Due to the unique structure of this game, there are scenarios where reflections cease to make a difference and shadows become more important all of a sudden. You see this mostly at night time or in a scene with a lot of direct shadows:
And, here’s the shot without reflections. As you can see, the differences are hard notice due to the lack sunlight:
Global illumination and ambient occlusion have similarly, subtle but worthwhile impacts on the lighting of the scene:
An example where RTGI has a quite drastic impact on the lighting can be seen below. In this case, RTAO can be ignored as it simply adds an additional layer of shade over an already shaded scene.
Despite the lack of daylight in the scene, RT reflections have a fairly appreciable impact on image quality by reflecting the edges and silhouettes of blocks:
It’s worth noting that since reflections aren’t using a denoiser, they introduce a fair bit of noise if you don’t DLSS alongside them:
Here’s another scene where shadows and RTGI has a quite noticeable impact on the lighting:
And another:
Let me know if you’d like to see the performance stats for this title. I decided to leave them out as they’re quite frankly inconsequential in a game like this.
