NEXON has just launched its latest free-to-play third-person looter shooter, The First Descendant, on PC. The game is powered by Unreal Engine 5, and supports Ray Tracing, as well as DLSS 3 and FSR 3.0. In this article, we’ll be taking a look at its Ray Tracing effects. And, as the title implies, they are the most underwhelming RT effects we’ve ever seen in any game.
For these benchmarks and screenshot comparisons, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, and NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4090. I also used Windows 10 64-bit, and the GeForce 556.12 WHQL driver. Moreover, I’ve disabled the second CCD on our 7950X3D.
According to the in-game setting, the Ray Tracing in The First Descendant aims to enhance its lighting.
So, in theory, there should be a big difference between RT On and Off, right? Well, actually no. Below you can find some comparison screenshots between RT On (left) and RT Off (right).
Even when using NVIDIA’s ICAT, it’s pretty hard to notice the lighting improvements that Ray Tracing brings to this title. The only comparisons that show some differences are the last two. However, the visual differences are minimal. And no, they do not justify the enormous performance hit.
Seriously, I don’t really know why the devs bothered adding Ray Tracing in this game. Ray Tracing can make a huge difference in some games. However, The First Descendant is the perfect example of why RT can be completely useless in other games.
As such, we suggest completely disabling Ray Tracing in The First Descendant. And, as you can see in the following graph, there is a big performance difference between RT On and RT Off.
With Ray Tracing, our NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 was able to push framerates between 43fps and 64fps. Without Ray Tracing, we were getting framerates between 63fps and 89fps.
And yes, as I said, the game supports DLSS 3. As such, owners of an RTX40 series GPU can use DLSS 3 Super Resolution and Frame Generation to get close to 100fps. But why do this when there are no noticeable image improvements? Without RT, you can push even higher framerates with DLSS 3 SR and FG.
Stay tuned for our next article, in which we’ll be comparing DLSS 3 with FSR 3.0!
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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Remember, the more you buy, the more you save…
800% value right there.
Good! No geh tracing. Cry more. And btw did John joined the evil gang that he keeps dissing this game. It has the best character designs I've seen in a long time. People are gonna play the hell out of it cause it looks beautiful
Koomer game.
Then you complain about the quality of video games today, when you play absolute F2P tier trash.
But it has tiddies so it's amazing man!111
So anomalies are here too? Alright where's my pest killer …oh there it is,
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c00a49d2264ad2a5d4d701a204c42ffdc36166f0aebe648cfd88acfe488a90aa.jpg
Just GFTO you Vomit garbage!
Wouldent be suprised if your a monkey POS to and a Transgender fucr!
"most underwhelming Ray Tracing effects"
First world problems…
Wow, what a joke…and like 30 FPS loss for that sh*t?
This is also another MP game being advertised as SP, when what that means is "some elements of solo play"
I tried this yesterday and it wants me to pay 100 dollars for the "ultimate" version of a character, which also happens to have the sexier outfit.
lol, uninstalled.
Wants? No, don't go over stating the facts. The game does not force you to buy anything. You can earn everything that's in that shop. Everything in the shop is for conveniences if you don't want to take the time to grind it out. But yeah, go ahead and keep spreading lies and false information.
That's a 4000 hour grind for a single ultimate character.
No, its not. I got Ultimate Gley in about 130 hours. But hey, try harder next time!
130 hours to earn a single skin? The f*k? 130 hours at minimum wage in some states is around $2k USD before taxes they could have earned and bought an entirely new PC or thousands of games. Hell, they could probably buy every single cosmetic in The First Descendant. You just proved the grind is unreasonable, unless you did it so hilariously beyond inefficiently that it would be a criminal sin.
take your bullshit some where else. your pathetic!!
It is pretty clear you are unhinged. May you get the treatment you need.
No, I’m just not going to sit here and put up with your lame bullshit. so fk off!
Get a job bum and buy all the skins at once in the same time you spend grinding 130 f*king hours for one.
get a life loser!!!!
Its clear your a worthless POS!
I'm not sure how you failed to read what they said, even when quoting it as your first word…, but "wants" because the design and grind tires to act as an incentive to purchase. Thus they "want". They never said it was mandatory.
There is a noticeable difference in this comparison.
https://youtu.be/3htPpnhZD0c?si=M6FA8BxgVfXCHtg2
Both are technically using raytracing, which is why there is a less significant difference. The "Raytracing On" is just using hardware raytracing to improve fidelity, primarily in regards to occlusion and reflections.
You'd think someone who spends two-thirds of his waking hours gushing over raytracing and lumen would understand the very fundamentals of it.
Both are technically using raytracing, which is why there is a less significant difference. The "Raytracing On" is just using hardware raytracing to improve fidelity, primarily in regards to occlusion and reflections.
You'd think someone who spends two-thirds of his waking hours gushing over raytracing and lumen would understand the very fundamentals of it.
Both are technically using raytracing, which is why there is a less significant difference. The "Raytracing On" is just using hardware raytracing to improve fidelity, primarily in regards to occlusion and reflections.
You'd think someone who spends two-thirds of his waking hours gushing over raytracing and lumen would understand the very fundamentals of it.
Ray tracing on should give better performance then, instead of worse. As the hardware would be put to actual use.
It would be like running Physx on hardware that supports it vs hardware that doesn't.
Or that TressFX suite.
If they where doing the same thing, yes. But they're not. Software tracing resolves ray-object intersections through various convenient approximations (surface cache, SDF etc.). Hardware tracing resolves (some) intersections through ray-triangle intersections.
RT cores accelerate ray-triangle intersections, and the acceleration structures required to make them possible on a scene-wide level. Even with hardware acceleration though, this is still more expensive.
What's that in layman's terms? I havent actually used Ray tracing in games. Aside from the Unreal Engine 5 games where it's on under every situation.
The slow part of ray-tracing in is the name – tracing a ray through a 3D scene and seeing what it hit, where scenes are comprised of millions of triangles. Hardware ray-tracing accelerates this process, but it is still computationally expensive.
Unreal 5's software tracing, instead of considering individual triangles, traces against simpler, mathematically convenient but less accurate representations of the scene.
Exactly, this article appears to be made as quickly as possible, playing 3 minutes of the introduction and jumping to conclusions…
RT actually has quite a big impact on the visuals in this title, but if you desperately want to put on a negative article about RT because that is a popular opinion, this article is what you get.
You clearly forgot Resident Evil Remake 4 exists.
It has ray tracing only on water reflections and even that doesn't work properly. It is currently the worst RT in a game, not this. This at least makes a difference, though very subtle even when comparing side by side.
Forspoken also has some broken RT effects and is worse than this, too, where it does work due to botched AMD FidelityFX tech that doesn't handle shadows and lighting properly.