[BUG] - RTX Smoke Becomes Very Bright

[Crimsomrider]

If the player has either Raytracing or Pathtracing turned ON, during certain parts of the day smoke will become very bright when shadows are being cast upon them and act weird while the sun is hiding behind buildings.

Not really a big deal as I usually play during night time, but it is kinda ugly to see and pretty distracting.

 

[BabaBooey88]

If the player has either Raytracing or Pathtracing turned ON, during certain parts of the day smoke will become very bright when shadows are being cast upon them and act weird while the sun is hiding behind buildings.

Yes. Likewise with various translucent objects. They have a common culprit.

CDPR has several rendering effects nested together. So to say specifically what the cause is would be misinformation perhaps. 'Distant Shadows' it's called. This alone is usually just what is says, it's far distance approximation of cascades, -in 2077 though other techniques are entangled with this shader for some reason. You can disable this with an ini config, but it will create some arguably worse artifacts - like fog being nearly pitch black, various post processing and culling masks will be disabled causing diffuse lighting bleed(yes, even with PT on), among other problems.

Similar story with SSS on character skin. Because Ray Reconstruction bypasses denoising entirely, CDPR has seemingly disabled this as without denoising character skin flickers from "fireflies". But, again, for some reason other world render effects are nested in with SSS. Having SSS disabled is what causes the distant fog, some the giant holo displays, and large scale (faux) bloom to flicker if you noticed. It's very apparent when facing Watson on the large freeway from Japantown toward Kabuki at night.

It's a mess. I had hopes they would address these with 2.0 as that's it. If it's not fixed now, it never will be unless they implement RT translucents which would only address the plastic and not things like steam and smoke.

 

[Crimsomrider]

Personally I think they're just waiting on Nvidia before they dedicate themselves to fixing all the RTX bugs, because half the issues with RTX were not happening at all until Nvidia started messing around with the game with 1.61, 1.62 and 1.63 updates and now with 2.0.

Hopefully... but seriously, they can't leave the game's RTX looking like this. Just like that stupid chroma-effect on skin has to get fixed at some point.

 

[BabaBooey88]

Personally I think they're just waiting on Nvidia before they dedicate themselves to fixing all the RTX bugs, because half the issues with RTX were not happening at all until Nvidia started messing around with the game with 1.61, 1.62 and 1.63 updates and now with 2.0.

Hopefully... but seriously, they can't leave the game's RTX looking like this. Just like that stupid chroma-effect on skin has to get fixed at some point.

The smoke and glass glowing has always been there but with PT it's much more notable because of how the basegame's exposure settings are antagonized with PT on - guessing it's a reSTIR thing.

The chroma skin is a real head scratcher personally. My best guess is that's a streaming sector setting, which is on CDPR's side, as it doesn't happen everywhere. That absolutely can be fixed and should be fixed.

Don't get me wrong, RT itself has issues because of the restrictions that make the tech possible. Like the damaged barriers turning black. I've seen that elsewhere in games - My only guess on how to fix that is redoing the entire process so that the base mesh is culled and replaced with progressive damage states, because what you're seeing is the result of the old mesh no longer being rendered but it's still present in the Gbuffer - causing RT/PT to shade areas that are clearly not in shadow. Issue there is that 2077 is pretty bad about swapping meshes so the entire thing would briefly turn black throughout the swap chain. You could see this happen on large scale objects, even buildings as recent as 1.60 ifirc, probably even now if you look for it closely.

The same issue on foliage could only be fixed if they disable 'physics' shaders - which means we either accept completely static foliage or we accept this artifact until the either physics or RT for games advances greatly.

The very odd double mesh issues we're seeing with shadows... I have no clue what's happening or why it's happening. Wasn't there before 2.0 and has nothing to with RR as it happens regardless - another Gbuffer issue. First time I brought this up I thought surely there isn't a second mesh for every character moving around out of sync, is there? Apparently so. I'm guessing the other appearances in the app or ent file are being rendered in the buffer and the anims are out of sync somehow...


I hope you're right, but I'm not confident they'll fix all the RT bugs when they can barely hold the game together as is and RT has gotten worse aside from RR(which is negatively impacted by all the other issues). Some things will forever remain broken I'm afraid

 

[Crimsomrider]

Maybe the 2nd mesh thingy you are suspecting is also somehow tied to this;

I saw this randomly in my Youtube feed and also some other people mentioned seeing V's 2nd body while riding bikes. Maybe it's tied to the currently bugged 2nd body (1st person model showing) or who even knows anymore what the hell is happening

All in all some pretty weird bugs with 2.0.

 

[BabaBooey88]

lmao! Yeah I had that happen also, odd that it's being drawn up in that one instance.
I thought I was being haunted briefly.

I'm trying not to be super cynical. I really do hope they fix this and I stand by my 'review' even though I wouldn't recommend anyone buy PL atm. Obviously their tech team and artists really give a f*ck, PT was solid in 1.63 aside from glowing stuff, and even design finally woke up and made a really killer combat and progression system. General Systems... like policing - still sleeping at the wheel it seems but better than nothing.

Just hope leadership will afford resources toward righting the game now that they won't extract many brownie points from the media or sales.

 

[Crimsomrider]

I would say don't lose hope ^^

The reason why I'm hopeful is because I'm noticing all the tiny stuff which were either bugged, broken or entirely forgotten until 2.0 and deemed "trivial" by many in the community, yet a lot of these small issues got fixed.

For example, this door in Kabuki leading into the Gig: Last Login for Charles Bucks ripperdoc. This was previously a regular slide door that would slide THROUGH the wall on the left

But now it's an actual door that opens inwards. I cracked a massive smile when I saw them fix this, even though I never reported this myself.

Also glass for example, before 2.0 glass did not have any sound effects;

Now glass so wonderfully shatters. Honestly the sound team really went all in with 2.0. and I was so impressed by how many SFXs they've added to so many things that previously didn't have any that I had to send them compliments when I was bug reporting the currently bugged puddles not having any ^^

Also some minor visual bugs such as this, I honestly thought they would never fix this;

Or this where the Delamain car can't have the radio turned on and had a broken headlight lighting up the entire interior;

They really are trying and I'm quite grateful they're not just taking care of the gamebreaking stuff. Afterall the Devil is in the details.

 

[BabaBooey88]

I would say don't lose hope ^^

The reason why I'm hopeful is because I'm noticing all the tiny stuff which were either bugged, broken or entirely forgotten until 2.0 and deemed "trivial" by many in the community, yet a lot of these small issues got fixed.

For example, this door in Kabuki leading into the Gig: Last Login for Charles Bucks ripperdoc. This was previously a regular slide door that would slide THROUGH the wall on the left

But now it's an actual door that opens inwards. I cracked a massive smile when I saw them fix this, even though I never reported this myself.

Also glass for example, before 2.0 glass did not have any sound effects;

Now glass so wonderfully shatters. Honestly the sound team really went all in with 2.0. and I was so impressed by how many SFXs they've added to so many things that previously didn't have any that I had to send them compliments when I was bug reporting the currently bugged puddles not having any ^^

Also some minor visual bugs such as this, I honestly thought they would never fix this;

Or this where the Delamain car can't have the radio turned on and had a broken headlight lighting up the entire interior;

They really are trying and I'm quite grateful they're not just taking care of the gamebreaking stuff. Afterall the Devil is in the details.

I'll... give it a shot.

I need to check if I tracked it, but I did find another area where the door slides through a wall after 2.0. Just shrugged it off and went about my day, but those are the things I always notice that pull me out of the experience. It's also why getting PT working again matters so much, the almost pitch perfect lighting makes all the difference for me, especially when raster gi infringes so heavily on the game otherwise.

Recently though, some streaming changes seem to be causing an effect similar to this where even PT is degraded. I'll post if I have a save later, but in the Jackie's garage the lighting is broken now, almost like there's no floor. Light is bleeding everywhere...