Is AMD copying NVIDIA for ray tracing hardware (tensor cores)

[redbread123]

so AMD said they'd have ray tracing hardware by next year, and I'm here wondering if nvidia during the release say they've been developing ray tracing hardware for 10 years, and AMD suddenly comes out of no where in 1 year has ray tracing hardware are they just copying NVIDIA. how does AMD suddenly out of the air know how to make ray tracing hardware?

[Juular]

It's not like that's some magic hardware that nVidia were developing, there's nothing new, it's just a piece of hardware that does matrix multiplications only. I'm not sure why exactly but it's not very useful for general 3D rendering pathway so it wasn't introduced earlier because it's simply useless without software support\demand. What nVidia did is a leap of faith to introduce it in their hardware and to try to encourage it's usage, it seems that it worked to some degree, even though it really works good only on high-end GPUs for now. But we can expect that hardware and software to get optimized more and more now when the starting point has passed.

[redbread123]

10 minutes ago, Juular said:

It's not like that's some magic hardware that nVidia were developing, there's nothing new, it's just a piece of hardware that does matrix multiplications only. I'm not sure why exactly but it's not very useful for general 3D rendering pathway so it wasn't introduced earlier because it's simply useless without software support\demand. What nVidia did is a leap of faith to introduce it in their hardware and to try to encourage it's usage, it seems that it worked to some degree, even though it really works good only on high-end GPUs for now. But we can expect that hardware and software to get optimized more and more now when the starting point has passed.

ah yes

[Princess Luna]

Ray Tracing is not a nVidia technology, games uses DXR which is part of Microsoft's DirectX portfolio.

 

All nVidia did was create dedicated hardware to improve performance on it, but if AMD can figure out how to do it on software level just as good that could give them the upper hand.

[Mira Yurizaki]

The specific techniques NVIDIA use to implement ray tracing have been around for over a decade, developed by researchers not affiliated with any graphics company, as far as I know.

 

So AMD could make hardware that accelerates ray tracing because they're basing it off of knowledge in more or less the public domain. What AMD can't do is directly copy NVIDIA's hardware.

 

[porina]

nvidia's approach is only one route of many. They get some kinda usable RT performance by getting some number of rays, then using the tensor cores to de-noise those rays. If you try the Quake II RTX and turn off the noise reduction, it is really heavy in "noise" from the limited number of rays. For a brute force approach you'd want a load more rays than that.

 

AMD will face a similar consideration. How much hardware do they throw at doing the rays? With their chosen number of rays, will they need to do other post processing to make it look good? This is what we wait to find out. It may be that they choose to go for a similar number of rays, but implement denoise in a different way for example.

 

While we may still be some way off Intel's joining of the GPU club, they currently offer an open RT denoise library. Although this is CPU based, they're not inactive in this area of software.

https://openimagedenoise.github.io/

 

[Guanzo]

They are copying their dlss technology tho. Look at fsr now they gave their source to modders