Too many, too strong interior lights!?

[Torx]

Wow, even if I turn off GI fully, indoors are all freakon lit! No real dark shadows in corners even.

Only the outdoors where are no, or only a few light sources in addition to the sun, there you find those big dark, Doom 3 like shadows.

[Xylber]

Originally posted by Monk:

Originally posted by Xylber:

(...)it is really hard for an scene ("level") to looks good with GI on and not dark with GI off.

Off should turn off fully to gain pitch black shadows. The new option could be called Ambient Light, that just lights up the pitch black shadows (...)

Good to see there is somebody here who understands perfectly what this technology is about.

[Torx]

Originally posted by Xylber:

Originally posted by Monk:

Off should turn off fully to gain pitch black shadows. The new option could be called Ambient Light, that just lights up the pitch black shadows (...)

Good to see there is somebody here who understands perfectly what this technology is about.

Seems it ain't yet on Github!? I guess they won't update Q2VKPT either.

If this ambient light is what I think it is. Then it should be only a matter of ripping out one multiplication from the shader and you get actual shadows back and with higher FPS.

But of course. If you made a direct comparison with GI low, you would spot differences. With GI bouncing there is always some extra light of course. Though some times I'm under the impression that the bouncing is too weak for some reason.

This corner with GI low: https://ibb.co/tpvwtNR

It seem way to dark. There is sooo much light next in the corridor, and yet, it can't get even a meter into that corner. In my apartment, I got a very dim light for the night right now. And there is a corridor. Even that one single dim light reaches into the corridor for at least 2 meters! I can clearly see to the end of the corridor!

Increasing the GI to High does nothing: https://ibb.co/RYj5Ytc

... except of wrecking the FPS again. For nothing... Seems the ray distance it cut off even on High, or something. Changing contrast and exposure only seem to ruin the rest of the normally lit room.

Maybe it's the lack of an HDR monitor. My eyes see HDR in real world of course.

[Torx]

It's actually worse than I described.

I placed my dim apartment light around 90 degrees to the corridor door. I even opened the freakon door at the end of it, too. I could walk at least FIVE huge steps until the my neighbor's front door and I STILL could see the dim light from my own apartment shining in from around 90 freakon degrees around the corner at the wall, and reaching through the corridor onto to my neighbor's door! Now, THAT'S "global illumination".

If I recall my work with MagicaVoxel and Blender. Increasing the bounce count beyond one bounce. And increased sample rate won't make longer reaching light. I do understand why the rays me be cut off for GI Low. But increasing the bounce count for High seem pointless. Ray reach would do more I think. And at a lower FPS cost maybe.

Of course the brighter the light, the further the reach. In game the light is certainly much, much brighter than my dim apartment light. And I didn't even open my neighbor's door!. My dim light could go a bit further I'm sure.

[Tiranasta]

When GI is off, Q2RTX applies an ambient light term. You can disable this by commenting out lines 79 to 82 of src/refresh/vkpt/shader/brdf.glsl.

[Kai]

Originally posted by Monk:

There is no light above the crates that could lit the spot between the wall, and the floor, and the crates. The sun doesn't have the right angle to be able to reach it with direct lighting, and indirect light is not active, so GI is off.

This didn't help either:
Exposure -3.0
Contrast: 1.0

Keep in mind that not all light sources in Quake 2 have visible casters like lamps etc. Some of the lights have been placed strategically back in the day to make the scene pop a bit more, it was a mapdesign choice. I very much doubt that those have all been removed in this port, so there will be lots of light sources that seemingly make no sense.

[EvilPolygons]

I had to tweak all three Exposure Bias, Contrast, and Environment Brightness settings to get the lighting just the way I wanted it. Then I used the Geforce Experience shader filters to adjust sharpness and other stuff to decrease blurriness and improve general image quality.

[Torx]

Originally posted by Tiranasta:

When GI is off, Q2RTX applies an ambient light term. You can disable this by commenting out lines 79 to 82 of src/refresh/vkpt/shader/brdf.glsl.

Thanks for saving me the time! Yeah, like a said before. It's only a matter of doing some commenting out of lines. It works for me!

Goal
The new shader won't force you to use GI Low instead of an actual GI Off. But since not even GI High may add much of a difference (in this scenario), you may not notice the visual difference of real GI Off vs GI Low either. But you gain FPS either way instead of choosing GI Low only to get those shadows that are removed but already present by default even in the original GI Off.

All resolutions are 1080p on GTX 1080ti. Different scenarios may yield different results. New shader is the lines 79-82 removed. P.S. I hope all links/names are correct.



GI Off (Original shader. 100%): https://ibb.co/FxYYhWQ

VS

GI Low (Original Shader. 100%): https://ibb.co/mb2wFHw

BUT!

GI Off (New Shader. 100%): https://ibb.co/LZXcrR9


As seen above, for this scenario there is a little less extra light for New Shader GI Off compared to original GI Low. But it got certainly more shadows than GI Off of the original shader. Compared to GI Low, this real GI Off with 100% scale, give you about ~15FPS. And on scale 50%, you can get up to 38FPS!


GI Low (Original shader. 50%): https://ibb.co/54gb3Jt

VS

GI Off (New shader. 50%): https://ibb.co/VYNyjLP


Also. My real world observation from yesterday, clearly showed me that even a dim real world light that is only a ~1/4 of this in-game light, can go to over 5 meters at an angle of 90 degrees! None of the GI settings here can do that it seems. Maybe the sun?! Anyways. The in-game angle is about 45 degrees, so more direct shining into the corner. Yet still no light in that corner. That's some flimsy GI or what?

GI almost adds nothing, but can wreck the FPS a lot. :|


GI High (Orignal shader 100%): https://ibb.co/S37DLjx

VS

GI Off (New shader. 100%): https://ibb.co/LZXcrR9

[Tiranasta]

Originally posted by Monk:

Originally posted by Tiranasta:

When GI is off, Q2RTX applies an ambient light term. You can disable this by commenting out lines 79 to 82 of src/refresh/vkpt/shader/brdf.glsl.

Thanks for saving me the time! Yeah, like a said before. It's only a matter of doing some commenting out of lines. It works for me!

No problem, though in retrospect the same thing could probably be achieved by just entering the console command "flt_scale_lf 0" (I'm gradually learning how Q2RTX works :P).

[EvilPolygons]

Originally posted by Monk:

Originally posted by Tiranasta:

When GI is off, Q2RTX applies an ambient light term. You can disable this by commenting out lines 79 to 82 of src/refresh/vkpt/shader/brdf.glsl.

Thanks for saving me the time! Yeah, like a said before. It's only a matter of doing some commenting out of lines. It works for me!

Goal


GI almost adds nothing, but can wreck the FPS a lot. :|

Not really. GI (high) only costs about 10 extra fps. The only thing that REALLY hammers fps is upping the rez scaling to 150%, which drops me down to about 30 fps average.

So at 1080p, GI on high, and rez scaling set to 130%, I get a steady 60 fps (I also use Nvidia Freestyle to apply a sharpen filter to improve visual quality).

I'm totally satisfied with the level of performance I'm getting here.

[Torx]

Originally posted by Tiranasta:

Originally posted by Monk:

Thanks for saving me the time! Yeah, like a said before. It's only a matter of doing some commenting out of lines. It works for me!

No problem, though in retrospect the same thing could probably be achieved by just entering the console command "flt_scale_lf 0" (I'm gradually learning how Q2RTX works :P).

Seems not. That command breaks everything for me.

It removes that ambient light, or rather the indirect light outdoors even when GI is Low or higher. Which really gives me trouble understanding how the heck the GI works in this engine.

Also, the GI in general seem to be as bad as I thought. It does nothing indoors!? And for outdoors, you know, there may be work arounds to avoid that pitch black. It would be a fake, but nobody would notice it I think. It may look the same as GI Low-High, and keep the higher FPS, too.

You would have to detect outdoor geometry with sun rays I guess. And smack simple ambient light on it. Done, pitch black is gone. No extra rays needed. So no bouncing needed. So no FPS wrecking. Combined with DLSS, and Variable Rate Shading, real-time ray tracing just got more real-time. And make the RTX look less stupid. Because only Turing can do DLSS and VRS. Pascal can't!

Seems you could go even further and reduce the resolution of the shadows like in that Minecraft path tracer by SonicEther. Yes, it will jag out. But frankly, ray traced shadows are always better than shadow maps. I think even the jaggy.

However, all this should have been done already when Turing got released. It may have sold much more units and Nvidia could have met its projected goal. The reflections in this game are just amazing. Oddly, they ONLY seem to take away 5 FPS on 100% scale? For the record, I have GTX, not RTX. o.0

[EvilPolygons]

I'm still not sure what you mean by the Global Illumination not doing anything other than costing fps. There's a huge visual quality difference in any location (including indoors) that doesn't have invisible lights set up for ambient illumination. Some locations have very little difference, sure, but that's because the ambient lighting in those areas washes everything out.

Lowering Exposure Bias to -2.5 and adding a Shadows +20% filter via Nvidia Freestyle makes the difference between Global Illumination off & on MUCH more noticeable, and generally makes the game much better looking. At least on my RTX 2080.

EDIT:
Now I understand what you meant about GI not working with interior lights. The indoor areas I mentioned all have one thing in common -- at least SOME amount of sunlight coming in from somewhere. It appears that GI only includes indoor lights in one case: enhanced pause mode. When you hit the pause key, you can see GI working with interior lights while the scene is rendering. Even the green lights on the shotgun bounce around. But it looks like that's the only time it works with anything other than the sun.

[Torx]

Another example for GI.


GI High: https://ibb.co/k96fYH6

GI Low: https://ibb.co/YkTtCZX

GI Off (Muh shader of pitch black shadows of darkness! The prime evils of the burning hells approve!): https://ibb.co/h8YLj4Q

GI Off (Nvidia shada still downloadz slida for ambient lighta!) https://ibb.co/SVmgj96


At first I thought that the GI mostly lights the room walls. But actually it's just extra lights in the air it seems just like in original Quake 2. Only the pillar gets some GI on it.

This is what it should looks like when you don't have lights in the air (Q2PT bounce 0): https://ibb.co/H2p8t1q

And Q2PT with GI, so with 1 bounce: https://ibb.co/YZqXQJT


No, Q2PT doesn't have a denoiser. :)

So, I would be careful with GI. Unlike reflection, shadows, caustics, and transparency, they may add little but wreck the FPS instead. GI Low isn't that bad. But High...

[Torx]

GI Low (Original shader, but with command flt_scale_lf): https://ibb.co/7j7gXv8


Using command flt_scale_lf 0 instead 1, that should do the same for all GI settings that the deleted lines 79-82 in src/refresh/vkpt/shader/brdf.glsl do for GI Off. It seem to break with GI Low though.

It removes the ambient light indoors. But outdoors is mixed and broken. Or it's not broken, and it shows that this GI doesn't fully work on exteriors either!? Lack of GI is always pitch black shadows. So, there should be that here, pitch black shadows. But the screenshots above shows a weird mix.

You know, Doom 3 doesn't have GI, not even in its light maps (It doesn't have any light maps). Yet, Doom 3, and Quake 4 do have outdoors levels, too. And the shadows aren't pitch black.

Manual per-level shadow intensity could control the mixing with the textures. No need to wreck 10 to 30 FPS just to light up the shadows a bit.

[Torx]

Originally posted by EvilDastard:

I'm still not sure what you mean by the Global Illumination not doing anything other than costing fps. There's a huge visual quality difference in any location (including indoors) that doesn't have invisible lights set up for ambient illumination.

If you are thinking of buttons, and door lights, and that light on the guns that sines on other surface. That's not GI. That's emissive surface. And with GI Off for some reason, i just noticed, it's also off. Which of course doesn't make sense and changes the entire lighting of the scene also.

Told you this GI is garbage. Global Illumination is bouncing of light, so indirect light. Emissive surfaces in the other hand, they first ray isn't indirect, but direct since there was no bounce but a direct emission from a emissive surface with usually an emissive map controlling the color/intensity. Yes, they can also bounce. It's just they don't disappear when bouncing is off. And don't confuse it with the actual emissive map that shows even when emissive surface light is off for real.

Quake 3 had plenty of those emissisve maps. That pentagram on the ground is an emissive map, and the glowing eye of zombies in Doom 3, are also the emissive maps. Quake 3 can even have actual ray traced emissive surfaces baked into the light maps. One of the reasons why Quake 3 looks so good. It also uses ray tracing. :)

[Tiranasta]

Originally posted by Monk:

GI Low (Original shader, but with command flt_scale_lf): https://ibb.co/7j7gXv8


Using command flt_scale_lf 0 instead 1, that should do the same for all GI settings that the deleted lines 79-82 in src/refresh/vkpt/shader/brdf.glsl do for GI Off. It seem to break with GI Low though.

It removes the ambient light indoors. But outdoors is mixed and broken. Or it's not broken, and it shows that this GI doesn't fully work on exteriors either!? Lack of GI is always pitch black shadows. So, there should be that here, pitch black shadows. But the screenshots above shows a weird mix.

You know, Doom 3 doesn't have GI, not even in its light maps (It doesn't have any light maps). Yet, Doom 3, and Quake 4 do have outdoors levels, too. And the shadows aren't pitch black.

Manual per-level shadow intensity could control the mixing with the textures. No need to wreck 10 to 30 FPS just to light up the shadows a bit.

flt_scale_lf 0 will remove the indirect diffuse light, but it won't touch the indirect specular channel. It also won't prevent sky light from being received from explicitly sampled sky polygons, such as those portions of the sky behind the windows just inside from where that screenshot was taken.