Ever since Nvidia formally unveiled their Turing RTX 2080 playing cards on Monday, we’ve heard nothing however ‘ray tracing this’ and ‘Giga Rays that’ – a lot in order that I can in all probability now recite 3573 issues about their fancy pants lighting equations off by coronary heart. What I can’t say 3753 issues about is their body fee efficiency, principally as a result of Nvidia has solely revealed a small handful of very particular figures to date (extra on these shortly) and I haven’t been capable of do any impartial testing on them, making it nigh-on unattainable to inform how they actually examine to the remainder of right this moment’s best graphics cards.
After talking with Metro Exodus builders 4A Games, nonetheless, we would lastly have some thought of what to anticipate when Nvidia’s fairly RTX settings are all switched on.
“We’re always going to be pushing 60[fps],” rendering programmer Ben Archard advised me once I requested if 4A have any form of efficiency targets when it got here to implementing Nvidia’s uber lighting ray tracing tech. “But we’ll see what we get. Obviously, there are three cards there and we’ll see what profiles we can get for each.”
He additionally confirmed that 4A’s 60fps goal was with a 1920×1080 decision as properly. “It’s 1080p, yes,” he stated. “That’s the goal, but we’ll see how it goes.”
Of course, there’s quite a lot of time between now and February 22 when Metro Exodus actually launches, and I’d hope that 60fps at 1080p could be a baseline efficiency goal relatively than its absolute higher restrict. Indeed, it could be very disappointing if neither the RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and even RTX 2080Ti might attain the identical form of pace at 2560×1440, if not 4K, however the proof might be within the pudding as soon as I lastly get my arms on correct overview samples.
Whatever occurs, although, you need to not less than have the ability to flip RTX off if it finally ends up being too taxing.
“We’re still working on it and haven’t set out all the myriad of options yet,” Archard continued. “We haven’t narrowed that down. But in principal, yes, it’s definitely something like [Nvidia’s HairWorks]. Yes, you can turn Hairworks on and off, and you can turn any given lighting system off. It’s a feature, so yes, you could have a button that goes, ‘We’re going to switch over to RTX mode now’, but it’s the same engine running all the time, so it’s just, ‘Okay, we’re going to switch over to traditional global illumination systems, or we’re going to switch over to the modern RT GI system. It’s an optional feature, but it’s a really, really important feature.”
Since growth is ongoing, Archard additionally (fairly understandably) wouldn’t be drawn on how the RTX playing cards’ total efficiency compares to Nvidia’s present GTX collection.
“That’s the trouble, we’re developing it and optimising it,” he stated. “We’ve got an existing engine with the existing systems, so a direct comparison isn’t really fair. Yeah, when you first do it and first implement [ray tracing] in a naïve way, it’s more expensive, it’s slower. But if you optimise, yeah, you can get there. You get it up to frame rate and that’s what we’ve been trying out. Actually saying what the final difference is, I can’t, because we’ve not finished.”
I’ll be placing up the remainder of my interview with Archard later this week, however if you wish to get on board with extra Metro Exodus goodies, Brendan has already been arms on with the non-RTX construct of the game, the place he fell in love with its silly manchildren.
