Path tracing? In Dragon’s Dogma 2? The sport shipped with ray-traced international illumination however a path tracer sits inside Capcom’s code – uncovered due to a brand new mod for the PC model of the sport. Graphics Suite Alpha, made by developer EXXXCellent, is out there on Nexus Mods and consists of path-traced lighting, shadows and reflections, all operating in real-time. So, how does it look, how nicely does it run – and why precisely is it there within the first place?
To put in the mod, you may additionally want the latest REFramework instrument from Github, extract that into the Dragon’s Dogma 2 set up listing, then add within the mod’s Lua script to the autorun folder. Go in-game, and it’s best to have entry to a bunch of extra choices on the backside of the REFramework overlay associated to RT and path tracing.
With PT enabled, you may see considerably extra materials and lighting element versus the usual ray-traced international illumination (RTGI) with the choice to make use of a per-pixel or four-samples-per-pixel stage of granularity – every with a corresponding efficiency price, after all. The usual RTGI has considerably much less info to work with – one pattern for each 4 pixels, so it has much more compromises in comparison with the ‘floor fact’ of path tracing.
Another excuse the path-traced model of the sport appears to be like higher is as a result of it consists of specular mild paths, or reflections. This may make a giant distinction to the looks of shiny objects like fits of armour, the place the usual RTGI does not look sensible – it will possibly look splotchy and glows oddly. Compared, the identical piece of armour with path tracing enabled appears to be like like steel, with real-time reflections and self occlusion. This addition of correct reflectivity vastly enhances a variety of the sport’s supplies and textures with correct colouring and shading, and makes differentiation between supplies like glass, wooden, stone and steel simpler too.
The sport world can be enhanced with path-traced shadows, which substitute the decrease decision (and generally temporally unstable) shadow maps present in the usual presentation. This permits for a lot larger shadow element to match the comparatively advanced geometry on buildings and different areas – and as shadows are performed on a per-pixel foundation slightly than on a projected grid, there’s a lot much less fizzle, pop-in and jittering too. Lastly, there are simply extra shadows on the whole with path tracing enabled, with smaller light-emitting sources like candles now casting shadows to ratchet up the element in lots of indoor scenes.
Given how a lot the sport’s visible constancy is improved by enabling PT, it is shocking {that a} single modder might have achieved a lot – so what is the catch? The reply could have already got been apparent to some readers from the video or screenshots on this web page: this mod provides path tracing with none sort of denoising step.
With no denoiser, there is a ‘movie grain’ of kinds seen nearly all over the place. And slightly than being a static texture, this movie grain is continually crawling, making it considerably extra noticeable. That is the noise that usually can be eliminated or at the very least closely minimised in a recreation with official path tracing help, like Cyberpunk 2077.
Furthermore, we are able to see from the debug overlay that the mod basically permits an additional choice already hidden within the recreation, letting you swap from ‘ASVGF’ – a sort of denoising filter used for international illumination – to ‘pure path tracing’. I believe this mode was almost certainly utilized by Dragon’s Dogma 2’s builders for graphics reference work. It is grow to be more and more frequent for graphics programmers to implement path tracing into recreation engines to verify lighting or materials high quality whereas growing the real-time graphics engine; basically path tracing serves as a ‘floor fact’ that may be checked towards. Typically these hidden path tracers have denoising, like in Unreal Engine 5, however generally they don’t, as appears to be the case right here.
On condition that path tracing was by no means meant to be an choice for gameplay, it isn’t shocking that the trail tracing implementation has some pretty main drawbacks. Past missing a denoiser, some massive objects on the bottom lack shadows utterly with PT enabled, as they don’t seem to be being ray-traced towards within the RTGI model of the sport to save lots of on efficiency. One other subject is randomness: whereas out of doors scenes simply produce superior outcomes to the RTGI model of the sport, indoor scenes can grow to be extraordinarily darkish as a result of the trail tracer is randomly sampling lights – and the possibility of a ray hitting tiny lights could be very low even at 4 samples per pixel. You’ll be able to see this extra clearly at evening, the place darkish areas close to torches present ‘fireflies’, artefacts which can be explicitly prevented in video games like Cyberpunk or Alan Wake 2.
One other subject with path tracing is its efficiency. Maybe unsurprisingly, doing a way more advanced lighting simulation is pricey even on high-end {hardware}. In a totally GPU-limited scene on the RTX 4090, I measured a 105fps common at 4K with DLSS efficiency and RTGI enabled. Turning on path tracing solely drops efficiency by 11 p.c, however with one pattern per pixel the outcomes are noisy. Getting higher outcomes requires switching it to 4 samples per pixel with two bounces, which drops the frame-rate to simply 40fps. You’ll be able to go additional too, with seven bounces as an alternative of two, which has a restricted visible impact however tanks efficiency to 20fps.
Whereas I discover this mod from Exxxcellent extremely cool, it is finally restricted in its utility, given the efficiency influence and its lack of a denoiser. Even with these drawbacks in thoughts although, the mod provides us an unimaginable glimpse of what Dragon’s Dogma 2 might appear like with a correct real-time path tracing mode if Capcom have been to spend the time to implement one. Supplies, textures, reflections and extra might look generationally higher than the usual presentation with denoising and express mild sampling, as we see with titles corresponding to Cyberpunk 2077 or Alan Wake 2. Even when Capcom simply implement ray-traced shadows, even this comparatively modest addition would have a huge impact on the sport’s look, with extra detailed and steady shadows that may be a higher match for the sport’s time-of-day system.
Whereas Capcom could also be unlikely to do both of these items, maybe modders can take this recreation even additional. We have already seen unimaginable issues performed with REFramework titles, and perhaps there’s room right here so as to add denoising and repair up different facets of the trail tracing presentation. If there’s one factor I’ve discovered whereas taking part in PC video games over the past 30 years, it is that it’s best to by no means underestimate individuals with ardour in the neighborhood.
