As promised, AMD has released the full-length video for its latest DX12 Ultimate RDNA 2 Tech Demo, Handar 21. According to the red team, this tech demo features realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections.
As AMD stated:
“The demo showcases a blend of DirectX Raytracing, compute, and rasterized effects enabled by AMD FidelityFX and Microsoft DirectX 12 Ultimate that elevate gaming visuals to new levels of fidelity.”
Going into more details, the Hangar 21 Tech Demo uses Ray Tracing Ambient Occlusion, Ray Tracing Reflections, and Ray Tracing Shadows. Now what’s interesting here is that AMD also used traditional Ambient Occlusion and screen-space reflections. In other words, Ray Tracing does not handle ALL the reflections and ambient occlusion effects like some other RT games did on the PC.
Additionally, the Hangar 21 Tech Demo uses God Rays, Volumetric Lights, real-time Global Illumination and dynamic area lights. It also uses Volumetric Fog, Depth of Field and 8K Textures.
The end result is great, and showcases some truly amazing graphics. However, and contrary to NVIDIA’s RT demos, this one uses a clever mix of rasterized and RT techniques. This combination obviously benefits RDNA2. Thus, it will be interesting to see how developers will implement Ray Tracing in future games.
Enjoy!
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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16k textures for a basic black back ground with a few stars.. LOL
I wasn’t really wowed by this. I thought Nvidia’s Marble demo was way more impressive
I would say the wins here are Ambient occlusion and lighting which games like WoW just adopted. People sit there and say there is no or little difference between the RT in Shadowlands and all the AMD stuff. Well…that’s the point. They are making the case that RT is only really worth the cost in very specific scenariors. The Marble demo also in no way looks like a game or somethign that would be playable.
Show me a RT game with better lighting than Demon Souls. Heck show me one with better “ray tracing” than simulated ray tracing people have done with reshade that is much more optimized because it’s only playing with what is on screen and not the entire scene.
Nvidia makes good stuff and I will most likely end up with a 3080 just for the Witcher 3 re release which hopefully has DLSS for some insane resolutions, but Nvidia sucks at optimizing anything. They purposely make things as unoptimized as possible to sell their higher tier cards. We see it over and over again, with DLSS 2.1 being the only really great thing for gamers they have ever done besides maybe HBAO+ which devs have already replaced with AMD’s solution. The future is not just raytracing. It’s a combination of things and true RT is multiple gens away from being what they claim it is now.
Before any AMD fanboys get mad at me I’m buying the new Ryzen, I bought a R9 290 and I bought a VEGA card. If Witcher 3 has DLSS though? I’m buying it. It’s a game I will play every year or two for the rest of my life like KOTOR 1 and 2. I have supported AMD when they were almost broke hoping we would get competition again. Now we have it. Your turn zoomers who love esports. Support Radeon. SAM appears to rock in those games. Enjoy that crazy FPS on countertrike etc on high hz monitors. I hope AMD and or MS with DirectML come up with a broader implementation DLSS like technology in the near future and that yet more Nvidia proprietary tech dies. If they can show anythign before the 6900 XT? Hell I will go wait in line for it at Microcenter in a tent.
Wtf you talking about. Relfex. Mfaa, Physx ,Hair works, so much sh*t has been pushed by NVIDIA. They aren’t god but they are just as innovative as AMD if not more so DLSS trumps everything though.
See purposely unoptimized in my OP. Physx middleware only became good at the end, Hair works was a joke and they made it run as poor as possible to push higher tier cards. All of Nvidia’s AA has been complete garbage until DLSS 2.1 if you want to even consider that AA. Their temporal was a blurfest. SMAA in reshade blew anythign they made away for less performance cost.
HBAO+
DLSS 2.1
Shadowplay was nice for years
The new streamer crap for delusional people who think they will be popular streamers.
That’s the list. The rest was hype. RT isn’t hype, it’s just gens away from being viable and when it is we will be saying why not just run 8 k instead. RT is more exciting for production than gaming atm.
Yep. The marbles demo was the closest thing to real-time photorealism I’ve ever seen.
Nvidia has more demo budget lol. Their demos are generally more impressive then AMD’s.
But this is supposed to show what you can do in games and marbles is just RT showcase, games won’t be able to look that good for a long time.
It would be nice to actually run the demos ourselves. Especially the Marbles demo.
this looks like something from the PS4 era…
but the end-scene’s smoke has no shadow?
I’m really not impressed, plus it just looks like some trash old game.
This was a tech demo that appeared to hide the new next gen tech…