Hello!
It’s a very exciting day in The Riftbreaker’s development. We can finally start telling you everything about one of our most strictly-kept secrets - our collaboration with AMD and the RDNA 2 architecture features that we were able to implement into the game. Without further ado, here’s a showcase video featuring exclusive, previously unseen footage from The Riftbreaker with ray-tracing features enabled.
Do you like it? We hope you do! You have no idea how difficult it was to keep the secret over the year we spent implementing all of these features. The Riftbreaker has benefited a lot from our partnership with AMD since they not only gave us the tools we needed but also directly collaborated with our programmers on the implementation front. The end result is that we learned a lot from this experience and we think you will be pleased with both the visual effect and the performance.
Note how the shadows change when the Arachnoid moves its tail.
All the techniques we used are thoroughly explained in the video, but if you can’t watch it right now, here’s a short description for all of them, along with some eye-candy.
There is an intense light source attached to the creature. When it moves, it changes the way shadows are cast on the entire scene.
Ray-Traced Shadows
Ray-traced shadows allow us to introduce additional shadow casting lights into the game world. For example, we can add an intense light source to a burning boss creature that walks around the scene and casts deep shadows from all of the details that are present in the world's geometry, even singular blades of grass are going to cast perfectly detailed shadows, updating every frame. Another example of how we use real-time ray tracing is special events like a comet flying over the player's head. The comet is an intense light source moving quickly across the sky and creating a fantastic spectacle of shadows on the ground.
Once Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion is enabled, the indirectly lit areas become much more realistic. The jungle, for example, becomes much darker. Once you destroy the light-occluding objects, the entire scene becomes much brighter.
Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion
Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion is a very advanced rendering technique. It simulates the behavior of light in places that are not directly lit. It is an approximation of global illumination that was previously available only in offline rendering scenarios. It provides excellent visual results in areas that are covered by dense vegetation or complex rock formations, by creating shade where it would form in real-world conditions. Doing it in real-time was previously not achievable due to the immense amount of computing necessary to calculate the behavior of light. Now thanks to the Radeon RX 6000 series we can enable this technique in The Riftbreaker to achieve very detailed shadowing.
The areas marked green contain less visible details, so the GPU can render it at a lower rate, resulting in improved performance.
FidelityFX Variable Shading
Variable-rate shading is one of the latest Direct X 12 Ultimate rendering techniques that allows the GPU to select an area of the screen to be rendered at a lower sampling rate. AMD Fidelity FX Variable Shading allows us to very efficiently select areas of the scene that are low on detail and can be rendered with a lower sampling rate without any visible degradation to the image quality. Some of these low detail areas can include for example places covered in deep shadow, plain ground textures, or areas of the screen covered by transparent user interface elements. Thanks to this new rendering technique we can save a lot of GPU power and deliver much higher frame rates to the player, without noticeable loss in graphical fidelity.
The comet flyby with RT shadows off. It still looks good but lacks the dynamic shadows.
Over the course of the coming weeks, we are going to publish more in-depth articles about each of those techniques. You will learn their exact purpose, their place in The Riftbreaker rendering pipeline and how we implemented them into Schmetterling 2.0.
Once the RT shadows are turned on the entire scene becomes much more realistic and pleasing to the eye.
We are currently working on an update that brings these features to The Riftbreaker Closed Alpha, as well as the Prologue, so you will be able to test all of them out yourselves. We also received some questions about this, so let’s clarify: the features described in this article WILL work with any raytracing-capable GPU, regardless of the manufacturer.
If you want to see real-life, unedited gameplay footage, make sure to join our streams - we go live every Tuesday and Thursday at 3 PM CET. Starting now, we’re going to play with ray-tracing maxed out, so you can see both the performance and the graphics quality. We also know that timezones can be mean sometimes, so we will post some VODs to YouTube as well.
Stay safe and stay tuned!
EXOR Studios