Indeed - this was shown on a 3080 - especially with upscalers since its a per pixel cost. But my point is the noise loss per ms cost is a lot less favorable after just a few rays in most scenes. You get good bang for your buck by going up even a few rays but the difference from 8 to 32 will be substantially less noticeable than 1 to 4, for example. I even tried 500 rays per pixel - didn’t look much different that 32 hah. I got single digit FPS but it didn’t crash the editor so I guess you could go wild for offline rendering. Kind of interesting that 8 RT rays looks better than 32 SMRT rays. I didn’t look at the frame time difference though.
Because RT is a per pixel operation, it is expected that lower source resolutions will be noiser and higher ones cleaner. If your rays per pixel are set to 1, but your resolution scale is 50% then you are only tracing 1 ray in every 4 final output pixels. The techniques employed by TSR and DLSS help deal with this but it’s not as good as native. 200% will trace 4 rays per final pixel when rays per pixel are set to 1.
I’m still seeing what looks like a lot of soft shading in that scene but maybe its just a brightly indirect light scene in full shadow.
Ultimately noise is currently pretty inevitable in real time RT right now. Look at basically any AAA RT title and you’ll see it to some extent. It is an area of great interest for nvidia and others so we should expect to see rapid improvements as time goes on.