Dragon’s Dogma 2 may not stand out in terms of detail, but thanks to RTGI it manages to look very good in terms of lighting. However, it could have looked a lot better and this key resource is implemented right into the game, it was just never used or made available. We’re talking about path tracing, which is used for all lighting, including shadows and background occlusion. It’s not officially available, but you can access it using a recently released mod from user EXXXcellent.
Digital Foundry’s Alex Battaglia took a closer look at the path tracing, and the results are truly stunning in many ways. Be it the lighting itself, realistic shadows or reflections, but perhaps somewhat surprisingly also significantly more detailed textures and materials. This is mainly due to the fact that here path tracing uses 4 samples per pixel, while public ray tracing only uses 1 sample per 4 pixels.
Unfortunately, the path tracing mode is not quite suitable for the game itself. As Battaglia says, this was probably implemented in the game to control the already mentioned textures and materials and some ideal visual quality that the final product should approach. The DD2’s path tracing cannot be enabled along with noise reduction, which is a big enough problem for real-world use as PT produces unpleasant graining in its raw form.
Certain problems may also arise with quality. Some objects lack shadows because they are not included in ray tracing, and while path tracing is excellent outdoors, it can sometimes make an environment too dark indoors.
Of course, performance is also a big hurdle. Battaglia’s frame rate is shown in a scene where the game is running on the RTX 4090 in 4K DLSS Performance mode (upscaled from 1080p) at 105fps at stock settings. With basic path tracing enabled (1 sample per pixel + 2 reflections), the frame rate drops slightly, to 93 FPS, but the result is indeed quite unstable, full of grain. For better image quality, Battaglia set the already mentioned 4 samples per pixel, which significantly affects the frame rate, as it drops to 42 FPS.
While there isn’t much to actually use here, the hidden path tracking mode shows what this technology is capable of and what we can expect in the future. For now, it can serve us at least with beautiful screenshots, which you can also take after downloading the mod.
You can buy Dragon’s Dogma 2 on Alza.cz, and our review can be found here.
Path trace renderer in the PC version of Dragon’s Dogma 2? It’s real – and here it is @Dachsjaeger with full details on what it looks like, what the performance is and how modders got access to it: https://t.co/Syne4uVtIV pic.twitter.com/myF8zwZuGJ
— Digital Foundry (@digitalfoundry) April 27, 2024
Source :Indian TV
