Remedy entertainment talks about the impact of raytracing on performance

There are currently no games that contain raytracing effects in Direct3D or Vulkan, as Battlefield 5, which will be the first to include it, will be released in November 2018. However, Remedy Entertainment, the developers of Max Payne and Alan Wake and more Quantum Break recently integrated raytracing into its own Northlight engine and explained how it affects frame rate in 1080p resolution.

Remedy Entertainment confirms the strong impact of raytracing on 1080p performance

Remedy Entertainment has shown a test scene created with the Northlight engine, featuring, among other things, a wet marble floor and lots of detailed furniture, and it can also demonstrate the benefits of global lighting. Specifically, Remedy experimented with contact and shadows from the sun, with reflections and with so-called diffuse indirect lighting. The Finns used a Geforce RTX 2080 Ti and presented the demo at 1920 × 1080 pixels.

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Raytracing produces cleaner, and above all, full shadows, reflections are independent of the camera angle, and global illumination does not show any rendering errors, such as banding. However, the costs are high: contact and shading from the sun calculated with two beams per pixel, including noise rejection, require 2.3 ms per frame and reflections 4.4 ms per frame. Global noise elimination lighting extends the rendering process by another 2.5 ms.

This is a total of 9.2 ms per frame and therefore a computational overhead of almost a third higher if we take 30 frames per second as the basis (42.2 ms instead of 33 ms per frame). Of course, these are fairly early experiments with no explicit adjustments, as this is a demo and not a finished game. However, the presentation gives an impression of the advantages and disadvantages of raytracing.

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