From Quake 2 to Cyberpunk in just four years - this is how it was done.
The question is, how?
It managed to initiate the game rather well at around 1080p, capable of 60fps with room to spare.
Developers are working hard to increase efficiency on the software side too.
The story has to begin somewhere though and the advances in the latest graphics hardware are impressive.
For example, each new Nvidia architecture has respectively doubled the triangle intersection testing throughput in the RT core.
However, in pure ray tracing workloads, RTX 3070 performance is a great deal better.
Another technical architectural advantage found in more recent GPUs is a greater amount of L2 cache.
For example, an RTX 3090 has 6MB of L2 Cache, while an RTX 4090 has 72MB.
The new RTX 40-series cards also include Shader Execution Reordering (SER).
The past four years have also seen dramatic improvements on the software side too, with huge efficiency boosts.
One of these key advancements comes from ReStir.
In ray tracing, to get accurate lighting results you are sampling in a way which is very noisy.
Beyond optimisations to ray tracing algorithms, we also have big advances in image reconstruction.
On top of this, we now have machine learning assisted frame-generation to further enhance that presentation as well.
However, this isn’t the end-point of the journey.
RT Overdrive still has visual and performance limitations to address.
Right now, areas that are mainly indirectly lit can suffer from noise.
Caching lighting information in a neural radiance cache could potentially alleviate this issue completely.
For example, right now the game does not take advantage of OMM - or opacity micromaps.
