Star Wars: Outlaws - RTX Direct Illumination and Ray Reconstruction - Needs Work

I examine the differences RTX Direct Illumination and Ray Reconstruction bring to Star Wars Outlaws. RTX Direct illumination doesn't seem really all that impressive at best and possibly bugged at worst and Ray Reconstruction while it does improve the denoising tremendously, it comes at an unusual performance cost which according to Ubisoft seems to be a bug that will be fixed.

PC SETUP:
ASUS TUF OC RTX 4090 - Graphics Card
AMD Ryzen 7 7800X 3D - 8 Core Processor
360 AIO H150i Corsair Elite Capellix
32GB 6000 mhz CL30 DDR5 Memory
ASUS ROG Strix X670E - A Gaming WiFi Motherboard
ASUS TUF Gaming 1000 Watt 80 Plus Gold ATX 3.0 Fully Modular Power Supply
1TB Samsung 980 Pro NVME SSD Operating System Drive
2TB Samsung 980 Pro NVME SSD Game Drive
Lian Li 011 Dynamic EVO PC Case

Windows 11 Pro
Nvidia Driver 560.94

00:00 Ray Reconstruction
02:42 RTX Direct Illumination
06:23 RTX DI Bug?
08:41 Conclusion

#starwarsoutlaws #rtx4090 #pcgaming

[Demente_Parker]

Regarding the shadows inside that cave city, my guess is that RTX DI actually has physically accurate shadows, since the whole scene is lit only by lights on the walls and the big hologram, one being a big object with an emissive material and the lights, if not the same, are area lights, both of this would cast extremely soft shadows, and if you pay attention really close you can actually see them. For the sharper shadows being casted on the default lighting, it seems that all the lights and the hologram are treated as if they were point lights or smaller area lights (this helps reduce noise and actually makes sense since most denoisers have a lot of trouble with low light scenes and emissive material), thats why they might be casting shadows that are so defined on the edges, similar to what the sun and moon would do. At first glance i thought the tree shadows were casted by the moonlight until you mentioned the contrary.

[TerraWare]

Regarding Ray Reconstruction and the unusually high performance cost when not having RTX DI enabled is apparently a bug Ubisoft is aware of and will be addressed apparently. As far as RTX DI upon playing around with it, it didn't seem like there were any real transformative changes that justified the performance cost and that was the drive for this video comparison to take a quick look at it and examine the changes and flaws.
Let me know what you think and thanks for watching. Cheers!

[Chanharp]

To be honest RTX DI Off at 6:15 looks better/realistic since the shadow moves with the tree. On Med and Ult it is static and looks baked.

[konga]

RTX DI isn't a Global Illumination system. The hint is in its name, it only handles direct illumination. Bounce lighting is still handled by Snowdrop Engine's ray-traced GI solution. Mostly this means ray-traced shadows from most light sources in the game on every object in the environment (or it's supposed to be), but I also notice some minor differences in direct lighting when artificial lights are involved, since the normal direct lighting method ignores some geometry and you get light bleed as a result. RTX DI's big selling point is that it can handle thousands of ray-traced lights in a scene with a *relatively* low cost to performance. It's still heavy, but ray tracing every object against every light was prohibitively expensive before this technique and others like it were developed.

I think the city scene has lots of surrounding lights that are causing the shadows to disappear, which may be more realistic. If you notice, the person standing next to the wall right when you enable RTX DI is still casting a shadow because that spot isn't affected by as many of the other lights. Still, I think there may be an issue with their RTX DI implementation. It is causing the shadows from many artificial lights to be much grainier and more poorly defined than I would expect from realistic shadows. They're not soft per se, but fizzly and not holding their shape super well. They may be using a low sample count which is causing the shadows to lose some definition. And it may also be causing some shadows to essentially be denoised away, depending on their size and shape (long thin objects may be especially prone to this)

[teslasnek]

Game looks so much better with Ray Reconstruction ON so what I did to compensate for the performance cost was turn the Raytraced Diffuse Reflections and Specular Reflections settings to LOW. From what I can tell, this reduces the number of times light is reflected off multiple surfaces, but the performance gain makes up for the performance cost of Ray Reconstruction so that Reflections don't shimmer anymore and look much sharper. Basically, there are fewer reflections overall, but at least the reflections that are there look good instead of a shimmery blobby mess.

[togrulalekperov]

less pronounced shadows with rtxdi on looks correct to me, they are still there, just more diffused and natural based on the scene lighting. That hologram is an emissive light surface which cant produce sharp shadows that you see with rtxdi off.

[craftercis]

Are you in game settings all ultra when you showed those 3 variants of the outside trees?

[ThomazMartinez]

You not said that while turning the DI on shadows are static, they don’t move

[IlGrandeRio]

The world was better before raytracing

[arbmoneyful]

I’m going to be honest here. If you go outside and look at shadows of trees you’ll see them flickering if there’s a breeze. Also distance of said object from the shadows can also defuse the shadow and screen space seems to do this really well. If rt is going for realism I’m just not really seeing it.

[SpoggiYT]

After playing around with the settings a bit, I found that Ray Reconstruction really affects the image quality in motion - foliage and other details get super smeary with it on.

[jorge]

They do have shadows but they are very soft because there is no strong light source. A higher sample count should show them better. Maybe RR can help.

[sirgareth]

RTX DI on ultra makes either the picture blurry. I have it now on high.

[reviewforthetube]

I believe the reason its not doing much is because its accidently already using it alot which is why its still so demanding when off.

[AnthonyAlvex]

On my rtx 4080 super i had to disable rtxdi to get always above 100 fps at 1440 everything maxed and was the best choice i made, if it was on sometimes i would get less than 60 fps ridiculous

[Someone-qykv]

I gave up for now. Between the ray tracing not playing nice and a few other things no matter what I tweaked it seemed the game just looked muddy and the shadows were always glitching out. On a 4070ti

[OniiXGaming]

Yeah is weird. There's also a Hidden graphic setting like Avatar.

[cjw]

Terra im getting close to 60fps without fg on 4k dlss performance with rtgi and ultra settings and rr. Im seeing 4090 benchmarks at 70fps with fg and the works at 4k.

What is going on here????

Am i missing something, im seeing my card level some 4090 performance. I double and triple checked my settings??

What do you get dlss quality 4k ultra with rr and rtgi?

[ThiagoVieira]

2:16 Good reflections? Man those reflections remind me of PS 3 games. With RT RR on the quality is better, but the water dynamics seem really fake. Big L for Ubi

[cjw]

Thanks for this. Im gonna drop the di till the fix it now too.

I know they will patch it so im guessing i should be getting better performance with it on in time.