No Ray Traced Reflections?

[christofin]

The Nvidia Geforce article mentioned that this game has ray traced reflections, but they seem to not be ray traced even with the setting enabled. For example the overhead lamp in the room next to the dock is still a cubemap when RT is on.

What is ray traced in this game? The sun shadows? Or is this a glitch on my end?

Nvidia article that mentions ray traced reflections:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/gamescom-2021-nvidia-dlss-ray-tracing-geforce-rtx-games/

"Launching August 26th for desktops, laptops and virtual reality headsets, the new Myst’s performance will be more than doubled using NVIDIA DLSS, if you play on a GeForce RTX GPU. And on GeForce RTX desktops and laptops you can further enhance your experience with ray-traced reflections."

[Hannah]

Hi there, we do have ray traced reflections enabled. Did you restart the game after enabling ray tracing? Some of the effects are very subtle and aren't as obvious. Please send us a dxdiag report to [e-mail] as well if you'd like us to investigate further.

[christofin]

Thanks for the response! Maybe I'm not looking in the right areas, but every surface that would be reflective seems to just use cubemaps. Maybe it's only specific surfaces? But for example, this is what I was talking about:

https://imgur.com/a/j8Ca3l0

The reflection seems to just be a cubemap as it's just a circular orb whereas the light hanging from the ceiling is much more complex. Shouldn't that surface be reflective and with RT reflections on, showing the accurate reflection?

[Hannah]

Originally posted by christofin:

Thanks for the response! Maybe I'm not looking in the right areas, but every surface that would be reflective seems to just use cubemaps. Maybe it's only specific surfaces? But for example, this is what I was talking about:

https://imgur.com/a/j8Ca3l0

The reflection seems to just be a cubemap as it's just a circular orb whereas the light hanging from the ceiling is much more complex. Shouldn't that surface be reflective and with RT reflections on, showing the accurate reflection?

I'll see if I can get one of our artists to respond to this next week and provide further information. I think a couple of the more clearer spots to see this effect are on the surface of the ship that rises on myst island, and the mazerunner in selenitic when it's at the entrance.

[christofin]

That would be great, thank you! I haven't gotten quite that far ahead yet, so maybe I'm missing most of the areas where the RT is visible, but it definitely feels like some surfaces right at the start of the game should be reflective.

I'll take a look at those areas when I get there, I'm still quite stuck near the beginning haha. Thanks again for the response!

[ShnitzelKiller]

Originally posted by christofin:

Thanks for the response! Maybe I'm not looking in the right areas, but every surface that would be reflective seems to just use cubemaps. Maybe it's only specific surfaces? But for example, this is what I was talking about:

https://imgur.com/a/j8Ca3l0

The reflection seems to just be a cubemap as it's just a circular orb whereas the light hanging from the ceiling is much more complex. Shouldn't that surface be reflective and with RT reflections on, showing the accurate reflection?

If the lamp reflection does not change positions on your screen if you move without changing your view direction, then it's a cubemap. Otherwise it cannot be a cubemap; if it is simpler than the lamp on the ceiling, that does not immediately mean it's a cubemap.
A cubemap maps reflected view rays onto a cubic texture, which will always behave as if the things being reflected are infinitely far away. Therefore, if you observe any parallax in the reflection, then it is using some other method. It may not be ray traced, but for a shiny floor, there are many other tricks that have been employed in games, such as rendering a simpler version of the scene upside-down.

[LucidEpyon]

That room looks like ray traced reflections for me, as there is proper parallax on the reflection and I can see some denoising artifacts around the outside of the lamp in the reflection. Most games uses a lower res environment in the ray traced reflections for performance reasons, I think that is why the geometry is slightly different in the reflection.

[LucidEpyon]

I just noticed something odd when looking at the reflections on the deck of the raised ship on Myst island, there are some odd rendering artifacts (especially when moving) when the "effects" graphics option is on any setting except "low." Setting "effects" to low makes the RT reflections look correct.

I think this is something like SSAO (or maybe SSR) and RT both trying to shade the same pixels using different geometry (screen space vs ray tracing structure), but the "effects" name in the graphics menu is too general to pin down exactly what is causing the issue.

[christofin]

Originally posted by LucidEpyon:

Most games uses a lower res environment in the ray traced reflections for performance reasons, I think that is why the geometry is slightly different in the reflection.

If that's the case, I'd love it if they let us turn that specific setting up.

[WildCat]

Originally posted by ShnitzelKiller:

Originally posted by christofin:

Thanks for the response! Maybe I'm not looking in the right areas, but every surface that would be reflective seems to just use cubemaps. Maybe it's only specific surfaces? But for example, this is what I was talking about:

https://imgur.com/a/j8Ca3l0

The reflection seems to just be a cubemap as it's just a circular orb whereas the light hanging from the ceiling is much more complex. Shouldn't that surface be reflective and with RT reflections on, showing the accurate reflection?

If the lamp reflection does not change positions on your screen if you move without changing your view direction, then it's a cubemap. Otherwise it cannot be a cubemap; if it is simpler than the lamp on the ceiling, that does not immediately mean it's a cubemap.
A cubemap maps reflected view rays onto a cubic texture, which will always behave as if the things being reflected are infinitely far away. Therefore, if you observe any parallax in the reflection, then it is using some other method. It may not be ray traced, but for a shiny floor, there are many other tricks that have been employed in games, such as rendering a simpler version of the scene upside-down.

Unreal Engine supports reprojection of cubemap reflections using either a sphere or a box shape, which the artist resizes and aligns as closely to the surfaces of the dominant environmental features as possible to produce an approximated parallax effect in the reflections.

However, in the case shown in christofin's screenshot, it is likely just a specular highlight from a point light.

[jdk 1.0]

Originally posted by WildCat:

However, in the case shown in christofin's screenshot, it is likely just a specular highlight from a point light.

But the reflection has texture to it, which looks very similar to the overhead lamp. If it's a specular highlight from a point light, wouldn't it be uniform? Unless they map a texture to the highlight...

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Side note: by the time we're pulling out magnifying glasses, measuring parallax, and poring over graphics algorithms, I think it's safe to say the devs and artists have achieved their goal of realism. XD