And you don’t need an ultra high-end rig to appreciate the most transformative effect.
It has its limitations - which we’ll go into - but overall, it’s a spectacular upgrade.
Full RT fixes that, greatly enhancing shadows quality, realism and detail.
Full RT is also transformative on glass rendering.
The world looks a lot more alive in comparison and glass takes on a new sheen, literally.
Perhaps the largest upgrade to the visuals comes from the change to indirect lighting, both diffuse and specular.
All reflections must be mirror-like, for example, which doesn’t look right on rougher surfaces.
Full RT’s perspective-correct reflections alleviate that issue completely.
With full RT, metal objects reflect themselves and nearby objects.
Brass, silver, and gold look much more visually distinct as opposed to looking very much the same.
The standard RTGI system is based around a grid of probes that extend from the camera origin.
These probes then ‘send out’ ray from the probe’s perspective into the world around it.
Again, the video showcases some of these scenarios quite effectively.
Turning on the path-tracing, lightingisevaluated on a per-pixel level, cleaning up the errors.
Along with looking more natural, it also greatly increases contrast.
Shadows and direct lightingnotfrom the sun are still rasterised and using shadow maps.
Indoor areas often exhibit the same shadow map ‘acne’ and issues in the base game.
Another issue is that bodies of water still use screen-space reflections.
There are no RT reflections here, which looks very strange indeed.
Then there are some more bizarre issues.
Indiana Jones as the player character is seen in reflections, but curiously, his hair is not!
It’s also important that DLSS ray reconstruction is added to the game.
Right now it’s using Nvidia’s NRD denoiser, which is fine but has issues.
Reflections in movement can smear and exhibit lag.
Reflections in reflections can be a bit unstable too.
How does the game scale down?
You’ll get RT sun shadows and a boost to the game’s base default RTGI.
In our initial coverage, we complained about cutscene animation issues.
The latest patch notes suggest it has been fixed, but it’s definitely still there.
It still looks pretty bad and definitely needs developer attention.
