s not the lesson! Slapping a bit of ray tracing onto a game that had been built from the ground up with non ray traced lighting in mind isnt always going to work out great, that’s my lesson
Yea, you can't just slap on realistic lighting and expect it to look better, you gotta do a lot of work to set it up in a way to emphasize a certain atmosphere and mood. Pretty much the whole job of a lighting crew in movies. I think ray tracing is the future, we just gotta get to the point where devs can assume most people have a powerful enough PC to support raytracing, and they can set that lighting up from the ground up so it looks great.
you may notice that half the props, stuff, has no shadows with RTX on :) both sides has pros and cons .. but i rather play without RTX because it extremely bothers me how stuff doesnt have any shadow and it looks like its floating mid air because of it
Thats what i was wondering…however since they didnt add Global Illumination sadly i believe it wont change much…maybe a bit better shadow casting but thats it then…
They only put shadows casted by the sun and not other livht sources which is a shame, it would add so much. Gi isn't really needed in this game and most of the time it's super heavy for nothing
@@SlenderSmurf yes, it is, but they already implemented good mimicry of GI. It's also considerably more expensive than shadows, and the game is already streaky.
The main reason I think most don't notice much difference is that RT shadows weren't applied to all light sources (would've looked great in caves with campfires, graces and torches or tombs with the candle lights and other lighting effects). And if I'm correct, they still just use the normal GI from the base game, and it's not ray traced while also having absolutely no reflections from ray tracing. I think RE4 Remake is a great example of how good RT can look if you actually apply a suite of the effects, rather than just two of them, only on select objects with ambient light. I'm guessing because they've not resolved any of the performance problems since the game came out (not noticeably so anyways) and they still haven't implemented any upscaling solution like FSR2 or DLSS, that's why they had to suffice with just ambient occlusion and basic foliage shadow map replacements. The basic RT they've implemented already eats like 25 - 30 FPS off of PC, and about 15 - 20 on both major consoles. So yeah...
@@extrabenbuja couldn’t agree more! Are you able to keep a 60fps lock at Maximum RTX setting? Would love to see a performance video with the different setting.
@@extrabenbuja that's full on RTX cope, I own a 4070 Ti myself, but I never use RT...of course realism is the only thin that matters to the player, then RT is better...but the shadow work in the game is better for the mood of the areas shown here without RT than with it...the lighting mood changes from dark and restricted to lit up and vice versa. Realism doesn't mean better to most gamers I'd say.
RT Low is honestly my favorite. It’s a noticeable increase in shadow quality (including the PC) while keeping the shadows crisp. Now if only the game wouldn’t crash when I turn Raytracing on lol.
observing this comparison.......im just going to keep it off to get higher fps. Hopefully the 5000 series next year really pushes the boundaries of 4K/8K. 4K has been around for years now, id like to see GPU's finally exceed some expecxtations fps wise without Ai. Its like they are just playing around with shadows. I thgouth we already had this, it was called soft shadows lol.
Best comparison so far. Honestly it's beyond me how anyone would trade 60 fps for that, as nice as it is. Even more beyond me how someone would pay significantly more on a gpu in order to get that difference. But I'm glad it's out there for everyone decide for themselves.
To each their own for sure. I think RT low already looks better than RT off though. RT medium seems to be the performance/visual sweet spot. You get the natural softness of shadows without the massive hit of RT maximum. I couldn't see that much difference between medium and max.
@@extrabenbuja how's the performance hit comparing off, medium and maximum? I don't think gpu usage is a good metric, so perhaps you could test at higher resolutions/other gpus so we get under 60 in all cases? Also, is a video on the ray tracing distance cuttof something you'd consider doing?
@@iurigrang Higher resolution test is a good idea. I might make an 8K video maybe. The other option would be to disable the 60 fps cap with a mod, but I tried it briefly earlier and it insta crashed, probably because of the anti cheat stuff. I don't really wanna mess with that so higher resolution seems like a good idea. Could also look for areas where the draw distance is more visible and then zoom in. Thanks for the suggestions!
Wish they added rt reflections , a lot of them look great with SSR but some are broken and don't reflect the area properly , so it would've been a bigger upgrade to the visuals . Also , they should add dlss , the performance hit is huge without it
Liurnia with raytraced reflections would make a cool screenshot. And I say screenshot because you'd probably only get 1 frame before the game crashed lol.
@@yewtewbstew547 i get what you're saying but it wouldn't be as big a performance hit as it may seem , the big hit is the initial calculation of the bvh structure for RT to work , the RT effects added on top of it won't have a super huge impact on performance compared to that , but yeah reflections in a world as big as elden ring may be problematic and destroy performance if no upscaling technique is present
I honestly wish more games would apply either RT reflections or, possibly better for performance, planar reflections in dungeons and caves. There is MUCH less to worry about in terms of performance overhead in those situations, so probably could easily hit performance targets there, even with the better reflections. SSR is cool if you want a really performant, but fairly accurate (on good implementations) reflection. But yeah, it's only screen space, so it by definition only works even mildly well on puddles of water on the ground or some reflective surface on the ground or ceiling. Because anywhere else, you'll EASILY notice it's wrong. And even on top/bottom surfaces it's easy to break the effect if you look at them up close the right way.
I love how in modern rendering, more detailed shadows means they are "blurrier", aka diffused, just like real life shadows work. In older games cranking up shadows usually increased the raw resolution of the shadow maps, which caused shadows to get very sharp and defined, and that has ALWAYS looked weird to me. I've been on record saying that low/medium shadows looked better, back in the day, and with this super advanced procedural RT stuff, I feel like I am vindicated. Yes, shadows are SUPPOSED to be soft! Go outside lmao!
It is amazing to see that baked lights and some clever shading can actually simulate RT lighting so well. We fought for ray tracing for so long. We have so much new tech and algos, and still, the visual profit margin is barely noticeable. At least not in examples without reflections and dynamic lights. I wonder if somewhere there's actually an entirely different rendering approach that will revolutionize graphics as designated hardware did back then.
The thing is, even tho faking everything can look almost as good as RT lighting, it takes a looooong time to do it. It can take hours for a lighting artist to make a single area as close to "how it should look like" as possible, while just using RT lighting, you let the GPU do all the work and calculations. Ofc, just having RT lighting in a game wont replace lighting artists, its just another tool in their toolbox to make amazing worlds. RT is that next thing, it will just take a while for it to be readily available to everyone, and ofc the dedicated hardware for RT needs to improve as well so we dont see a significant performance hit.
@Rajta So, for a case like this, do you think there is even a point to adding in raytracing? Since the baked in lighting with raytracing off seems just as good to me. The shadows even tend to match up for the most part. I guess my question is: what is the actual benefit for elden ring to have raytracing?
@@aidan4031 Probably not. My best guess, fromsoft is testing it for their next game, and learing to use the tools, see the performance impact that it has.
I think RT hardware IS the next revolutionary thing. It's just been kind of slow to roll out. At the point that one can create raytraced light sources and just tweak a few variables instead of having to generate, bake, check, rebake, etc. you'll have your next revolution. I doubt that'll make all artists lives easier because... well, someone always finds someway to offset any free time we acquire with some crap, but it certainly should at least make lighting and shadow mapping a lot faster... once machines all are able to have at least competent dedicated hardware.
@@desmondbrown5508 yea, RT was always demanding, and its pretty wild that we even have any form of RT available to us, and being able to render frames per second. Its no surprise that in the movie industry, you render movies at frames per days. Even though RT in games is much less accurate and light sources cast a small amount of rays compared when they render movies, it's still an impressive feat.
You chose some GREAT vistas, nice job! Personally I can't play with RT on because it always crashes my client, perhaps a future update will fix it but at this point I'm not holding my breath.
No one will ever convince me that RT is worth the performance hit. Barely makes a difference overall unless you closely stare at every shadow you come by
@3rd World Gamer yeah, and out of every game I've ever seen implement it regardless of how they do it, it never makes a big enough difference to lose upwards of 50% of your performance. Developers can make lighting and reflections look just as good as raytracing with enough effort.
@@TDR-0484 on that front, it depends again. There are games where it's really well optimized or is such a positive impact on image quality without much impact on performance where it's just dumb not to have it... Especially if you're not planning on hitting above 60fps and if your video card can handle it. Great examples: Metro Exodus, Dying Light 2, Control, Minecraft, Spider man (on PC is just beast), Hitman trilogy and a few more. Those games with raytracing are on a whole other level. I'm leaving cyberpunk out btw since it does look awesome but that one indeed heavily tanks performance.
Yeah, DLSS would be such a nice addition to this game. The AA solution ingame is kinda blurry in my opinion. DLSS would increase the image quality a lot and help with the added stress from RT
@@extrabenbuja Yeah a good DLSS quality implementation would be great. A lot of the time I just use that in games instead of TAA even if I'm not using raytracing, because often it looks better _and_ you gain some performance headroom back. I'd love it if they added that to Elden Ring.
@@yewtewbstew547 I wonder if it would be possible to add DLSS via modding, because it's actually possible in Resident Evil 4, I just made a video about that. Even DLAA is possible, which has the AA benefits of DLSS, but still uses native resolution. It looks incredible in RE4. It would be awesome to have that in Elden Ring.
Interesting to see that low ray tracing only seems to cast hard shadows whilst no ray tracing sometimes tries to approximate blurrier shadows. All settings abow low give the correct smooth shadown expected from full raytracing where the further away a shadow is to its source, the blurrier it becomes. Maybe the normal shadow map is just so low for some scenarios that it just looks blurry either way?
when RT for Elden Ring was announced, I was convinced it would be used selectively to improve reflective materials like metals, marble, and water. What we got is pretty disappointing.
So it basically amounts some ambient occlusion, high shadow resolution, self shadows, and shadow distance blur. You could barely call it RT since shadow casting technology uses an optimized form of raytraycing anyways. Would've really loved some ambient light effects, but I guess FromSoft's programmers aren't quite there yet
I love the FS games and think they have some of the best concept designers in the business. Shame their tech and performance is always so far behind. Majority of lights don't even cast shadows in the game so any ray traced features seems like a waste before that is addressed. I mean look at what Bluepoint achieved without ray tracing in their lighting model for DeS:R - it's one of the best looking lighting solutions around and I'm fairly certain it was done with distance fields!
Yeah, it's a shame because FS games are easily among my favorite games out there, but technically their games always suffer from some issues, and it's such a shame Bloodborne hasn't been ported yet. The PS3 version is pretty messy technically, it would really shine on PC or PS5/XB1X, well as long as there are no technical issues again lol.
@@extrabenbuja BB on PC would be a dream come true but it would still suffer from the lack of shadow casting lights and performance would probably still be a mess if From were the ones to do it, haha.
So as expected it is just shadows and maybe RTAO? Couldn't even be asked to do reflections. GI would have made a world of difference even. Minimal effort but its the thought that counts I guess.
I’ve been playing it via boosteroid on all max and I have to say as much as people are hating on the raytracing added, I personally think it makes the game seem so much more beautiful. Started a new arcane build today and it was just like starting the game for the first time walking about Limgrave.
@@TiennosMigos in this dude other video there is a Raya Lucaria room scene where it looks like reflections are better then what I remember. Need to check this out
So far it seems reflections are still screen space or cubemap based from what I've seen. I'm gonna check it out some more tomorrow. It's late, but thanks for watching!
@@TiennosMigos shadows and ambient occlusion are ray traced. Find a shack with a sheltered awning, toggle between max and off and you can see the RTAO in effect.
I'm running an i9 11900 OC @ 5.4 gig watercooled with 32 gigs of ram and the EVGA RTX 3060 ti FTW3 Ultra: Most of the time I'm hitting 58-60 FPS and noticed micro stutter died around 57 FPS and am wondering if they optimized ER with this patch - Monitor's G-sync working flawlessly for very smooth frames. DId you notice anything different with this patch regarding this? - Great video by the way =)
My 7900XT can't handle RTX max even at 1440p in some areas, had to lower general settings to high to get it closer to 60. At 4k,. performance was generally unstable in the 40s. Cpu is a 13700k running at stock settings. I think I'll just settle for medium RT with max settings. Wish the had FSR, that would solve a lot for me.
@@canakar1657 You can notice the change if you are someone who does play more different video games regularly. The artifacting of SSR is truly something you see once and then you wont stop noticing them.
very impressive review, subscribed immediately. I have one question, which setting do you recommend for raytracing? I also use 4090, but the fps drops to 45 - 50 here and there
Thank you! I recommend either RT medium since it has the RTAO as well as more natural soft shadows, or RT high which has higher resolution RTAO from what I can tell. Because with RT medium I noticed some graininess on certain patches off grass at distance. I played a bit with RT high earlier and it performed pretty well. RT maximum just seems overkill tbh.
@@extrabenbuja Thank you! Then I will give it a try for RT high. Hope From Software will fix this soon, the current performance is not what it should be...especially for a RTX 4090 card
I really love From Software, they are my favorite devs for a while now, and i don't even care about their games having poor graphics, but they should at least add things like Vulkan 1.3 support (they should have gone Vulkan instead of DX12 imo), DirectStorage, FSR and DLSS, seems like a waste a masterpiece like Elden Ring not having a single standard feature, no nothing.
The game looks phenomenal with RT turned on IMO. I think it buffed the graphics of the game big time. In some places the game looks very realistic now.
I think this should highlight more Fromsoft's abilities to produce great looking, expertly lit environments without the need for fancy tools like RT. Sure, the added ambient occulsion and softer, more accurate shadows look nice, but it's hardly a significant upgrade from From's original setup.
RT Medium seems like the best option. Reaches a level of smoothness that's very pleasing without sacrificing performance. High and Maximum are just diminishing returns. Low is not worth it.
I don't see much difference when it comes to GI, low seems to do pretty well. No more weirdly glowing objects in the shadows. However, the sun shadows seem to be much better on medium.
Is it just me, or are there serious diminishing returns beyond "medium RT"? (Huge difference from off -> low though, and certainly noticeable low -> medium)
Yeah, you're absolutely right. I really have trouble seeing any differences beyond medium, even at distance. I'd recommend RT low for anyone who wants the RTAO and better shadows than RT off, without sacrificing too much performance, and RT medium if you have the performance to spare. Maybe RT High for high end if there are instances where the RT shadows do pop in noticeably that I haven't seen yet.
Elden Ring only does ray traced shadows, and from what I've seen it only applies to shadows from "the sun" or "the moon". In other games like Minecraft they do all of the illumination with RT (global illumination) which has a much greater impact on the look of the game. In Minecraft you get color blending from every light source, you can filter it through stained glass, you get these really beautiful diffuse reflections and sharp reflections too depending on how rough the material is. Basically Elden Ring has the weakest form of ray tracing, similar to the stuff we saw 5 years ago with Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
ray tracing can affect a lot of stuff, like ilumination, global ilumination, shadows, reflections, refraction etc, elden ring just implemented RT Shadows
i have a laptop with 4060 and RT low seems very worth it, generally seems it lets much more light go on and so details and shadow appreciation, i prob could put it on max with np cause elden ring it's such insane optimized game but it seems it just blurs the shadows and bit more, dont look much better just personal likes.
The shadow isn't even real-time ray traced. This is the lowest and laziest form of the entire Ray-Tracing options, but From Software somehow make it worse and unoptimized it. Beautiful. xD
is there still stuttering in the pc port? i finished the game at launch and it seems like it has the exact same performance issues, but now with RT on top of it all i can't imagine thats smooth
Not much for the performance hit on a game that still has performance issues on all platforms. They should just hand it over their technical work to another company like BluePoint. And at least for me it introduced so many more bugs and crashing in 1.9 that has been mostly fixed by 1.4. Hopefully they can fix it before the DLC.
I don't think this makes any difference in the experience at all. I wouldn't notice these differences while playing, I would have to be looking for them. BUT, what I do like is how enabling ray tracing can speed up game development by making this natural form of lighting easier to implement. The fact that Fromsoft's engine now has RTX capabilities means if should be no problem to add it to any future games, and faster development time from a studio like Fromsoft is welcome.
Kind of weird that they put in RT support without DLSS... I mean, unless you're taking screenshots or filming pretty scenes, I doubt most people would want to enable RT seeing how badly it kills your frames. Even on an RTX 3070, just putting my RT on Low drops my frames from solid 60 to 50.
I'm curious what it does to faces. In Elden Ring, your face is either greyed out or you look like you're sat at your makeup table with a mirror surrounded by lightbulbs.
If you ask me, raytrace is good for some shadow games, like dont follow the shadows, something or some monsters can come out, or something like that... are only shadows, who watch inside a game where are shadows?
is it only shadows? are RT reflections a thing? there arer puddles in caelid that reflect the red sky and look amazing untill you tilt the camera so the sky isn't in vision anymore then the screen space reflections have nothing to show. RT reflections would be a game changer for stuff like that.
So basically, we can just use regular low detail shadows, and get the same blurry mess as on RT Ultra, but at a fraction of the computational cost. Amazing... 😂
First scene comparison is very suspect. Why does the RT OFF look like they forgot a major light source? That is obviously not indirect bounced lighting in the RT ON shots.
In that area somehow the RT-off sun appears at a later time than with RT On. It might be a bug, or maybe RT calculates the long distance shadows differently. I caught that difference by accident in this video. You can recreate it if you teleport to outside the Lucaria Academy and skip to morning and check the differences between RT on and off.
I was confused why my game went from running at a consistent 140fps to 30fps when looking at the burning erdtree. Turns out I had no clue RT was added and it was set to Medium by default. I've had this game on max since I got my 3070 and was confused when I came back to playing it.
Even the almighty 4090 gets checked with RT. The game is very playable at RT on high & I'm glad its finally been implement. That said, we do need DLSS/FSR.
There's a mod that enables DLSS and it works pretty well. The HUD elements are a bit blurry though, but with DLSS quality even RT maximum is quite playable. 70-100 fps easy, most of the time I was actually CPU bound.
I want to see some of the armors. Because the reflectivity would not be against a cubemap and actually be calculated correctly with raytracing as well.
The RT shadows as they've implemented them don't include small objects and leaves in the BVH structure, making them paradoxically _less_ accurate on average than non-RT shadows. This is very clearly visible at 1:16 - look at the pebbles and shrubs next to the character's right shoulder. Any RT solution that can't properly resolve plant shadows is not a _serious_ implementation of ray tracing. Looking at how long adding it took, the performance issues, the poor BVH handling and the lack of upscaling tech, I would speculate that Fromsoft had ray tracing as a publishing contract requirement but didn't actually want to do it. This half-hearted gesture in the vague direction of ray tracing helps no one.
It makes a "difference" in shadows...but it's again a poor and quick implementation of RT with no path-traced GI...so the quality boost is minimal and sometimes even a downgrade. I don't agree with some that "realistic" lighting and shadow work are better than crafted lighting specifically created to set a mood in a room, forest, or more. Elden Ring at least runs, without mods, at 60fps so the performance impact on high-end cards doesn't show up for most users...but this still ain't worth possible slowdown for me. It's just...meh.
I'm somewhat troubled about the shadows at Farum Azula. Almost all lights are static lights. Why do these shadows have lower quality than the ray traced ones? Shouldn't they be completely rendered offline at compile time at the best quality possible? Maybe a gamedev can answer me this
Idk maybe the lighting isn't static in-game it just doesn't change with time, so it technically progresses, but doesn't visually change at all (so it changes from day to night lighting, they just look the same) so they couldn't use pre-rendered shadows?
Pre-rendered shadow (maps) have to rendered at some chosen resolution, same issue applies if rendering them offline. The problem with shadow-mapping is which resolution do you choose for shadows for a given camera angle, it depends on where the camera is (how many shadow-pixels cover a screen pixel, it depends on view angles, distance, etc). RT shadows on the other hand works with geometry so they render at the same resolution as your screen instead of a pre-defined lower shadow resolution.
@@SerBallister I mean I know no game which has prerendered shadows which look better than what real time shadow maps can offer. rt of course is an absolute win, perfomance aside
Thanks for showing this! Seems like a meaningless update for consoles as the frame rate penalty is no where near "worth it" for a game like this, but if I had a nice gaming pc with a beefy graphics card, I'd love this new feature.
Note that the non RT shadows in the first scene might be bugged. I did some testing there as the difference was extremer than most areas, and it turns out non RT shadows appear there at a later point in the day as RT enabled shadows.
That might be due to more accurate long distance shadow casting with RT or some bug, I'm not 100% sure yet. Might be something for @DigitalFoundry to investigate. Every other scene should be fine though.
You have to wait a few minutes and the shadows will come and non RT will look exactly like the RT. That first comparison is misleading.
Yeah, that's what I wrote. Not that it was my intention to mislead.
Does the update have reflections? I was wondering how the swap looks and such, I saw it in raya in your last video it appeared to have raytraced reflections. Might be worth checking more reflective armor too.
I have noticed that HDR is finally fixed in Elden Ring, might have been in an earlier patch though as I haven't played the game in a couple months prior to the RT update.
It's no longer washed out though!
@@sacb0y Elden Ring uses RT Shadows and RT Ambient Occlusion only, the reflections are still just normal Screen Space Reflections.
Maybe one day when they've ironed out some of the kinks with the RT performance they might consider reflections as well? 🙏
Though, as a personal preference, I would much rather have RTGI, which gives the biggest graphical upgrade of any RT feature when the entire world is lit up by actual physical rays of light, like say your shiny knight armour will constantly reflect some of the light from the Erdtree wherever you are in the overworld, constantly giving off a faint golden glow thanks to just how bright and ever present that the Erdtree is.
This, by far, is the only channel ive seen since RT update who knows what to show. Thanks, buddy!
by far, is the only?
Easily the clearest comparison I've seen! I'm not convinced the other folks making comparison videos even know what to look for. Hopefully other players see this and realise there actually is quite a difference in shadow quality.
Thanks lol. Yeah it seems many people don't know what to actually look for when doing these.
That seems to be it, tho, isn't it? Shadow Quality. There's some occlusion too (which is kind of part of the shadow rendering I guess) but I didn't see much in terms of GI. Maybe it's about the light sources in DS games being scarce and unnatural (haven't played ER yet so not sure if it's an issue as well in this last entry).
Also, it feels like the optimal level is "medium". The difference with high and max seems irrelevant.
@@Maiqel Yeah, I struggle to find any meaningful differences between medium and maximum, even at distance. RT Medium should be fine in most instances.
@@Maiqel
I was hoping for some RT GI as well, from what I have seen it is either not there or not working in ER.
Raytracing is far more noticeable with multiple light sources at night. Except for reflections the effect is minimal during the day. There are much better ways of showcasing raytracing...
The only video right now to actually show the differences instead of randomly walking through Limgrave.
It seems many people don't actually know what to look for when it comes to raytracing, probably because RT implementations in games vary a lot. But yeah, I know exactly what to look for and how to properly compare it. I've been interested in the gaming tech aspects since the NES days.
@@extrabenbuja And for that you got another well deserved sub.
Also forgot to mention that the afterburner overlay is very much appreciated. Always nice to see how big of a performance/usage impact certain settings really are.
@@meisterwu8922 Thank you!
So far it seems like there are no raytraced reflections. And the regular ambient light is done well enough that its hard to tell it isnt already ray traced.
Ive been playing around with it in many areas and its hard to spot any real diffrance between medium and max. Seems like it would be best for most people to leave it on medium setting imo. Unless you want the solid 60 fps. Then just turn it off. Not really worth it performance wise.
Yeah, medium seems to be a sweet spot. You get the RT shadows with the natural softness without the huge impact.
The only difference I noticed is that the distant trees don't look like paper anymore and have proper shadows. With higher the RT settings the more distant trees get their shadow, but I'm not seeing any difference between High and Max. But the game becomes choppy on my 3080 Ti, and VRR doesn't help somehow, so I just disabled RT and continued playing.
Thank you. First sane comment that isn't pretending like they see any significant differences. The only thing I noticed were softer tree shadows which isn't expressly objectively better than before. Shadows are soft or sharp based on the intensity of the sunlight, one isn't more realistic than the other lol.
Also the railing shadows in Farum Azula looked better but nowhere near impressive enough to take the massive hit on performance for them, considering the game has always looked incredible before this update.
@@jackboneart It depends what you would say is "objectively better". If being more realistic is better, then RT shadows are supposed to be better. A shadow's sharpness is determined by how the light hits the subject, which is what RT is calculating in real time, although it's doing it in the opposite direction. The intensity of the light is also only part of the equation. Size, distance and angle all matter as well. If "objectively better" is how the artists intended it, then I think it's probable that neither options fit that criterion. It's definitely verifiable provided you can talk with them though.
Personally, I'm arriving at the same conclusion though. Looks better, not by enough to be worth the performance hit. The environment is already very well shaded. If they add DLSS then I will consider using RT with it on. Otherwise, good for screenshots.
@@poipoi300 We can actually tell the intention of the artists: RT is objectively better as they added it to the game. Static light was a technical compromise, with RT they achieved what they wanted.
The main difference between modes is the "graininess" of ambient occlusion. With low values you can see more shimmering and artifacts when looking at ambient occlusion, while higher values clean up the image but comes with an fps cost. Low is a good quality IMO, still an improvement over default, without being too jarring.
Yeah, I noticed less shimmering with RT on high on certain grass patches, that's the main difference I've seen between RT medium and high.
The art style without RT still looks good. Still, gotta love those rays
Damn near every game that supports RT looks good without it.
@@Minmataro718That's because most games until recently have been using different techniques to mimmick ray tracing but now that path tracing is a thing it looks way better...look at Cyberpunk.
I wish the RT shadows would apply to interior lights and things like torches instead of just sun shadows. Interior spaces look flat because they have almost no shadow casting lights in Elden Ring.
What's the point of even having this update then? Those things you mentioned would get the biggest visual boost with them being raytraced. Also those things were done even before raytracing for the last 15 years.
@@outlander234 I agree. Even Dark Souls 2 had shadow casting torches! It’s bizarre
I know this video shows that it doesn't make a huge difference for Elden Ring, but I'm just happy that they bothered to do this patch because it means they have no gotten some experience with it. From Soft's best trait is how well they iterate. They continue to take what they know, reshape it, and then form it anew and improve each time. They build upon their knowledge.
That goes for every single software engineer.
Imo it’s hard to tell because the world design wasn’t built to have reflection, but the lighting game definitely hit different, even tho minimally.
@@vieris9893 sure in a general sense, but From Soft does it very well. I see plenty of other studios that advance in some areas but regress in others
@@vieris9893 yeah but most companies are not engineer driven, but business driven. Notice the massive jump on each From game.
now we just need a proper fps unlock from their games haha
I know it's technically less realistic looking in terms of lighting & shadows but I prefer the non RT in almost every scene. RT Shadows in this case are definitely not gonna be worth the performance hit IMO
I hopped back into the game yesterday on a whim and had no idea they added raytracing. Spent a little bit of time trying to figure out why my game was getting so much lower performance than usual. Noticed the setting and turned it off...much better.
The lesson here is that realism over stylism isn't always the answer.
the RT looks great in caves with all of the candles and ambient light. it gives the game more visual depth, doest look so 2d.
@@XOB89 that’s not the lesson! Slapping a bit of ray tracing onto a game that had been built from the ground up with non ray traced lighting in mind isnt always going to work out great, that’s my lesson
Yea, you can't just slap on realistic lighting and expect it to look better, you gotta do a lot of work to set it up in a way to emphasize a certain atmosphere and mood. Pretty much the whole job of a lighting crew in movies. I think ray tracing is the future, we just gotta get to the point where devs can assume most people have a powerful enough PC to support raytracing, and they can set that lighting up from the ground up so it looks great.
would be great to see going back to "off" after cycling through to maximum, to show just how far it gets from the default
you may notice that half the props, stuff, has no shadows with RTX on :)
both sides has pros and cons .. but i rather play without RTX because it extremely bothers me how stuff doesnt have any shadow and it looks like its floating mid air because of it
Good video. I would love to see some comparisons of RT with the Lantern on/off in a cave.
Thats what i was wondering…however since they didnt add Global Illumination sadly i believe it wont change much…maybe a bit better shadow casting but thats it then…
They only put shadows casted by the sun and not other livht sources which is a shame, it would add so much. Gi isn't really needed in this game and most of the time it's super heavy for nothing
@@m0nztam0nk the game already mimics global illumination so adding it would be unnecessary.
@@RockyHoward Ray traced global illumination is significantly nicer. I'm very disappointed they only added RT shadows.
@@SlenderSmurf yes, it is, but they already implemented good mimicry of GI. It's also considerably more expensive than shadows, and the game is already streaky.
The main reason I think most don't notice much difference is that RT shadows weren't applied to all light sources (would've looked great in caves with campfires, graces and torches or tombs with the candle lights and other lighting effects). And if I'm correct, they still just use the normal GI from the base game, and it's not ray traced while also having absolutely no reflections from ray tracing. I think RE4 Remake is a great example of how good RT can look if you actually apply a suite of the effects, rather than just two of them, only on select objects with ambient light. I'm guessing because they've not resolved any of the performance problems since the game came out (not noticeably so anyways) and they still haven't implemented any upscaling solution like FSR2 or DLSS, that's why they had to suffice with just ambient occlusion and basic foliage shadow map replacements. The basic RT they've implemented already eats like 25 - 30 FPS off of PC, and about 15 - 20 on both major consoles. So yeah...
Yeah elden ring is the worst implementation of ray tracing that I've ever seen. Ironically, it still looks amazing.
Excellent job. Literally the only channel that’s properly conveyed the changes
So...
Hardly any...
The floor of Sir Alonne's boss room was 9 years ago, and now with rtx we went to this...
I'm not angry, just a bit disappointed
comparisons are legit but apart from cherry picked instances there isn't a whole lot of difference. You don't miss RT when you turn it off
I mean that's up to everyone, but even RT low looks better than RT off in most instances.
@@extrabenbuja cap
@@extrabenbuja couldn’t agree more! Are you able to keep a 60fps lock at Maximum RTX setting? Would love to see a performance video with the different setting.
It's only because Elden Ring already has phenomenal art direction and lighting.
@@extrabenbuja that's full on RTX cope, I own a 4070 Ti myself, but I never use RT...of course realism is the only thin that matters to the player, then RT is better...but the shadow work in the game is better for the mood of the areas shown here without RT than with it...the lighting mood changes from dark and restricted to lit up and vice versa.
Realism doesn't mean better to most gamers I'd say.
RT Low is honestly my favorite. It’s a noticeable increase in shadow quality (including the PC) while keeping the shadows crisp.
Now if only the game wouldn’t crash when I turn Raytracing on lol.
Shadow crisp is not what it should be
@@IghorMaia Looks better that way though imo. A game set in a fantasy world doesn't have to mimic boring earth physics.
@@IghorMaia The crisp shadows fit the art style.
@@solomon9655agreed. most games benefit from soft shadows but this game actually looks cleaner with the hard shadows.
@@solomon9655 I had some ray tracing crashes on PC after the update, verifying integrity of game files through steam fixed it for me
Great examples so far. Mountain top of the Giants shadows are terrible but this should fix it.
observing this comparison.......im just going to keep it off to get higher fps. Hopefully the 5000 series next year really pushes the boundaries of 4K/8K. 4K has been around for years now, id like to see GPU's finally exceed some expecxtations fps wise without Ai. Its like they are just playing around with shadows. I thgouth we already had this, it was called soft shadows lol.
rt medium, seems to be the sweet spot between realism vs performance.
The best video i have found about it. Clean and straight to the point. Thanks
Best comparison so far.
Honestly it's beyond me how anyone would trade 60 fps for that, as nice as it is. Even more beyond me how someone would pay significantly more on a gpu in order to get that difference. But I'm glad it's out there for everyone decide for themselves.
To each their own for sure. I think RT low already looks better than RT off though. RT medium seems to be the performance/visual sweet spot. You get the natural softness of shadows without the massive hit of RT maximum. I couldn't see that much difference between medium and max.
@@extrabenbuja how's the performance hit comparing off, medium and maximum? I don't think gpu usage is a good metric, so perhaps you could test at higher resolutions/other gpus so we get under 60 in all cases?
Also, is a video on the ray tracing distance cuttof something you'd consider doing?
@@iurigrang Higher resolution test is a good idea. I might make an 8K video maybe. The other option would be to disable the 60 fps cap with a mod, but I tried it briefly earlier and it insta crashed, probably because of the anti cheat stuff. I don't really wanna mess with that so higher resolution seems like a good idea. Could also look for areas where the draw distance is more visible and then zoom in. Thanks for the suggestions!
I think the visual benefits are far more practical for the cost than going from 1440p to 4k unless you can afford a giant $3,000 monitor or something.
I'm using a RTX 2060 on maximum raytracing settings and still have 60fps. It's really not that taxing in this specific game.
This is just the beginning. Hopefully they will add reflections.
And DLSS/FSR to help it work.
Wish they added rt reflections , a lot of them look great with SSR but some are broken and don't reflect the area properly , so it would've been a bigger upgrade to the visuals .
Also , they should add dlss , the performance hit is huge without it
Liurnia with raytraced reflections would make a cool screenshot. And I say screenshot because you'd probably only get 1 frame before the game crashed lol.
@@yewtewbstew547 i get what you're saying but it wouldn't be as big a performance hit as it may seem , the big hit is the initial calculation of the bvh structure for RT to work , the RT effects added on top of it won't have a super huge impact on performance compared to that , but yeah reflections in a world as big as elden ring may be problematic and destroy performance if no upscaling technique is present
@@yewtewbstew547 I imagine this exact case is why they probably didn't do raytraced reflections. Probably nuked their workstations lmao.
I honestly wish more games would apply either RT reflections or, possibly better for performance, planar reflections in dungeons and caves. There is MUCH less to worry about in terms of performance overhead in those situations, so probably could easily hit performance targets there, even with the better reflections. SSR is cool if you want a really performant, but fairly accurate (on good implementations) reflection. But yeah, it's only screen space, so it by definition only works even mildly well on puddles of water on the ground or some reflective surface on the ground or ceiling. Because anywhere else, you'll EASILY notice it's wrong. And even on top/bottom surfaces it's easy to break the effect if you look at them up close the right way.
finally a good comparison for this update, thanks mate
Should have done comparisons in the catacombs too, changes the way candle light fills some of the hallways, and all the nooks and crannies.
Thank you for taking the time to do this.
Thanks for watching it
Nice if not subtle improvement. No doubt testing RT for their next project. Medium looks to be the highest you need to go imo
I love how in modern rendering, more detailed shadows means they are "blurrier", aka diffused, just like real life shadows work. In older games cranking up shadows usually increased the raw resolution of the shadow maps, which caused shadows to get very sharp and defined, and that has ALWAYS looked weird to me. I've been on record saying that low/medium shadows looked better, back in the day, and with this super advanced procedural RT stuff, I feel like I am vindicated. Yes, shadows are SUPPOSED to be soft! Go outside lmao!
It is amazing to see that baked lights and some clever shading can actually simulate RT lighting so well. We fought for ray tracing for so long. We have so much new tech and algos, and still, the visual profit margin is barely noticeable. At least not in examples without reflections and dynamic lights. I wonder if somewhere there's actually an entirely different rendering approach that will revolutionize graphics as designated hardware did back then.
The thing is, even tho faking everything can look almost as good as RT lighting, it takes a looooong time to do it. It can take hours for a lighting artist to make a single area as close to "how it should look like" as possible, while just using RT lighting, you let the GPU do all the work and calculations. Ofc, just having RT lighting in a game wont replace lighting artists, its just another tool in their toolbox to make amazing worlds. RT is that next thing, it will just take a while for it to be readily available to everyone, and ofc the dedicated hardware for RT needs to improve as well so we dont see a significant performance hit.
@Rajta So, for a case like this, do you think there is even a point to adding in raytracing? Since the baked in lighting with raytracing off seems just as good to me. The shadows even tend to match up for the most part. I guess my question is: what is the actual benefit for elden ring to have raytracing?
@@aidan4031 Probably not. My best guess, fromsoft is testing it for their next game, and learing to use the tools, see the performance impact that it has.
I think RT hardware IS the next revolutionary thing. It's just been kind of slow to roll out. At the point that one can create raytraced light sources and just tweak a few variables instead of having to generate, bake, check, rebake, etc. you'll have your next revolution. I doubt that'll make all artists lives easier because... well, someone always finds someway to offset any free time we acquire with some crap, but it certainly should at least make lighting and shadow mapping a lot faster... once machines all are able to have at least competent dedicated hardware.
@@desmondbrown5508 yea, RT was always demanding, and its pretty wild that we even have any form of RT available to us, and being able to render frames per second. Its no surprise that in the movie industry, you render movies at frames per days. Even though RT in games is much less accurate and light sources cast a small amount of rays compared when they render movies, it's still an impressive feat.
You chose some GREAT vistas, nice job! Personally I can't play with RT on because it always crashes my client, perhaps a future update will fix it but at this point I'm not holding my breath.
No one will ever convince me that RT is worth the performance hit. Barely makes a difference overall unless you closely stare at every shadow you come by
Depends on a per game basis... Different games implement it differently.
@3rd World Gamer yeah, and out of every game I've ever seen implement it regardless of how they do it, it never makes a big enough difference to lose upwards of 50% of your performance. Developers can make lighting and reflections look just as good as raytracing with enough effort.
@@TDR-0484 on that front, it depends again. There are games where it's really well optimized or is such a positive impact on image quality without much impact on performance where it's just dumb not to have it... Especially if you're not planning on hitting above 60fps and if your video card can handle it.
Great examples: Metro Exodus, Dying Light 2, Control, Minecraft, Spider man (on PC is just beast), Hitman trilogy and a few more.
Those games with raytracing are on a whole other level. I'm leaving cyberpunk out btw since it does look awesome but that one indeed heavily tanks performance.
Perhaps I just have a different experience because I have 3080 12gb?
@@3rdWorldGamer I have the same gpu. We will just have to agree to disagree
It just feels nicer, but it's not worth an fps drop of any amount in my opinion, and the fact that it shipped without DLSS or even FSR is so strange
You'd figure it'd get some type of FSR cause of consoles, but yeah kinda weird.
Yeah, DLSS would be such a nice addition to this game. The AA solution ingame is kinda blurry in my opinion. DLSS would increase the image quality a lot and help with the added stress from RT
@@extrabenbuja Yeah a good DLSS quality implementation would be great. A lot of the time I just use that in games instead of TAA even if I'm not using raytracing, because often it looks better _and_ you gain some performance headroom back. I'd love it if they added that to Elden Ring.
@@yewtewbstew547 I wonder if it would be possible to add DLSS via modding, because it's actually possible in Resident Evil 4, I just made a video about that. Even DLAA is possible, which has the AA benefits of DLSS, but still uses native resolution. It looks incredible in RE4.
It would be awesome to have that in Elden Ring.
Look at that power consumption switching between rt settings
Interesting to see that low ray tracing only seems to cast hard shadows whilst no ray tracing sometimes tries to approximate blurrier shadows. All settings abow low give the correct smooth shadown expected from full raytracing where the further away a shadow is to its source, the blurrier it becomes.
Maybe the normal shadow map is just so low for some scenarios that it just looks blurry either way?
when RT for Elden Ring was announced, I was convinced it would be used selectively to improve reflective materials like metals, marble, and water. What we got is pretty disappointing.
So it basically amounts some ambient occlusion, high shadow resolution, self shadows, and shadow distance blur. You could barely call it RT since shadow casting technology uses an optimized form of raytraycing anyways. Would've really loved some ambient light effects, but I guess FromSoft's programmers aren't quite there yet
I love the FS games and think they have some of the best concept designers in the business. Shame their tech and performance is always so far behind. Majority of lights don't even cast shadows in the game so any ray traced features seems like a waste before that is addressed. I mean look at what Bluepoint achieved without ray tracing in their lighting model for DeS:R - it's one of the best looking lighting solutions around and I'm fairly certain it was done with distance fields!
Yeah, it's a shame because FS games are easily among my favorite games out there, but technically their games always suffer from some issues, and it's such a shame Bloodborne hasn't been ported yet. The PS3 version is pretty messy technically, it would really shine on PC or PS5/XB1X, well as long as there are no technical issues again lol.
@@extrabenbuja BB on PC would be a dream come true but it would still suffer from the lack of shadow casting lights and performance would probably still be a mess if From were the ones to do it, haha.
@@katanalevygames True lol
So as expected it is just shadows and maybe RTAO? Couldn't even be asked to do reflections. GI would have made a world of difference even. Minimal effort but its the thought that counts I guess.
I’ve been playing it via boosteroid on all max and I have to say as much as people are hating on the raytracing added, I personally think it makes the game seem so much more beautiful. Started a new arcane build today and it was just like starting the game for the first time walking about Limgrave.
THIS is the video I was looking for finally, thank you, medium seems to be the way to go imo
finally someone who knows what ray tracing in showing it lmao cheers
now i can see what it would look like if I wasn't on PS4
thank you! can you show us some areas with reflective surfaces? like that room in raya lucaria?
I think fromsoft didn't add raytraced reflections only shadows unfortunately
@@TiennosMigos in this dude other video there is a Raya Lucaria room scene where it looks like reflections are better then what I remember. Need to check this out
So far it seems reflections are still screen space or cubemap based from what I've seen. I'm gonna check it out some more tomorrow. It's late, but thanks for watching!
@@TiennosMigos shadows and ambient occlusion are ray traced. Find a shack with a sheltered awning, toggle between max and off and you can see the RTAO in effect.
@@extrabenbuja thank you
I'm running an i9 11900 OC @ 5.4 gig watercooled with 32 gigs of ram and the EVGA RTX 3060 ti FTW3 Ultra: Most of the time I'm hitting 58-60 FPS and noticed micro stutter died around 57 FPS and am wondering if they optimized ER with this patch - Monitor's G-sync working flawlessly for very smooth frames. DId you notice anything different with this patch regarding this? - Great video by the way =)
Thanks! I didn't really notice any microstuttering, but tbh I didn't really notice them before the patch either lol
Low, Medium, and High all perform within about a 5% window of each other.
Much like most of the other settings in Elden Ring 😂
My 7900XT can't handle RTX max even at 1440p in some areas, had to lower general settings to high to get it closer to 60. At 4k,. performance was generally unstable in the 40s. Cpu is a 13700k running at stock settings. I think I'll just settle for medium RT with max settings. Wish the had FSR, that would solve a lot for me.
Amd cards are not known for their ray tracing capabilities.
You can use Lossless Scaling. For this and other games
@@TkachenkoArtem Does this work with borderless mode? I tried Magpie with borderless and it did nothing for me.
@@canakar1657 You can notice the change if you are someone who does play more different video games regularly.
The artifacting of SSR is truly something you see once and then you wont stop noticing them.
very impressive review, subscribed immediately. I have one question, which setting do you recommend for raytracing? I also use 4090, but the fps drops to 45 - 50 here and there
Thank you! I recommend either RT medium since it has the RTAO as well as more natural soft shadows, or RT high which has higher resolution RTAO from what I can tell. Because with RT medium I noticed some graininess on certain patches off grass at distance. I played a bit with RT high earlier and it performed pretty well.
RT maximum just seems overkill tbh.
@@extrabenbuja Thank you! Then I will give it a try for RT high. Hope From Software will fix this soon, the current performance is not what it should be...especially for a RTX 4090 card
I really love From Software, they are my favorite devs for a while now, and i don't even care about their games having poor graphics, but they should at least add things like Vulkan 1.3 support (they should have gone Vulkan instead of DX12 imo), DirectStorage, FSR and DLSS, seems like a waste a masterpiece like Elden Ring not having a single standard feature, no nothing.
Poor graphics? What? Did we play the same game?
FSR/DLSS is an absolute must for any modern game now.
The game looks phenomenal with RT turned on IMO. I think it buffed the graphics of the game big time. In some places the game looks very realistic now.
2:07 wow that's a nice one!
Best comparsion, no only idiotic RT on/off, but also differences between RT settings.
I can't tell any difference above medium, and medium and high seem to have the same performance hit. I think safe to use high for optimal setting
RT Medium seems like a sweet spot. If only there was DLSS or FSR support on PC:/
DLSS 3 would be perfect for this game.
I think this should highlight more Fromsoft's abilities to produce great looking, expertly lit environments without the need for fancy tools like RT. Sure, the added ambient occulsion and softer, more accurate shadows look nice, but it's hardly a significant upgrade from From's original setup.
RT medium looks like a good middle ground
I’m experiencing a wee bit of lag in the RT update on the ps5
It’s an improvement on the visual aspect but it’s a bit laggy when rotating the camera
interesting to note that rt off idles at 120w & rt max is over 200w.
Not that strange given it's using the RT cores with RT on.
RT Medium seems like the best option. Reaches a level of smoothness that's very pleasing without sacrificing performance. High and Maximum are just diminishing returns. Low is not worth it.
RT Medium (and above) look great.
I don't see much difference when it comes to GI, low seems to do pretty well. No more weirdly glowing objects in the shadows. However, the sun shadows seem to be much better on medium.
GI was not touched for RT. Literally just sun shadows.
@@JebsonofJeb There is an obvious improvement in AO, which is part of GI
Is it just me, or are there serious diminishing returns beyond "medium RT"? (Huge difference from off -> low though, and certainly noticeable low -> medium)
Yeah, you're absolutely right. I really have trouble seeing any differences beyond medium, even at distance.
I'd recommend RT low for anyone who wants the RTAO and better shadows than RT off, without sacrificing too much performance, and RT medium if you have the performance to spare. Maybe RT High for high end if there are instances where the RT shadows do pop in noticeably that I haven't seen yet.
Finally after years thanks to this simple video I understood what RT actually does
Elden Ring only does ray traced shadows, and from what I've seen it only applies to shadows from "the sun" or "the moon". In other games like Minecraft they do all of the illumination with RT (global illumination) which has a much greater impact on the look of the game. In Minecraft you get color blending from every light source, you can filter it through stained glass, you get these really beautiful diffuse reflections and sharp reflections too depending on how rough the material is. Basically Elden Ring has the weakest form of ray tracing, similar to the stuff we saw 5 years ago with Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
ray tracing can affect a lot of stuff, like ilumination, global ilumination, shadows, reflections, refraction etc, elden ring just implemented RT Shadows
Nah, this is only RT shadows, not full RT
Finally a good comparision and not fucking open world necrolimb
i have a laptop with 4060 and RT low seems very worth it, generally seems it lets much more light go on and so details and shadow appreciation, i prob could put it on max with np cause elden ring it's such insane optimized game but it seems it just blurs the shadows and bit more, dont look much better just personal likes.
In some areas it makes litrally 0 Difference but whens theres more sunlight its easier to see the shadow difference
Are you getting a steady 60 fps at 4K during gameplay? I was surprised to see a constant 60 on the fps counter.
So its just raytraced shadow? No full path trace, global illumination, or water reflection?
Only shadows and AO
The shadow isn't even real-time ray traced. This is the lowest and laziest form of the entire Ray-Tracing options, but From Software somehow make it worse and unoptimized it. Beautiful. xD
is there still stuttering in the pc port? i finished the game at launch and it seems like it has the exact same performance issues, but now with RT on top of it all i can't imagine thats smooth
They improved it a good amount. Not "fixed" but it is mostly playable nowadays.
@@meisterwu8922 thank you
Low is worth it but with some extra power I would turn to medium cause of the soft shadows
The only video what knows what to show. But, honestly, RT in this game is a waste of resources for unnoticeable changes
Atlus looks absolutely dreamy even though im watching at 360p
am i weird for thinking the low ray tracing looks the best? shadows almost seem too diffuse at higher settings.
is this only raytraced shadows or is it raytraced reflections with light bounce etc?
It was fun watching GPU utilization and power consuption kreeping with each change
Not much for the performance hit on a game that still has performance issues on all platforms. They should just hand it over their technical work to another company like BluePoint.
And at least for me it introduced so many more bugs and crashing in 1.9 that has been mostly fixed by 1.4.
Hopefully they can fix it before the DLC.
sheesh rtx 4090 didnt even sweating
I don't think this makes any difference in the experience at all. I wouldn't notice these differences while playing, I would have to be looking for them. BUT, what I do like is how enabling ray tracing can speed up game development by making this natural form of lighting easier to implement. The fact that Fromsoft's engine now has RTX capabilities means if should be no problem to add it to any future games, and faster development time from a studio like Fromsoft is welcome.
Do you still get the uneven frame pacing and/or stutters? It got better but was never really resolved for me.
Kind of weird that they put in RT support without DLSS... I mean, unless you're taking screenshots or filming pretty scenes, I doubt most people would want to enable RT seeing how badly it kills your frames. Even on an RTX 3070, just putting my RT on Low drops my frames from solid 60 to 50.
I'm one of those player that doenst notice anything big with the ray tracing update, it just feels same for me, lol
Imagine updating your game with RTX Shadows but its still capped at 60fps... thanks Myazaki, great game
Why keep framerate capped? Would be nice to see hit on performance
I'm curious what it does to faces. In Elden Ring, your face is either greyed out or you look like you're sat at your makeup table with a mirror surrounded by lightbulbs.
So, the low RT looks the best.
RT should dynamically adjust quality depending on scene complexity. This is turning into an obvious racket.
So is the RT only for shadows? I thought it was going to be for lighting as well but that seems unchanged.
So is it just shadows?. No reflections and Global Illumination with bounces and stuff?.
Just RT shadows and AO
If you ask me, raytrace is good for some shadow games, like dont follow the shadows, something or some monsters can come out, or something like that... are only shadows, who watch inside a game where are shadows?
Great video! Had mine set to maximum, but now I’ll set it to low because I honestly don’t see much of a difference.
is it only shadows? are RT reflections a thing? there arer puddles in caelid that reflect the red sky and look amazing untill you tilt the camera so the sky isn't in vision anymore then the screen space reflections have nothing to show. RT reflections would be a game changer for stuff like that.
Just shadows and AO, reflections are still screen space based unfortunately.
So basically, we can just use regular low detail shadows, and get the same blurry mess as on RT Ultra, but at a fraction of the computational cost. Amazing... 😂
First scene comparison is very suspect. Why does the RT OFF look like they forgot a major light source? That is obviously not indirect bounced lighting in the RT ON shots.
In that area somehow the RT-off sun appears at a later time than with RT On. It might be a bug, or maybe RT calculates the long distance shadows differently. I caught that difference by accident in this video.
You can recreate it if you teleport to outside the Lucaria Academy and skip to morning and check the differences between RT on and off.
I was confused why my game went from running at a consistent 140fps to 30fps when looking at the burning erdtree. Turns out I had no clue RT was added and it was set to Medium by default. I've had this game on max since I got my 3070 and was confused when I came back to playing it.
Even the almighty 4090 gets checked with RT. The game is very playable at RT on high & I'm glad its finally been implement. That said, we do need DLSS/FSR.
There's a mod that enables DLSS and it works pretty well. The HUD elements are a bit blurry though, but with DLSS quality even RT maximum is quite playable. 70-100 fps easy, most of the time I was actually CPU bound.
I want to see some of the armors. Because the reflectivity would not be against a cubemap and actually be calculated correctly with raytracing as well.
the armors look a lot better now, the textures pop out more
The RT shadows as they've implemented them don't include small objects and leaves in the BVH structure, making them paradoxically _less_ accurate on average than non-RT shadows. This is very clearly visible at 1:16 - look at the pebbles and shrubs next to the character's right shoulder.
Any RT solution that can't properly resolve plant shadows is not a _serious_ implementation of ray tracing. Looking at how long adding it took, the performance issues, the poor BVH handling and the lack of upscaling tech, I would speculate that Fromsoft had ray tracing as a publishing contract requirement but didn't actually want to do it. This half-hearted gesture in the vague direction of ray tracing helps no one.
Even having RT on low makes a big difference
It makes a "difference" in shadows...but it's again a poor and quick implementation of RT with no path-traced GI...so the quality boost is minimal and sometimes even a downgrade. I don't agree with some that "realistic" lighting and shadow work are better than crafted lighting specifically created to set a mood in a room, forest, or more. Elden Ring at least runs, without mods, at 60fps so the performance impact on high-end cards doesn't show up for most users...but this still ain't worth possible slowdown for me. It's just...meh.
I'm somewhat troubled about the shadows at Farum Azula. Almost all lights are static lights. Why do these shadows have lower quality than the ray traced ones? Shouldn't they be completely rendered offline at compile time at the best quality possible? Maybe a gamedev can answer me this
Idk maybe the lighting isn't static in-game it just doesn't change with time, so it technically progresses, but doesn't visually change at all (so it changes from day to night lighting, they just look the same) so they couldn't use pre-rendered shadows?
we've already had prerendered shadows in games before sekiro, and they are awful, no thanks
Pre-rendered shadow (maps) have to rendered at some chosen resolution, same issue applies if rendering them offline. The problem with shadow-mapping is which resolution do you choose for shadows for a given camera angle, it depends on where the camera is (how many shadow-pixels cover a screen pixel, it depends on view angles, distance, etc). RT shadows on the other hand works with geometry so they render at the same resolution as your screen instead of a pre-defined lower shadow resolution.
@@SerBallister I mean I know no game which has prerendered shadows which look better than what real time shadow maps can offer. rt of course is an absolute win, perfomance aside
Thanks for showing this! Seems like a meaningless update for consoles as the frame rate penalty is no where near "worth it" for a game like this, but if I had a nice gaming pc with a beefy graphics card, I'd love this new feature.