Control Raytracing

MangoSeed

[H]ard|Gawd
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Oct 15, 2014
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Nice video on the implementation and IQ impact of raytracing in Control.

I think this is the first game to use RT for this many effects:

- Transparent and Opaque Reflections
- Global Illumination (ambient occlusion and indirect diffuse lighting)
- Contact hardening shadows
 


Nice video on the implementation and IQ impact of raytracing in Control.

I think this is the first game to use RT for this many effects:

- Transparent and Opaque Reflections
- Global Illumination (ambient occlusion and indirect diffuse lighting)
- Contact hardening shadows


I like these frame breakdowns (4:12), so you can see where the RT cores get a workout. There was one of these for Metro Exodus, but there was only one section for RT cores, here there are multiple sections of RT cores, followed by shader, and then a denoising pass. Three of each this time.
RTX_Frame.JPG
 
I like these frame breakdowns (4:12), so you can see where the RT cores get a workout. There was one of these for Metro Exodus, but there was only one section for RT cores, here there are multiple sections of RT cores, followed by shader, and then a denoising pass. Three of each this time.
View attachment 183783

Yeah the breakdowns are really interesting. Goes to show that there’s a lot happening each frame and performance is bound by different things depending on what type of work is being done.

I don’t know how accurate that visualization is but I was surprised to see such low memory bandwidth usage during the RT steps. Maybe the entire BVH structure fits in L2.

It’s probably just how the graph was drawn and the green RT section is blocking the memory graph.
 
Yeah the breakdowns are really interesting. Goes to show that there’s a lot happening each frame and performance is bound by different things depending on what type of work is being done.

I don’t know how accurate that visualization is but I was surprised to see such low memory bandwidth usage during the RT steps. Maybe the entire BVH structure fits in L2.

It’s probably just how the graph was drawn and the green RT section is blocking the memory graph.
I wouldn't expect the memory to be utilized much when the GPU is just crunching numbers. You can see when the framebuffer updates and postprocessing happens that the memory gets hit really hard, which is where I would expect it to. I didn't do a lot of shader work, and it was with SM 2.0, but I remember needing to try and simplify color calculations as much as possible to keep the memory from becoming more of a bottleneck than it already is. Bandwidth is around 20x wider than it was back then, but we have added a hell of a lot more to the postprocessing part of the pipeline since then, too.
 
That’s the best explanation of ray tracing I have seen yet in a game. Considering all the different uses it’s amazing that this will even run on current gen RTX hardware at all. They really have done an amazing job and it makes me have second thoughts about grabbing a 5700 and instead buying the 2070 super.
 
I wonder what performance will be in Watch Dogs Legion even on 2080 Ti. UBI :D SoFT
 
That’s the best explanation of ray tracing I have seen yet in a game. Considering all the different uses it’s amazing that this will even run on current gen RTX hardware at all. They really have done an amazing job and it makes me have second thoughts about grabbing a 5700 and instead buying the 2070 super.

Yeah, the combo of the first videos breakdown of the frame analysis, showing GPU sections usage, and DF meticulous effect analysis really brings it all together, to see what they are doing and the cost impact.

DF really delved into the subtleties I have never seen in other visual analysis. It can really change a lot of small items seldom bothered with, sort of automatically, but that is why it is so expensive.

You need a Beast of a GPU for this, not just for the RT cores to do the intersection testing, but shader cores for shading, and then the denoising component. Nearly every effect needs those three steps, and here repeating those steps multiple times over in a single frame.

Shading + Denoising each RT effect is often taking more frame time than Intersection RT core work!

Look at the frame breakdown. Reflections - Bunch of Green on graph for RT cores testing the rays. But then there you have to shade those Rays of the Reflection on the surface, then finally you need to denoise.

There isn't going to be a big jump in RT HW soon because you need more of everything. More RT Ray testing, more Shading performance, and more Denoise performance.

Doesn't hurt that reviews are also making this out to be a pretty great game as well.
 
Yeah, the combo of the first videos breakdown of the frame analysis, showing GPU sections usage, and DF meticulous effect analysis really brings it all together, to see what they are doing and the cost impact.

DF really delved into the subtleties I have never seen in other visual analysis. It can really change a lot of small items seldom bothered with, sort of automatically, but that is why it is so expensive.

You need a Beast of a GPU for this, not just for the RT cores to do the intersection testing, but shader cores for shading, and then the denoising component. Nearly every effect needs those three steps, and here repeating those steps multiple times over in a single frame.

Shading + Denoising each RT effect is often taking more frame time than Intersection RT core work!

Look at the frame breakdown. Reflections - Bunch of Green on graph for RT cores testing the rays. But then there you have to shade those Rays of the Reflection on the surface, then finally you need to denoise.

There isn't going to be a big jump in RT HW soon because you need more of everything. More RT Ray testing, more Shading performance, and more Denoise performance.

Doesn't hurt that reviews are also making this out to be a pretty great game as well.
Snowdog do you have maybe a movie about production of 2080 Ti ? I mean fabric lines etc.
 
That’s the best explanation of ray tracing I have seen yet in a game. Considering all the different uses it’s amazing that this will even run on current gen RTX hardware at all. They really have done an amazing job and it makes me have second thoughts about grabbing a 5700 and instead buying the 2070 super.

That DF video was really excellent. It mentions that in Control they're using one ray per pixel which is much higher than what BFV uses and performance is better. That's a massive improvement.

They seem to be applying Rt effects to even the most mundane objects in the scene (coffee makers, phones, extinguishers). With that level of detail the performance they've achieved on first gen hardware is impressive.

The side by side comparisons really help to highlight the limits of what we can do with rasterization alone. This gives me hope that the consoles will actually be powerful enough to make RT a standard feature in a few years.
 
This gives me hope that the consoles will actually be powerful enough to make RT a standard feature in a few years.

According to everything it will be a standard feature on the HW next year when new consoles release, but it will still be early generation HW and it might be the console generation after that, that really exploits it in most games. The frame breakdown really makes it clear you need beastly GPU power in all areas to do many RT effects.
 
FPS Review has a blurb about how improved the DLSS is in this games as well:
https://www.thefpsreview.com/2019/0...ss-with-improved-image-processing-in-control/

It's actually quite an improvement vs general scaling. Watch video at 1080p and see how objects edges are stable in motion vs scaling:


It’s impressive but it’s not DLSS as it’s not using a trained ML network. They’re using a hand written algo for Control and calling it DLSS to make up for some of the bad press so far.

Not sure how you could call a hand written algorithm “deep learning” anything. Doesn’t really matter as long as it works I guess.
 
Getting Control and Wolfenstein with a new 2070S easily makes it a better buy than a 5700XT: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/campaigns/control-wolfenstein-youngblood-bundle/

Even if you own both games or don't want them, you should be able to sell the coupon. I heard there is an nVidia gpu check in bundles now but I haven't checked to confirm.

The one thing that concerns me after getting to the end of that video is that a 2080 Ti can't maintain 60 fps at 1080p with everything on high. Although they did show a negligible drop in visual quality by setting certain RT effects to medium, you would probably have to run all effects on medium with a 2070S and below. Still looks visually stunning, hopefully they fix the shader stutter mentioned in the video.
 
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It’s impressive but it’s not DLSS as it’s not using a trained ML network. They’re using a hand written algo for Control and calling it DLSS to make up for some of the bad press so far.

Not sure how you could call a hand written algorithm “deep learning” anything. Doesn’t really matter as long as it works I guess.

Where are you getting that from?
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/dlss-control-and-beyond/

During our research, we found that certain temporal artifacts can be used to infer details in an image. Imagine, an artifact we’d normally classify as a “bug,” actually being used to fill in lost image details. With this insight, we started working on a new AI research model that used these artifacts to recreate details that would otherwise be lost from the final frame.

This AI research model has made tremendous progress and produces very high image quality. However, we have work to do to optimize the model's performance before bringing it to a shipping game.

Leveraging this AI research, we developed a new image processing algorithm that approximated our AI research model and fit within our performance budget. This image processing approach to DLSS is integrated into Control, and it delivers up to 75% faster frame rates.

It isn't really clear what this new approach entails, and where it runs. Is it a mix of DL and code, pure shader code?
 
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It’s impressive but it’s not DLSS as it’s not using a trained ML network. They’re using a hand written algo for Control and calling it DLSS to make up for some of the bad press so far.

Not sure how you could call a hand written algorithm “deep learning” anything. Doesn’t really matter as long as it works I guess.

Where are you getting that from?
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/dlss-control-and-beyond/



It isn't really clear what this new approach entails, and where it runs. Is it a mix of DL and code, pure shader code?

DLSS just uses an algorithm with "millions of parameters". The AI DL nonsense happens at nVidia on a super computer and the output is the algorithm. Are you saying the AI didn't happen at nVidia?
 
Where are you getting that from?
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/dlss-control-and-beyond/

It isn't really clear what this new approach entails, and where it runs. Is it a mix of DL and code, pure shader code?

It’s right there in the quote. The AI model isn’t ready for prime time so they wrote a hand coded approximation.

This AI research model has made tremendous progress and produces very high image quality. However, we have work to do to optimize the model's performance before bringing it to a shipping game.

Leveraging this AI research, we developed a new image processing algorithm that approximated our AI research model and fit within our performance budget. This image processing approach to DLSS is integrated into Control, and it delivers up to 75% faster frame rates.
 
DLSS just uses an algorithm with "millions of parameters". The AI DL nonsense happens at nVidia on a super computer and the output is the algorithm. Are you saying the AI didn't happen at nVidia?

The output of deep learning is a trained model that can take a bunch of parameters. This is the “AI Research” model. Nvidia is saying that model
Isn’t quite working yet.

That’s of course different from the “image processing” algorithm that they’ve written for Control that supposedly approximates the ML model. That isn’t an inferencing model. It’s just plain old shader code.
 
The output of deep learning is a trained model that can take a bunch of parameters. This is the “AI Research” model. Nvidia is saying that model
Isn’t quite working yet.

That’s of course different from the “image processing” algorithm that they’ve written for Control that supposedly approximates the ML model. That isn’t an inferencing model. It’s just plain old shader code.

Well... it seems way more well recieved than actual DLSS so maybe they should quietly replace DLSS. ;)
 
It’s right there in the quote. The AI model isn’t ready for prime time so they wrote a hand coded approximation.

They never say it's "hand coded", but if it is, I hope they release as part of a new AA method, because these kinds of algorithms are general purpose and don't require per game training.
 
Well... it seems way more well recieved than actual DLSS so maybe they should quietly replace DLSS. ;)

Yeah it’s the end result that matters. Nvidia claims the new AI model is really good but it’s just slow. Hopefully they figure out the performance and deliver on the original promise of DLSS.
 
Whoa, impressive feature set. The RTX implementation of course comes at a rather heavy toll, cutting fps in half.
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/control-benchmark-test-performance-nvidia-rtx/4.html

This means at the highest settings, not even a 2080ti would reach 60 fps at 1080p RTX.

To be fair, it barely gets 60FPS at 1440p with RTX off.

I just got this game, did settings and that was it. Basically going to try maxed with DLSS and you can choose to upscale from 1080p or 1440p to 4k. These might be two seperate options... “render” and “dlss”.

From a different review DLSS gave almost a double FPS improvement. Just gotta see the IQ impact.

You can also pick and choose RT settings for types of RT.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/guides/control-graphics-and-performance-guide/
 
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To be fair, it barely gets 60FPS at 1440p with RTX off.

I just got this game, did settings and that was it. Basically going to try maxed with DLSS and you can choose to upscale from 1080p or 1440p to 4k. These might be two seperate options... “render” and “dlss”.

From a different review DLSS gave almost a double FPS improvement. Just gotta see the IQ impact.

You can also pick and choose RT settings for types of RT.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/guides/control-graphics-and-performance-guide/

Overall this game is a perfect example of increasing game demands fighting off gpu performance improvements with diminishing returns in IQ.

The fact that a 1080ti barely gets 60 fps at 1080p is pathetic considering the visuals. It's all an excuse to get people to buy $700+ GPU's every 2 years.

I am guessing this is an Nvidia sponsored title, though I guess that is a given with RTX.
 
Overall this game is a perfect example of increasing game demands fighting off gpu performance improvements with diminishing returns in IQ.

The fact that a 1080ti barely gets 60 fps at 1080p is pathetic considering the visuals. It's all an excuse to get people to buy $700+ GPU's every 2 years.

I am guessing this is an Nvidia sponsored title, though I guess that is a given with RTX.

A lot of games have a setting or two that is crushing. I’d rather have the option and turn it off.
 
Overall this game is a perfect example of increasing game demands fighting off gpu performance improvements with diminishing returns in IQ.

It does look uninspired but the setting is a basic office building after all. Sometimes it's hard to separate technical improvements from art style and texture quality.

Based on the info posted so far Control uses pretty advanced rendering techniques for volumetric lighting, screen space reflections and ambient occlusion. Turning down a few settings from high to medium seems to help a lot.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/guides/control-graphics-and-performance-guide/
 
Nice. Setting things like screen space reflections shows a big performance with little visual impact.

Overly sharp shadows always looked kind of stupid imho.
 
The games visuals are being praised ,especially RTX but the real truth is ,the game is noisy and blurry and RTX is not all that great when you consider they Remedy or Nvidia removed cubemaps and stuff or just did not include them to make RTX look better.
I Played the game on RTX 2080 maxed out but put it aside until the visuals are fixed or there is a toggle to get rid of the noise in the game.
Saying that RTX is still the best to date and DLSS can double FPS when on because it cuts your resolution from native to 1/3 or 2/3 of native resolution.

I was shocked when I first played the Control game with how bad it looked to me on 4K screen.For some reason most people do not have a problem with it and that is fine.
Also for office building in small areas this should run lights out with RTX on.
 
The games visuals are being praised ,especially RTX but the real truth is ,the game is noisy and blurry and RTX is not all that great when you consider they Remedy or Nvidia removed cubemaps and stuff or just did not include them to make RTX look better.
I Played the game on RTX 2080 maxed out but put it aside until the visuals are fixed or there is a toggle to get rid of the noise in the game.
Saying that RTX is still the best to date and DLSS can double FPS when on because it cuts your resolution from native to 1/3 or 2/3 of native resolution.

I was shocked when I first played the Control game with how bad it looked to me on 4K screen.For some reason most people do not have a problem with it and that is fine.
Also for office building in small areas this should run lights out with RTX on.

I hope to play tonight but not sure if your post makes sense given the screen shots I’ve seen? Maybe checkout the geforce guide and trade off some settings for higher resolution?
 
I hope to play tonight but not sure if your post makes sense given the screen shots I’ve seen? Maybe checkout the geforce guide and trade off some settings for higher resolution?

LOL Ok ,I can not wait for your expert opinion.
 
The games visuals are being praised ,especially RTX but the real truth is ,the game is noisy and blurry and RTX is not all that great when you consider they Remedy or Nvidia removed cubemaps and stuff or just did not include them to make RTX look better.
I Played the game on RTX 2080 maxed out but put it aside until the visuals are fixed or there is a toggle to get rid of the noise in the game.
Saying that RTX is still the best to date and DLSS can double FPS when on because it cuts your resolution from native to 1/3 or 2/3 of native resolution.

I was shocked when I first played the Control game with how bad it looked to me on 4K screen.For some reason most people do not have a problem with it and that is fine.
Also for office building in small areas this should run lights out with RTX on.

Your first sentence is a mess and unreadable. I think you need to break it up or something. Also, the DLSS sentence seems to be a fragment yet still attempts to touch multiple points. Please clarify what you are saying about DLSS in particular.
 
Best I got,it is what it is.

No clue, I understood everything you said. Sure, punctuation and breaking into more sentences could help, but honestly it's easy enough to comprehend...

That being said, looks like one of the better attempts and lots of settings to turn on/off things you like or don't like or make to much of a bit.
I did notice a lot of comparisons are coming out where they either don't implement or turn off features that are normally enabled (like non RT global illumination of cube mapping) to make the difference look bigger.
 
Best I got,it is what it is.

By noise did you mean the lack of contrast in shadowing? It looks like a lack of color depth. That might be my TV though.

1080p upscaled to 4k looks good to me at 6’ away on my 55”. I could see how it might be distracting up close to a monitor. 1440p with “medium” + RTX high + DLSS is also possible but it dips under 60 here and there.

That’s my expert opinion. ;)
 
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Yeah, the only part about this game that is a disappointment is lack of HDR at release. It's absolutely a game that would benefit from it with all the dark scenes.
 
I would like an expert opinion on this video.Restart for all resolutions.
3840x2160 native resolution scale 3840x2160 + 4xMsaa
1920x1080 resolution scale 3840x2160
3840x2160 native resolution scale DLSS 2560x1440

 
Have to ask same as Dayaks - what do you mean by noise? Could you indicate a time and location to examine?
 
Do not look at the video in post #39 and your post is #40.If you do not know then
Control-DX12-2019-09-06-00-50-20-115.jpg
 
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