4.27.2 v 5.0EA v NvRTX 4.27.2-1 - Foliage and Landscape Studies

Studying the differences between these three versions trying to see which combination of Nvidia features and raytracing settings currently give the best results for foliage and larger landscape environments.

I’ve setup a simple island scene to experiment and so far, it seems 5.0EA is doing the lord’s work. It’s personal preference for the aesthetic I’m going for, but on the main technical considerations, 5.0 appears to handle these better:

-Lovely soft dynamic shadows in the grass
-No hard shadow edges on the landscape
-Good volumetric fog and atmospheric perspective in the far distance with little to no effort
-Overall great performance

I’ve got Lumen turned on in 5.0, and using whatever RTX raytracing features that are available in the other two.

The other two versions produce undesirable hard edges and shadow faceting when using dynamic lighting. It seems if I turn off the Direction Light’s raytracing shadows, I get ride of those strange landscape shadows. Despite spending a good amount of time making sure scene elements and values are as identical as I can get them to line up between the three of them, I can’t figure out why 5.0 seems to handle those things much better, seemingly straight out of the box.

It would seem on paper the RTX DI feature set of the NvRTX branch should be producing better dynamic results, but so far the Lumen feature set appears to work better.

(automaterial and island map provided by Unreal Sensei Unreal Engine Landscape Master Material Tutorial - UE4 Tutorial - YouTube)