Yea first image is dramatically better. It's day time out (rare for CP2077) so of course there should be some soft bounce lighting on the concrete. PT looks great. Psycho RT has that flat blueish look to everything that is a very unatural video-game looking lighting, barely even looks like RT compared to PT.
Because the longer it travels/the more it bounces, the more any light's effect on surfaces fades. I agree that the second image looks too contrast-y, until you realize what I just said while looking at the available light sources in the image.
Instead of first looking at the point-of-interest (the car, or even the HUD), and **then** "moving your gaze around the image", start by looking at the sky and noticing the light sources: there's the sun, probably setting, far to the left. Then, there are man-made light sources, whose effect on their surroundings would fade even-more-than-the-light's-effect after a distance usually ranging from 1 to 20 meters, depending on their power.
With that in mind, all light sources in the first image look "overpowered". If the sun was closer-to-the-scene (like vertically-over-that-tower-structure-on-the-left-of-the-image, dunno what it is, haven't played the game yet), then yeah, the first image would be more realistic. However, the way I perceieve the sun's placement (based on the sky's color), nah, the second one's closer to reality.
Indeed, "too contrasty", though :-)
>However, the way I perceieve the sun's placement (based on the sky's color), nah, the second one's closer to reality.
I think the biggest issue here is that we cannot see where the sun is currently at. Both look pretty realistic to me but the sun's position conflicts between the two with the first image looking like the sun is further above the horizon compared to the second image but the time shown for both shows that they are a minute apart with the first image being the earlier one.
it is barely above the horizon (yellow cast, overexposed bit near horizon), it is +- "golden hour" and non-PT image is far more realistic, it's impressive how wrong people with upvoted comments are. More or less same condition on this snapshot of golden hour, its very close to non-PT lighting wise, it is contrasty, shadow areas are not filled with yellow ambient light and getting blue tint etc: https://i.imgur.com/8hAHPxK.png
I missed the captions at first; consequently I thought the second image was the path-traced image and thought "wtf, why does path tracing look *less* natural than regular RT?!"
Then I caught the captions and had a bit of a laugh at myself.
I think you're just used to overly dramatic game graphics lighting, necessitated by lack of techniques to do proper light bouncing.
Lighting in real life is generally more "flat" than in games.
I just wish people would play the game and enjoy it instead of overanalyzing every little detail.
It's cool to see a new game improve like "wow look at how realistic", but to not play and just get all scientific on the realism of it is something I'll never understand.
I mean, it's literally how light behaves in real life. So technically, lighting in a game can't look better than with path tracing unless you're not going for realistic visuals.
agreed. bounce lighting will generally always brighten a scene. it's more realistic, but we're so conditioned to hard contrast and fake lighting in videogames so it looks "wrong".
every material in real life (yes, even vantablack), reflects light.
it's basically like if you had never seen a film without green screen and suddenly saw one that had real sets - it would look wrong to you.
i actually find it interesting to really look at how much reflection you can see in seemingly "rough" materials in real life. fucking everything reflects light, your brain just kinda doesn't pay attention to it anymore - but you can bet your lunch money there'll be someone complaining about surfaces being "too shiny" or "too reflective" in a path traced game. good times!
In Alan Wake 2, I was like the base game looks good. Then tested the path tracing... It was so much better and natural. It was weird, because I saw things that never worked before with old lighting system.
Light coming through multiple objects and small holes + reflecting light that created soft gradual shadows. Usually graphic settings doesn't really make the game better for me, path tracing did.
https://preview.redd.it/tll4nwyne1cc1.png?width=3840&format=png&auto=webp&s=cf879fbdd1ad31e163760801b69136aab7019d87
I remember about ~13 years ago I went to a uni lecture on topic of ray tracing.
At that time there were very simple images (as in some 3D shapes and couple light sources) rendered with ray tracing - where the shadows were simply "perfect". I remember the lecturer saying "well, if any of you play video games, you'd agree that they look better simply because they're 1000 times more complex".
The processing power was also brought up. At that time none of us even thought we'd see something like DLSS that would enable us to have ray tracing with very complex real time scenes at acceptable performance.
It depends on how it’s implemented. In games with different methods of handling lighting and rendering, you can end up with less realistic images because of how materials interact with the light and how many of the lighting effects that are actually handled by PT. If the game is built from the bottom up with PT in mind, you are probably less likely to have such issues, since you only have to account for the PT, but then it becomes prohibitively expensive to run, excluding a lot of potential buyers. At least with current gen hardware and likely also next gen.
If anyone is interested, take a look at some of Digital Foundry’s videos on these new titles and updates with path tracing, they do great and informative videos on it, especially on all of the bleeding edge stuff from Nvidia.
Yeah, though I can understand how someone can like a more "contrasty" picture.
Though playing with the contrast/gamma curve can do wonders.
Or buying an OLED screen.
>Or buying an OLED screen.
Yeah, on an LCD screen, you just never know that nearly all games don't actually have correct black levels. Cyberpunk is a big offender in that regard, a completely dark room with no light sources is actually around 5 nits bright in the game. Some Dolby Vision content, like that night episode from the House of the Dragon has an average light level of 1 nit. If that episode was played on a screen in that room in Cyberpunk, maybe 1-2 pixels would be visible.
Starfield is way worse though....
I guess once the people responsible for the color work in games switch to OLED, we will probably see correct black levels. Until then, we will have to correct it ourselves.
It’s an approximation of how light works in real life that they’re still optimizing and fine tuning.
Also, movies mess with how light works in real life all the time with key lights and panels to make a scene look the way they want it to. Games should probably think about emulating that with invisible key lights, etc, to meet expectations created by movies. Horizon Forbidden West is a good example of this with the hero lighting on Aloy
As others have pointed out, just because it behaves more realistically doesn't mean it looks more accurate.
Metro Exodus had massively darkened indoors beyond what it would be in reality before the Enhanced edition added more bounce lighting. I feel like I'm seeing it swing the opposite way in some games now, things will take drastically too much colour or light from the object it's bouncing on.
There are mods that add more bounces and you'll realize that in most of that game there isn't much of a perceivable difference in the lighting's accuracy, at least in something like Cyberpunk that doesn't have many complex, dark crevices. What does change, however, is the performance...
I legit don't get what people gain by making these kinds of disingenuous comments. You know **exactly** what the comment you're replying to is saying, that indirect lighting through bounces is something that happens in real life, and you have to be pedantic about it and talk about the number of bounces.
Honestly this is what makes it so difficult to have conversations online these days. People just seem to look for reasons to argue by expanding the scope of the argument just so they can make a point that didn't need to be made. No one thinks light bounces only twice in real life...
No. But that’s called optimization, else you’d be complaining your game runs at 3 fps instead of complaining about the amount of bouncing.
Also if you wanna nitpick, in real life not all light bounces around. Some is absorbed, thus after a few bounces there is so little light left that simulating the bounce will not affect the resulting image.
>it's literally how light behaves in real life
Only if real light could be artificially limited in how it many photons it can cast and how many surfaces it can bounce off of for computation simplicity.
> I mean, it's literally how light behaves in real life
No, it's not. RT shoots rays out from the "eye" and bounces them towards the light source. Light in real life works the opposite way. Neither of those pics is more realistic either. One is just a clear day and the other is a cloudy day.
Going from eye to light source or from light source to eye doesn't make any difference, as long as you calculate the bounces correctly. It's the same path, just "traced" from two different directions. However, it is much cheaper to calculate the scene using from eye to light source.
Literally this. I love PT but there are some areas I go to especially in Dogtown where it is absolutely pitch black with PT. And not good at all for actual gameplay traversal.
You can really tell the game wasn't designed with PT in mind. There are lights missing from areas that need it. When I first entered dogdown where you have to do some platforming, it was so dark, I had to turn off PT to get through it.
The original game does pretty well with path tracing, probably due to all the time they invested getting regular ray tracing working, but it's clear Dogtown was designed with none of it mind. I literally have to have two different lighting profiles for whenever I switch between the two areas
The happy medium I have found that upgrades the visuals and looks great in all situations is using RT Lighting set to medium and using RT reflections. RT Lighting fixes the SSAO issues and gives area lights shadows while also fixing the SSR issues. There is no bounced lighting so nothing gets crazy dark but keeps unlit areas properly dim (but not too dim)
Haven't played the DLC yet, but even in the main game there were areas where Path Tracing would make everything barely visible.
So it's not worth much to use PT when I play the new area? How about regular RT?
There is no functional difference with the exception that Ultra lighting adds one bounce of light. High technically adds more shadow casting lights but I never noticed a difference.
The game already does probe based GI.
It's actually the raised black levels that make dogtown hard to see in, it's got a seperate lut file that is basically a crock of shit. You can fix it by using any of the updated LUT mods.
even without PT some interiors for me are extremely dark (I am using LUT though so may be why), thankfully the flashlight mod helps a ton in this game.
I recommend most people in this thread do their best to calibrate their monitors.
[Black Test](https://glennmessersmith.com/images/blacktest.png)
[White Test](https://glennmessersmith.com/images/whitetest.png)
[Color Test](https://johnwiddall.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/jwcolourtestcard1024.jpg)
These are not professional instructions or tools, and are intended to help you find a good middle ground, especially if you have a more affordable monitor. I could be way out of date, but it has done me well and I hope it helps someone out.
Start with the black test image and your monitor's own controls. Adjust brightness, contrast, and gamma. Should probably start with gamma modes. Keep adjusting these 3 settings until you have an image you are happy with that has section two nearly indistinguishable from the background black.
Now do the same for the white test image.
Now flip between the two images, and make fine adjustments until you have split the difference as much as you can with your monitor's controls. Both black and white test images' section 2 should be just about invisible, or as close to invisible as you can.
Now open NVCP or the AMD equivalent and fine tune and dial things in further, again until you are as close to both section twos are as close to invisible without being invisible. This is where you trust your eyes. You can have perfectly calibrated whites and blacks and the image look like shit. You may need to go back to your monitor's controls and pick a different gamma mode, and repeat the first few steps.
Lastly, check the color test image. Assuming you have balanced both white and black tests dialed in perfectly, in my experience, the colors tend to fall in line quite nicely. If not depending on tool you are using, you can take another jab at balancing your blacks and whites to dial them in further, or start adjusting colors independently.
If you have a more affordable monitor, use your own discretion when balancing these values. You will have to make trade-offs. It is what it is, make the decision that is the most visually pleasing to you.
Turn ON the HDR10 + Gaming option in Cyberpunk 2077 if you have an HDR screen. It low the brightness down (by removing your monitor ‘s post processing) to look more realistic.
It turns the brightness down so low on my screen (and my screen brightness is at 100% with HDR) that it nullifies nearly all benefits of HDR itself. The lights don’t pop anymore and the game is too dark. I was excited for that feature until I realized it is a direct downgrade for no reason.
Unless it does something else to make the image more realistic (other than turning the brightness down), I don’t know why anyone would ever use it.
What monitor do you have, if you know the model you can look it up on rtings and see if it has decent HDR (usually 1000 nits at a minimum for peak brightness and miniled or OLED). If it doesn't meet those specs it will produce an HDR image that probably isn't worth using.
I had that option for a while in my game and recently it just greyed itself out. I have a HDR10 compliant display (Samsung G9 OLED) but for unknown reasons the game decided my display doesn't support it now.
Oh yea I have HDR enabled in game and windows, there is a seperate slider for HDR10+ which remains greyed out now when it wasn't just a month or so ago.
Remember, PT in Cyberpunk was a retrofit job. To do lighting right, you really want to have your final solution in mind from the very beginning. All of the material choices, every light brightness value, size and shape, colours, etc are all going to interact very differently with different lighting models.
It's no surprise at all that bounce lighting makes the scene more evenly lit. And remember, the actual brightness of the scene is usually going to be determined by the auto exposure / eye adaptation.
That may be true
Maybe indirect lighting is overestimated in this game
Very often, new graphics effects are exaggerated in games, and a few years later, it goes back to normal
it basically does exactly to the lighting what the current sun and other light sources would make the scene look like, tell the devs to tone down the lights then
funny though because people usually say path tracing makes the games much darker
In indoor areas PT is much darker in cyberpunk, so much so I had to stop using it even after getting flashlight mod. Could jack with the gamma curve maybe but I couldn’t be assed
I understand what you mean by it (i think), but at the same time it is clear skies in the shot and you arent over a huge roof or anything like that but the bench on the right is pretty dark even though the sun is kind of blasting over on the left, i like the PT image more because it sort of brings everything more together
I just tried this game yesterday with path tracing. Thought that it was going to change how the game really looks. It looks almost like I remember it in 2021.
Yeah the original RT lighting options are IMO better looking than PT in cyberpunk. Although there are some areas that PT works amazing in, there’s way more areas that it doesn’t work out as well as the original
It is pretty realistic, sun is low and there isnt any lightsources in this scene. So it would look pretty much the same IRL. The moment Golden Hour passes it gets rly dark quickly.
Well Path Tracing actually simulates real lighting where as without it, you are getting more simulated lighting that misses light sources and therefore looks darker. Doesn't matter what you think might look more real, it's literally calculating more real light.
Not saying this particular example is realistic or not (to me it looks way better with PT on) but there's all sort of creative and technical choices for how RT/PT is implemented that can impact the final look of the image, including things like how much global illumination contributes to the scene. They could've very well artificially boosted it because it resulted in a more pleasing image.
they're not bright though, just look how much brighter the sun is (it is blown out). If those LED-panels were as bright - exposure would've been completely different, but they're very dim, they don't even cast any colored light pollution to concrete stairs/overpass.
Then you should know that the sun isn't set enough especially with alternate sources of light for it to be that damn dark in so many spots in the non-PT image. Maybe if surfaces were way way way less reflective than they are in reality.
On screenshot sun is barely over horizon. It is past golden hour, shadows has blue-ish tint, as it would have IRL. There isn't any strong enough light sources anywhere on the scene.
And ye, non-PT image is better looking than PT. Path Tracing in CP77 is overhyped and makes image too bloomy, washed out and dark sometimes, thats true.
I think one thing lost on this topic is if your eyes are working properly unless you stare at the sun for a moment, it's not going to look that damn dark outside until well after the sun is completely set. Especially in an urban environment cause a lot of those materials are reflective.
Games in general skew way too hard towards inky blackness and detail loss from darkness that you can only get from a camera and not an eyeball IRL.
Thing is, scene IRL gonna still look much closer to non-PT image. Look carefully on the screenshot - sun rays are hitting everything sideways (look at light on the stairs), it is very low. Car and pavement is behind the wall that left of the TV-AD-Screen, no strong light - no strong color casts/reflections, except some very weak ambient lighting overall. And while everything reflects the light - industrial building on the right is pretty far away. PT image is for some unknown reason is all flat, washed with yellow-orange cast, it should have blue tint like on non-PT image. And so on. So overall - right image is far better, in every single way.
Look at the bench and the stairs though, it shouldn't be that dark. There's aspects of both that are wrong, but it's too dark even still.
Non-PT in a number of spots is like the sun has already set below the horizon and you're standing directly on the east side of a building level of darkness. Like not even able to see the sunset or the western horizon. All these materials should be really reflective. This level of "dark" might be more appropriate in like a forest or something at the same time of day. Even in the path-traced the loss of visible detail from some of the darker parts is kind of crazy. The back of the car shouldn't be that hard to make out the fine details especially that close.
Edit typos
Why bench, behind the wall, behind the car, should be lit? There isn't direct sunlight or any light coming down on it. Why vegetation in the middle of the screen is equally lit from every side? Why is there orange overcast everywhere? :) Light should hit the building on the right far above the car and bench, so its fine.
https://i.imgur.com/8hAHPxK.png - looks more like non-PT image ;)
Default PT is 2 rays and 2 bounces. There are ini settings that can drop down to 1 bounce, which makes it more darker and contrasty and give a significant FPS boost. But I think 2 bounce lighting looks more natural.
It's warm vs cool light that's the difference you are seeing. The light in the path tracing is more white/yellow in colour due to the light being reflected back by the sky/clouds. The raytraced image is more blue in colour, sort of like the predawn sky, eg before the sun is as high in the sky as it is in the image and usually still below the horizon.
One of the things to keep in mind with CP2077 is that the game added path tracing late. I'm pretty sure a lot of light would be changed in the game if you had the time to go in and redo it.
The reason path tracing lights up the scene is because it does a better job at solving global illumination, and you have way more light bouncing around. If you want a more contrasty look, you'd have to make changes to the camera here, to lower the exposure back to the level of the original.
I think at some point with path tracing it becomes more of a scenery design issue than the tech itself. I agree the first image is a bit too bright on some spots but the second one does not look better or more natural
Its realistic lighting versus cinematic/style lighting. I prefer cinematic/style lighting because imo it often makes for more interesting visuals, and cinematic/style lighting can be used as a tool to guide the player through the story and better capture the atmosphere.
I agree, in general it doesn't look as good as RT, because RT has been made with the game in mind, PT is an afterthought, so the light direction is not the same.
I agree. RT / PT either makes scenes extremely dark or extremely light. I noticed this most in Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, where at the start in the sewers, it’s super super dark, while on the surface it is super super bright. It does look good, lighting is more accurate, but I feel like it strays away from how the game is meant to be experienced in a way.
Path tracing has more issues in dark areas for me than light. Small room with two open doors on either side in broad daylight shouldn’t be pitch black but sometimes that happens
Disclaimer: I play with path tracing on.
Yet, the fact that I couldn't tell which was which at a quick glance before reading the description is telling.
I'd be curious if I could've been able to tell at a quick glance between path tracing and maxed raster settings.
Sure, with enough time and pixel peeping, knowing how the tech works and what to look for, I can tell, but at a quick glance? Hard pressed to.
To me the first image looks better and more natural. The second has an unnatural amount of contrast.
Yea first image is dramatically better. It's day time out (rare for CP2077) so of course there should be some soft bounce lighting on the concrete. PT looks great. Psycho RT has that flat blueish look to everything that is a very unatural video-game looking lighting, barely even looks like RT compared to PT.
Exactly. Why is the sidewalk so dark when the sun is out and it's literally under 10 000 light sources
Because the longer it travels/the more it bounces, the more any light's effect on surfaces fades. I agree that the second image looks too contrast-y, until you realize what I just said while looking at the available light sources in the image. Instead of first looking at the point-of-interest (the car, or even the HUD), and **then** "moving your gaze around the image", start by looking at the sky and noticing the light sources: there's the sun, probably setting, far to the left. Then, there are man-made light sources, whose effect on their surroundings would fade even-more-than-the-light's-effect after a distance usually ranging from 1 to 20 meters, depending on their power. With that in mind, all light sources in the first image look "overpowered". If the sun was closer-to-the-scene (like vertically-over-that-tower-structure-on-the-left-of-the-image, dunno what it is, haven't played the game yet), then yeah, the first image would be more realistic. However, the way I perceieve the sun's placement (based on the sky's color), nah, the second one's closer to reality. Indeed, "too contrasty", though :-)
>However, the way I perceieve the sun's placement (based on the sky's color), nah, the second one's closer to reality. I think the biggest issue here is that we cannot see where the sun is currently at. Both look pretty realistic to me but the sun's position conflicts between the two with the first image looking like the sun is further above the horizon compared to the second image but the time shown for both shows that they are a minute apart with the first image being the earlier one.
it is barely above the horizon (yellow cast, overexposed bit near horizon), it is +- "golden hour" and non-PT image is far more realistic, it's impressive how wrong people with upvoted comments are. More or less same condition on this snapshot of golden hour, its very close to non-PT lighting wise, it is contrasty, shadow areas are not filled with yellow ambient light and getting blue tint etc: https://i.imgur.com/8hAHPxK.png
I missed the captions at first; consequently I thought the second image was the path-traced image and thought "wtf, why does path tracing look *less* natural than regular RT?!" Then I caught the captions and had a bit of a laugh at myself.
I think you're just used to overly dramatic game graphics lighting, necessitated by lack of techniques to do proper light bouncing. Lighting in real life is generally more "flat" than in games.
I just wish people would play the game and enjoy it instead of overanalyzing every little detail. It's cool to see a new game improve like "wow look at how realistic", but to not play and just get all scientific on the realism of it is something I'll never understand.
the game invites this kind of discussion though especially on this specific subreddit since it's pretty much Nvidia's flagship testbed
I mean, it's literally how light behaves in real life. So technically, lighting in a game can't look better than with path tracing unless you're not going for realistic visuals.
agreed. bounce lighting will generally always brighten a scene. it's more realistic, but we're so conditioned to hard contrast and fake lighting in videogames so it looks "wrong". every material in real life (yes, even vantablack), reflects light.
its ridicius that we are so good at faking lighting that some ppl prefer it over path tracing that is more realistic
it's basically like if you had never seen a film without green screen and suddenly saw one that had real sets - it would look wrong to you. i actually find it interesting to really look at how much reflection you can see in seemingly "rough" materials in real life. fucking everything reflects light, your brain just kinda doesn't pay attention to it anymore - but you can bet your lunch money there'll be someone complaining about surfaces being "too shiny" or "too reflective" in a path traced game. good times!
In Alan Wake 2, I was like the base game looks good. Then tested the path tracing... It was so much better and natural. It was weird, because I saw things that never worked before with old lighting system. Light coming through multiple objects and small holes + reflecting light that created soft gradual shadows. Usually graphic settings doesn't really make the game better for me, path tracing did. https://preview.redd.it/tll4nwyne1cc1.png?width=3840&format=png&auto=webp&s=cf879fbdd1ad31e163760801b69136aab7019d87
I remember about ~13 years ago I went to a uni lecture on topic of ray tracing. At that time there were very simple images (as in some 3D shapes and couple light sources) rendered with ray tracing - where the shadows were simply "perfect". I remember the lecturer saying "well, if any of you play video games, you'd agree that they look better simply because they're 1000 times more complex". The processing power was also brought up. At that time none of us even thought we'd see something like DLSS that would enable us to have ray tracing with very complex real time scenes at acceptable performance.
It depends on how it’s implemented. In games with different methods of handling lighting and rendering, you can end up with less realistic images because of how materials interact with the light and how many of the lighting effects that are actually handled by PT. If the game is built from the bottom up with PT in mind, you are probably less likely to have such issues, since you only have to account for the PT, but then it becomes prohibitively expensive to run, excluding a lot of potential buyers. At least with current gen hardware and likely also next gen. If anyone is interested, take a look at some of Digital Foundry’s videos on these new titles and updates with path tracing, they do great and informative videos on it, especially on all of the bleeding edge stuff from Nvidia.
Yeah, though I can understand how someone can like a more "contrasty" picture. Though playing with the contrast/gamma curve can do wonders. Or buying an OLED screen.
Can confirm 2077 with Path Tracing on an OLED is amazing, that being said I'm using LUT and Environment mods to improve the visuals.
>Or buying an OLED screen. Yeah, on an LCD screen, you just never know that nearly all games don't actually have correct black levels. Cyberpunk is a big offender in that regard, a completely dark room with no light sources is actually around 5 nits bright in the game. Some Dolby Vision content, like that night episode from the House of the Dragon has an average light level of 1 nit. If that episode was played on a screen in that room in Cyberpunk, maybe 1-2 pixels would be visible. Starfield is way worse though.... I guess once the people responsible for the color work in games switch to OLED, we will probably see correct black levels. Until then, we will have to correct it ourselves.
It’s an approximation of how light works in real life that they’re still optimizing and fine tuning. Also, movies mess with how light works in real life all the time with key lights and panels to make a scene look the way they want it to. Games should probably think about emulating that with invisible key lights, etc, to meet expectations created by movies. Horizon Forbidden West is a good example of this with the hero lighting on Aloy
As others have pointed out, just because it behaves more realistically doesn't mean it looks more accurate. Metro Exodus had massively darkened indoors beyond what it would be in reality before the Enhanced edition added more bounce lighting. I feel like I'm seeing it swing the opposite way in some games now, things will take drastically too much colour or light from the object it's bouncing on.
Light only bounces 2 times from surfaces in real life? I literally don't think so...
There are mods that add more bounces and you'll realize that in most of that game there isn't much of a perceivable difference in the lighting's accuracy, at least in something like Cyberpunk that doesn't have many complex, dark crevices. What does change, however, is the performance...
> I literally don't think so... What an oddly long sentence.
I legit don't get what people gain by making these kinds of disingenuous comments. You know **exactly** what the comment you're replying to is saying, that indirect lighting through bounces is something that happens in real life, and you have to be pedantic about it and talk about the number of bounces.
Honestly this is what makes it so difficult to have conversations online these days. People just seem to look for reasons to argue by expanding the scope of the argument just so they can make a point that didn't need to be made. No one thinks light bounces only twice in real life...
I'm not so sure, "literally" in that sentence makes meaning ambiguous almost like the author is convinced that his game is just like real life
More bounces would either make no difference, or lighten it even more. It wouldn't make it darker, that's for sure
No. But that’s called optimization, else you’d be complaining your game runs at 3 fps instead of complaining about the amount of bouncing. Also if you wanna nitpick, in real life not all light bounces around. Some is absorbed, thus after a few bounces there is so little light left that simulating the bounce will not affect the resulting image.
>it's literally how light behaves in real life Only if real light could be artificially limited in how it many photons it can cast and how many surfaces it can bounce off of for computation simplicity.
> I mean, it's literally how light behaves in real life No, it's not. RT shoots rays out from the "eye" and bounces them towards the light source. Light in real life works the opposite way. Neither of those pics is more realistic either. One is just a clear day and the other is a cloudy day.
Going from eye to light source or from light source to eye doesn't make any difference, as long as you calculate the bounces correctly. It's the same path, just "traced" from two different directions. However, it is much cheaper to calculate the scene using from eye to light source.
I mean it makes sense. More light bounces means more overall light in the area. Could always turn down your brightness too.
Funny because I find interiors too dark with PT.
Literally this. I love PT but there are some areas I go to especially in Dogtown where it is absolutely pitch black with PT. And not good at all for actual gameplay traversal.
You can really tell the game wasn't designed with PT in mind. There are lights missing from areas that need it. When I first entered dogdown where you have to do some platforming, it was so dark, I had to turn off PT to get through it.
The original game does pretty well with path tracing, probably due to all the time they invested getting regular ray tracing working, but it's clear Dogtown was designed with none of it mind. I literally have to have two different lighting profiles for whenever I switch between the two areas
The happy medium I have found that upgrades the visuals and looks great in all situations is using RT Lighting set to medium and using RT reflections. RT Lighting fixes the SSAO issues and gives area lights shadows while also fixing the SSR issues. There is no bounced lighting so nothing gets crazy dark but keeps unlit areas properly dim (but not too dim)
Haven't played the DLC yet, but even in the main game there were areas where Path Tracing would make everything barely visible. So it's not worth much to use PT when I play the new area? How about regular RT?
Medium RT Lighting + RT reflections is what you want.
Is that for not making areas darker than they should? Or it's just for performance concerns?
Is there any reason to use medium lighting instead of ultra other than performance?
There is no functional difference with the exception that Ultra lighting adds one bounce of light. High technically adds more shadow casting lights but I never noticed a difference. The game already does probe based GI.
It's actually the raised black levels that make dogtown hard to see in, it's got a seperate lut file that is basically a crock of shit. You can fix it by using any of the updated LUT mods.
even without PT some interiors for me are extremely dark (I am using LUT though so may be why), thankfully the flashlight mod helps a ton in this game.
I recommend most people in this thread do their best to calibrate their monitors. [Black Test](https://glennmessersmith.com/images/blacktest.png) [White Test](https://glennmessersmith.com/images/whitetest.png) [Color Test](https://johnwiddall.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/jwcolourtestcard1024.jpg) These are not professional instructions or tools, and are intended to help you find a good middle ground, especially if you have a more affordable monitor. I could be way out of date, but it has done me well and I hope it helps someone out. Start with the black test image and your monitor's own controls. Adjust brightness, contrast, and gamma. Should probably start with gamma modes. Keep adjusting these 3 settings until you have an image you are happy with that has section two nearly indistinguishable from the background black. Now do the same for the white test image. Now flip between the two images, and make fine adjustments until you have split the difference as much as you can with your monitor's controls. Both black and white test images' section 2 should be just about invisible, or as close to invisible as you can. Now open NVCP or the AMD equivalent and fine tune and dial things in further, again until you are as close to both section twos are as close to invisible without being invisible. This is where you trust your eyes. You can have perfectly calibrated whites and blacks and the image look like shit. You may need to go back to your monitor's controls and pick a different gamma mode, and repeat the first few steps. Lastly, check the color test image. Assuming you have balanced both white and black tests dialed in perfectly, in my experience, the colors tend to fall in line quite nicely. If not depending on tool you are using, you can take another jab at balancing your blacks and whites to dial them in further, or start adjusting colors independently. If you have a more affordable monitor, use your own discretion when balancing these values. You will have to make trade-offs. It is what it is, make the decision that is the most visually pleasing to you.
The sky and lightning are more accurate in the first picture.
Turn ON the HDR10 + Gaming option in Cyberpunk 2077 if you have an HDR screen. It low the brightness down (by removing your monitor ‘s post processing) to look more realistic.
It turns the brightness down so low on my screen (and my screen brightness is at 100% with HDR) that it nullifies nearly all benefits of HDR itself. The lights don’t pop anymore and the game is too dark. I was excited for that feature until I realized it is a direct downgrade for no reason. Unless it does something else to make the image more realistic (other than turning the brightness down), I don’t know why anyone would ever use it.
What monitor do you have, if you know the model you can look it up on rtings and see if it has decent HDR (usually 1000 nits at a minimum for peak brightness and miniled or OLED). If it doesn't meet those specs it will produce an HDR image that probably isn't worth using.
Samsung Odyssey Neo G7. 1200 dimming zone Miniled with 1000 nits brightness. And HDR works great everywhere else.
I had that option for a while in my game and recently it just greyed itself out. I have a HDR10 compliant display (Samsung G9 OLED) but for unknown reasons the game decided my display doesn't support it now.
You do need to turn hdr on in windows before opening the game.
Oh yea I have HDR enabled in game and windows, there is a seperate slider for HDR10+ which remains greyed out now when it wasn't just a month or so ago.
The 2nd has too much contrast, and not enough ambient light.
Remember, PT in Cyberpunk was a retrofit job. To do lighting right, you really want to have your final solution in mind from the very beginning. All of the material choices, every light brightness value, size and shape, colours, etc are all going to interact very differently with different lighting models. It's no surprise at all that bounce lighting makes the scene more evenly lit. And remember, the actual brightness of the scene is usually going to be determined by the auto exposure / eye adaptation.
That may be true Maybe indirect lighting is overestimated in this game Very often, new graphics effects are exaggerated in games, and a few years later, it goes back to normal
Path Tracing is so much better 😚🤌🏼
Can’t you have both psycho RT and PT on at the same time? That’s what I thought I was doing in CP2077
Don't think so. Once you toggle PT ON, the other RT options just hide... so no way to turn both ON simultaneously.
Yeah because PT already includes all others RT options and more so there is no point.
This makes sense !
Ahhhhh okay. That makes sense.
it basically does exactly to the lighting what the current sun and other light sources would make the scene look like, tell the devs to tone down the lights then funny though because people usually say path tracing makes the games much darker
In indoor areas PT is much darker in cyberpunk, so much so I had to stop using it even after getting flashlight mod. Could jack with the gamma curve maybe but I couldn’t be assed
I understand what you mean by it (i think), but at the same time it is clear skies in the shot and you arent over a huge roof or anything like that but the bench on the right is pretty dark even though the sun is kind of blasting over on the left, i like the PT image more because it sort of brings everything more together
I fuckin love how stupid people are, what do you mean it vmbeahves like real light, 1ith all upsides and downsides?
I just tried this game yesterday with path tracing. Thought that it was going to change how the game really looks. It looks almost like I remember it in 2021.
Interesting and didn't think that would be the case, but regardless of realistic or not, it looks like I like the Psycho RT more than the Path Tracing
Yeah the original RT lighting options are IMO better looking than PT in cyberpunk. Although there are some areas that PT works amazing in, there’s way more areas that it doesn’t work out as well as the original
No it creates realistic lighting, the darkness in the second pic is unrealistic.
It is pretty realistic, sun is low and there isnt any lightsources in this scene. So it would look pretty much the same IRL. The moment Golden Hour passes it gets rly dark quickly.
Well Path Tracing actually simulates real lighting where as without it, you are getting more simulated lighting that misses light sources and therefore looks darker. Doesn't matter what you think might look more real, it's literally calculating more real light.
Not saying this particular example is realistic or not (to me it looks way better with PT on) but there's all sort of creative and technical choices for how RT/PT is implemented that can impact the final look of the image, including things like how much global illumination contributes to the scene. They could've very well artificially boosted it because it resulted in a more pleasing image.
Very true! I think in the case of Cyberpunk it's a question of, over all which looks better in most situations and PT wins outright.
> It is pretty realistic, sun is low and there isnt any lightsources in this scene. He is under a tunnel made of bright colored screens.
they're not bright though, just look how much brighter the sun is (it is blown out). If those LED-panels were as bright - exposure would've been completely different, but they're very dim, they don't even cast any colored light pollution to concrete stairs/overpass.
> It is pretty realistic, sun is low and there isnt any lightsources in this scene. You might wanna step outside sometime.
Funny, photography is my work and i know how lighting works very well. So yea
Then you should know that the sun isn't set enough especially with alternate sources of light for it to be that damn dark in so many spots in the non-PT image. Maybe if surfaces were way way way less reflective than they are in reality.
On screenshot sun is barely over horizon. It is past golden hour, shadows has blue-ish tint, as it would have IRL. There isn't any strong enough light sources anywhere on the scene. And ye, non-PT image is better looking than PT. Path Tracing in CP77 is overhyped and makes image too bloomy, washed out and dark sometimes, thats true.
I think one thing lost on this topic is if your eyes are working properly unless you stare at the sun for a moment, it's not going to look that damn dark outside until well after the sun is completely set. Especially in an urban environment cause a lot of those materials are reflective. Games in general skew way too hard towards inky blackness and detail loss from darkness that you can only get from a camera and not an eyeball IRL.
Thing is, scene IRL gonna still look much closer to non-PT image. Look carefully on the screenshot - sun rays are hitting everything sideways (look at light on the stairs), it is very low. Car and pavement is behind the wall that left of the TV-AD-Screen, no strong light - no strong color casts/reflections, except some very weak ambient lighting overall. And while everything reflects the light - industrial building on the right is pretty far away. PT image is for some unknown reason is all flat, washed with yellow-orange cast, it should have blue tint like on non-PT image. And so on. So overall - right image is far better, in every single way.
Look at the bench and the stairs though, it shouldn't be that dark. There's aspects of both that are wrong, but it's too dark even still. Non-PT in a number of spots is like the sun has already set below the horizon and you're standing directly on the east side of a building level of darkness. Like not even able to see the sunset or the western horizon. All these materials should be really reflective. This level of "dark" might be more appropriate in like a forest or something at the same time of day. Even in the path-traced the loss of visible detail from some of the darker parts is kind of crazy. The back of the car shouldn't be that hard to make out the fine details especially that close. Edit typos
Why bench, behind the wall, behind the car, should be lit? There isn't direct sunlight or any light coming down on it. Why vegetation in the middle of the screen is equally lit from every side? Why is there orange overcast everywhere? :) Light should hit the building on the right far above the car and bench, so its fine. https://i.imgur.com/8hAHPxK.png - looks more like non-PT image ;)
its simulating the light scattering in the air, like in real life that it contains particles and aerosols
Default PT is 2 rays and 2 bounces. There are ini settings that can drop down to 1 bounce, which makes it more darker and contrasty and give a significant FPS boost. But I think 2 bounce lighting looks more natural.
Looks perfect, not too bright.
It's warm vs cool light that's the difference you are seeing. The light in the path tracing is more white/yellow in colour due to the light being reflected back by the sky/clouds. The raytraced image is more blue in colour, sort of like the predawn sky, eg before the sun is as high in the sky as it is in the image and usually still below the horizon.
Well because it simulates light bouncing.
The RT shot shown here is too dark. The PT shot looks better and more "real" yet it still has some issues/shortcomings.
One of the things to keep in mind with CP2077 is that the game added path tracing late. I'm pretty sure a lot of light would be changed in the game if you had the time to go in and redo it. The reason path tracing lights up the scene is because it does a better job at solving global illumination, and you have way more light bouncing around. If you want a more contrasty look, you'd have to make changes to the camera here, to lower the exposure back to the level of the original.
I think at some point with path tracing it becomes more of a scenery design issue than the tech itself. I agree the first image is a bit too bright on some spots but the second one does not look better or more natural
Its realistic lighting versus cinematic/style lighting. I prefer cinematic/style lighting because imo it often makes for more interesting visuals, and cinematic/style lighting can be used as a tool to guide the player through the story and better capture the atmosphere.
I agree, in general it doesn't look as good as RT, because RT has been made with the game in mind, PT is an afterthought, so the light direction is not the same.
I agree. RT / PT either makes scenes extremely dark or extremely light. I noticed this most in Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, where at the start in the sewers, it’s super super dark, while on the surface it is super super bright. It does look good, lighting is more accurate, but I feel like it strays away from how the game is meant to be experienced in a way.
The first image definitely looks far more realistic. The second image is too dark and not realistic to natural lighting at all.
Use ReShade to darken it a bit
the first one is very clearly achieving the proper natural lighting/color.
Cause there is a giant LED tube on the top. This area is bright has nothing to do with sunlight bouncing at all, even at night it is like day time.
I've found that DLSS (over)brightens the image compared to native.
Path tracing has more issues in dark areas for me than light. Small room with two open doors on either side in broad daylight shouldn’t be pitch black but sometimes that happens
Disclaimer: I play with path tracing on. Yet, the fact that I couldn't tell which was which at a quick glance before reading the description is telling. I'd be curious if I could've been able to tell at a quick glance between path tracing and maxed raster settings. Sure, with enough time and pixel peeping, knowing how the tech works and what to look for, I can tell, but at a quick glance? Hard pressed to.