Ray tracing makes Cyberounk look...worse?

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Subject: Ray Tracing makes Cyberpunk look... worse?

So I'm running Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p, with a Geforce Nvidia RTX 2080 Super. The game automatically detected that for that resolution, I should be playing on Ray Tracing Ultra. I was perfectly happy with that so on I went into character creation. Upon starting to create V, I noticed that he looked rather.... blocky, like he was at low texture, like I was playing a game that was from quite a few years ago. So I go into settings and I start tweaking, going back and forth between setting and character creation many times.

In the end I found that if I set the game to Ultra settings, with Ray Tracing and DLSS disabled, V was in a much higher quality texture. Much more like I've seen in screenshots of character creation prior to the game's release. So I continued on and loaded in as a Street Kid, into the bar you start in. Once there I tried again, toggling between Ultra and Ray Tracing Medium through Ultra. And the moment I activate Ray Tracing, texture quality seems to drop, all the character models lose their sharpened edges. Very much like if you turn anti alising off in a game and edges go from smooth to blocky.

I have all the latest drivers and all my other system components are higher than what your official requirements say I would need for 4k running Ray Tracing Ultra.

So I am currently at a complete loss as to why the fabled RTX Ray Tracing, makes the game actually look worse rather than better.

Any help would be awesome, thanks!
 
It probably is dlss which is rendering the game at lower resolution and that using AI to upscale it, it's in the graphics settings, try to put in at quality. Also turning film grain off might help
But with 2080s don't expect good fps with RT at 1440p + dlss (less than 40) let alone 4k
 
Yeah I only have a 1080p display so I never intended to try 1440p or 4k. I did wonder if it was due to DLSS and have already tried telling it to prioritise Quality, but it had zero impact.

That aside CDPR's recommendations suggested with a 2080s at 1080p I should be able to use the Ray Tracing Medium setting. However, whilst this does give a small but noticible improvement to lighting, shadows etc, the drop in quality with models, presumably due to DLSS trying to be clever upscaling low res models, is far far worse than any improvement Ray Tracing offers. The models end up looking like a game from the mid noughties rather than one from 2020. Sadly this is probably something Nvidia needs to fix with DLSS rather than CDPR, so for now I'll just have to focus on Ultra with no Ray Tracing and hope Nvidia improves the way DLSS functions eventually.
 
You can force sharpening in nvidia control panel by clicking on manage 3D settings, select the program settings tab, then click add, and add cyberpunk 2077 from the list.
image sharpening should be the first option, click on it, turn it on, then play with the settings til you get a desirable result.
Mine is set to - sharpen - 0.63 - ignore film grain 0.00
make sure to hit apply, and also restart the game each time you make changes to see results, also make sure film grain is turned off in game. Hope this helps.
 
So I am currently at a complete loss as to why the fabled RTX Ray Tracing, makes the game actually look worse rather than better.
RT does look better, but IMO it's only worth the performance hit when playing at 1440p or higher.
 
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Guest 4519094

Guest
while we're on DLSS don't forget to set
your LOD at -3
 

ya1

Forum regular
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You sure? [Ultra settings, with Ray Tracing and DLSS disabled]
I think he meant both RT and DLSS disabled.
I've used the same settings with my old GPU. Here's what I've learned:
At 1080P, Ultra settings without DLSS look much better than 1440p with DLSS enabled. Yes, at 1080p you get typical aliasing due to the low screen resolution, but objects that are far away (like fences, reflections in puddles, or the big numbers on buildings) look crispier when DLSS is disabled because the game doesn't upscale the textures from a lower resolution. 1440p for example, with DLSS set to Auto, it uses the "balanced" mode most of the time, which upscales from a resolution lower than 1080p.

You can reduce aliasing and blurry textures that is caused by DLSS, by using these settings:
4K: DLSS_Performance
1800p: DLSS_Balanced
1440p: DLSS_Quality
1080P: DLSS_OFF

A good location for comparison:
V's apartment. Shut the window, go to the entry of the apartment and look at that window.

It's a texture filtering thing you do with nVidia settings. Afaik it's not possible through nvidia control panel, and you need an app to do that (or afaik manually edit .bin files in program data/nvidia corp/drs). It's explained in that link above in the thread.
Thanks! I've seen the link from @deuscaesar. Will check it out.
 
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ya1

Forum regular
I think he meant both RT and DLSS disabled.

Oh yeah sorry, I saw what I wanted to see.

You can reduce aliasing and blurry textures that is caused by DLSS, by using these settings:
4K: DLSS_Performance
1800p: DLSS_Balanced
1440p: DLSS_Quality
1080P: DLSS_OFF

I play on 3070 with RT Ultra and DLSS on quality but got a lot of drops. Then I change to DLSS auto and RT to medium. And then I turn off both RT and DLSS. And back to square one. Every 1 or 2 hours. I've been playing like this for 150 hours. Just can't decide which looks best.

Anyway I feel like the engine should be better optimized. Graphics is nice but should not be THAT taxing.
 
I have the 3090.
I decided to play with RT off and DLSS off, If I turn RT on I get around 22-25fps which is just not enough for me. Unless I turn DLSS on but this seems to scale most textures into a blurry mess on every DLSS setting (Performance being worse than Quality of course).

Anyway I'm not really convinced that the raytracing looks that much better anyway, seems like the non raytraced lightning is really really well made.. And sometimes I think the ray tracing exposes some semi-bad textures with its kinda unpredictive illumination.

Below in my screenshots the tech boxes with wires and pipes and such is way more illuminated with raytracing which in my opinion probably looked better left in dark, as they are with RT off.
Also the cracks in the road is kinda over-illuminated which makes the road-texture show its edges a bit more and look a bit wonky.

Anyways since DLSS seems to make the game look even worse, and I think CDPR did a really great job with the "fake" illumination and shadows, I'm very happy with the 40'ish fps increase turning RT off.

Ray tracing OFF:
rtx_off.png


Ray tracing ON:
rtx_on.png
 

ya1

Forum regular
Anyway I'm not really convinced that the raytracing looks that much better anyway

It does look better but it's not apparent everywhere. RT is reflective surfaces and shadows mostly. In that pic you hardly have any reflections. But look at the character model's shadows. They are way better with RT.

Anyway, I think anyone will agree that the increase in image quality in not proportional to the decrease in performance. I'm sure there is a lot of room to optimize this technology.
 
Wasn't expecting anybody to reply to this thread after all this time, but thank you to all those who ventured advice and opinions!

Firstly about 1440p resolution, my monitors aren't really capable of anything above 1080p, so I'm not going to try and force a higher resolution on them as it will probably create more issues of a diffferent nature.

As to the various suggestions reguarding having DLSS and Ray Tracing enabled with various settings, I have in the intervening time tried all the suggestions here.

Firstly Ray Tracing, the improvements from having this enabled at it's Medium setting(not going to go any higher on my 2080S, as the performance hit would be too heavy) are tiny. Small improvements in shadows are pretty much only noticible either in photo mode or if I stop and examine it intently, during regular play it doesn't really look any different from the standard Ultra settings. The general lighting looks... different, no better or worse just different, with the brightest lights having slightly more glare and the darkest areas sometimes looking brighter or darker than without it but no real change in quality. Reflections, this is the one place where it's noticible during regular play, but the game's reflections have such regularly occuring bugs that at times I feel it's just drawing my attention to those glitches.

DLSS, always and I mean 100% of the time, regardless of settings in or out of game, ruins models and to a lesser degree textures. Close up, models(character models are most noticible but even static object models are noticble enough that you frequently pick up on it whilst playing) have reasonable textures, but the edges of any part of the model end up looking from a time before antialising where edges, particularly curved edges, you could see lots of small blocks where the model was drawn out of many straight lines rather than a smooth curve. At a distance, both the model edges become blocky and textures sometimes appear like they have are taken from a low resolution image and scaled up getting that stretched like effect.

I tried running the game with Ray Tracing Medium on and DLSS turned off, more out of curiosity than any real expectation. Visually, it did the trick, making the game look the best it has yet. FPS took a big hit dropping to 30-50, where on standard Ultra settings it's lowest value is 81 in busy areas if uncapped(though I tend to cap it at 75, my monitor refresh rate to avoid screen tearing). This did however "cook" my GPU, recording it's highest ever temperatures, but the cooling coped. The problems really came about 5minutes in where the game started to get periods of juddering, it would stutter for 5-10seconds then run fine for 20secs and then repeat. My best guess is the Ray Tracing filling up my Graphic's card's RAM, as I've heard tales of people who disable DLSS find that Ray Tracing can then exceed their max GRAM quite easily.

I've finished the game now and won't be back to it unless there are substantial changes but at the end of the day standard Ultra settings worked perfectly fine for me and still made it one of the best looking RPG's I've played(though Skyrim with assorted mod and shader packs etc is still the most beautiful) and ran smooth as silk excluding when bugs with the game caused performance problems.

All in all, the advice I've given friends who have had Ray Tracing issues and asked my advice is to basically forget Ray Tracing unless you have a new GeForce 30 series or new AMD 6000 with a beefy system running at 4k resolution. Below 4k or with older hardware, I just don't think the gains are worth the performance hit not when it's standard Ultra settings can make the game look better all the other Ray Tracing enabled games I've tried anyway.
 
Ray Tracing on in 1080p with DLSS @ Quality

photomode_23022022_204413.png



Ray Tracing off DLSS Off

photomode_23022022_204514.png



And here is a scene that shows off all the more subtle aspects of RT

photomode_20022022_191111.png


Ray Tracing is amazing. Still screenshots do not do it full justice because RT really does give life to CDPR's already excellent lighting. This is on a 3080 and I get an average frame rate of about 74 FPS. As has been said already its a very resource intensive system but, damn, it's worth it.
There are some problems, as has been said, with DLSS, at 1080p, working up from 720p but that's been improving with every new driver release.

I would go 4k if I could but I already sold one of my kidneys to get the 3080 and the price of a 3090 is beyond me. Its worth remembering that the 2080 was not a great improvement on the 1080 series. At the end of the day though, I fell in love with the GFX of this game on a 970 GTX. No matter how good the graphics get you always want more.
 
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Ray Tracing on in 1080p with DLSS @ Quality

View attachment 11287321


Ray Tracing off DLSS Off

View attachment 11287327


And here is a scene that shows off all the more subtle aspects of RT

View attachment 11287333

Ray Tracing is amazing. Still screenshots do not do it full justice because RT really does give life to CDPR's already excellent lighting. This is on a 3080 and I get an average frame rate of about 74 FPS. As has been said already its a very resource intensive system but, damn, it's worth it.
There are some problems, as has been said, with DLSS, at 1080p, working up from 720p but that's been improving with every new driver release.

I would go 4k if I could but I already sold one of my kidneys to get the 3080 and the price of a 3090 is beyond me. Its worth remembering that the 2080 was not a great improvement on the 1080 series. At the end of the day though, I fell in love with the GFX of this game on a 970 GTX. No matter how good the graphics get you always want more.
You're replying to a post from a year ago. At that time DLSS at 1080p was poor, plain and simple.

The implementation in patch 1.5 has improved it to the point it is now very good at 1080p. It does, however, suffer from noticeable artifacts similar to sharpening halos on high contrast lines whenever you are in motion. It is tolerable, just about, as a trade-off for the performance.
 
Wait! Its not 2021 anymore? Damn Iv've necro'd a thread. AH well, there are still plenty of people banging on that RT is no good. This is what I get for posting at five in the morning :giveup:
It's fine -- the post is still on-topic and highlighting how far things have come. That's a valid necro. (Behind him, one of the paladins lets out a very audible sigh. He looks at him sidelong.) Something to say, Telvarius!? (The paladin just lets out a slightly more resigned, albeit, much longer, sigh.) Anyway, that reflection on the car is a fantastic comparison.
 
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