Made a thread to track ray tracing performance here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/8465

Btw, I updated the test to match the settings and location from that video exactly.

Here is the result:

Linux: ~25 fps



Windows: ~55 fps



Last edited by Shmerl on 11 April 2023 at 8:52 pm UTC

I think in practical terms, ray tracing is of little value even with RDNA 3 cards because of the massive performance hit.

So just keep the settings on Ultra and ray tracing off and the game looks great as is.

Last edited by Shmerl on 7 March 2023 at 1:48 am UTC

Quoting: ShmerlI think in practical terms, ray tracing is of little value even with RDNA 3 cards because of the massive performance hit.

So just keep the settings on Ultra and ray tracing off and the game looks great as is.

DLSS had a way to use its scaling option for the RT, but run the main game at high resolution. I presume there's no similar option here for Mesa/FSR?

How much does FSR affect overall framerates?

FSR improves it somewhat, but it's counter intuitive to me to use upscaling if you want to improve visuals at the same time. I.e. ray tracing is supposed to improve visuals while upscaling does somewhat the opposite due to lowering the actual rendering resolution.

Last edited by Shmerl on 7 March 2023 at 10:36 am UTC

Quoting: ShmerlFSR improves it somewhat, but it's counter intuitive to me to use upscaling if you want to improve visuals at the same time. I.e. ray tracing is supposed to improve visuals while upscaling does somewhat the opposite due to lowering the actual rendering resolution.

Yeah, but the videos on DLSS I watched suggested that the lightmap RT uses doesn't need to be that high-res, so they got the shiny reflections from RT, but with the clarity of a crisp game world. I think it was a feature directly built-into DLSS though. I think I'm remembering a LinusTT video on Cyberpunk when it first came out. Maybe it's moved on since then.

Overall, even with ray tracing enabled I guess I didn't notice that much of an improvement in CP2077. In a neon lit city it's probably hard to notice that some lighting effects look better. So I'd rather take good framerate on ultra settings without RT than RT + upscaling and lower settings overall.

Quoting: ShmerlIn a neon lit city it's probably hard to notice that some lighting effects look better.

I won't be doing dedicated ray tracing (maybe a bit of software ray tracing will become a thing some day, just for dithering) on my hardware, but I would think the most noticeable improvement in CP2077 with ray tracing would be things the fog around street lights. That looks pretty stupid without RT.

Another game like that for me is Control, somewhat annoying fog+lighting effects.

Depending on your setups, namely if you don't use "gamemode" from feral, it may be worth checking your GPU performance setting. (I don't use that mode)

I found I was able to push an extra 10-20fps out of my GPU by forcefully setting the pp_power_profile_mode to 3D_FULL_SCREEN and even more by using the COMPUTE profile, though the compute profile did cause stuttering quite quickly.

Setting this I usually get around an hour or two's gameplay before the typical AMD "ring 0" errors with a higher FPS.

In any case, it's worth trying just in case you get some extra performance, though I should note my GPU is crazy old and slow compared to new GPUs at this point (5600XT).

I'm OK with current GPU performance on max load really, since it's balanced and runs not very noisy or super hot.

Last edited by Shmerl on 10 March 2023 at 2:20 am UTC

In fairness I usually don't notice noise (I use noise cancelling headphones, due to neighbours who complain about the slightest noise, seriously, I got a note stuck on my front door once for making too much noise because I fell down the stairs LOL)

As for heat, my GPU normally reaches a max of around 70C.