What do you prefer? Ray Tracing ON or OFF?

[Jeruhmee3]

For those that are able to play with RT. do you still play with it on? I love how the game looks with RT, but the FPS drops especially in big combat situations gets annoying. I tried the game with out RT and the huge FPS boost is amazing and even though I notice a difference after having RT on for so long I kinda prefer the huge FPS boost now.

Just curious to what other thought about this and if you deal with the lower FPS or that sexy RT or keep it off for the smooth FPS.

Thank you!

[Porkhammer]

I definitely prefer keeping it on. The reflections are a joke without it. DLSS set to quality helps mitigate some of the fps loss.

[~Black Cat~ [EH]]

You can always find a sweet spot in between.
Having RT on doesn't mean you need to have every setting to max, I've tweaked with settings so it looks good, I have RT on and still runs with acceptable frame rate in combat.

If this was a online fps whith pvp I would definitely have RT off while having most of the normal settings high to get a good frame rate.

[Leon]

doesn't seem to make the game visually THAT different for me, could run it on my laptop and still have 70+ fps on balanced DLSS and maxed settings, but again, RTX with current generation cards feels like overkill for the performance which the cards currently can handle.

maybe 40 or 50 series can run RT with native res and no DLSS xd

[Jeruhmee3]

Originally posted by ~Black Cat~ EH:

You can always find a sweet spot in between.
Having RT on doesn't mean you need to have every setting to max, I've tweaked with settings so it looks good, I have RT on and still runs with acceptable frame rate in combat.

If this was a online fps whith pvp I would definitely have RT off while having most of the normal settings high to get a good frame rate.

What are some of the settings you tweaked to help you? If you don't mind me asking.

[Pellaeon]

I have RT on (only reflections) on my RTX 3070 PC with DLSS quality and 1440p resolution. Game stays above 70 FPS indoors, dips into the 50's and high 40's outside in crowded areas around the city. I don't mind it since the game looks great and I like high crowd density, even if FPS suffers. But I'm just running or walking around in those areas so gameplay isn't affected. Overall this is the best looking game I've played to date, and happy that I bought a new PC for it

edit: I also have a few settings below max to lower the impact of RT reflection. Youtube videos from Hardware unboxed/Digital Foundry helped me find the right settings.

[~Black Cat~ [EH]]

Originally posted by Jeruhmee:

What are some of the settings you tweaked to help you? If you don't mind me asking.

It should be personalized as no two cards are the same and people play with diferent screen resolutions, I also got my card overclocked and a default one might have worse performance doing the same things.

I started using the presets and I picked one of the highest ones that leaves the game looking good while having a acceptable frame rate for me as a base, then tweaked some things down and others up.

If I don't talk about something is maxed.
Fov I set to 80(don't know why), facial lighting geometry is off, distant shadows low, volumetric fog resolution in high, volumetric cloud quality off-medium(this one I still haven't found what it does-when is working), screen space reflections ultra.

For me ambient occlusion and ray traced lighting can go to high or psycho while having dlss on, but I stick with it at medium and no dlss because having it on sometimes I thought that some things redered bad leaving some kind of artifats arround them. Still with it on looks great so you might pick whatever you like.

TLDR: The things I would always leave at max would be textures and meshes, shadows and fog can be lowered and still look fine, and last occlusion and rxt at medium don't look bad but can be bumped up if how it looks with dlss on isn't a problem for you.

[Porkhammer]

Originally posted by ~Black Cat~ EH:

Originally posted by Jeruhmee:

What are some of the settings you tweaked to help you? If you don't mind me asking.

It should be personalized as no two cards are the same and people play with diferent screen resolutions, I also got my card overclocked and a default one might have worse performance doing the same things.

I started using the presets and I picked one of the highest ones that leaves the game looking good while having a acceptable frame rate for me as a base, then tweaked some things down and others up.

If I don't talk about something is maxed.
Fov I set to 80(don't know why), facial lighting geometry is off, distant shadows low, volumetric fog resolution in high, volumetric cloud quality off-medium(this one I still haven't found what it does-when is working), screen space reflections ultra.

For me ambient occlusion and ray traced lighting can go to high or psycho while having dlss on, but I stick with it at medium and no dlss because having it on sometimes I thought that some things redered bad leaving some kind of artifats arround them. Still with it on looks great so you might pick whatever you like.

TLDR: The things I would always leave at max would be textures and meshes, shadows and fog can be lowered and still look fine, and last occlusion and rxt at medium don't look bad but can be bumped up if how it looks with dlss on isn't a problem for you.

Pretty sure you can disable screen space reflections completely if you have raytracing enabled. At least in my mind, it makes no sense to keep it on, as raytracing provides all your reflection needs.

[Zero McDol]

Massive FPS hit aside (1660 ti), I prefer it off. Too shiny.

edit:
The only thing that I keep enabled from tracing is local shadows.

[~Black Cat~ [EH]]

Originally posted by Porkhammer:

Pretty sure you can disable screen space reflections completely if you have raytracing enabled. At least in my mind, it makes no sense to keep it on, as raytracing provides all your reflection needs.

For me it runs fine with it on so I don't need to take them off, but yeah it's about moving the sliders until you get to the point where your game runs fine on your pc while still looking good.

[JefferyNothing]

Originally posted by Porkhammer:

I definitely prefer keeping it on. The reflections are a joke without it.

Really?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2778482260

Thats with RT off and that looks pretty great to me.

I only turn RT reflections on now and again. The game runs worse with them on since 1.5 so i've been turning them off. I do really love the car reflections though, looks awesome.

[Weaver]

Definitely on. DLSS quality. RTX3080, i7-10700kf, 32GB, SSD, 1440p ultrawide. Sits around 60fps which is fine it's not like it's a PvP shooter. I have some of the shadow and volumetric cloud settings at medium because it gains you a chunk of performance, about 15% more fps,and you couldn't tell the difference without side by side screenshots and looking very closely.

[Weaver]

Originally posted by Porkhammer:

Originally posted by ~Black Cat~ EH:

It should be personalized as no two cards are the same and people play with diferent screen resolutions, I also got my card overclocked and a default one might have worse performance doing the same things.

I started using the presets and I picked one of the highest ones that leaves the game looking good while having a acceptable frame rate for me as a base, then tweaked some things down and others up.

If I don't talk about something is maxed.
Fov I set to 80(don't know why), facial lighting geometry is off, distant shadows low, volumetric fog resolution in high, volumetric cloud quality off-medium(this one I still haven't found what it does-when is working), screen space reflections ultra.

For me ambient occlusion and ray traced lighting can go to high or psycho while having dlss on, but I stick with it at medium and no dlss because having it on sometimes I thought that some things redered bad leaving some kind of artifats arround them. Still with it on looks great so you might pick whatever you like.

TLDR: The things I would always leave at max would be textures and meshes, shadows and fog can be lowered and still look fine, and last occlusion and rxt at medium don't look bad but can be bumped up if how it looks with dlss on isn't a problem for you.

Pretty sure you can disable screen space reflections completely if you have raytracing enabled. At least in my mind, it makes no sense to keep it on, as raytracing provides all your reflection needs.

With RT reflections on SSR isn't used unless a scene gets really performance heavy then the game automatically switches over to SSR usage for better performance (then back afterwards). So you still want both on.

[Lefurtif126]

RTX is too sexy to turn it off in this game and the classic SSR looks pretty bad so :

HDR 600 display, 1440p G-sync, DLSS Quality, RT shadows + local shadows + Reflections, those are the biggest visual upgrades.

RT lighting OFF because there's almost no difference in the majority of scenes compared to the already very well done classic lighting and it eat a lot of fps.
Volumetric clouds OFF, it's buggy/glitchy, very ugly and it eat a lot of fps.
SSR OFF/Ignored because of RT reflections taking over.
Everything else set to maximum quality.
film grain OFF.
Motion blur OFF.
Depth of field OFF. (badly used/implemented.)
Chromatic aberrations OFF. (all of these are horrible effects almost always forced in modern games degrading image quality.(Except motion blur and DoF, they can look nice in some games))
Lens flare ON.

70 ~ 90 fps RTX 3080, i5-10600K, game installed on M.2 SSD

With HDR + DLSS + RayTracing the game looks incredibly beautiful.

[Zero McDol]

On a slightly off-topic note, but still on the topic of rtx cards:

https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/nvidia-launches-new-gpus-for-budget-friendly-laptops-4192433

I'll be keeping an eye on this and may not even decide to buy the rtx 4xxx series. That'll of course, depend on if these future lower budget laptops will have DLSS capabilities or not.

edit:
Looks like they may end up having DLSS capabilities after-all.

[~Black Cat~ [EH]]

Originally posted by Zero McDol:

On a slightly off-topic note, but still on the topic of rtx cards:

https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/nvidia-launches-new-gpus-for-budget-friendly-laptops-4192433

I'll be keeping an eye on this and may not even decide to buy the rtx 4xxx series. That'll of course, depend on if these future lower budget laptops will have DLSS capabilities or not.

edit:
Looks like they may end up having DLSS capabilities after-all.

If you are between a 4000 series desktop card and that kind of laptop just wait and get a 4000 series card.

Looking info about it a 2050 has a 64-bit bus, 4gb ram and draws 30-45w that just sounds like a gtx1650. I don't know but waiting more to the next gen laptops and getting a lower priced 3000 series laptop would be better.

A laptop unless you travel a lot is not worth the money because it's going to be like the previous years cards at most (3060 laptop = 2060 desktop) and even then some might be worse if they can't draw enough power.