Remedy, one of the companies that will implement real-time ray tracing effects in its upcoming title, Control, has revealed the performance overhead for the RTX effects in its Northlight Engine. According to the team, RTX effects require an additional of 9.2ms per frame.
Unfortunately Remedy did not reveal any framerate numbers, though it did reveal the additional computational power that is needed for specific effects like Global Illumination, reflections and de-noising.
As Golem reported, contact and sun shadows – calculated with two beams per pixel and with also including noise rejection – require 2.3ms per frame and the reflections require 4.4 ms per frame. As for the Global denoising lighting, it requires an additional 2.5ms. As such, we are basically looking at a 9.2ms performance overhead for the real-time ray tracing effects that Remedy will implement in – most likely – Control.
As pointed out, these are early numbers and Remedy may be able to reduce this overhead by tweaking the RTX effects. Now in case you did not know, 30fps require 33ms and 60fps require 17ms per frame. As such, for Remedy’s games that already run at 60fps we are basically looking at an overall performance of 26ms per frame when real-time ray tracing effects are enabled. This could translate to around 40fps, though do note that Remedy is using real-time ray tracing for very specific effects. As such, you cannot really use these numbers to estimate the performance overhead for other titles like Shadow of the Tomb Raider or Metro Exodus, or for games powered by Northlight that use RTX for completely different graphical effects.
Still, we believe that this is interesting and may give you an idea of the raw power required to run real-time ray tracing effects in modern games!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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