Alan Wake 2 PC Path Tracing: The Next Level In Visual Fidelity?

[Music] Alan Wake 2 is a rather Sublime looking game and the hardware path tracing and Ray tracing exclusive to the PC version elevated it to a pinnacle of real-time rendering in today's video for digital Foundry I will explore how the raate tracing Works in Allen wck 2 taking you on a tour of what it brings to the game I will also talk to you a bit about tweaking its quality to make it more viable for older less capable gpus and lastly I will talk a bit about dlss Ray reconstruction how it is looking here in the game and its positives and negatives to start the video off let us begin in a classic North American institution a diner I think the OD deer Diner in Allen wake 2 just looks positively wonderful and it looks so positively wonderful as we're seeing here with Ray tracing but it also looks pretty great without it and that's what this looks like here is a real-time rendered image of one of the diner booths in Allen wake 2 and none of the hardware rate tracing options are enabled here I think it looks great even without RT really top of the class rendering there for titles without RT at this camera angle the various techniques that remedy uses for Reflections shadows and bounce slighting do shine but I think we could agree it could be better now here is where I will turn on one of the first RT effects to make it better and that is Ray TRC direct lighting now this primarily makes it so all lighting sources will be using Ray TRC Shadows for our dining Booth here this has a few important consequences for one the shadow map errors on the back rest here of the booth disappear Shadow Maps can be a bit of a testy technique that will be Rife with problems that may need workarounds and this is a fail area that we can see here where flickering is brought into the image so the image will be more stable with Ray tracing on another thing not seen in this still image of this booth is how the ray Trace direct liting helps with Cascade issues from Shadow Maps check out this zooming shot here of the camera moving forward I want you to pay attention to the Shadow from the bush in the center of the screen on the left with cascaded Shadow maps you can see hard Cuts between the various resolutions of the Cascades causing noticeable and abrupt jumps in Shadow quality as the camera gets further away or closer to the bush this is a problem cascaded Shadow maps have with the rate Trace Shadows on the right we can see how the shadow of that bush stays similarly detailed throughout the camera's movement Arc toward it it doesn't show the comparatively obvious to see snapping behavior in the shadows so it'll look more stable with this I'm trying to show you that Ray traced images in still side by sides can often look more similar than they do actually in the real game when a camera is moving when cameras move in games that's when you tend to see some of the bigger differences actually in rendering quality but even with a still camera we can see some great increases to detail thanks to the r Trace direct liting let's go back to the diner again take note of the Shadows from the crocheted curtains here with the typical rendering we see on the left the shadow map resolution at this range really can't cope and solve the Shadows there from the curtains the ray Trace direct lighting though does it incredibly well showing each and every bit of the Shadow casting from those crochet details with per pixel Precision the denoiser here for the ray tracing using Ray reconstruction as I'm using here can resolve ridiculously fine detail and you'll find this all throughout the game where the Shadows cast by light sources or from the main character's flashlight will show off off greater detail with Ray tracing on razor sharp Shadows where you can see every little bit of the geometric detail in the shadows while the shadow Maps May in comparison struggle with their limited resolution to capture all the detail in the game and there's a lot of geometric detail in this game but that doesn't mean Shadows are universally sharp or anything like that with the direct lighting enabled check out this shot here of a chain link fence on the other side of this fence is a large area light source and with the direct Lighting on on the right here you can see how we get accurate penum effects the shadow starts off perfectly pin sharp with a full-on umber Shadow but as the shadow moves away from the fence casting it it gets more diffused as the size of the area light makes it so that the Umbra in the shadow primarily disappears on the other hand with Shadow maps on the left we can see how the shadow sharpness is universally the same which really makes no physical sense the variability of hardness or softness in the shadows can really make some scenes like here in the woods on the left where all the Shadows are universally soft and diffused with the shadow maps on the right with direct lighting Ray tracing we can see great variation in the sharpness of Shadows some like those from far away trees here are nice and soft While others that are closer to the objects casting to them are razor sharp this might be a minor detail for some of you out there but I think it actually enhances the scenes greatly capturing a realism that you don't often see in video games [Music] okay so let's get back to the diner and the game scene without any hardware Ray tracing now let's add on full multi-bounce indirect lighting into the image in addition to the direct lighting we had before now I think you should see there are some rather large differences here and while concentrate on a few specifically first is the most subtle one but it is fundamental if you look at the napkin dispenser reflection in both images I want you to see how the left image of the napkin dispenser reflection kind of starts to disappear towards the top of the reflection and notice that the bottom of the reflection where the reflection meets the bottom of the dispenser how it looks completely attached even though the dispenser is actually elevated on pegs this makes no physical sense of course the reason for this is because the reflection on the left and all the smaller Reflections in the image on the left here are done primarily in screen space as we can see when I move the camera up and down with the game not having Hardware rate tracing on we'll see that nearly all the Reflections in the image will completely disappear as the objects and surfaces reflected are no longer in screen space this is a huge difference between Hardware Ray tracing being on and off and as we can see here with the hardware rate tracing on No Such Thing occurs because the game is tracing outside of scream space now this is a really big difference in the game and it can lead to results like this for example where we see here where check out the scene with Saga staring at this wall and door that I'm looking at there are windows behind Saga that are lighting this room up but since those windows are not in screen space you cannot see much of the reflectivity from them the wall and the door as a result look rather matte as the other reflection systems in the game do not have the Fidelity to capture the things off screen with a great enough precision with the path tracing engaged now we can see a variety of Reflections being added into the mixture that really up the realism and it really UPS the material quality we can see really soft and diffus Reflections in the wood grain on the wall we also get really clear and sharp Reflections off the glass cover from the photo that is hung on the wall and in that glass reflection we can see how there's differing levels of roughness on the glass it's not just completely pin sharp and lastly my favorite reflection is that one on the varnished door which I just think looks Ultra Cool and looks like something you'd see in real life a varnished wooden door that's a material type you don't see too often represented well in video games but like I said earlier with the Shadows static images don't actually do the differences Justice R tracing is much more transformative in this game when the camera is moving as we can see here when SSR is being obscured it creates really big disconnects and Fidelity that will take you out of the scene and this doesn't happen at all with Hardware rate tracing active this issue of disclusion of screen space Reflections affects all the materials in the game actually so many materials that are rough or very smooth in Allen wake without R tracing don't look completely right but then look a lot more correct with the ray tracing on these rate Trace Reflections make a big change to the game's visuals in all those scenes with more modern materials in them plastic Metals polished woods and whatnot one thing that alen wake 2 does does differently than other games do is that the reflections are path traced in other games like we can see here the world in the reflections is pretty simplified there's not much lighting information there to keep the performance up so Shadows shading and interreflections are just really missing or don't look right in comparison Reflections in Allen wake 2 Trace up to three bounces of light so in Reflections you can have highly detailed lighting and Reflections and shadows like this shot here of Allen wake in the rounded surveillance mirror we can see how alen wake has his flashlight out then there's light spilling behind him from the open door and we can also see bounce sliding from that light spilling out the door on the adjacent wall if we compare to the software R Trace Reflections using signed distance field that the game otherwise uses with Hardware rate tracing off I think it's obvious enough to say that there are generational differences in Fidelity here when you turn on the raate tracing and thanks to the path tracing of light those things that are reflected in a number of scenes look rather good in the reflections whereas the game without Hardware R tracing and just screen space Reflections and the software R tracing technique can look pretty weird and unnatural especially when there's a lot more reflective things on screen such as [Music] mirrors going back to the diner again another thing that the path traced indirect lighting gives us is less noise in the reflections we can see this on the back rest of the booth again on the left hand side of the image without Hardware rate tracing we can see there's this kind of speckled look in the reflection on the back rest now that isn't detail there it's actually just an artifact of the game's SSR and software Ray tracing which thanks to higher precision and modern D noising is completely missing in the right hand side image with Hardware Ray tracing this difference in noise is more obvious in other scenes like this one here here I'm showing you this scene with Hardware rate tracing off and this couch looks a little weird I would say there's speckled noise from the game software rate tracing that is giving it a stippled look when we turn on Hardware R tracing it is denoised rather intensely so we can see how it looks a lot less like there's holes in the couch or that the couch is made of some sort of reflective sandpaper and that is a general upgrade that this game gets when you turn on the hardware Ray tracing there's a lot less IM noise due to the SSR and software rate Trace Reflections no longer being [Music] [Music] used so that covers specular lighting path tracing or Reflections as they're commonly called another thing that the path tracing in Allen wake does is it also Al covers diffused lighting so dull surfaces and their interreflections of light this is what people tend to mean when they use the phrase Global illumination this is an area in Allen wake that looks particularly awesome I would say with Hardware rate tracing but it is also done in a very different way than previous path Trace titles we've seen like cyberpunk 2077 and it's going to need some extra explanation but before I get into that let me talk about what it does add to the image in the diner scene again where once again we're looking at it here without any hardware RT and once again let me turn on the direct lighting plus indirect path Trace lighting the diffuse interreflections that I want to call out very specifically are in this little Bowl here holding the heavy cream packets I think it's obvious when I put these two images side by side which one is more realistic but I'm going to describe why I think it is that case on the image on the right we can see the sunlight hitting the Blue Bowl which then bounces blue tinged light off of it onto the table and AJ jent window sill it also bounces the color from the bowl in the bowl itself so it adds a blue tinge to the creamer packets in there and we also see the sunlight bouncing off those little creamer packets as well adding in a lot more local color variation and contrast in the inside of the bowl to describe it in simple aesthetic terms the image on the right has the objects jelling much more with each other they're grounded and their lighting is interrelated that is the power of path tracing on a small scale scale we can see that in another scene here where path tracing in alen Wake 2 for diffuse lighting helps ground things into the scene on a smaller scale here alen wake's flashlight is Illuminating the ground on both sides of this image left and right but on the right hand side we can see that the path tracing captures the light of that flashlight bouncing around the scene it's lighting up Allen's pant leg and the traffic cone itself and it makes the image just look a lot more natural I would say and this is the general difference you will see with path tracing on for a lot of the smaller features in alen Wick 2's visuals a lot of small light bounce detail but on a larger scale turning on path tracing actually will not always create very big differences in the lighting and that is because Allen Wick is doing something a bit strange I would say based on what I can see Allen week 2 is mixing the results from path tracing with the larger scale Global illumination that the game uses when Hardware rate tracing is set to off and there's some good evidence of that in the game check out this area here where we can see that the path tracing is off and notice how we can see some large aliasing in the lighting of this image that is produced by the global illumination with Hardware Ray tracing off the lighting and shadows here look like a low resolution texture a representation of what lighting is in a degraded form if we switch on path tracing I want you to notice two things for one that low res Alias look is still there in the lighting so it appears that the patch racing is being blended with this this other lighting technique but one thing you should notice is that the hard Alias lines that made it look like a low reses texture are much softened due to the path tracing kind of blending over them as a result of this Behavior I would say path tracing in alen Wake 2 isn't really pure as the standard system for GI is also being used in some capacity underneath it all throughout the entire game and that is why when you turn on and off path tracing in some scenes it doesn't change the look of the game in a really big way unlike say in cyberpunk 2077 where turning on the overdrive rate tracing there will lead to huge differences the upside to this in Allen wake 2 is that people without path tracing get good enough to fuse Global Illumination in the game and technically the path tracing might need less Den noising work for example but the downside of it is that the path tracing will inherit visual errors from the other GI solution that is running in tandem with it take this area here inside this building this is with the path racing off and if we look I think it's pretty easy to see that there's something wrong with the image the GI solution here is too low Fidelity to capture the finer geometry detail in the scene like the table and the chair so the light is leaking through this geometry onto the ground the chair legs and the table support almost look like they're floating above the ground as the light is leaking through them now if I turn on path tracing we can see that that same look is actually maintained there the path tracing is inheriting the issues from whatever other GI solution is being used in the game as they're Blended together with this you can see areas in the game where the other GI solution tends to bring up errors in the path tracing a good example of the errors that you'll see from the mixing of the GI systems is at the thresholds of buildings in the forest sections of the games like at windows or at doors take notice here for example in this shot how Saga is not casting a shadow with path tracing on even though light is spilling into the room and across her with pure path tracing you would really expect that but here the other GI solution is overriding the light it's almost as if diffuse Rays cannot leave this building you can see that as well with the game's leaves now the leaves in the game World outside of indoor areas will always have perfect Shadow casting and perfect indirect lighting but when they are indoors like you can see here at the threshold of the door they'll have improper lighting applied to them and this comes from the other GI system in the game overriding the path tracing without path tracing on the game gives these leaves a semblance of shadowing with ssao but of course there is no ssao with path tracing on as path tracing fully replaces it as it should as ssao is just a hack as a result areas like these in the game at the threshold of doors can look a little bit awkward due to the other GI system in the game overriding the path tracing results but sometimes the path tracing can help the image out in spite of the errors for example here here is all the hardware R tracing set to off again and with the standard GI solution we can see the light leaking through the wall here I think it's a bit distracting in this otherwise rather dark scene but with path tracing set to on we can see how it eliminates most of the light leaking here and it just leaves a tiny little dull amount of light leak in the corner so the path racing can help improve the results of the other GI solution in the end I'm a little torn on the lighting setup here for path tracing in Allen WG 2 the game does look really really good and I love the way the path tracing Alters the spec lighting of the game as in all the reflections but the way it affects diffused lighting is a bit mixed since it uses the other GI system that is more prone to errors and is less precise that means that the path tracing in Allen wake 2 is less precise and more error prone than we've seen perhaps in other games that use path tracing but still the game with path tracing set to on improves detail greatly on a micro scale since the path tracing is much better than the other GI system in handling small detail and small [Applause] geometry okay so the last bit I want to cover in the diner is Ray Trace transparency and adding that in as we can see here will add in Reflections on transparent surfaces here we can see it adds a not noticeable reflection on the glass here where we can now see the table objects on the table and the rest of the din are reflected in the glass window which really just wasn't there in a good way with it off as I pointed out earlier these Reflections on transparent surfaces are not just full mirror Reflections there's a varying level of roughness there where we can see glass surfaces having scuffs smudges and dirt on them and that'll affect the way the reflections look and this transparency reflection is the bow tie on our Ray tracing here and it helps tie a scene alt together so we started off with this a good-looking rendition of a diner table and Booth but with large inaccuracies and we end with this which I think looks extra fantastic in my opinion when we flip between these two we can see a nice generational jump and Fidelity on this scale and once again this is just a still image in motion since we're no longer relying on screen space tracing for anything that means we're going to have the ray Trac image looking a lot more stable and noise-free and this stability is something that elevates alen wake 2's Graphics tremendously now before I moved on to how the rate tracing scales on Lower gpus I want to talk about some idiosyncrasies in alen Wake 2's Ray tracing one thing that is really cool is how it handles vegetation with my talking with remedy at Gamescom I know that the vegetation of the game is fully represented in the ray tracing alen wake 2 apparently uses skin geometry for its vegetation which is not too common and that means that grass leaves and tree branches all will move and look right in the shadows and Reflections like you expect they would this is an area where many games often fail when they use R tracing and you'll see vegetation being static or missing shadows and Reflections since they rely on older tricks to kind of fake vegetation movement having things like vegetation though represented accurately in the bvh in Allen wake 2 is rather expensive as you could imagine and I think here they added in an optimization that can sometimes be a little bit distracting check this out as you move through grass patches in the game sometimes you can see them having a popping effect as lighting applies to them as you move through them it's almost like they're being called out of the BBH structure a bit aggressively I find this a bit distracting and I would really love an option perhaps to increase or decrease quality for future gpus and PCs a last idiosyncrasy that I noticed that is worth mentioning is not everything is path traced to Perfection glass for example with the direct lighting does not do transparency Shadows or costic so shining a light through water or glass does not bring about cool transparent shadow effects or refraction like you might expect there similarly although the reflections are incredibly true to World Lighting and geometry they don't include everything you can see some decals here are added in screen space with this graffiti and lastly although we get path traced Reflections for opaque geometry the reflections shown in transparency as we can see here don't seem to follow the same path tracing rules notice how we can see Allen and the mirrors reflected here in this transparent glass surface but we don't see the reflection of Allen in the mirror in that reflection you get what I mean these minor graphical inconsistencies that I'm showing off here show that the sky is the limit with Ray tracing still there's still so much more things that can be more fully rate traced or path Trac in games and games like Allen wake 2 are really just the beginning here and even though this game looks incredible now there are still many areas in the future where raate tracing could still be even better coming to optimization for this path tracing I chose the RTX 380 as it's still a rather common GPU out there and it's still really powerful at the same settings as the PlayStation 5 for example we can see it achieving nearly two times the performance of the PS5 which is awesome to see and I think ampor gpus are really doing well in this game and outpacing older Generations but watch what happens when I Max the path tracing options with dlss reconstruction at that same resolution and otherwise same settings yep the performance goes way down you would essentially be looking at a 30fps experience in this game at these settings if you wanted to Max it out arguably you could but I want to offer an alternative for 60fps with rt so let's go through the settings first you have the quality settings for the indirect path tracing which control the amount of specular bounces visible and diffused bounces we'll start with reflection here we can see ranged from low to high how there are less Reflections in the reflections the lower you go that's a high quality level we get all three bounces at low and medium there appears to just be one bounce of specular lighting and you can see a more matte tone in the reflection of that phone booth the difference between medium and low for specular quality is the reflection resolution it appears to be half resolution or so at low and full resolution at medium and we can see that affecting the quality of smaller details in the reflection like the text and symbols visually I would say low is actually a good optimized setting here for diffuse lighting quality we see something similar I would say here even at the low setting with its limited bounces of light we can still see a good amount of light bounce occurring the blue light is bouncing off the bowl onto the table and window sill at the higher settings like medium and high we can see more resolution and bounces there which increase the contrast and indirect shadows and light in the bowl but honestly I still think it looks pretty good at low here and I would say if the performance is good enough which we'll talk about very soon then it's a great optimized setting for the transparency tracing there's a quality switch here from low to high which you can see reduces the tracing resolution of transparency in motion it means the low setting is just more unstable in comparison to the high setting but I would say the low setting here is a good candidate for optimized settings for direct lighting you only have an on and off switch but there is control of its denoising and here I want to show you something interesting here are the three denoisers for direct lighting they all look kind of different and it's hard to say actually which one is most accurate as we don't have a ground truth example here to say what is most accurate so it's a matter of taste but the most important thing to notice is that the performance is way different between them the denoising set to high will half the frame rate in comparison to Ray reconstruction or the denoising set to low here for such things as Shadows I prefer the look of Ray reconstruction and given its performance it makes a lot of sense to use it on an Nvidia card or low if you're not on an Nvidia card for the 3080 though this test that I'm showing is very important as it shows us that even at PS5 settings and only using RT direct lighting with the low denoiser we're just about 60 FPS or so so if we were going to add in any of the indirect lighting we would definitely be way below 60 FPS so for something like the RTX 3080 I actually only recommend doing RT direct lighting and using Ray Rec construction if you're going for a 60fps experience recommended settings get more interesting though when I drop in an RTX 470 here and here we can see at those PS5 settings that I showed off earlier it underperforms next to the RTX 380 it runs on average 14% slower than it at the same setting but if you compare it with the full path tracing Suite enabled and with Ray reconstruction at at those settings and res while we can see the tables flip 470 is now outperforming the 380 by 26% at 41 FPS while the 380 is just a bit above 30 here my recommendation for 4070 tier gpus is to turn on indirect path tracing options and transparency to low to save some more performance and then turn on frame generation when doing that the game is now at 80 FPS as we're seeing here and this is one of the heaviest areas in the game it is a great deal faster as we seeing here in the nonforest areas running at and above 100 FPS for example so it's a pretty great experience but I would still say it's actually not perfect depending upon your input device now it's a bit hard to show off in this video but the game controls really well on a controller as I'm showing here but with a mouse if you're not at a frame rate divisible by 30 the game can have stuttering with camera motion using a mouse just like it did in death Loop now I don't like this at all and I think this is something that remedy really needs to fix and as soon as possible getting over over to Ray reconstruction I have the same appreciation of it as I saw in cyberpunk 2077 more or less Reflections in motion are much better than the standard D noising that is provided they really make the game look a lot better here where we can see the olden noiser smearing in comparison to the really crisp look that we see there with Ray [Music] reconstruction the same with rapid lighting changes which look Snappy and natural with Ray reconstruction on but look a lot less responsive and a bit weird with Ray reconstruction off in cyberp punk you might recall that I said that it looked artificially sharpened at points in time and I'd say that is lessened to a degree in Allen wake but it's kind of hard to say exactly why that is the case but I still see that oversharpening occurring and a great place to point it out is in character faces where the sharpening aspect kind of over highlights normal maps on people's faces and makes their skin look a bit odd it kind of destroys the subsurface scattering in a scene like this one with Alex Casey's character I actually think Ray reconstruction is not a detriment to the realism of the material on his face I think it looks pretty great here but in other scenes like we can see here I want you to notice how the ray reconstruction effect is killing the subsurface gettering on Alan wake's skin here making it look papery and kind of wrong as it's overemphasizing the normal Maps this sharpening is something that I think really needs to be worked on for future iterations of Ray reconstruction as I find it a noticeable blemish on otherwise good results another thing I want to see improved is the oversharpening that can occur the lower the internal resolution is at lower dlss presets like we're seeing here the game can have a more obvious posterized look than it has at higher dlss presets like I said earlier I think this game doesn't look as oversharpened as cyberpunk does but I still can see some of the Hallmark issues that I saw in cyberpunk including a number of times seeing Trails behind objects with Ray reconstruction on and I really want to see this Tech improve for the future but it is otherwise really great in this title and all the shots you've seen in this video have been with Ray reconstruction on speaking of all the shots in this video I want to extend a special thanks to France BMA whose cinematic photo debug camera tools that I've been using here really made this video possible and allowed me to get the insights and all the awesome cinematic shots that you've seen so far and it goes to show I think how important it is for a game with this High Fidelity to launch with something like a photo mode because this game looks great and it's awesome to see all the objects and everything up close in full detail with that being said I've reached the end of this video hopefully you have a good idea of the rate tracing and path tracing in this game and also a little bit of a strategy to help make it run on your PC I think Allen wake 2 does look incredible at the moment even with the issues I pointed out and I cannot wait to see what remedy does in its patching cycle for this this game or in future games if you did enjoy this video hit that like button and subscribe to the channel if you're already a subscriber hit that little bell in the corner to be informed as soon as digital Foundry posts a video if you want to help us out support us on patreon to get years of our content in high quality for download comment below follow on Twitter and as always this is Alex bding you farewell on [Music] in

Channel: Digital Foundry

Views: 199,967

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Id: tXfwvohROPA

Length: 31min 33sec (1893 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 04 2023