5/16/2023 0 Comments Elden ring testSaints Row launched without an upscaler but added AMD FSR 2.1 in a patch released in late November. The games that attempted to introduce ray tracing support without any upscaling can be counted on one hand: Life Is Strange: True Colors, Rune II, Stay in the Light, and World of Warcraft. There's a reason NVIDIA created the GeForce RTX graphics cards with both RT Cores and Tensor Cores, the latter of which have been dedicated to winning back at least some of the performance loss inherent to ray tracing with clever AI image reconstruction (DLSS). The biggest disappointment, however, comes by way of the lack of any upscaler addition in this patch. Additionally, it's not that much of an improvement compared to the screen-space RTGI shader that people have been injecting via ReShade since shortly after the game's launch. Overall, the Elden Ring update isn't as disappointing as mentioned by the initial reports, but it's also not great. In this small cave, for example, max ray tracing costs 29 FPS (on the GeForce RTX 4090, the mightiest graphics card available, at 4K resolution), a 24% decrease compared to ray tracing set to off. Speaking of performance, outdoor scenes are a lot more taxing. Aesthetically, it tends to make the visuals darker than the non-ray traced option. It can be noticeable, though it is hardly a night-and-day difference. Generally, the ray tracing implementation improves the accuracy of shadows, making objects like rocks or foliage look more grounded and realistic. Going back to Elden Ring, the impact of ray tracing (set to max on PC) varies between scenes, which is why I've captured several, both indoors and outdoors, near the beginning of the game. For that, we have the precedent of additions to an existing game and a live service one at that ( Grand Theft Auto V on current-generation consoles). While it is understandable that the developers wouldn't want to go into adding ray traced global illumination since it would have required re-authoring the game's entire lighting, they could have at least added ray traced reflections, too. It's not a game-changing difference, which is hardly surprising since FromSoftware only elected to implement ray traced shadows and ambient occlusion. So, did FromSoftware manage to elevate the game's visuals to new heights? Yes and no. Then, there were no more official news on the matter (although dataminers had spotted the addition of related strings that hinted at an imminent release) until ray tracing was at last added to Elden Ring with this week's 1.09 patch. Bandai Namco first announced that Elden Ring would be updated with ray tracing support months before launch. That's why I had been eagerly anticipating the ray tracing update.
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