Ray Tracing Quality Presets Compared
Now that we have looked at the performance of the base game’s graphics quality settings, let’s now compare the quality presets of Ray Tracing that are available. Naturally, you can turn Ray Tracing OFF, so that is our baseline for performance, but then we test the Low, Medium, and High presets of Ray Tracing as they are to see the difference in performance. We will also be able to see how simply turning on Ray Tracing to Low from OFF drops performance, i.e., this is how much Ray Tracing causes a hit on performance. We will be using the default preset options, which means that DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction will be ON in each Ray Tracing quality setting in this game.
4K – Native Rendering with DLAA
In the graph above we are using the High Quality Preset of the game, and we are toggling the different Ray Tracing Quality Presets at 4K display and rendering resolution, Native Resolution with DLAA. Without Ray Tracing the starting framerate is 66 FPS, this is just the basic High-Quality setting in the game on an RTX 4090 at 4K. Now, once we turn on the Low Ray Tracing Preset performance drops by 47%, and the game is not playable at this setting. Moving up to Medium Ray Tracing causes a 14% drop further from Low Ray Tracing (and remember Path Tracing is now enabled in this quality preset). Finally, moving to High Ray Tracing Preset drops performance another 7% from Medium RT.
Overall, what this tells us is that yes turning on Ray Tracing, even to Low, without Path Tracing, takes a huge hit to performance that will render the game unplayable. However, after that, the Low to Medium or Medium to High settings don’t have a big drop. In fact, the drop to High from Medium is rather small, considering. So the individual Ray Tracing options compared to each other have a relatively small difference in performance.
4K – Quality DLSS (2560×1440 Rendering Resolution)
Now we are testing the same thing as above, but with Quality DLSS (Super Resolution) enabled. Instantly, we can see how much better performance is with DLSS, but even with it, just turning on Low Ray Tracing drops performance under 60 FPS. Starting with No Ray Tracing we are at 91.9 FPS, and enabling Low Ray Tracing drops it to 59 FPS a drop of 36%. Already, we can see that this isn’t as large of a drop as it was without DLSS. Moving up to Medium from Low drops performance by 14%, and moving to High from Medium is a drop of only 2%. As you can see, there isn’t much difference in performance between High and Medium, but there is between Low and Medium because Medium enables Path Tracing.
4K – Quality DLSS (2560×1440 Rendering Resolution) + DLSS 3 Frame Generation
Now we have enabled DLSS 3 Frame Generation along with DLSS (Super Resolution), and this really is the answer to making even High Ray Tracing very playable at 4K display resolution. Turning on Low Ray Tracing drops performance by 28%, once again even lower of a drop in performance than with DLSS. Moving up to Medium Ray Tracing from Low Ray Tracing drops performance by 10% and moving to High from Medium drops performance by 4%. Once again we see a small difference between High and Medium, but a larger one between Medium and Low.