Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 - PC Tech Review - DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction Deep Dive

foreign [Music] with cyberpunk 2077's Phantom Liberty expansion and 2.0 update there are quite a lot of changes to the base game and the technology driving the games from the DF perspective the update to the game's full Ray tracing overdrive mode with dlss 3.5 Ray reconstruction is perhaps the most intriguing as of version 2.0 all RTX users from Turing ampere all the way to add a Lovelace gpus can now select the dlss 3.5 Ray reconstruction Tech in the game menu to enhance the visuals when using the RT overdrive mode so what does this dlss 3.5 bring to the table and what other Tech changes are there in cyberpunk 2077's 2.0 version I will cover that and more in this video but first before I get into the changes themselves specifically I want to talk conceptually about what dlss 3.5 Ray reconstruction is why does it even exist what is the point to get into that let me explain denoising a bit basically in a game with raytraced effects any of the pixels that are affected by Ray tracing need to be denoised take for example Quake 2 RTX here where the entire image is essentially path traced you can turn off the denoiser in that game and you can see the raw Ray tracing hit results and shading completely noisy and obviously not how you'd want to play the game with a software program called the denoiser developers try and clean up this mess of pixels and noise to make coherent visuals that do not flicker or Sparkle like when the denoiser is off in Quake 2 rtx's case it's a combination of denoisers called asvgf and although I can simply toggle it on and off and Quake 2 RTX it is far from a simple thing denoising is incredibly complex and full of Hazards at times denoising can overly blur surfaces it can lead to ghosting of light and objects and lighting can lag where shadows and and lighting can take a number of seconds even to take on their full proper look in a game with many race-raised effects there can also be many special steps for the denoiser all of which may require hand tuning on a per seen basis to get the best visuals possible with the least amount of artifacts there's entire research and presentations from game developers and Engineers about how to tune denoisers to get the most out of them a lot of working hours are put into denoising dlss 3.5's goal is essentially to simplify it to do away with multiple specialized denoisers that are hand tuned by Engineers it is looking to save time money and effort that humans spend trying to figure out denoising manually it is instead saying a machine learning program running on the RTX gpus on their tensor cores can do it better it can decide which current pixels and past pixels to use to clean up very noisy Ray traced or path traced images that is the hope at least that we can save engineering sweat and tears and we we can perhaps also increase the quality of denoised results better than what perhaps humans could do with manual tweaking and I will talk about that later in the video on where it is successful and what the quality differences are another thing that dlss 3.5 is trying to do is to temporarily reconstruct the image at the same time it is denoising it in the past this wasn't the case we can see this in remedies control for example which when using dlss denoising actually occurs at the lower internal resolution of the dlss specific mode so in dlss performance mode at 4K that would mean denoising is at 1080p dlss then upscales that denoise result to 4K the issue here is that it will lead to things like Reflections looking noticeably chunkier and blurrier when using dlss than in comparison to a native 4K image dlss 3.5 is going to change that and make dlss's reconstruction of Ray traced effects like Reflections look better as the denoising is going to occur at the output resolution now so in dlss performance mode denoising would then be done at 4K so that is how it is in theory let us look at it in practice in cyberpunk 2077's 2.0 patch in the base game here I'll be comparing the game with Ray tracing overdrive with dlss in its performance mode at 4K with Ray reconstruction on or off as it is right now dlss Ray reconstruction is only supported with dlss on so it won't work with dlaa so keep that in mind another thing to keep in mind is that I'm comparing the game's state of the art standard compute denoiser at that same internal resolution I am not comparing the ray reconstruction images made to perfectly crisp offline reference path traced images or anything like that this is not ground truth comparisons here I don't have the ability to do that so this isn't a test of how perfect images are rather it's taking a look at the differences between the opt options that are available to the user one denoiser done without machine learning and one done with it all tests are of course done at the exact same time of day with just the save being reloaded so you can see things like NPCs at times or car placement being a little bit different or there's some other random elements in there like distant building lights looking a little different since those are randomized little things to keep in mind okay with that being said let us start with image quality while the camera is still first with surface texture quality and then reflection quality in this first image I captured at the edge of the opening of this garage I want us to specifically pay attention to the ground here in both images the lighting is the same and this area is primarily lit from the sky and bounce lighting from Outdoors this is pretty sparse lighting with Ray reconstruction the normal map texture on the ground definitely shows up much better I would say the traditional denoiser on the left is blurring the ground texture in an obvious way making it look like the ground texture lacks anisotropic filtering the texture quality in indirectly lit areas like this one here seems to be an area where the new Ray reconstruction Tech in dlss 3.5 has good advantages same thing in this image here if we look at the mattress on the ground here I want you to notice how much more detail is visible in the texture work on that mattress it just appears that DLS is 3.5 denoiser is much better at reconstructing normal map surface detail than the previous denoiser another aspect that it is better at is also seen here with small Shadow and lighting detail take a look at the area around the locker notice how the self Shadows there under the wall on the locker itself or on the corrugated metal behind the locker are much more defined easier to see this is something that dlss 3.5 just does better than the previous denoiser in any shot of the game you can really find small objects or small Shadow details are better preserved instead of being blurred out by the denoiser as a reminder these small Shadows from punctual light sources or from the sun should be very crisp and hard edged as that is physically correct they should realistically only be blurred if the level of Parallax with the light is greater or if the light size is dramatically larger like a big area light so yes Shadows now are much more defined in a realistic manner than in the previous denoiser one area of texture detail that is quite a bit better in the new version of the denoiser is on characters and specifically on character faces now originally I didn't even know to look for this difference but I was tipped off to it by CD projekt Red's own art director jacobic who was commenting that the new denoiser improved the quality of textures on character faces to show this off let's look at Jackie in the older version of the denoiser if we zoom in on his face a bit we can see that his skin looks rather soft here his skin almost looks buffed out a bit I would say blurred a bit and we don't see a lot of the stubble the wrinkles and more shining through there and that's detailed that according to the game's art director that should be there now let us switch over to the new 3.5 denoiser the big difference I want to point out is all in that notice how the texture of the skin is much more visible now now we can see more of the pores and that normal map detail there we can see a bit more of the stubble from his beard but the biggest detail change I would say is how the normal Maps under his eyes are actually showing up now whereas they don't actually show up at all before and they show off quite well that Jackie is definitely not a smooth faced youth anymore he's actually a bit grizzled and he's seen better days so a lot more texture detail is showing through here with the LSS 3.5 and it's doing on an animated and complex character the old denoiser definitely struggled with faces in comparison and that's something that CD projekt read wanted to even point out to me okay so that is texture detail now let us look at reflection detail in Stills one of the easiest places to see the difference is in this shot here of a puddle in the previous denoiser we can see an issue that I showed off earlier in control basically the reflections denoising is done at the lower internal resolution so it lacks detail and it has obvious blockiness from the internal resolution with the LSS 315 well it looks a lot higher resolution quite simply looks like the output resolution so we can see a lot better reflection detail than in the previous denoiser and for perfectly smooth Reflections like this one we see here scenes you can see a lot more detail in them than you could have possibly ever seen before so a lot of that detail is preserved in the reflection for rougher Reflections it tends to mean that you will see more of the surface normal map detail shining through instead of being erased by the denoiser the denoiser was kind of getting rid of a lot of surface detail from Reflections before something that dlss 3.5 doesn't seem to struggle with as much [Music] okay now let's talk about image stability and lighting quality in my discussion with CD product ads Jacob napic he pointed out that cyberpunk 2077 City design is a big challenge for lighting in general and especially for denoising there are these tall and overlapping structures which block direct lighting from the Sun so you have little nooks and crannies in the world beneath and between buildings that tend to be only lit by light that has been bounced from somewhere else this sparse indirect lighting is then combined with the fact that most surfaces in cyberpunk 2077 are reflective in some way usually highly reflective with rough or smooth surfaces as the art director said these two properties in reality are conflicting desires for a denoiser the denoiser should want to smooth out results in these heavily occluded areas to make the game lit well but it also needs to be highly reactive because the surface is being lit are reflections and reflective Services require reactive denoiser otherwise you get a lot of ghosting with the old denoiser this was an area where many failure cases could occur take a look at this area here it's completely lit indirectly by second order bounces of Skylight or sunlight the metal surface detail in the scene with the old denoiser combined with dlss in its lower internal resolution led to flickering on the metal surfaces and fizzle with the new dlss 3.5 denoiser you can interestingly see how this has been completely removed and the image is much more stable now which leads to a higher visual quality I would say this also applies to any really sort of metallic object in the game like this car door here the metal is not a perfectly smooth reflection it's a bit rougher so the Rays of light coming off of it have more random directions which is hard to denoise so in the old denoiser we can see a kind of swimming of pixels that it can occur in the surface of the car door and the handle that doesn't happen in the dlss 3.5 denoiser another difference in areas that are indirectly lit can be seen in here check this out if I flip back and forth between the old and the new denoiser I want you to notice how the old denoiser makes this area darker than the new denoiser and how the new denoiser actually has a lot more defined surface detail and less flicker for example if you pay attention to something like the fans movement basically the old denoiser has trouble stabilizing light in areas that are very sparsely lit so it kind of homogenizes them to be a bit darker than they arguably should be dlss 3.5's denoiser is apparently better Adept at retaining Lighting in the image versus the old denoiser so areas are not as over darkened with the new one last thing to mention about these images in Stills is in regards to Shadows from the Sun basically with the old denoiser when the Shadows from the Sun were long and thin so like at sundown they could Alias and Flicker at times and we can see this is another area where the new denoiser does a better job on the right here so as a whole in total I would definitely say dlss 3.5 makes the game look quite a bit higher resolution with a lot better surface texture detail and of course more stable and detailed Reflections which in total make this Ray tracing overdrive mode in the 2.0 patch just look a lot higher res and I think that's going to be the immediate impression most people will have who flip Ray reconstruction on and off when they get their hands on 2.0 but how does this dlss 3.5 Hold Up In Motion now here I want to focus on a couple things the first being Reflections in motion with classical denoising like I showed off in Spider-Man earlier moving the camera with Reflections can cause smearing and this is a really common thing to see in games with Ray Trace Reflections and if Spider-Man has it all over the place it's a common problem in cyberpunk 2077 the race racing overdrive this is an even bigger problem actually because one cyberpunk 2077 overdrive has Ray Trace Reflections being applied to more objects in general not just more mirror-like ones that are biased to be more like mirror Reflections it applies to really rough materials cyberfunkel 77 also has a lot of reflective materials in it it's the design of the game world we also see a lot of moving Parts here with civilians and cars moving around the scene so Reflections are a lot harder to do in cyberpunk 2077 than perhaps in other games so blurring and trails in motion is something that would definitely happen with the old path traced denoising given those challenges let's look at a reflection here while the camera is moving laterally with the original denoiser versus dlss 3.5 Ray reconstruction look at the reflection of the neon text I think it's really easy to see the legibility of that text in the reflection is greatly improved with dlss 3.5 with the old standard denoiser it was unreadable due to smearing of the reflection but dlss 3.5 keeps it cleaner I would say though it isn't exactly Pixel Perfect or anything with dlss 3.5 at this resolution it is better I would say but I imagine a ground truth image would keep the surface detail visible in the reflection surface itself so you would see a bit more of that bumpiness of the road but it is unarguably better than the previous state of the art solution that you as a player would have had access to I see a very similar situation when moving along the axis of depth here with this car moving forward on a rain-slicked road there are far less fireflies as in flickering pixels and Distortion in the reflections while moving with dlss 3.5 the reflections are more coherent as a whole and much more stable which is a very positive image quality aspect but much like I said with the previous example I think the road and movement does lose a bit of its normal mapped detail while moving at this resolution at least something I imagined a reference path traced image would definitely not have but still overall this is a genuine upgrade over the previous state of the art available to the user another area of lighting lag that could be seen with the old denoiser and basically an all real-time denoising is light lag that occurs when a light light rapidly switches on or off or changes in temperature let's look at the old denoiser first so you know what I mean take a look at this massive screen on the left of area lights with each change of the color I want you to notice how the lighting area around the car and somewhat on the car itself takes a while to change the lighting in the environment is misaligned in timing due to light lag induced by the denoiser if I count the amount of frames it takes 1.5 seconds for the illumination to finally settle after a light color change occurs in this shot specifically so there is a good amount of lighting lag here in this scene for dlss 3.5 it does it much more rapidly and will be put them back to back I want you to notice how it takes half the time about 0.8 seconds after the Light Grid changes color the lighting will fully settle on the dlss 3.5 side it's not perfect of course in this specific example and I think there's going to be an area of iteration in the future for Ray tracing and perhaps Ray reconstruction but it is a core issue in raytrace lighting that has been now cut in half 100 better that is a pretty large Improvement for just a software difference the biggest area of improvement over the previous denoiser is in light smearing and reflection smearing while moving and this includes shadows and more a good example can be seen here as this car accelerates rapidly forward with the old denoiser you should notice a couple of things for one notice how the blue lights and the red tail light on the bottom of the car stretch out into a smear behind and along the sides of the car as the car moves forward the shape of their reflection on the road completely loses coherence in the old denoiser it kind of looks like the Speed Racer movie if you ever saw that another thing to notice is that when the car passes a street light with the oldenizer you can see the car Shadow at that speed cannot keep up if I pause you'll see that the shadow is just smeared completely losing nearly all of its shape and it's also lagging behind the car in position it's wrong now let us compare the ray reconstruction on the right we should notice a couple of things first when the car starts up it's pretty easy to see that it no longer has that smearing of the tail light and the blue lights underneath the car body their Reflections on the road stay coherent throughout the entire trip of the car no matter its speed another thing that is awesome to see is what happens when the car moves past a street light look at its shadow in 3.5 versus the old denoiser it's a completely coherent shadow on the right versus the smear of a laggy shadow in the old denoiser on the left we can also notice other things like how the road is much easier to see and its per pixel detail shows out much better indeed in motion dlss 3.5 is generally like this lighting looks near instantaneous for Reflections in comparison to the old denoiser like I'm showing here it's a generational quality difference in other views it can look even more obvious take me peeling out with this car in the shot here notice the lights under the car again in the old versus the new denoiser they look like very coherent tube lights underneath the car on the right versus some sort of I don't know know smear lacking any definition on the left this is a pretty impressive showing in the difference of lighting coherence versus the old denoiser so lighting responds much better to on and off States and it keeps up with camera motion and object Motion in a one-to-one way actually versus the old denoiser it's a lot better but dlss 3.5 is not perfect and now I will go into those areas where I specifically saw dlss 3.5 having issues the first one I notice is that although lighting does not smear like it used to and there is little to no flicker there can be a kind of inner Surface or Surface Edge smearing to moving objects of a small screen space size that means thin objects or small objects like NPCs that are far from the camera or tiny things near the camera and this happens in low lighting conditions I found out for example check out this shot here take a look at the ground here in the old annoyzer we can see a visible can rolling on the ground in the DLS 3.5 view well it's hard to see the cam because it's kind of been smudged and blurred it's almost like the can isn't there I also noticed it happening in this shot here while I was panning the camera look at the can on the ground yep it's kind of an apparition of a cat you can also see this with NPCs at a distance in low lighting conditions or even on the edges of character hands in low lighting conditions take a look at the difference in the MPC here in the old denoiser versus the new here yeah the entire head and face of the MPC with dls's 3.5 Ray reconstruction and this shot here is looking rather odd you can't really see much of that face anymore it's just kind of blurred over the second issue I saw with dlss 3.5 is regard to a certain look it can have and this doesn't happen in all scenes mind you far from far from but I definitely noticed something happening and I will call it posterization which is a kind of stylization of rendering visuals check out the shot here now I would 100 say here that DLS 3.5 is doing a much better job than the old denoiser on the left there's a lot more real detail being brought in there in the Reconstruction and the ground is not pixelated at all like it used to be before and you can just see a lot of information in the texture work here that is just not present on the image on the left real texture information but check out the look of it I would say and also notice the transition of color here on the edge of this Appliance it's a black shadowed edge with a light thin Halo to me that looks like posterization and an over sharpened Halo this doesn't happen in all scenes in the game but it can be visible in some areas of some scenes so while there is generally always a lot more detail while using dlss 3.5 and it's more stable and reactive and all those things I showed off earlier there can sometimes be this stylization that can occur this posterization of detail and it can look like it has over sharpened Halos on that detail specifically the last issue I noticed with 3.5 occasionally is that some Thin objects will widen out now take a look at this shot here I would say the the old the noise around the left definitely has a lot less bounce Shadow detail along the walls Edge there so yeah reconstruction is better on the right hand side but if we look at the grass I want you to notice how it is yes of course cleaner and better anti-aliased in DLS 3.5 but it also lacks some of that per pixel fineness seen in the old denoised shot the LSS 3.5 kind of widened out the grass here and it reminds me a bit of how tent filtered anti-aliasing can look there's more stability there but it could be less detailed technically so dlss 3.5 Ray reconstruction is not perfect and the issues I'm pointing out actually remind me a lot of those issues that we saw in the first few iterations of dlss 2.0 posterization and over sharpening of edges like I showed in my original dlss 2.0 video on control and there's also some odd inner object and Edge smearing at times when you really wouldn't expect it and that reminds me a lot of things I saw in Hitman 3 when that launched as well as in God of War War when that launched those issues in dlss super resolution have changed over time and gotten better given how that is how machine learning works so I'm thinking Ray reconstruction could have a similar trajectory my total review of Ray reconstruction in this 2.0 version of cyberpunk 2077 that is hard to imagine Ray tracing now in the future without Ray reconstruction Tech I'm serious about that it helps clean up so many of the typical Ray tracing issues that I've come to know and then expect in my last five years of looking at Ray traced games when it is working its best Ray reconstruction looks incredible and it's kind of a watershed dlss 2.0 like moment I would say for the graphics industry and while generally looking a lot better than the old way of doing things it also runs a bit better too in this scene here we can see the ray reconstruction running four percent better than the previous denoiser it does that while looking genuinely better for nearly all the content that is thrown at it and that is kind kind of the promise of dlss right managing to look a bit better while performing better perhaps so it's hard to complain but for the issues that I did encounter I will say like I said when fsr2 launched that we're looking at the first iteration of something here so the jury is still out on how and if it will improve but given how it is machine learning I think we can be a bit optimistic there okay enough about 3.5 for now I will also be covering it again when Alan Wake 2 comes out and before I wind down this video I want to talk about two other things with the 2.0 patch the first is that now the game is slightly heavier on the CPU this is hinted at in the new system requirements brought out by cdpr before the game came out and I also could find it in game in my measurements using our little Benchmark here that we use for gpus and CPUs the game ran around 10 percent slower on average versus the previous patch the reasons for it running slower are hard to know but technically version 2.0 of this game is going to be doing more with MPC Behavior years like the police so perhaps that's why and it's definitely something to keep in mind as 2.0 will be heavier on your CPU on the GPU side of things the game is mostly the same except for Ray tracing overdrive mode if you have an Atta Lovelace GPU which will now run significantly better in some areas of the game here in this park for example in this Forest version 2.0 runs 33 faster than version 1.65 at the same settings while using the old denoiser and of course using Ray reconstruction it's a bit faster as well on top of that the reason for the speed up is because the game now uses opacity micro maps and add a Lovelace Hardware feature that speeds up the ray tracing of partially transparent triangles and as you can see with game foliage usually other than that I don't have much to say about the 2.0 version of cyberpunk 2077 other than there's really no other game out there that looks like this at the moment visually it's kind of ridiculously beautiful looking and I'm happy cdpr has gone out of their way to keep pushing this game further they keep improving on it and they keep upping the ante and making it The Shining Beacon for visual excellence and as a forerunner in PC graphics technology all that deserves praise is I see it and with that being said I hope you enjoyed this video if you did enjoy it hit that like button and subscribe to the channel if you're already a subscriber hit 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Channel: Digital Foundry

Views: 490,185

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Id: hhAtN_rRuQo

Length: 26min 42sec (1602 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 22 2023