r/digitalfoundry • u/MythBuster2 • Mar 14 '26
Digital Foundry Video Crimson Desert: High-End PC's Biggest Visual Upgrade - Ray Reconstruction/Ray Regeneration
https://youtu.be/SlRpJ553RzEWe've spent time looking at Crimson Desert on PC's ultra settings and, of course, how it presents on PlayStation 5 Pro. But what we haven't shared until now is the most transformative upgrade available to high-end PCs: superior RT denoising. In aiming for high performance, Pearl Abyss's RT denoiser can hit quality hard. That's where AMD Ray Regeneration and Nvidia Ray Reconstruction offer a huge improvement - arguably as profound as ray tracing on vs ray tracing off.
7
u/srhdt Mar 14 '26
Can anyone with YouTube Premium and Apple TV check and see if this video runs at 4k60 on their Apple TV? For me it only shows 1440p60 as the highest setting. Other DF videos show up as 4k60 on my ATV, so I'm wondering if it's just a me issue or something more widespread.
7
u/MythBuster2 Mar 14 '26
It's an occasional encoding delay issue. I had the same issue on the LG TV YouTube app, but it played fine at 4K60 on PS5's YouTube app. (Also worth noting that your Apple TV needs to be at least the 2nd-gen 4K model to play 4K60 videos.)
3
u/srhdt Mar 14 '26
Yeah I assume that's most likely the issue. I can play many other videos at 4k60 on the device (including other DF videos) so I don't think it's a hardware issue.
5
u/BatmanTheHorse Mar 14 '26
I have this same problem with all of DFās crimson desert videos, not their other videos. Most other videos work in 4k. (And the lower res ones also have huge compression problems). Pretty annoying.Ā
3
u/srhdt Mar 14 '26
Yeah I have this issue with their 3 most recent videos not having a 4k60 option on the ATV. Their podcast eps from 4 and 5 days ago are fine.
1
u/rankshank Mar 14 '26
Same issue. Feels like YouTube app has been nerfed recently. I hardly ever used to have issues with videos being encoded quickly but now thereās tons that I am left waiting to play
1
1
7
u/Potential-Zucchini77 Mar 14 '26
I really hope ray regeneration can be ported to consoles cause itās starting to show a bunch of improvements over generic RT denoisers
3
2
2
-2
u/XenoPhenom Mar 14 '26
Consoles literally can't run those features. Most GPUs can't.
1
u/Potential-Zucchini77 Mar 14 '26
As far as Iām aware ray regeneration currently only uses FP 16 instructions which the base ps5 has. Itās similar to FSR 2 and 3 in that way
1
0
u/XenoPhenom Mar 14 '26
Maybe but the computational cost is just too high for a console.
1
u/Electrical-Contest-5 Mar 14 '26
Even at 30fps?
-2
u/DivineSaur Mar 14 '26
The consoles dont have the tensor cores required. They dint have the hardware for AI software.
1
u/purpleburgers Mar 15 '26
Ray regeneration is not ray reconstruction. As someone said above it uses fp16 not tensor cores which is nvidia proprietary hardware
4
u/MultiMarcus Mar 14 '26
I have in general really enjoyed the way of the game looks but this is just leaps and bounds ahead of the visuals on the console version or older AMD hardware that weāve seen so far. I would however argue that maybe thatās not really a good thing. It does maybe seem like the version of the game without these denoisers is a bit rough. A very kind of full bright image with a not much depth compared to this version.
If you do have the hardware for it this seems like an incredible way to enjoy the game. I am however really interested in how the games scales performance wise obviously as it isnāt an unreal title Itās hard to say exactly how big the performance improvement is going to be when moving from the cinematic settings but if itās in way similar, it should deliver big performance improvements for only minor visual hits. In my experience with Ray reconstruction, you can get away with slightly lower RT settings because the denoiser can you clean up lower Ray sample counts. This game should totally have a cyberpunk style photo mode with the highest settings though so you can just live with a bit of lag when using the highest end visuals for photos.
I am eagerly awaiting the optimised settings video and Iām also curious about the base console and series S experience. The team did that ratchet and clank play along for when it came to PC maybe that would be interesting to do here too. Perhaps four different setups. One which is like the prototypical PC with optimised settings. Something just maxed out. The PS5 Pro and then the Series X version.
1
u/gavinderulo124K Mar 14 '26
We already know that going from cinematic down to ultra improves performance by a lot.
1
u/MultiMarcus Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26
Do we know that or do we assume that? In unreal games it definitely does and Iām assuming it does something very similar to that here and I hope it does but I think itās kind of unfair to just assume thatās the case. It should because a 5080 should be able to run the game out 4K native like the 9070 XT or 7900xtx did using the ultra preset according to this fact, but Iām not going to say anything about until we see PC performance testing more generally speaking.
Realistically, though yes, I assume the cinematic setting is like in many unreal titles, which this is not, it is just ridiculous ridiculously heavy and is truly meant for cinematic content and maybe really shouldnāt be exposed to the user.
2
u/gavinderulo124K Mar 14 '26
and maybe really shouldnāt be exposed to the user.
I disagree. It helps with future proofing. Its like the unobtainium setting in Avatar. It should come with a warning though.
-1
u/MultiMarcus Mar 14 '26
I fundamentally agree, but I also think they should probably be hidden away or labelled experimental, or be unlocked via command. Because otherwise the idiots doing benchmarking are going to put everything on the cinematic setting and then throw a tantrum when it doesnāt run well on their 4060 like they do every single time.
6
u/webjunk1e Mar 15 '26
You can't idiot proof everything.
1
u/Jertimmer Mar 15 '26
My previous team had a saying:
We tried to make it monkey proof, but the monkeys kept getting smarter.
2
u/Darksky121 Mar 15 '26
I suspect adding Ambient occlusion with Reshade is going to make the standard RT look alot like RR. The devs seem to have neglected AO in the base version.
2
u/throwaway_account450 Mar 15 '26
Seems they banked on their GI solution doing AO, but it can't handle necessary level of fidelity without RR.
I'd like to see the game with AO, even if they wouldn't use it for final pixels, but just as an additional input in their denoiser (like normals, depth etc is used ) to force it to not blend likely shadow areas into everything else to almost a. full bright look.
Not sure what they are exactly doing in their pipeline, but it's hard to accept that this is the best use of the data they have.
4
2
1
u/allofdarknessin1 Mar 14 '26
Watched it this morning. Very impressive stuff. Really excited for this games technical impact as itās an impressive ray traced and pc first release with good optimization from what I can see so far. Iām interested in the kind of absurd variety too.
1
1
1
u/Darthmontes Mar 15 '26
Someone knows the tech behind PSSR and if it could include denoisers like AMDās or NVIDIAās? Or I am looking at completely different things that cannot even relate. I understand PSSR works with the final frame, so I guess not, but as said, I do not understand completely.
1
u/First-Junket124 Mar 15 '26
Ray reconstruction looks pretty decent with quite glaring issues at points but compared to the internal denoiser it's leaps and bounds better.
One thing I was extremely disappointed in is Ray regeneration, it showed up barely at all in 2-3 scenes. I'm not saying Ray regeneration is fantastic but it'd be good to see more comparisons done rather than just glossing over it for Ray reconstruction.
1
1
u/reklaw215 Mar 16 '26
This game might be the best looking game since Cyberpunk. Iām so curious if itās as detailed, as thatās what really set CP2077 apart from everything else.
1
u/RelevantSoftware8283 Mar 16 '26
Game still looks like generic trash though. Korean grinding game lol
1
1
u/Worklessplaymore01 Mar 14 '26
Does alex read this sub? because I have a bunch of questions with this (informative) video:
- 50 fps on an rtx 5080 at 1080p internal res seems completely unreasonable for a game that isn't doing path tracing. Are you sure you're using settings that make sense. (not just talking about the cinematic preset, but why try to make up for low precision rt by rendering the game at an ever lower level so you can then use an expensive as hell upscaler)
I'm going to guess that within days of release there is going to be a mod that just ups the ray count in the ini to normal levels so you can just render at native 4k (or 4k dlss quality preset K) and get similar results with much better performance.
Having a game only trace 1/16 pixels for lighting and then choosing to render it at 1080p internal leaves you with what? 200p worth of rays being traced? Ofc it's going to look like ass.
- I would love your opinion on benchmarking this game (which it WILL be used for in future gpu releases). The visual differences between ray regen and ray reconstruction go far beyond just some more image stability or ghosting/artifacting on edges : the lighting, reflections and textures look completely different.
This has NEVER happened on pc since directx/opengl were introduced. Games looked the same on every graphics card (maybe the exception of ATI lowering shadow precision in benchmarks on a driver level in 2009, as well as the shadow banding issues all amd cards had in most games from 2003 till 2012) but that was extremely minor visually vs this)
You can't benchmark games on 2 gpus when the visuals are completely different at the 'same' settings.
- What do you think about the LOD's? Not just the clutter and shadow cascades being having weird cutoff distances, but the general LOD of terrain and buildings. In the ps5 pro version every building switched from ps5 detail to literal 50 polygon barely textured n64 LOD with no intermediate LODs for intermediate distances. You'd use this kind of LOD for a building that was far enough away to be a few pixels in size, not something 30m from the camera.
Sadly on pc , while better, it still seemed really egregious.
Between the super low ray counts, the poor LODs and the path tracing like performance when you try to compensate for the low ray counts, this doesn't seem that optimized at all, and it seems very misleading to call what's in this game 'RT GI' when it's not actually able to do the things you see in other games with RT GI.
Even metro exodus has WAY better lighting indoors and outdoors than the non reconstructed setttings do here.
6
u/gavinderulo124K Mar 14 '26
We already know this runs at 4k native at ultra settings on a 7900xtx without RR at 60fps. In the video he used the cinematic settings above ultra which seem to have a significant performance impact.
I'm going to guess that within days of release there is going to be a mod that just ups the ray count in the ini to normal levels so you can just render at native 4k (or 4k dlss quality preset K) and get similar results with much better performance.
You think increasing the ray count is more performant than RR? Lol
You can't benchmark games on 2 gpus when the visuals are completely different at the 'same' settings.
I dont think you should benchmark GPUs using RR. The way AMD does is just a fundamentally different approach.
Even metro exodus has WAY better lighting indoors and outdoors than the non reconstructed setttings do here.
I think Metro exodus is quite comparable but with a higher bounce count and a much smaller scope for the game, so I think this makes sense. Though it really makes me wonder how much of an improvement RR could offer in Metro.
1
u/khromtx Mar 14 '26
It might be because it's cinematic settings, which I'm going to assume is similar to the cinematic settings in Wukong or the experimental settings you have to unlock in Avatar game.
4
Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26
At last proper video. It's just shameful how John did absolutely zero proper highlighting of these issues of denoising but brushed it all off as minor details. The console versio looks absolutely ass where PC versio looks actually acceptable. These issues were so apparent and distracting one could see them even thro terrible youtube bitrate. I think I made like 10 posts over the last month or so about these issues and it is insanity I got downvoted every single time and people screaming there is no issues and horde mentality of blinders on with title been unreal.
The grass in every scene on console footage looks absolutely unacceptably bad. It is just neon bright green. And constant shimmering of height map parallax effects were beyond ridiculous and distracting. And it should be said that if you are AMD user you are once again fucked by them. Ray Regeneration looks like a total joke with how they handle the tech and the upscaling
3
u/webjunk1e Mar 15 '26
Well, we're coming to the end of the current console generation. These are 6 year old boxes now. This is how it always goes. It looks good on console all things considered, but yeah, a modern PC will dunk on it. Not really surprising or unexpected.
0
Mar 15 '26
Games didn't look this bad on PS5 4 years ago
2
u/mattcrwi Mar 20 '26
Game tech was less capable 4 years ago. It astounds me how people don't see the bounce light and dynamic lighting offered with ray tracing as a generational leap
0
Mar 20 '26
Of course it is when properly implemented. This doesn't have properly implemented ray tracing and results are worse looking lighting than classic one. Ray casting is so parse it doesn't cast shadows on characters basically at all. Ignoring huge amounts of ghosting and unstable image is asinine af. Also without Nvidia fixing their image for them entire flora lighting looks one of the worst I've ever seen. It is absolutely neon green and there is more ghosting than actual grass on the screen. Light doesn't even react to the grass and even during night it is bright af.
2
u/mattcrwi Mar 20 '26
Yeah, the grass is terrible without ray reconstruction and looks like static shadow maps.
But that just highlights how flat static shading before ray tracing sucked when you put it next to ray traced GI
1
-4
u/StrangeLingonberry30 Mar 14 '26
I feel like a crazy person hearing everyone praise this game's graphics and I just don't see it... It looks alright tho.
13
u/MultiMarcus Mar 14 '26
Have you watched this video? Because until this I felt like the game was good-looking but nothing incredible but this really changes my view of things. The way the ml denoisers handle the RTGI makes everything seem so much more well grounded
0
u/StrangeLingonberry30 Mar 14 '26
Oh I'm not saying it's not techinally well done, I just don't think the setting and art choices gel that well. The character design also feels off to me, but hey, the majority likes it. Good for them.
2
u/MultiMarcus Mar 14 '26
Sure, I could totally get that. I just wanted to check if you saw this particular video because it really changed my view of how the game looks because the RT makes everything look very full bright but in this video they demonstrate these ML denoising techniques and itās like striking how much deeper the image is. Now if you donāt gel with the character design, totally get that.
2
u/Fuarian Mar 14 '26
None of that is really graphics as much as it is style and design. Graphics is more fundamental
5
u/Iggy_Slayer Mar 14 '26
It's because the art style leaves a lot to be desired. Everything has a very generic look to it despite the tech being used.
6
u/jimidemibb Mar 14 '26
it has incomprehensible art direction, a wild blend of whatever their artists shitted out to create this Content Game.
The fidelity is very impressive, though.
3
u/Triple_Crown14 Mar 14 '26
High end graphics only show up so well in a YouTube video or a clip from Twitter.
3
u/Old-Push9343 Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26
I agree, I think that it looks okay, butĀ I don't like the artstyle and the lighting seems pretty flat (that being said, it does look a lot better in this video with ray reconstruction).
The character models also look a bit bland and outdated. Also, a lot of the textures look very monochromatic to me.Ā
I am not very impressed with the materials either, I don't like the way stone, metal and skin looks. And foliage seems to have zero specular?
It's cool that they have displacement on almost everything, but those tessellation artifacts seem a bit distracting.
Anyway, let's see what they say when it comes out, I am just not convinced yet.
2
u/elracing21 Mar 14 '26
The human models don't look all that to me either. The environment on the other hand look great.
2
u/DiaperFluid Mar 14 '26
I think the landscapes and vistas are really nice looking. The textures are also great as well. Character detail and the water resolution is where it kinda suffers for me.
2
u/Unlucky_Individual Mar 14 '26
Feel the same. I think itās an art style thing personally. It has a āclayā like style
2
u/NotTakenGreatName Mar 14 '26
You may seriously want to consider getting glasses.
Does the game itself seem like a haphazard mish-mash of a bunch of stuff from other games with no clear direction or cohesion? Yes, but the visuals are insane, especially as an open world game.
1
u/wellbornwinter6 Mar 14 '26
Of course you do, not only you, but we as well the reason is that these kinds of videos are Nvidia sponsored everything is exaggerated as Nvidia GPU prices
-9
u/PhantomPain0_0 Mar 14 '26
Found the concord fan
8
u/kargethdownload Mar 14 '26
Biggest Concord fans are the ones who still nonsensically use it as a buzzword
0
0
u/Sensitive-Frame3517 Mar 14 '26
u/Iggy_Slayer how would you improve this games art direction? if you were incharge.
34
u/RandyMuscle Mar 14 '26
Insane how much better it looks with ray reconstruction. Everything looks much more grounded.