RocketWerkz and Dean Hall have just released their session-based PvE survival game, ICARUS. ICARUS supports Ray Tracing Global Illumination, as well as NVIDIA’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR. As such, we’ve decided to benchmark them and share some comparison screenshots.
For these benchmarks, we used an Intel i9 9900K with 16GB of DDR4 at 3600Mhz and NVIDIA’s RTX 3080. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce 497.09 driver.
ICARUS is the first game that supports a new RTXGI feature, called Infinite Scrolling Volumes. RTXGI Infinite Scrolling Volumes uses ray tracing to constantly update the Global Illumination lighting volume around the player as they move through Icarus’ world.
Below you can find some comparison screenshots between RT On (left) and RT Off (right). Pay attention to the light that bounces on the objects, especially on trees. You can easily notice this in most comparisons. However, there are occasions in which there is only a tiny difference (like in the snowy area).
Now the good news here is that these Ray Tracing effects are not that demanding. For instance, the performance difference between them at both 1080p and 1440p is only 10fps. Still, and even without its Ray Tracing effects, ICARUS is one of the most demanding PC games we’ve seen to date.
Our NVIDIA GeForce RTX3080 was only able to push a constant 60fps experience at native1080p. At 1440p, and even without the Ray Tracing effects, there were some drops to 58fps. Thankfully, those with G-Sync/FreeSync monitors will be able to enjoy the game, even when the framerate drops to 55fps.
As said, ICARUS supports NVIDIA’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR techs. Below you can find some comparison screenshots. Native 4K is on the left, DLSS is in the middle and FSR is on the right. DLSS looks better than FSR and native 4K when it comes to eliminating aliasing. DLSS also runs slightly better than FSR. What’s also awesome here is that both DLSS and FSR come with a Sharpening filter, meaning that you can adjust the sharpening to your liking. As such, you can get crisper visuals (than native 4K) with both DLSS and FSR.
Graphics-wise, ICARUS looks amazing in still images. However, the game suffers from MAJOR pop-in issues. Not only that, but you will see animals spawning right next to you, and stones transforming to plants when you get close to them. And then there are the awful artifacts from screen-space reflections. ICARUS is a buggy mess right now. The fact that this is NOT an Early Access game, but a full release makes things even worse. ICARUS can be as buggy as Cyberpunk 2077 or GTA The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition.
PC gamers can eliminate some of the game’s pop-in issues by following this guide. We’ve tested and yes, it works. However, there are still some annoying tessellation and shadow pop-ins. Not only that, but distant textures look noticeably worse in lower resolutions. Below you can find a comparison between native 1080p, 1440p and 4K. As you can clearly see, the distant textures in the 4K image look noticeably sharper than the 1080p image. Hell, even at 1440p you can notice the blurry textures.
My guess is that the game has tied both tessellation and mipmaps to its internal resolution, something that can negatively affect the whole image when running at lower resolutions (even when you’ve set Tessellation/Draw Distance/Textures to Epic).
All in all, ICARUS suffers from numerous technical issues. This is one of the most demanding games on PC, even without its Ray Tracing effects. And while in still images the game looks great, everything falls apart once you start moving. Additionally, the game suffers from some truly awful stuttering issues. At least the game’s RT effects are not that demanding. Furthermore, both the DLSS and FSR implementations appear to be great. For RTX owners, we highly recommend using DLSS. As for all other players, you can at least give FSR a go!
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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DLSS is so amazing i hope it becomes a standard and future AMD graphics cards are able to use it. It would be a real shame if such an amazing tech as it is gets lost in time due to proprietary issues
Inte’s XeSS should be what we want lets hope its good
we have no idea how good that will turn out to be, also, it doesn’t require specific hardware like tensor cores for DLSS, which means its gonna use the regular GPU components, which means it will introduce a bigger overhead compared to DLSS for sure, meaning lower fps for equal image quality (and that is supposing it is as good as dlss which i doubt). So I would be cautious regarding XeSS
Only Pascal/Turing/Ampere and RDNA2 support DP4A instructions, needed for XeSS.
-> https://www.pcgamer.com/intel-xess-compatibility-nvidia-amd/
Thanks
Shouldn’t be a surprise that this thing’s a mess. It IS a Dean Hall joint…
There is no reason for this game to be so demanding.
I was about to say there is until I saw the actual test. This could very well be the most demanding game ever.
There is, trust me.
And Nvidia NIS work with this game???
nvidia NIS works with any game. It’s a driver level feature
Yes, but have games like Metro Exodus, Forza Horizon 4 and 5, and anothers not work ?
I can barely notice that DLSS is by a fraction better than FSR (which btw looks indistinguishable from 4K native) when you blow up the image.
All in all, the differences are too subtle to notice them during gameplay (same can be said for RTX… utter waste of resources if you ask me at this time because again, the differences between RTX on and off are virtually impossible to spot unless you’re standing still most of the time).
Turning on RTX makes the GPU take a big hit in games. I don’t think it’s worth it for the graphics improvements. Besides that most people can’t afford $2,000 for a RTX 3080 or are just not willing to be scalped. I fall into the latter group. The most I’ve ever paid was $675 for a 980 Ti years ago.
RTX really isn’t worth it.
If the visuals were noticeably different, then perhaps… but right now, in most games, the difference between RTX on and off is virtually non-existent (its too subtle) – sure its there if you stand still for long periods of time and then look very closely for it… but who does that?
In games, there are so many things that keep you distracted from noticing the subtle and fleeting changes in detail.
Same with DLSS vs FSR… definitely usable for perfomance improvements, but overall, if both solutions are properly optimized for in-game, and, unless you stand still and squint, you’ll be hard pressed in making out the differences where you will barely notice DLSS is better by a certain amount (which in games like these that have good implementation of both you won’t notice).
From what I’ve read it’s not even all ray tracing. It’s a mixture of ray tracing and rasterization. We’re probably years away for games to have full ray tracing. Maybe never unless there are huge increases in performance from GPUs.
I bet we have at least 10-15 years to go before we get any full raytraced titles beside the few demo ones like rt quake. Until then we will have hybrid solutions where the majority of render work will be done through raster for performance and then RT for the parts where it adds the most for its cost.
Hope for some breakthrough in RT that will reduce that time estimate
There are scenes for ex. in CP where the dif is huge. Talking about the red laser club area. But yeah usually its just nitpicking.
Like 64K said, current RTX games aren’t fully ray traced. We already have an example of what real ray tracing looks like in Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (and the icing on the cake? It performs better than the original with RTX ON):
https://youtu.be/3T02lrhWyvc
Though, I have to say, since the game wasn’t designed with Ray Tracing in mind, the Enhanced Edition ruins the atmosphere.
If you can’t notice the difference in 2 seconds or less its not a feature but a marketing scheme.
The era of playable tech demos is running strong.
FML
I miss the performance analyses where you compare performance between different core configurations… they were the best… pls bring them back..
This is an online game with a full dynamic time of day cycle. It’s really hard to replicate the exact scenarios (which is why we did not include any other GPUs or CPU benchmarks). For single-player games (in which we can reproduce our benchmark scene) we always include multiple GPUs and CPU benchmarks.
Thank you for taking the time to respond and I am really happy that you still do what you do. Every time there’s a new big game I come to see your tests. Much love 🙂
“ICARUS can be as buggy as Cyberpunk 2077”
Still, CP2077 beats it by 10x in the disappointment department. Its not even in the same league.
If you created expectations on that game, it’s your fault, not the game’s.
Also, there’s a game there, buggy and bland, but there is.
Now, what about this cr4p here?
I don’t mind that aspect so much. I remember it being fun when DayZ standalone first dropped kinda learning with friends what to do in the gameworld. But these days I’m not able to tolerate games releasing in extremely buggy states and missing features like key rebinding. Not that I’ve ever cared personally a whole lot about key rebinding but it’s the principle that as a full priced product these basic features SHOULD be in place. Same reason I won’t be playing the Halo Infinite campaign when it drops. Too buggy. The game clearly isn’t done.
Having fun in coop in this game, it sure is demanding (have an higher spec rig than the one tested here but play in 1440p super-wide so basically 4k load, slightly less pixels but wider fov.
Big part of it being demanding is that not much can be pre-baked compared to more static games…
Its been somewhat plagued with server issues but no doubt they will be resolved down the road