DLSS 3.5 - Better Pathtracing for Free

this video is a paid promotion for NVIDIA where I attempt to figure out what dlss 3.5 actually does and how it can transform this into this while remaining at a similar frame rate and it's all to do with d noises so first a warning this segment contains flashing images because raw R tracing looks very grainy and speckly imagine this image but fizzing if you want to skip this segment then move on to the D noiser chapter at around the 130 mark thank you so yeah this is what cyberpunk would look like with path tracing and nothing else no D noises no dlss just a raw look at the millions of rays being fired every frame to light the environment realistically but as you can see it still isn't enough for a smooth result and the world appears to pop and to Fizz as each Ray pummels the screen and this visual noise only gets worse as we enter darker and indirectly lit areas how do we make this look better the easiest way is to fire more Rays I've done this here by quadrupling the resolution yet the speckling remains and now it's slowing down my PC another way to get more Rays is simply to wait this for example is how the mapping tools in Source 2 manage it this path Trace image looks grainy whenever the scene changes but the moment the camera stops moving then it can begin compiling Ray after Ray after Ray until the scene looks almost perfect but this can take hundreds of frames to achieve amounting to several seconds games like cyberpunk do not have the luxury of time if we want 60 FPS then we need a good-looking image in under 160th of a second and this is where D noises come in D noises believe it or not get a noisy image and den noise it and anybody who's tried to fix up a grainy image will appreciate that this is a difficult thing to do out of curiosity I tried doing this myself with this image from cyberp Punk one way I tried was just to get the image and to shrink it down to a tiny size look it's got rid of the grain but it's also got rid of everything else so we can't do this I tried blurring the image and then sharpening it again but the more I changed it the worse it looked I tried running it through some more advanced denoising programs and I got better results but it was is still far from perfect so when you see what cyberpunk can do with the image it's pretty impressive this is the result of several hand tuned D noises the result of which is then run through dlss to upscale the image but what if there's an even better way and this is where dlss 3.5 comes in instead of D noising followed by upscaling dlss 3.5 does both of these things at the same time meaning more of the raw detail makes it to your screen dlss 3.5 is currently listed in cyberp Punk's Graphics menu as Ray reconstruction and I'll show it on on the right hand side of the screen in these comparisons and we'll start with Reflections just because they're a clear demonstration of how much more rare information dlss 3.5 can retain and how stable it can look it now looks like a mirror image of the street and instead of ghostly Trails behind and inside of moving objects stuff in Reflections now looks a lot more solid and stable this puddle is another demonstration of the difference it can make you can argue all you like about how reflective a puddle should be but at least now if it is to be mirror perfect dlss 3.5 can achieve this this I especially like this example notice how before using DSS 3.5 the reflections on the pipes looked pixelated and buggy whereas with Ray reconstruction now on they seem to be correctly upscaled by dlss and these improvements can be seen elsewhere in the image as well like on the pipes overhead supports and on the walls behind looking back at the example with Ray reconstruction off it reminds me a lot of controls Ray tracing bugs where some surfaces looked quite pixelated and there would sometimes be ghosting behind movement and it makes me wonder if D LSS 3.5 could also to make that game look better again I benchmarked the difference that Ray reconstruction made to the frame rate and these were the results in other words it doesn't make much of a difference and if anything it improved cyberpunk frame rates thanks to it all being done in one go instead of through several different D noises Ray reconstruction simply makes much better use of the existing Ray data and it results in higher quality and more stable images so yeah you can see in instances like this where there are a lot of rays to construct the Reflection from that Ray reconstruction produces a much sharper clearer looking image and it even convey small movements to these palm tree leaves which previously weren't visible in the slightest and this is another example of Highly reflective surfaces and you can make out this guy throwing up in the corner much more clearly from the reflection on this mannequin's highly reflective butter thanks to Ray reconstruction but what about instances where there aren't so many Rays to construct details from take a look at these plants previously the manual D noises were really struggling to decipher the lighting on these leaves and branches and the whole area became just a blob gradient from light to dark with visible flickering in the shadows however with the same amount of Ray information Ray reconstruction can produce a much more stable result keeping better track of the motion of the leaves and even highlighting individual leaves in the darker areas of the foliage and the previous distracting flickering dots that were everywhere have now been greatly reduced but I noticed all this came with a slightly painted sharpened looking appearance so I tried changing the sharpening value to see what kind of difference this would make both examples seen here are using Ray reconstruction and I personally prefer sharpness being set to zero but if you want to further reduce this smooth but sharpened look to the foliage more Rays may be required which right now can be most easily achieved by upping the resolution you run the game at as if me using the terms dlss 3.5 and Ray reconstruction interchangeably wasn't confusing enough I also tend to use the terms Ray tracing and path tracing interchangeably because they're two of the same thing path tracing consists of rays and Ray tracing traces the path of Light how the ray tracing has evolved in cyberpunk is that it started off just replacing individual effects like Reflections and shadows then psycho mode was in roduced which just added more rise to these effects to make them more accurate and then when cyberpunk got its overdrive mode this setting replaced everything completely doing away with the many old tricks and methods for rendering games swapping them all out for rays instead and this makes it path tracing and is how all the footage in this video is done unless labeled otherwise now unlike the other features added to cyberpunk Ray reconstruction doesn't add more effects or Rays it simply makes better use of what was there already so I feel like now is a great time to compare cyber Punk without Ray tracing versus cyberpunk with all path tracing on and there's good reason to do this because sometimes there are materials which vary greatly in appearance between Ray Ro construction off and on like this table now clearly these bits aren't meant to be distractingly flickery but are they supposed to be Uber reflective so in examples like these I think it's best to consult the non-ra TRC version just to see how the artist may have intended for these materials to look and it looks like R Rec construction does a better job of imitating the look of non-r traced here though it still seems to mask the checkerboard effect more than the non-r traced one does which probably isn't intended this time I've plunked the non-r traced example right in the middle between the two path traced ones and again we can see the same weird shimmery Reflections on this car when path tracing is on but when Ray reconstruction is off so I think we can Ru out this version for this comparison and just directly compared dlss 3.5 versus no Road tracing whatsoever in a way this is the ultimate battle the best traditional rendering methods versus the latest path traced implementation in this game and again with this cast material it looks like Ray reconstruction perhaps masks some of the finer scratches and details more than the non- retrac version does but it trades this for more environmentally correct lighting and Reflections to my surprise though the non-rc version can still reflect parts of the cars in other bits of the car under the right circumstances but of course the moment I look away from whatever is casting the reflection the reflection also disappears so this is a clear win for path tracing under the car path tracing clearly wins as well since it now actually Shadows beneath the car and while I'm down here this wheel also looks a lot better when path traced both the lighting on the top and the reflections on the Hub I think a lot of the time particularly in the cut scenes path tracing is fighting an uphill battle because these scripted scenes are clearly being made with nonroad tracing in mind in the game's Nomad intro for instance the whole scene looks dark and edgy with dark shadows cast Over the mechanic's face to they call ominus and stuff meanwhile path tracing bounces the lighting a lot more which changes the look of the scene by brightening the room and these people's faces which although more technically correct is perhaps not how the artists intended for the scene to look when they designed it in the first place without Road tracing and this isn't something that's going to change until games start being designed with path tracing in mind however cyberpunk for the most part is a large vertical dynamically lit environment and this is perfect to Showcase where path tracing can truly pull ahead of older rendering methods take a look beneath this large concrete structure here this is cyberpunk at maximum settings but without path tracing and it just looks artificially bright everywhere and it's very boringly lit if I just saw the screenshot I'd assume it's from a game that's at least 10 years old but now if we enable path Trace even without the LSS 3.5 on just yet it instantly looks 100 times better not just by shading everywhere a lot better but by giving them the correct colors too this blue area here is being lit by the general blue color of the sky while this warm glow is from this orangey light way over there this is where path tracing can really shine literally so let's just move back to the old methods again just to see how flat and drb it looks in comparison and if I turn dlss 3.5 on it doesn't change the broad Strokes much at all path tracing was already getting the shading and col coling almost perfect Ray reconstruction just helps with the smaller and finer details like behind this metal bar just here because I suspect this Shadow was previously being scrubbed out of existence by the hand tuned de noises without Ray reconstruction these shadows will gradually fade into existence and get more defined as I approach them this draw distance Improvement is shown in this example as well Ray reconstruction retains the Shadows beneath these bushes even at this distance whereas previously they only fade into existence once you got closer to them so dlss 3.5 generally does a better job of shading small areas that may have been denoised out of existence previously like underneath all the small items in this example and to like the shrubs behind them moving to even smaller details now RAR reconstruction can successfully and consistently shade beneath these cigarettes which you'll notice were lost every time the camera moved upwards before amusingly these cigarettes still appear to be lit despite being found in an abandoned Apartment spooky the move to Ray reconstruction in this example is like moving from low to high Shadow quality dlss 3.5 enables much sharper clearer Shadows where needed and also undefine blobs where those are needed as well from the Shadows you can now make out the shape of the tools on this table and these over here and it now makes this bottle Shadow go from sharp to blurry whereas previously it went from blurry to even more blurry the only thing I'd say is that having sharpness turned up with RAR reconstruction on gives the outlines of the Shadows an artificially grainy look to them so it's best to keep sharpness set to zero to minimize the look of this artifacting when it comes to motion the old D noises had a rather distracting issue they didn't know how to light stuff on the first frame it was displayed meaning that in this example as new scenery is revealed from behind the concrete structure is filled with distracting blobbing and flashing colors until the d noises have collected enough information to settle on how it should look I can also trigger this by equipping a weapon which leaves an unresolved ghostly blob on the screen for a visible length of time yet Ray reconstruction orbit eradicates this kind of artifacting which I think will give players and developers more confidence that path tracing can provide its benefits with one fewer serious negative as it can more capably react to a faster camera character and scenery changes now for the most complicated thing in this video why is it called dlss 3.5 because it isn't an extension of three it's in addition to what two is already doing it should be called 2.5 but that name's already been taken and if it was called that then it would sound like a backward step when three already exists the truth is although dlss is represented by a single number it's now trying to represent three different things in game this doesn't matter because these different features are all represented in the graphics menu under their different names anyway way the number in dlss 3.5 has become nothing more than just a way to represent how new the dlss implementation is and if it's 3.5 then you know it will contain all three parts of the technology frame generation included on the surface Ray reconstruction may not sound as exciting as other forms of dlss it doesn't magically double your resolution or double your frame rates it just makes each frame you do see look better and without a significant performance hit which means it complements the other parts of dlss nicely I said at the beginning of this video that I hope to figure out what dlss 3.5 actually did I think I've done that but I think I've also understood better what dlss itself is it started off as image up scaling but it's becoming an all-encompassing collection of tools to grant us access to Graphics that would otherwise have been reserved for future generations of Hardware but thanks to dlss we don't need to wait for future Hardware or for faster cards to unlock things like having realtime path tracing in games we can have things like that now by using clever tools and techniques running on pre-existing graphics cards so because of that Ray reconstruction is a quiet but significant leap towards a future of fully path traced games and that benefits everyone it benefits developers because it no longer requires manual tuning to get the most out of the D noising for every game that R tracing is featured in it benefits Gamers by enabling higher image quality on existing hardware and I think that by eliminating many of The Telltale D noising artifacts that existed previously it will give everybody more confidence in path tracing now that its benefits are attainable with fewer compromises so of course RAR Rec construction makes the future more exciting but also the present in the form of games like cyber Punk right now and I also hope it will be rolled out to earlier R race games like control and Minecraft it's good news for everybody really it looks like rain

Channel: 2kliksphilip

Views: 208,988

Keywords: 2kliksphilip, game, 3kliksphilip, review, nostalgia, tech

Id: 0ETEGGlYi1I

Length: 13min 9sec (789 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 31 2023