This is the embodiment of everything that I despise about the RT(x) scam.
NVIDIA’s “RTX Remix” initially appears to be a useful tool for modders to enhance classic games with high-fidelity path tracing and improved textures. The AI-generated textures and revamped shadows and lighting through path tracing offer significant visual improvements.
However, these enhancements come with a notable impact on performance, rendering certain games unplayable.
For example, Remedy’s Max Payne has been upgraded using RTX Remix and is compatible with any GeForce “RTX” graphics card. However, the severe performance penalties associated with these enhancements will certainly deter players from experiencing the game in this enhanced state.
Despite being a 23-year-old game running on the prehistoric DirectX 8 API, Max Payne performs well on both modern discrete and integrated graphics solutions.
With NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4080, it maintains an average of over 1400 frames per second, however, when tested with RTX Remix, the FPS drops to around 65 frames per second, over a 95% drop in performance for some fancy lighting effects that hardly rejuvenates the two decade old title.
With RTX Remix enabled, there’s a significant increase in the GPU’s Total Board Power (TBP), jumping from 185W to 300W. Additionally, the CPU which in this case is an Intel Core i7-10700F which has a 65W power rating now experiences spikes of upwards of 90W.
Memory consumption also rises from 7.8GB to 9.2GB, generally the entire system is being thrashed and bashed with RTX Remix.
https://www.moddb.com/mods/max-payne-rtx-on-demo-level
Enabling path tracing incurs a significant performance cost, but it does fundamentally enhance the game with a more advanced lighting system, but is the severe performance penalty worth the flashy lighting system? I genuinely don’t think so.
As a community mod, there’s continual potential for enhancement depending on the efforts of modders. They may choose to incorporate additional light sources or replace game assets to further elevate fidelity and visual quality.
But on a fundamental level, it’s baffling to witness an RTX 4080, a $1200 GPU is being cucked so severely with RTX Remix on a game that released back in July of 2001. And not just that but rather the performance drops from 900-1400 FPS down to around 60+ on average.
To compound the issue, during this test, the game was running at 1440p with DLSS 3.5 set to “Quality” mode.
This means that the RTX 4080 is achieving an impressive average of 60 frames per second at an actual resolution of 1707×960.
Such a steep performance drop on exponentially expensive hardware is the very reasoning behind why I perceive the whole ray tracing march to be nothing short of a gimmick slash scam.
Ray tracing is undoubtedly the future, or rather path tracing actually is the replacement for our current rasterization process, however as you’d guess it requires an insane amount of throughput to accomplish to any significant feat, we the consumer are being pushed this technology in its infancy for the soul purpose of marketing.
https://www.scribd.com/presentation/437918327/McGuire-SIGGRAPH19-From-Raster-to-Rays
Currently, if you’re seriously about enabling Ray Tracing or Path Tracing in games you need the horsepower of an RTX 4090 graphics card to actually consider it. But that goes without saying that the RTX 4090 simply will not be remotely powerful enough to handle RT / PT in future titles whatsoever.
Just as the first lemmings, and by that I mean RTX 2000 series (Turing) owners how their graphics cards have been holding up in terms of Ray Tracing performance in games released after 2020.
I haven’t encountered a single game where enabling Ray Tracing / “RTX” justifies the substantial performance hit, except maybe for Minecraft, but seriously, is it really worth it?
Your $2000+ expensive silicon and plastic toy will become a useless paperweight before consumer grade hardware actually has the throughput to actually handle real path tracing, are you sure you want to invest in a premature gimmick, because I sure as shit don’t.
The performance of Ray Tracing and most certainly Path Tracing will remain horrible for many years to come, as manufacturers such as NVIDIA continually incorporate more logic dedicated to Ray Tracing inside their mega monolithic GPU dies while traditional rasterization is being gradually phased out entirely.
NVIDIA themselves have specifically stated that we simply cannot obtain enough ray tracing throughput until at least 2035, until then each new generation will gradually shift away from rasterization, FP32 to focus on incorporating more “RT cores” into their humongous dies to facilitate large leaps in marketable Ray Traced performance metrics.
At least AMD themselves incorporates worthless RT acceleration within the actual cores themselves, whereas NVIDIA continues to devote an increasing amount of die space towards ASICs instead.
However the performance remains dogshit for those who seemingly don’t have thousands to spend on an RTX 4090, do you believe that your 1080p orientated RTX 4060 class product is going to be relevant for actual Ray Tracing? It’s performance isn’t even relevant today let alone another eleven whole years of this drip fed rubbish.
Why do you think the secondary gimmick associated deep within the RTX camp is DLSS? Simply because the actual RT / PT performance remains abysmal that the only way to justify enabling the technology is to arbitrarily “upscale” the image outside of the tracer itself, aka rasterized, and now we have “frame generation” to fluff the numbers even more so.
