Dragon's Dogma 2 Path Tracing: It's Real, It Works And Here's How It Looks

This week, we were approached by modder EXXXcellent with something remarkable: the existence of a path tracing renderer within Dragon's Dogma 2. The technology is far from a shippable state for gamers, but it is there, it works and it looks terrific. In this video, Alex Battaglia shows you the path-traced renderer in action, how to install EXXXcellent's mod and speculates on why the renderer is in there in the first place.
Find the mod here: www.nexusmods.com/dragonsdogm...
Subscribe for more Digital Foundry: bit.ly/DFSubscribe
Join the DF Patreon to support the team more directly and to get access to everything we do via pristine quality downloads: bit.ly/3jEGjvx
Want some DF-branded tee-shirts, mugs, hoodies and more? Check out our store: store.digitalfoundry.net
For commercial enquiries, please contact [e-mail]

[@respectfulremastersbymetal8336]

Grain? 24FPS? FINALLY, A TRULY CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE!

[@user-dq5pm1nk2h]

"Dead Island 1: Definitive Edition" looks same or better while playing at 60fps on my Xbox Series X.

[@-Wall-Eater]

How big is the map? How many npc are there?​@@user-dq5pm1nk2h

[@apostolos8734]

As soon as I started watching this video, my 4070 began to shake in what I can only assume as fear.

[@Kondiqq]

You should buy a GPU stand to keep it from sagging. Should also prevent shaking from fear.

[@LBPreviews]

The thumbnails of the lady with red hair on the mod page are taken by me with my RTX 2080. Set the mod to 2spp with 1 bounce, and you'll be alright :)

[@Nateyo]

Imagine what my 6800XT did LMAO. It's traumatized from the time I tried path tracing in cyberpunk.

[@KoeiNL]

My Series X just jumped off my tv cabinet.

[@Oozaru85]

My 3070 needed a wakestone to be brought back from GPU Nirvana.

[@kurtwells711]

Finally, 4090 users can get the same performance as the rest of us!

[@sometech6971]

Hehe they already do, cpu bottleneck is absolutely insane in DD2.

[@lyndongaming]

they already do. game has a massive cpu bottleneck where even the best CPUs cannot maintain 60fps.

[@rikachiu]

@@lyndongaming dlss 3 mod has helped bypass that CPU bottleneck and the latency is fine

[@slaynnyt8130]

more like we can finally hit 100% gpu usage instead of 60% with that horrible CPU bottleneck 😅

[@stianlavender1683]

@@lyndongamingno we dont? I Get 120 fps locked even in the biggest town. All Max settings

[@KaiSchSp]

My graphics card took off and shot out the window, but the two frames of gameplay I got were pretty great.

[@Mecha_Gear]

50x0 coming later this year if I'm not mistaken

[@arsenii_yavorskyi]

@@Mecha_Gear and exactly nobody will be able to afford it.

[@DeadPiixxel]

@@arsenii_yavorskyi speak for yourself

[@ViperT0ngue]

I'll certainly be upgrading my 4090 to 5090 no doubt

[@Mecha_Gear]

@@arsenii_yavorskyi Worse even. NV needs to react to AMD's AI solution. 50x0 series will be pricey, but also might be half-baked.

[@Withing_]

Wow. The path tracing genuinely looks absolutely incredible. When PT comes to mainstream and can run alright it's gonna be so awesome

[@lolmao500]

It will only happen once the crappy consoles can run it easily... so maybe in 2 console generations.

[@blackops2001]

@@lolmao500 Doubt it, even modern High end gpu's struggle to run games at 4k + RTX on, and Path tracing is like much heavier than RTX.

[@yrh002b8]

We probably going to have to wait until the 70xx or perhaps 80xx. 4090 can do PT but only with the help of FG.

[@lemonhaze715]

​@@blackops2001the only way ik able to run pathtracing in cyberpunk at 4k is with dlss quallity and frame gen on ... and sometimes i get under 60fps but i kinda blame my 64gb ddr5 that has cl40.. instead of cl30.. it is wh ie ies"

[@Vorexia]

@@RicochetForce There's also software improvements to take into account. For instance, according to Epic, hardware Lumen performance is almost doubled in UE 5.4 (give or take, depending on the scene), and Microsoft is patenting an upcoming LoD solution for ray tracing. Combine that with the massive improvements in FSR and PSSR we'll likely be seeing in the "RDNA 5" generation (might be post-RDNA at that point) as well as AMD's track record of transitioning to a much more performant microarchitecture every console generation, and I don't think path traced 4K30 with an 1800p internal resolution would be far-fetched in next-gen consoles. Especially when you take into account that, although the current RDNA 2 in consoles does support RT, the architecture itself is not all that optimised for RT, so there's a huge potential waiting to be tapped on both the hardware and software sides.

[@Alovon]

Honestly the biggest improvement is more the material properties the Total RT Reflections add. Not just to metals and glass, but skin, eyes.etc everything feels a lot more realistically lit.

[@ArathirCz]

3:30 this is a great example how much better lighting and reflections add to the perceived realism of a scene. I could see this mod being used by people who take "cinematic"/artistic screenshots in games.

[@mikecarter7645]

Agreed! I'd say that the first example at 1:32 also shows it off incredibly well. It also shows how better lighting leads to dramatically better looking materials.

[@melonytoni9016]

the bottle on the ground goes from 2005 to photorealism

[@Krisztian5HUN]

No realism here. U cant interact any of these objects on the ground. Realism is not just lights and shadows....

[@LikeYouWereThereOfficial]

The lighting is cool but I personally can't get over the weird grain to everything

[@donloder1]

@@Krisztian5HUN here comes the hurr durr bandit

[@davidburk4546]

7:32 “big outdoor lights like the sun or sky.” Something you’ll only hear on DF 😂

[@Praxss]

On DF and specifically from Alex 😂

[@wretchedslippage3255]

The sun IS a big outdoor light. lol

[@HomemadeIndie]

Whaha, so true dude! Love it

[@spacewombat4569]

Sounds funny but it's not that uncommon to hear things expressed that way in 3D graphics. The sun in a 3D scene is usually nothing but a spotlight node. The sky is nothing but a skydome light driven by an HDR image.

[@SkinnyBlackout]

Sun lamp/emitter and sky HDRi.

[@EXXXcellent480]

Hey, little update on Path Tracing: Praydog has added a feature to the latest Nightly build of REFramework that enables you to layer 2 RT modes, letting you denoise a bit of the path tracing with the regular ASVGF RTGI (also helps illuminate some pitch black shadows where the PT isn't working quite right). In conjunction, I've added a sun fix to the Graphis Suite for path tracing that re-adds specular details and decreases the overall sun intensity. Together with these 2 aspects bringing the image contrast more in line, the noise is reduced quite a bit and you can even play with 0 bounces on the path tracing for 0 noise altogether, though you'll be relying on the RTGI for reflection light etc and only really have the path traced shadows.

[@Stef3m]

Great to hear that, keep up with such an awesome work

[@DavyDavePapi]

Path tracing is so beautiful. Really makes games come to life. I can't wait to own a 6090 to play it at 60 fps

[@fartloudYT]

rtx 6090 is going to be lit. probably literally.

[@kill3rbyysight]

@@fartloudYT it's also goin to lit ur money 🔥🔥🔥👍

[@bombyo3634]

What about 5090

[@dunnono00]

@@bombyo3634 nah

[@bombyo3634]

@@dunnono00 lol!!!

[@SICK_O]

"Look at the richness of the door frame." 😅 This is why I love Alex's tech breakdowns.

[@fnvfanMSPR]

The lighting and shadows look absolutely amazing but the noise is something I have noticed since the start of this video

[@candycabngfl]

lol for a second there I though it might be KZbins wonderful compression.

[@colossusrageblack]

There's a hybrid path tracing mode too. It helps with the noise and indoors while most of the surface material detail you get from path tracing.

[@EXXXcellent480]

Thanks for the coverage! Still working on adding more options to the mod as and when I can. Just found a way to make the clouds in the game render at the correct resolution, no more blurry pixellated clouds.

[@Stef3m]

Fantastic! it really looks terrific and would near perfection with a denoiser

[@ibrokemykeyboard]

Amazing how even rough path tracing shows off all the other materials and work that went into them

[@selohcin]

Alex was right to quadruple the number of samples per pixel to 4, but you can see that it only halfway solves the problem of speckling and weird shimmering and pixel noise. To totally solve the problem, we would likely need to quadruple it again to 16 samples per pixel. This would inevitably lead to even an RTX 4090 running the game around 10 FPS at 1080p, but at least we know what it will take!

[@MrSpineduke]

the real fix is a well implemented denoiser, you'd get far better results than brute forcing it

[@striata6299]

16 times the detail!

[@stubman5927]

​@@MrSpinedukean even better result is to implement a better sampling technique for the path tracer like ReSTIR. denoising relies on input being good enough and if you have it bad like that torch at night example they showed in the video... it's gonna do nothing but a big blurry light

[@Wladislav]

Cinematic film grain to compliment your cinematic 24fps.

[@roccococo2498]

The first thing I saw was that horrible film grain. It looks worse like this, I cannot ignore that noise :)))))

[@PedroGhost12]

"I recommend you try out... if you can" My 3060 hearing this: alright lemme cook

[@itsuadman]

It looks incredible, especially the shadows as time passes. Those standard shadows seriously look like theyre about to artifact out of existence. Thanks for highlighting this mod, Alex! A shame about the denoiser but it just shows the absolute potential beneath the surface

[@bingewatcher9153]

I guess if this supported DLSS 3.5 ray reconstruction like Cyberpunk it would be fine

[@ReachTea]

@@RicochetForce After finishing Cyberpunk from start to finish with path tracing, every single "realistic" game with real time lighting looks like ass, pre-baked is still great looking

[@richardcollis5576]

Deffo breaks the illusion, I’m looking fwd to the next Witcher in this regard……. Although I might be waiting till a 8090 turns up for all I know.😂

[@HomemadeIndie]

My PC unplugged itself, jumped on the table and is staring at me.

[@JaiArah]

lol

[@reddragon2943]

I am Surprised it did not slap you and say NOO!!

[@Typecast-L]

My gosh, I REALLY hope the community goes nuts with improving this if Capcom wont. The difference is HUGE!

[@mw9771]

My Legion Go will play Ray Charles records backwards with this mod.

[@Zastrutzki]

What a snack of a video. Thanks Alex!

[@EdProsser]

I'm blown away by what you've been able to achieve with what you had - I've never dabbled in CGI stuff it looks like a lot of work but a lot of fun - interested to see what you share next!

[@Geraltofrivia12gdhdbruwj]

now this is a proper proof that path tracing is the future of game graphics

[@dahahaka]

9:40 we gotta keep in mind that even 1-2 spp can be plenty with a proper implementation of DLSS3.5, Restir etc.

[@Stef3m]

ReSTIR would solve the indoor hanging candle problem and perform much better but as much as I love and consider it extremely clever algorithm it will introduce a bias, I'm curious about what simply a good denoiser would make it look

[@dahahaka]

@@Stef3m what kind of bias do you mean? Funnily enough this seems to be an unbiased path tracer, you can improve visuals and performance drastically by making it biased, nvidia is doing this with their engines, presumably also CP2077

[@cjack2355]

Great coverage, just like the lighting in this mod lol. Feel better soon Alex!

[@maikux3995]

Deep Down fedelity level reached

[@MountainManJax]

Now that's a name i haven't heard in a long time.

[@rlfernandes9538]

This is why we have DF. Unmatched!

[@OshMMf]

Even with the thick noise it looks amazing !

[@Case_]

One thing that would be nice to mention is that the mod also includes an optional tweak to standard RTGI to improve its performance somewhat by using heatmaps.

[@marsovac]

If they fix the shimmering of pixels due to lack of denoising and shoot more rays inside it would be good.

[@FaultyTable]

Yeah... Idk if my eyes are broken or if everyone is smoking something but to me this looks like shit in its current state.

[@Deliveredmean42]

@@FaultyTable I guess it helps if you are only watching it on a phone, pausing the video to see the details, or they show the best case scenarios, but for the rest of us that have keen for details, you can see the noise for sure, especially when Alex zoom in a lot.

[@gavinderulo12]

​@@FaultyTabledo you mean the noise? Because I think the general improvements to lighting quality are massive. The denoising could be fixed through NRD or RR. As well as smarter sampling through ReSTIR. This would improve performance AND quality.

[@jcm2606]

The noise can be fixed just by actually using a denoiser. Path tracing isn't using denoising at all here, even just routing the path tracer output through the A-SVGF denoiser would massively help at the cost of killing a bit of detail. That's where DLSS RR, NRD and ReSTIR would come in as the former is generally a better denoiser and the latter two help clean up noise before lighting even goes through the denoiser.

[@ondowmosa6283]

The key mode in DD2 is the one to increase RT resolution to full and turn denoiser off. Now you can enjoy the game with not much of a performance hit. Because the 0.4 original resolution and aggressive denoiser really makes for an unstable image that was annoying the hell out of me more than the poor performance on launch.

[@pirkkafilander342]

I wish more developers used baked lighting which is baked according to path traced lighting. I know its very labour intensive but could work in linear single player games and achieve similar results as path tracing + our gpus could actually run it.

[@tyrus1235]

Baked lighting is what makes old(er) games like the original The Last of Us and The Order 1886 look so beautiful even today. Most games that do not have a dynamic time of day/weather system could use baked lighting for static light sources. They'd still need to use proper shadow maps (or simple RT shadows) for dynamic objects (like the player character, for example). Also, baked lighting does not work well with specular surfaces, sadly - you need real time solutions for those.

[@WereCatStudio]

Baked ligts and shadows looks great but the limitation is that they work well in static environments. The moment the light source is movable it wouldn't work.... sun changing position in the sky for example.

[@TheCrewExpendable]

@@tyrus1235 Yeah The Order 1886 looks like it could be a PS5 game. Especially if you boosted it to 4k60. (And, you know, finish the rest of the game since it's basically a 4 hour tech demo).

[@NeovanGoth]

It is not possible to bake an equivalent of path traced lighting. Particularly for materials that are both diffuse and specular there are no know algorithms to do that properly. For those you need to solve the rendering equation on the fly, for which path tracing is currently the most performant way.

[@mitsuhh]

Baked lighting isn't possible if you have dynamically reactive environments.

[@slot9]

Amazing video! So cool that Ray Tracing is the 'reference standard' for newer games.

[@Blindsyde5762]

Man, as they keep improving this , this is gonna be amazing in the future. That really does look like a generational leap in visual fidelity.

[@demasprojects]

think a rtx 5090 + ray reconstruction + denoiser = playable and gorgeous

[@marsovac]

it would be playable even on a 4080 if it had a denoiser and frame gen. The denoiser, as frame gen, on RTX is part of the optical flow and does not compete with reources on the GPU, and frame gen is good for these kinds of slower games even if the base framerate is under 60., And of course with dlss 3.5 they could use ray reconstruction to recoup some quality and get more performance. CP2077 does it with much more complex geometry and much more reflections, so why not dogma? Capcom doesnt want to spend resources on a few % of players that own high end gpus :P I guess we will see stuff like this only when Nvidia sponsors the game or when capable RTX gpus are the norm.

[@jose131991]

@@marsovacyou will get really noticeable artifacts with a base framerate under 60.

[@marsovac]

@@jose131991 I don't in cyberpunk. I use it there to get to 70-80FPS, with a base around 40 and something. WIthout it Path tracing is not playable on the 4080 even with agressive DLSS. But it might depend on the game and the implementation I guess. If you play with a controller it works much better I feel, since you cant do abrupt scene changes.

[@redtro8678]

@@jose131991 Not really, even a 4090 struggles to keep a base of 60 in cyberpunk btw Base framerates of 40-45 still work just fine

[@gavinderulo12]

​@@redtro8678really depends on the resolution. With dlss performance I'm always above base 60fps on a 4090 even in the most demanding areas like the Dogtown market. At least in the current version of the game. Though I prefer to play at 4k dlss balanced.

[@leftyfourguns]

Very cool but the added layer of fur on every object makes it unplayable. Hopefully modders can sort out the de-noising over time. I'd love an official update for pathtracing just for the materials alone though. The metal objects look incredible

[@TallSilhouette]

Next generation is gonna look so good with path tracing.

[@ivansoedjono]

I have spent so many hours in photomode, mainly because the mode itself is rather restrictive to use to it's fullest. To see the game being so much more beautiful with this mod really makes me want to get a new PC🤯

[@glowerworm]

Took a few weeks break from dd2, came back last night and played for eight hours straight. This game is a work of art. You have to meet it on its own level, but if you do all the pieces fit together so nicely. The post game especially blew me away, absolutely phenomenal work by Capcom, they just placed themselves on the level of Fromsoft and Arkane for me

[@woodearthdvd]

So does this mean this mode is available for all RE engine games? Path Traced SF6?

[@Paakli]

Even just one sample per pixel path tracing with a proper implementation makes the game appear more true to life. Would be cool to see it.

[@AluminumHaste]

At 05:00 the stones that form the circular base are not occluding light, even with pathtracing. So there's more work to do to make it look even better.

[@Filip10101]

Would it be possible to also mod in DLSS ray reconstruction for denoising? 🤔

[@sterlonb.digital777]

I am having an absolute BLAST playing Dragon's Dogma 2!

[@usergk71]

How is the combat?

[@IronMan9771]

​@@usergk71personally I'm quite enjoying it. It varies quite a bit depending on which vocation you choose, mage and sorcerer feel different to the archers, which feel different to the melee builds, so there's bound to be at least one you enjoy. A lot of them also have some really good parries, fighter can parry with their shield, warrior can parry by attacking at the same time as the enemy, thief has a parry special ability, and mystic spear hand can go full Vergil, dodge an attack while leaving a cheeky little after image, only to reappear above the enemy and come down hard with a helm splitter. I love a good parry and can confirm, this game has them. The boss fights are plentiful and can feel very Shadow of the Colossus-esque, with you climbing on enemies to stab them in their weak spot. Leveling up your character and your combat class turns you into an absolute powerhouse, with endgame abilities being ridiculously OP in a fun way. And if you're not a fan of a particular fighting style it's super easy to switch to a different one at a vocation guild. There's a lot of exploration in the game, and a good chunk of that exploration is rewarded with more combat. Like, "oh hey, a cave! Let's see what's inside! Oh, it's a chimera for me to fight, neat!"

[@tlreclipse1126]

incredible how lighting is now makes your game look Very good or Epic.

[@Cptraktorn]

they should hit up nvidia to set up DLSS 3.5 denoising

[@Clutch4IceCream]

Ray reconstruction looks fucking terrible, a perfect example of this is the faces on cyberpunk 2077 with path tracing and ray reconstruction on it looks so bad

[@stianlavender1683]

@@RicochetForcewrong.. I agree with the other guy path tracing / ray reconstruction in Cyberpunk literally looks horrible in some areas. Like PS2-grade shadows and fuzziness everywhere (I have an RTX 4090 btw). And no, its not because of DLSS or Frame Gen, I play all of my games in DLSS-Q or DLAA and I always turn on FG if a game supports FG. I cannot tell the difference between 4K native and 4K DLSS-Q in any game I play…So what makes CP2077 so blurry and soupy? Its either the path tracing itself, or the RR…

[@Cptraktorn]

@@stianlavender1683 pretty sure it's because CP2077 path tracing uses very few bounces.

[@Antares-dw9iv]

​​​@@RicochetForceI don't think it looks terrible but I also wouldn't say it's an outright upgrade over the conventional denoiser. It does some things better, a lot of fine lighting detail is reconstructed more believably and reflections look a lot sharper, but it still has that oil painting look, buries a lot of detail, oversharpenening issues around edges and kinda falls apart in motion, even with the most recent DLLs. It is of course better than having no denoiser like in this mod and adding more options (within reason) is a good thing but it still has issues.

[@CrzBonKerz21]

It will be pretty incredible when we can play games with reasonable performance with path traced lighting.

[@scottj10]

I love path tracing.

[@El.Duder-ino]

This review excellently confirms that path tracing is truly wave of the future feature which radically (also on the performance side) changes the visuals of the game.

[@dmitripopov8570]

Great explanation and research!

[@krizby87]

Needs Ray Reconstruction mod

[@danielgebert4556]

If this were properly implemented, I could see it being a contender for best graphics of the year.

[@t.k.5972]

@8:23 could also be perception. Our eyes pupils widen so a dark room is actually "lit". its not unrealistic for a candle lit room to be actually very dark through a fix model such as a game engine (unless it has build in light setting adaption parameters, have not installed the game yet)

[@theshadowcult]

With how good that looks, i'd honestly be happy with the noise, if we could just get reasonable performance, and some kind of "fix" for indoor areas.

[@huor1990]

How about the hybrid path tracing setting there? Does that maybe add the de-noising? would love to see what that setting does.

[@crestofhonor2349]

This is why lighting is so important to a game. It can transform what looks mediocre into something incredible. This is my main complain for games like FF7 Rebirth as it lacks this ambient lighting in many scenes making the game look worse. This stuff makes all the materials and model shine and look far better than what they do under poor lighting quality

[@thiagovidal6137]

9:48 That's pretty acceptable. Anything from 30fps and above is good enough when it comes to fully path traced game at 4k. Capcom should definitely implement this. With the help with a denoiser and DLSS this would look and play great.

[@astreakaito5625]

Great video, and wow everything looks way better, even the characters. 1 pixel rt isn't even that expensive vs raster and something like DLSS's denoiser with ray reconstruction could clean up even that amount of noise without losing material details. Capcom should just do it!

[@robertlawrence9000]

That potential!

[@iLeicha]

It looks better for sure but there is too much image noise with path tracing

[@paul1979uk2000]

This actually looks quite good compared to the base game, with a few issues to resolve like denoising and areas that are too dark, this could be a good way to play the game once we do an upgrade or two that we have the power to run the game. It's also likely we are going to get a lot of mods for the game over time, I just hope Capcom doesn't give up on the game because it's got so much potential if they resolve the performance issues, bring in more enemy variety and more missions, things to do.

[@yayab42]

I remember been setting up for hours a reshade with path tracing in Kingdom Come Deliverance and Witcher 3. Resulting in amazing looking visuals. I even was more playing for these than actual gameplay lol

[@MythicResonance]

Ready to set my 8GB 3070 on fire, baby

[@thorocomments817]

I’m bottlenecked and imma STILL do it, lol

[@MythicResonance]

UPDATE: it did not go well lol

[@linomata6583]

At least you tried.

[@brando3342]

@@MythicResonance How “not well” did it go?

[@oliverdavis4642]

​​@@brando3342so not well that they had to post this comment from their phone

[@drinkwater3453]

The noise makes it look like the most hyper-realistic medieval acid trip simulator ever

[@magnomliman8114]

Omg this is huge ! i well try it right now !

[@hedzsooo]

Yeah, this put into work my 4070 even in native Full HD res. but I love in it! XD

[@Wizard_Pikachu]

Biggest gripe with DD2 Graphically is how shitty the damn shadows flickering is.

[@TheSliderW]

That engine has roots in the ps3era, it has been barely upgraded for the RE games but shows it's limits in open and dense environments. I wish they either picked another graphics engine or reworked the internals to scale better with more powerful hardware as it's very likely that the next Monster Hunter game will also have the same issues.

[@OshMMf]

@@TheSliderW Yeah and let's not forget the horrible SSR as well

[@yewtewbstew547]

@@OshMMf Maybe an unpopular opinion but I think SSR is usually horrible unless it's backed up with a half decent cubemap. Seeing reflections gradually become occluded as the object casting them moves off-screen is just really distracting to me. And obviously the bigger the reflection is the worse that gets. Screen space ambient occlusion, shadows and global illumination are not so bad, their occlusion is usually less jarring imo.

[@brunohollenberger2563]

you can set shadows to max on pc and that fixes that

[@praisetheoak]

Haven't had any issues with shadows, but then of course I have them maxed out. Using 4k interlaced makes them flicker like hell, FSR3 at balanced seems to fix them though.

[@thoru4367]

Will glad to use it with my 7090 rxtx 500gb vram in 30 years

[@lysergicaciddiethylamide6127]

My RTX 11090 with 2gb of VRAM

[@n0ah7]

Nice video, Alex. Imagine Path Tracing in their Street Fighter 6 game! 😃

[@MechetheGoat]

The future is reallly bright. This shows how behind we still are on hardware in terms of ray tracing.

[@itag295]

Jesus, with Path Tracing it looks absolutely glorious. Even with the noise, it's so much better.

[@Oryyyt]

I'm hyped for the future of Path Tracing ngl. Imagine perfecting the look while not being so taxing on future cheaper gpus. Textures can screw it. The games could be stylized with simple textures for all I care. As long as the lighting is believable.

[@tyrus1235]

Jusant is a game that uses ray tracing to extremely beautiful results and its textures are more or less just base colors. It's really incredible! That said, proper textures do add to the realism of a scene - it's how you get granular detail like the sheen of wood or the relfectiveness of water and glass, for example.

[@arisozerah]

Yup, the lighting goes a long way for sure.

[@Vorexia]

@@RicochetForce Portal with RTX was a full remaster, though. All the assets were remade to be higher-fidelity and compatible with PBR. But yeah, Quake 2 RTX looks stunning.

[@Oryyyt]

@@tyrus1235 Dude I love Jusant's art direction. Combined with it's color palette it's really gorgeous to look at. And well if the game is aspiring for realism like Forbidden West or RDR2 then high-fidelity textures makes sense. But something stylized like Jusant or Lightyear Frontier benefits by embracing their simplified look and still manages to evoke the right materials/surfaces with the use of proper stylized textures and lighting.

[@asmongoldsmouth9839]

*I'm buying an RTX 5080 in October or November 2024 (when it releases). I pray it can handle this. D.D.2 is my favorite game.*

[@minisculex3]

8:03 this is pretty much accurate and realistic if u ask me lol in order to lit up exactly like the left side, you need to places the candle right next to the wall and the floor

[@tonny.c]

I guess the next step in raytracing (or path tracing) is to remove the grain/noise effect. I wonder if that can be fixed with some clever blending effect.

[@jcm2606]

There are already multiple steps that could be taken to reduce the noise. Importance sampling and ray guiding could be used to help guide rays towards the directions that contribute the most to lighting, an (ir)radiance cache could be used to provide a relatively noise-free baseline to sample against for deeper rays, and a denoiser could be used to clean up any remaining noise. What you're seeing is the raw output of the path tracer without any of these steps.

[@programmedgamer7101]

Wow, the materials took on a whole new life with PT.

[@TheLiverX]

There is plenty of both temporal and heuristic denoising going on with pure path-tracing enabled despite it being called "pure". I suppose, "pure" here means "only", without the raster part. Anything in the ballpark of single digit sample count looks like noise almost everywhere: rapidly shifting, compression destroying, eye scooping bunch of static noise. Image denoising is there and it's doing gods work for the given parameters, it's just that there is no amount of denoising that would be suffice to completely smooth out mere 4 spp.

[@gamer812]

Looks incredible.

[@donjuan2001]

I looked inside my computer after watching this video and saw my graphics card doing pull ups while playing 'eye of the tiger' at max volume. I just hope he'll be ready.

[@murder00redrum]

May be able to come back to this game in 10 years when the tech can play it.

[@dlbutters7164]

Now, THAT'S indeed impressive!

[@Archangel125]

It’s crazy that we have hardware capable of real time path tracing

[@alumlovescake]

There is not a single PC that can do a solid 60fps in all areas at lowest settings, Cool mod gonna use it in 2030 when the game MAY actually work.

[@ATLsF1N3ST91]

That's simply not true. It may have been at launch, but I bought it on PC 3.5 weeks after launch, after putting in 110hrs on PS5, and it runs at 60fps on my i9-13900k/ 3080 PC in the towns in 4k with adjusted settings mixing low/med/high.

[@mikem2253]

Jensen be like “This 5090 can do it… for $2,999!”

[@ATLsF1N3ST91]

@mikem2253 why would raising your GPU do it, if it's CPU bound?? My 3080 runs at 75%-90% load when running the game in 4k There is plenty of headroom.

[@KillahMate]

The slowdowns are because of a CPU bottleneck - your GPU is actually not even running at full utilization a lot of the time in DD2, so adding more load to it might not be as much of an issue as you'd think.

[@BoofPack69]

Probably could rather easily lock 60 fps with 3 samples instead of 4. Also, path tracing performance doesn't usually scale, either up nor down, as it casts rays indiscriminately. Performance impact should in theory be more or less the same everywhere. I think with some small tweaking and adding a denoising pass this could be very playable.

[@EViLeleven]

The lighting looks amazing but man that grainy noise is disgusting

[@PARANDROID]

beautiful video

[@Davidium84]

I LOVED this video! And now I actually want to play Dragons Dogma!! Was a bit disappointed on the RT effects or rather lack thereof.

[@ThatsMySkill]

i think its crazy that this was possible to be enabled. makes an okay looking game look incredible

[@MaxIronsThird]

I hope someone mods DLSS3.5 into this game

[@Mike79745]

So we need like 4x more performance to enjoy this level of image quality. We should be there around RTX 8090 :p

[@SimonVaIe]

Or a proper implementation using a denoiser and possibly ray reconstruction. Would run much better. But dd2 doesn't run great anyways.

[@hakdog4299]

Wow this looks absolutely amazing wtf

[@yfz450rider39]

Turned very unremarkable graphics into something incredible!

[@peterGchaves]

*... Waiting for the analysis of the disastrous Fallout 4 "next-gen" update!* 🤭😅

[@lysergicaciddiethylamide6127]

Same

[@gothpunkboy89]

Game been running and looking great on my PS5. Whats so disastrous about it?

[@CFM7]

​@@gothpunkboy89 on PC it broke F4SE which is needed for many mods, so until f4se updates people like me can't even play it

[@toasterdogg]

@@gothpunkboy89On PC it broke a bunch of stuff and made the game 15 GB bigger despite adding nothing.

[@gothpunkboy89]

@@toasterdogg Every game update can and will break mods. An extra 15 gb is nothing. The game is less then 80GB with all DLC on PS5.

[@hermestrismegistus9142]

When I was a kid real-time path tracing in video games was a dream. Now it's a reality!

[@WhyDaroOdaarra]

Path tracing would be amazing but it’d pretty much have to be paired with frame gen tech to make it playable at current. I however would already be more than happy to see RT reflections & shadows added officially or modded in somehow.

[@23cookieface]

Me: Is this Path tracing for DD2? My GPU: No. This is Patrick.

[@Drstrange3000]

This makes a big difference. It doesn't look like path tracing will be much of a thing this gen, but I hope for next gen they can utilize this for more smaller scale games. I know the goal is for realism, but I would like to see this kind of lighting used for more stylized games. The raytracing already makes a HUGE difference for games like Minecraft and Fortnite.

[@mando5279]

@@RicochetForce And it speeds up Level Design by a lot as you dont have to bake lights with every change.

[@Drstrange3000]

@@RicochetForce I'm not sure if my comment got across correctly. I am familiar with current animation using PBR and path tracing as well as Blender being able to make all sorts of styles with advanced lighting. I was just saying, I hope the industry doesn't JUST try to make photorealistic games with path-tracing since I have already seen it done really well with stylized CG outside of gaming.

[@reddragon2943]

WoW. looks awesome.

[@jjforcebreaker]

It does look very impressive!