This article goes over some points from the VFX team about the improvements made to Ray Tracing technologies in the Hornet’s Sting update.
As promised at the end of last year, work on making Ray Tracing better doesn’t stop! First up, Ray Tracing is now enabled on all PCs, regardless of GPU Vendor. AMD Radeon and Intel Arc users can now enjoy all RT features. We’re still working to make RT available on Xbox Series and PlayStation 5 consoles.
By making several changes in the code, we’ve significantly improved RT performance.
We have reworked the way rays go through foliage, which helps when going through a forest.
We have updated the denoiser we use to process the RT results. The new version has a bigger improvement in speed, while maintaining the same quality.
We have a new Shadow Quality setting. This is a big one. Low allows us to shoot half as many rays as before, while medium is contextual, but usually removes 30-50% of the rays in fully lighted or shadowed areas. This is a serious improvement, and you should be aware that even on the Low setting, the difference from the High setting is very small if you are using one of the advanced Temporal anti-aliasing methods, like TSR, DLSS, XeSS of FSR. They are for sure more demanding than less advanced methods, but surpass them in image quality in both native resolution and when doing upscaling. The Low setting is also less prone to performance drops in heavily loaded scenes.
Don’t see much of a difference? Exactly. And as said before, Low demands two times less resources than High (which was used before the update).
All of these improvements can result in an overall 20-25% reduction of the GPU cost of the RT effects.
We’ve worked on the windows of buildings with Ray Tracing enabled. At launch they were way too mirror-like, but after some love they now look much more natural and physically correct.
Before
After
We’ve also identified several code paths where RT became unstable, which lead to GPU or even game crashes. These are now greatly reduced, and RT is much more stable now.
That’s it for now! We’ve got even more great improvements ahead, so stay tuned.
I wonder when Gaijin will focus on fixing poor map assets like rocks with aura capable of stopping a shell mid air instead of adding more excuses for 40 GB worth of update of shadows and bugs.
And yet we still have extremely low polygon air maps, rocks, etc. Sound is still broken (it goes through the map when it shouldn’t), render distance are still a thing, the hamster are dead and their zombified corpses are used to run the servers, but hey we improve something no one cares about because it’s a competitive game where higher fps and lower particles mean having an advantage.
Thank you, please continue to work on ray tracing as I would love to use it. It was pretty unusable before this update with my 7900 XTX, though I haven’t had a chance to test it since Hornet’s Sting has releases.
TBH about this change - looks not bad. aswell as it is quite optimized.
“ultra” ray tracing preset + “Movie” general settings + DLSS4 works quite well, near to 100 FPS, 60 1%low.
and thats with 4060 Ti and I5 10600kf
*flight test map, israel
Looking forward to future further improvements!
Despite having a powerful enough GPU, as of now I can’t use RT in any sensible way due to my CPU being old and slow and the entire PC crashing if I crank the RT too high. Looking to upgrade a majority of the rig soon though, and RT will definitely be enabled then.
Might not be your cpu, RT works fine for me on every game and did so before the hornets sting update on ultra, I can no longer use RT without the war thunder freezing and then crashing out on any settings no matter what now
I’ve been to the extent of fully deleting drivers, reinstalling, even reinstalling the game too and the issue remains only with war thunder
Can we get the completely black cockpits fixed with ray tracing turned on? Anytime I turn on ray tracing and go into cockpit view it’s just one massive shadow. Like someone went through 50 sharpies colouring in the cockpit but leaving out the mirrored MFD screens.
