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CD Projekt's Cyberpunk 2077 Update 2.0 + Phantom Liberty Expansion Thread

Bad Sector

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
What i am talking about is mostly penumbra and umbra.

It is possible to have that without raytracing (and a bunch of games already have it), e.g. here is a screenshot of my engine from a year ago when i first added it:

Ueh5rN5.png


However it has several drawbacks, main being that it only works with lights whose area can be expressed as a distance from the lightsource itself (e.g. sphere-shaped where the lightsource is a point light and the distance is the sphere's radius). And of course all the drawbacks it inherits from shadowmapping in general, like aliasing, peter panning, shadow acne, etc.

IMO while GI is nice, the biggest feature for raytracing is shadows that actually work without ghastly hacks on shadowmapping.
 

Perkel

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yeah. If penubra and umbra were easy then games would already have it. It is not naturally so games don't have it.

Also making shadow correct is one thing. Making all shadows in scene correct is completely different matter.

Raytracing allows for shitload of dynamic lights with correct shadows it does have heavy impact on scene performance but even greater impact is when you have normal non raytraced lights trying to cast all correct shadows.
 

King Crispy

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For what it's worth, for every hand-picked screenshot you can post that shows a visual improvement using ray-traced shadows over rasterized ones in CP2077, I can show you a thousand screenshots that virtually look the same between the two (and I acknowledge that you already stipulated that on the last page).

The probem, currently, is that the tradeoff in situational visual improvement vs. in-game performance is far, far too large. To go from 120fps sustained with everything at Ultra other than RTX down to 75-80fps just by turning RTX on is unacceptable. I don't care how good the scene looks; for such a heavily action-based game, to me, you're defeating the purpose of the game by giving up such fluidity. There are certain areas of the game such as the central part of the Japanese area that can bring RTX down to 50fps using a 10900K and a 3090 at 1440p!

So your point is well-received, but unless you look at CP2077 as nothing but a screenshot maker, what's the point? You'll likely never really notice the visual improvements other than in rare situations, all the time wondering why there's microstutter and you're getting slightly motion sick playing the actual game.
 

Yosharian

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For what it's worth the RTX in CP2077 looked more or less the same and not worth the FPS cost at all whereas when I tried it in Dying Light 2 (shit game) the difference was astounding and I couldn't play without it, the game still ran at over 100 FPS though which is a minimum for me
 

Bad Sector

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yeah. If penubra and umbra were easy then games would already have it. It is not naturally so games don't have it..

But there are games that already have shadows with penumbras everywhere, e.g. GTA V and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. They aren't as easy to notice as raytracing's pixel perfect soft shadows because of overall shadowmap problems, but you do get that "contact hardening" effect that penumbras provide.
 

Kjaska

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IMO the difference between RTX On and Off is very significant and worth the performance hit. It's not like the game is particularly difficult that you'd need the 120fps. Besides, the hardware is going to catch up eventually and you don't have to activate it until it does.

If it was some tech that required even more artists to create assets for the game, inflating the costs of production even further, I would be against it. But it's the opposite, potentially automating away a lot of manual work required for creating scenery.
 

soulburner

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RT is still in its infancy. It brings back memories of GeForce 3 and pixel shaders. The early games used them sparingly and even then it was a big performance hit. At least two GPU generations went by before shaders became the norm and had no performance concern. Doom 3 was designed around the idea of shaders of the GeForce 3, but when the game was released it was pretty much unplayable on it.

So we've had two generations of RTX cards, one generation of RT capable Radeon cards. I believe RT might become less of a curiosity with the upcoming generation of GPUs that's coming later this year, but RT as a feature you see enabled by default in most games will happen no sooner than a year later. It will probably take years before full path tracing becomes anything else than a Quake 2 RTX you play for half an hour and forget about.

There is no doubt we can achieve great lighting and shadows with pure shaders and no hardware ray tracing. Unreal Engine 5's Lumen does pretty much everything without engaging hardware RT and looks absolutely marvelous, but I think we're close to crossing the line of what is feasible with "normal" rasterization (by becoming too complex and requiring too much raw horsepower) vs doing RT in hardware.
 

Bad Sector

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If it was some tech that required even more artists to create assets for the game, inflating the costs of production even further, I would be against it. But it's the opposite, potentially automating away a lot of manual work required for creating scenery.

Indeed, raytracing simplifies a lot of things, from the visual perspective you get more accurate lighting and shadows and from the programming perspective you get a simpler rendering pipeline (no need for shadowmapping hacks). The hardware isn't at that point yet though, some hacks are still needed and we still only get to shoot a handful of rays, but raytracing is even more parallelization friendly than rasterization so performance is bound to boom in the future.

In addition it can enable some things that were hard or even impossible to do previously, e.g. better transparencies and -if/when the intersection tests themselves become programmable- volumes like smoke and water that aren't rendered as surface approximations (or as particle quads) but take depth and translucency into account and get properly shaded and cast and receive shadows.
 

Perkel

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yeah i expect raytracing to pick up pretty quickly as hardware improves. The best thing about full raytracing pipeline is that it massively simplifies rendering. No need for hacks, no need for quadruple 360 hops around various problems, no need to build advanced math techniques to have just a taste of GI and so on.

I think the real test for raytracing will come with 4xxx of nvidia gpus. 3xxx improved raytracing only just a little bit performance wise while 4xxx should be where nvidia will change a thing a bit. There should be a lot of low hanging fruits at start of this process.
 

gurugeorge

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Just as an amateur onlooker, it strikes me that raytracing is in an analogous position to what shaders were like in the first couple of Nvidia generations that had shaders - heavy load, more of a gimmick and not really worth it, games didn't implement it much, or didn't impement it well. But it eventually picked up to be ubiquitous and fantastic. I think the same will probably happen with raytracing.
 

Bad Sector

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
The best thing about full raytracing pipeline is that it massively simplifies rendering.

Well, we're still far from full raytracing pipelines, right now the GPUs aren't fast enough even for secondary effects without denoising and the rasterization functionality is still a large part of the GPU - meaning if it isn't used then the GPU's power isn't used to its fullest and the game would be leaving performance on the table.

I think it'll take a few generations for rasterization to take a back seat and even a bit more for it to be removed from the hardware (rasterization can be "emulated" in terms of raytracing) - consider that Nvidia GPUs even in the 4xx series (and most likely later too) still had dedicated hardware for fixed pipeline functionality even though theoretically that could have been implemented in shaders several generations before.
 

soulburner

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Each new 3D technology is barely useful initially. Shaders tanked performance on a few generations of shader capable cards. So did tessellation. So will RT. And as with shaders and tessellation before, RT will soon become the norm.

The rumors and leaks suggest the new gen of GPUs will supposedly be ~100% faster in each price segment, but they're also completely silent about the RT aspect. It's worth to know that RT calculations are very memory bandwidth intensive. I recall reading an Nvidia paper about moving BVH calculations from the shader engine to a fixed pipeline hardware, which could be 2-3 times faster in theory, but it currently makes no sense because memory is not fast enough to offer a significant performance improvement, if any. So until we see graphic cards with GDDR7 I wouldn't count on a huge RT perf increase just yet.
 
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Just as an amateur onlooker, it strikes me that raytracing is in an analogous position to what shaders were like in the first couple of Nvidia generations that had shaders - heavy load, more of a gimmick and not really worth it, games didn't implement it much, or didn't impement it well. But it eventually picked up to be ubiquitous and fantastic. I think the same will probably happen with raytracing.
that's generally been the trend with nvidia over the decades, rtx isn't an isolated thing in that
 

Wunderbar

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The entire story of first expansion has been leaked.

It was accidentally added into game files with patch, now dataminer who found it after quarell with CDPR moderator leaked it. It was originally on r/ff06b5 subreddit, but now its deleted. You can find there every line and dialogue from first expansion.

https://www.mediafire.com/file/nzf1swld4io43or/ep1.7z/file

CDPR is the gift that keeps on giving.
 

lukaszek

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Summary of leak?
You portray Roszondas, who's just awakened from a decade of death with no memory of his past other than hazy recollections about fighting demons and the undead. However, in short order, you recall a lot about who you are, including your mission to defeat the evil forces invading the land of
Gorasul
and the special powers granted by your dragon stepfather, Crakan. These powers serve as an addition to the basic character stats. You're rated in dragon breath, dragon fear, dragon strength, and dragon eyes, and each can be adjusted with points awarded every time you advance a level. These attributes are of questionable value during the game, as they typically come into use only when Roszondas is in immediate peril. Whenever death approaches, he'll automatically use flame breath, a fear effect, or immense strength to fend off enemies.
 

Ibn Sina

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Summary of leak?
You portray Roszondas, who's just awakened from a decade of death with no memory of his past other than hazy recollections about fighting demons and the undead. However, in short order, you recall a lot about who you are, including your mission to defeat the evil forces invading the land of
Gorasul
and the special powers granted by your dragon stepfather, Crakan. These powers serve as an addition to the basic character stats. You're rated in dragon breath, dragon fear, dragon strength, and dragon eyes, and each can be adjusted with points awarded every time you advance a level. These attributes are of questionable value during the game, as they typically come into use only when Roszondas is in immediate peril. Whenever death approaches, he'll automatically use flame breath, a fear effect, or immense strength to fend off enemies.

Sounds like an improvement in every way over the main story imo.
 

WhiskeyWolf

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Well, at least one thing is certain after this leak... the expansion exists.
 

gerey

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This will be the one and only expansion before abandoning the game and the engine
Pretty much what I expected, considering that not only did CDPR massively scale back the support for the game post-launch (hence why it took them so long to patch the game), never delivered all the promised free DLC and went completely radio silent. They likely cut the second expansion a month post-launch and simply kept quiet until people stopped giving a shit about the game.

I predict the expansion itself will be cobbled together with whatever stuff was left around from the base game, with a few addition, and it will be done on the cheap (hence why Keanu Reeves isn't reprising his role as Johnny) as a final cashgrab. In the meantime they'll release one final patch that will do fuckall, like all the other patches, and shift their focus towards fucking up Witcher 4.

Mark my words, the expansion won't fix any of the oustanding issues with the game, won't overhaul any of the retarded systems in place, won't introduce any new features - it will just be a bunch of shitty quests that all boil down to "go here, kill stuff".

CDPR can't die fast enough.
 

Wunderbar

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I predict the expansion itself will be cobbled together with whatever stuff was left around from the base game
pretty much this - the DLC will be set in Pacifica, the famously unfinished area.
 

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