Crytek reveals real time raytracing that works with both Nvidia and AMD hardware.

[Skanky Sylveon]

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Crytek has built a real-time ray tracing system that doesn’t care about special hardware, and they’ll be implementing it into CryEngine to let any game developer build their games with ray tracing for free.

https://www.techspot.com/amp/news/79221-much-rtx-crytek-reveals-real-time-ray-tracing.html

 

I was informed thag posting a YouTube video is appropriate in this instance, so below you will see a video demo that was using a Vega 56 to render a partally raytraced scene, not unlike Nvidia's own real time raytracing. 

 

That's definitely interesting.  Perhaps this will be the gateway for rtrt with AMD users.  I have my doubts though, this so far is just a demo, which isn't necessarily indicative of real time performance, second off, as the article itself says. 

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Nvidia has said before that GeForce GTX cards can render ray traced scenes, but they are several times slower than RTX graphics cards. 

We are still not sure whether this particular form of rtrt will benefit from Nvidia's specialized rtrt hardware, even though, it seems to run well on AMD cards if the demo has anything to say about it. 

 

However, this is Crytek, the same company that developed/created Crysis, which was revolutionary and pushed what hardware could do at the time to it's limits, so it wouldn't surprise me if they manage to make rtrt possible for non RTX users.

[The Benjamins]

I feel sad for people that paid extra for this tech, lol

[Jurrunio]

lol Crytek, let's see if a new wave of "can it run Cry[something]" will come in the future

[Dabombinable]

Crysis already has pretty impressive lighting, especially for its age. Imagine how good it would look with real time raytracing added on top of that.

[Hellion]

You can do ray tracing on technically any card. The difference is that apparently the rt cores are better optimized for it. I guess time will tell.

[Dabombinable]

8 minutes ago, Hellion said:

You can do ray tracing on technically any card. The difference is that apparently the rt cores are better optimized for it. I guess time will tell.

Considering how well Vega does at compute in general, they probably do very well at least compared to Nvidia's non RTX counterparts. Though since Crytek didn't release the demo for even press to test out....no one knows exactly what is reuired of a graphics card to actually handle Crytek's implementation.

[Jurrunio]

32 minutes ago, Dabombinable said:

Crysis already has pretty impressive lighting, especially for its age. Imagine how good it would look with real time raytracing added on top of that.

If Crytek gave it 4K textures it can fool young gamers that it's a fresh release

[Skanky Sylveon]

1 hour ago, VegetableStu said:

my thoughts are similar to Mira's. there's a possibility they're using a lighter raytracing algorithm (1-reflection or 2-reflection limits)

Let's do some tests, shall we?

The gif that I'm going to link should be self explanatory. 

 

Blender uses pathtracing, which is more complex then raytracing, but is the same basic thing.

 

The render uses 500 samples, is the same resolution with each render, the only difference is the number of light bounces.

 

The render that has the higher number of light bounces clearly has more highlights and just "pops" more.  Now let's check some of the rtrt examples in the form of glorious screenshots.

 

It seems that the rtrt reflections are the same, they "pop" less then the original.  The reflections do look a bit "smeared" or had some ghosting like @Mira Yurizaki stated, not entirely sure why it's there, but my guess is that the raytraced reflections are using a rather low sample rate, and there is some kind of blurring used to mask the pixelated look that a low sample rate would provide. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

6 minutes ago, Skanky Sylveon said:

-snip-

I'm wondering if this is an evolution of previous single bounce reflections (since they've been a thing for a while) and there's a basic ray tracing component in it. Since there is some ray-tracing component in it, marketing is free to use the term "ray tracing." After all, Guerilla said their reflection system for Killzone: Shadow Fall uses "ray tracing" (https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-the-making-of-killzone-shadow-fall

https://www.guerrilla-games.com/read/killzone-shadow-fall-demo-postmortem (slide 84) )

 

But anyway, the proof is in the pudding that CryTek did something impressive. However I want to know how that pudding was made.

[Skanky Sylveon]

22 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

But anyway, the proof is in the pudding that CryTek did something impressive. However I want to know how that pudding was made.

I'm not sure how willing they are when it comes to sharing that information. 

23 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

I'm wondering if this is an evolution of previous single bounce reflections (since they've been a thing for a while) and there's a basic ray tracing component in it. Since there is some ray-tracing component in it, marketing is free to use the term "ray tracing." After all, Guerilla said their reflection system for Killzone: Shadow Fall uses "ray tracing"

Interesting, there are many ways to implement ray tracing though, so not too surprising. 

[RejZoR]

1 hour ago, Skanky Sylveon said:

Let's do some tests, shall we?

The gif that I'm going to link should be self explanatory. 

 

Blender uses pathtracing, which is more complex then raytracing, but is the same basic thing.

 

The render uses 500 samples, is the same resolution with each render, the only difference is the number of light bounces.

 

The render that has the higher number of light bounces clearly has more highlights and just "pops" more.  Now let's check some of the rtrt examples in the form of glorious screenshots.

 

It seems that the rtrt reflections are the same, they "pop" less then the original.  The reflections do look a bit "smeared" or had some ghosting like @Mira Yurizaki stated, not entirely sure why it's there, but my guess is that the raytraced reflections are using a rather low sample rate, and there is some kind of blurring used to mask the pixelated look that a low sample rate would provide. 

Well, what I hate the most is when you get "mirror from 20cm distance" reflections on everything which is just stupid. Nothing is that reflective and nothing ever reflects things like that except mirror.

[laminutederire]

2 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Well, what I hate the most is when you get "mirror from 20cm distance" reflections on everything which is just stupid. Nothing is that reflective and nothing ever reflects things like that except mirror.

That could be fixed rather painlessly. I'm not sure they even use the Fresnel equations to do their reflections, and they seem to assume total reflection no matter the angle. They seem to use coefficients for light extinction only.

 

3 hours ago, Skanky Sylveon said:

 

Your example is irrelevant for comparison. The reason why bounces changes appearance that much is that it's a fur model, so you ultimately have complicated lights paths to find that you can't with few bounces. In the case of reflections that number is rather irrelevant fast. You just need to put an upper bound and let it stop naturally as soon as it hits a non reflective surface, which in practice is generally once or twice. Implementing more is then free, and will change the result in very specific situations that can be avoided or hardcoded.

That being said, of course reflections "pop" less or whatever that means. Unless you have a proper mirror (and even then), there is always a loss of energy happening due to part of the light being transmitted and not reflected, micro irregularities of the glass and so on. Physics tell you that something accurate is supposed to have lesser intensity.

For the rest, reflections shouldn't really need much denoising, so I'd put my guess on motion blur instead here.

(Rtx actually denoises 1 sample per pixel images, hence why it's not super impressive either)

[RejZoR]

I literally don't care how they do it. If reflections are 100% reflection of the world and all objects and they are 100% perspective correct, what does it even matter how it's done? We've been faking 3D shit for 30 years, but all of a sudden that ain't good enough even if 99,99% of people couldn't tell it apart from actual ray tracing even after in-depth analysis. I'd say, bring it on.

[Stefan Payne]

3 hours ago, huilun02 said:

Or AMD can just not adopt raytracing and let it die.

Why?!
How can you think that?! 

IIRC AMD talked about Raytracing in the past - well, who didn't.

And its already in use in one form or another in games.

Just the usual suspects thought to pound the marketing drum a bit more for whatever reason.

 

And with Async Compute, there is no reason to assume that AMD is not able to implement it, especially since they already talked about it and that in theory all more modern cards can be enabled for Raytracing (My guess would be Polaris and VEGA, but also Tahiti is posible as well, though with higher performance impact).

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Because majority of the gaming market is on consoles and game devs will reluct to invest in framerate-killing features that only a minority will be able to enjoy.

yeah, like using tesselation for hair for example.

That's total horse shit and makes NO SENSE as it isn't very efficient and wastes performance for nothing.

 

The better Implementation, wich is also free, we've seen in Tomb Raider 2013...

 

But hey, we pound the Marketing drum, so it has to be better, right?!

 

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If raytracing can be implemented at the game engine level and not require special sauce from the API or hardware, then all the better.

The If makes no sense as it is already in use. Look for the Presentation of Killzone Shadow Fall. 

Also it makes no sense to implement something that like 0,000002% of the Market can use, especially when the Manufacturer of that technology fragments the Market with the new generation and doesn't allow it with the lower end cards.

 

In other words: RTX is already dead because the lower end cards don't come with it.

It never worked ever in the past.

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Game devs should take their own initiative to decide on the cost/benefit of this feature, instead of having to be persuaded by external parties to do things that only end up shafting their customers.

 Yeah and also stop using proprietary garbage that nobody knows what it does.

But it seems that they tank the Performance "magically" on some cards...

[paddy-stone]

7 hours ago, Skanky Sylveon said:

Linking YouTube videos outside of status updates aren't allowed

Think that's only for self promotion... people are always linking youtube videos.

[colonel_mortis]

7 hours ago, Skanky Sylveon said:

Linking YouTube videos outside of status updates aren't allowed, but if you click the link, you will see a video demo that was using a Vega 56 to render a partally raytraced scene, not unlike Nvidia's own real time raytracing. 

You're welcome to post the video - it's just posting your own videos that isn't allowed, and even then it's not as strict as "never except in status updates".

[MyName13]

So another tech demo that will become reality in 10+ years?

[SkilledRebuilds]

I remember when this was a big deal, such a long time ago..
Oooooo Ahhhhhh

I've seen most of ATI's and Nvidia's "TimeDemo" scenes in the past... I guess it ended up being an excess cost as users themselves can now create all the techdemos for the companies.

 

And this also caught my eyes a couple of years ago too..
https://youtu.be/ND96G9UZxxA?t=217

 

[Mihle]

2 hours ago, colonel_mortis said:

You're welcome to post the video - it's just posting your own videos that isn't allowed, and even then it's not as strict as "never except in status updates".

For example if its your own video that just shows an issue you need help with, its fine.

[BuckGup]

Wouldn't it have been so much cheaper for NVIDIA to spend the R&D developing software over hardware? There have also been ASICs that have done real time ray tracing a couples years before the 2000 series were even announced. Well that's NVIDIA for you. They simply brute force everything. Need a new GPU? Shrink Maxwell and brute force clock speeds and sell it as new called Pascal. Need to sell GDDR5X? OC some GDDR5 and call it good. 

[Doobeedoo]

I'd really like to see a new Crysis game and with RT for it. Would be awesome. But ye cool to see doing this without dedicated hardware at least to some degree. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

20 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

Wouldn't it have been so much cheaper for NVIDIA to spend the R&D developing software over hardware? There have also been ASICs that have done real time ray tracing a couples years before the 2000 series were even announced. Well that's NVIDIA for you. They simply brute force everything. Need a new GPU? Shrink Maxwell and brute force clock speeds and sell it as new called Pascal. Need to sell GDDR5X? OC some GDDR5 and call it good. 

Because at some point if you're going to spend as much effort to cheat on the effect as it does to do the effect itself, you may as well do the effect.

 

Also note that this is only showing off reflections. NVIDIA's ray tracing also touches on shadowing, global illumination, ambient occlusion, and transparency/translucency. NVIDIA likely wants to make it so RT handles those instead of traditional shaders. Unless CryTek's RTRT can do all of those as well at the same time, it's only scratching the surface.

[an actual squirrel]

I think the ghosting is because the reflections are updating at a very low frame rate, and there is motion blur being used to try to cover that up.

 

My understanding is that the crytek method uses octrees instead of BVHs, so it can't be accelerated by ray tracing cores. But the crytek method should be extremely slow, so I don't think this is the RTX killer that some are touting it to be.

[Drak3]

14 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

Also note that this is only showing off reflections. NVIDIA's ray tracing also touches on shadowing, global illumination, ambient occlusion, and transparency/translucency.

Still, it's not a horrible starting place for raytracing in gaming on current hardware.

[Mira Yurizaki]

It's funny when you look at things again.

 

So Eurogamer's Killzone Shadow Fall interview led me to a term called "Volume ray casting." Looking this up led me to find this term is a synonym for something called "ray marching." And I found you can do reflections with this method.

 

https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch17.html

https://reindernijhoff.net/2015/03/tokyo-breakdown-of-a-webgl-fragment-shader/

 

So I'm leaning on CryTek implementing this. Probably.