Titan V ray tracing (almost) like a RTX 2080 TI

[Tech Enthusiast]

Disclaimer:

This is according to users on a German forum. So confirmation by trusted outlets pending.

 

Sources:

English article: Guru3d

Original posts on German forum: 3dcenter

 

According to user testing a Titan V can get comparable RT performance, without even having any RT cores.

Two Benchmark runs in BFV showed impressive results on 1440p@ultra, DX12, DXR on high: 

 

Quote

30-12-2018, 19:06:48 bfv.exe benchmark completed, 38930 frames rendered in 548.360 s
Average framerate : 70.9 FPS
Minimum framerate : 51.7 FPS
Maximum framerate : 97.4 FPS

30-12-2018, 19:21:57 bfv.exe benchmark completed, 22472 frames rendered in 317.438 s
Average framerate : 70.7 FPS
Minimum framerate : 55.3 FPS
Maximum framerate : 101.1 FPS

 

Guru3D tries to explain and raise the question if RT cores are actually needed.

Quote

Of course, Volta is a very powerful card with loads of headroom and tensor cores. DX-R mode enabled, in theory, can work on any compatible DirectX 12 graphics card as long as it is fast enough, as the DirectX Raytracing is merely an extension to the DX12 API. If the hardware is not supported, it could run it in a software modus. However, the findings raise the question, are dedicated RT in hardware cores actually needed? 

 

My take on this:

BFV was developed on Volta. They did not have RTX cards at hand.

Also, the first few demos where rendered on Tensor cores. That is why so many people got upset about the crappy RT performance, without knowing that RT cores never got used.

 

So the real question for me is actually: What the hell is up with BFV?

Does it still run on tensor cores and ignore RT cores? If not, why does it run on Volta with almost exactly the same performance?

What would RT performance be like if it would use RT cores? 

 

There are quite a few possibilities here and the tinfoil hat guys will surely find a way to blame NVidia for "something" again. 

Personally I guess BFV does not run on RT Cores at all and what we really see is an amazing showcase on what Tensor is capable of. But why do we pay for RT cores again,... Hope to see some outlets dig into this some more and check what really happens.

[sazrocks]

How much do we know about the architectures of the RTX cores and Tensor cores? Is it possible that they are similar?

[S w a t s o n]

I'm not sure about post-patch but BFV was not using the RT cores on launch

[Fnige]

Hey look, It could be done without RT cores... the 20 series is starting to lose its greatness...

[S w a t s o n]

6 minutes ago, SlimyPython said:

Hey look, It could be done without RT cores... the 20 series is starting to lose its greatness...

This was always known, they are using the tensor cores instead but the RT cores SHOULD be a fair bit faster.

Basically unless you have a Titan V you have to go with 20 series for RTX still

[Crunchy Dragon]

19 minutes ago, SlimyPython said:

Hey look, It could be done without RT cores... the 20 series is starting to lose its greatness...

It could be done with Pascal too, just not at the same framerate.

[DuckDodgers]

The DXR extension in DX12 doesn't specify how ray-tracing is implemented. The only requirement is that the device driver exposes the minimum functionality to perform RT to the API. It is up to the hardware vendors how to do that -- dedicated logic or software (compute) emulation including any combination of both.

[BuckGup]

1 hour ago, SlimyPython said:

Hey look, It could be done without RT cores... the 20 series is starting to lose its greatness...

Ray tracing was shown off on mobile grade ASICs in 2014. Nvidia doesn't have something super special and I don't know why most people think they are the first.

[S w a t s o n]

1 hour ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

It could be done with Pascal too, just not at the same framerate.

RTX could not be done with Pascal. If you mean just some other general raytracing solution than yes every gpu can do it at a lower framerate

[S w a t s o n]

4 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

Ray tracing was shown off on mobile grade ASICs in 2014. Nvidia doesn't have something super special and I don't know why most people think they are the first.

Ray tracing has existed for decades, the hype is about real time raytracing in games which was not a thing before

[BuckGup]

18 minutes ago, S w a t s o n said:

Ray tracing has existed for decades, the hype is about real time raytracing in games which was not a thing before

 

What'd you say?

[mr moose]

I thought we already established you didn't need specific hardware to run it, it's just that Nvidias new cores really helped a lot.

 

BTW the titan V has about 100 more Tensor cores than the 2080ti so that might account for some of it.

[S w a t s o n]

1 hour ago, BuckGup said:

 

What'd you say?

I said what I said. I am well aware of imagination's product. Did you ever see this product and supported games ever actually come to fruition? No? So was there real-time raytracing in games? No.

[BuckGup]

5 hours ago, S w a t s o n said:

I said what I said. I am well aware of imagination's product. Did you ever see this product and supported games ever actually come to fruition? No? So was there real-time raytracing in games? No.

The point is the technology has existed for longer than Nvidia makes it seem

[leadeater]

21 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

The point is the technology has existed for longer than Nvidia makes it seem

Nvidia isn't marketing Ray Tracing though, they are marketing hardware accelerated Ray Tracing as well as developer tools that now makes it possible to use more effectively in games, RT cores are not a requirement for those developer tools. BFV has always done the Ray Tracing in the Shader Pipeline, it was developed using Titan V's which do not have RT cores.

 

RT cores could be 10 times faster than using Shaders, who knows but BFV will never give us that information without a complete rebuild and massive update to the game to use that accelerated hardware pathway i.e. Battlefield 6 most likely.

 

This isn't any different to a lot of games not utilizing AVX2, it's there in the CPU but games not using doesn't mean AVX2 is bad or doesn't give a large performance increase.

 

It was never possible to develop BFV to use RT cores, the hardware did not exist and you can't realistically emulate something that is designed for one of the most demanding tasks you can do. You would have to delay the release of the game so you could carry out actual testing and debugging.

 

Finally remember BFV is not Nivida marketing nor an Nvidia product.

[Bcat00]

Really don't understand why all the hate, can't people just be happy they aren't sitting on their asses?

 

 

[BuckGup]

8 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Nvidia isn't marketing Ray Tracing though, they are marketing hardware accelerated Ray Tracing as well as developer tools that now makes it possible to use more effectively in games, RT cores are not a requirement for those developer tools. BFV has always done the Ray Tracing in the Shader Pipeline, it was developed using Titan V's which do not have RT cores.

 

RT cores could be 10 times faster than using Shaders, who knows but BFV will never give us that information without a complete rebuild and massive update to the game to use that accelerated hardware pathway i.e. Battlefield 6 most likely.

 

This isn't any different to a lot of games not utilizing AVX2, it's there in the CPU but games not using doesn't mean AVX2 is bad or doesn't give a large performance increase.

 

It was never possible to develop BFV to use RT cores, the hardware did not exist and you can't realistically emulate something that is designed for one of the most demanding tasks you can do. You would have to delay the release of the game so you could carry out actual testing and debugging.

 

Finally remember BFV is not Nivida marketing nor an Nvidia product.

That makes sense

[leadeater]

9 hours ago, Tech Enthusiast said:

So the real question for me is actually: What the hell is up with BFV?

Does it still run on tensor cores and ignore RT cores? If not, why does it run on Volta with almost exactly the same performance?

The game was developed and tested on Titan Vs, it runs slightly better on RTX cards because they have game ready drivers and faster clocks etc. Titan V can be made to outperform 2080 Ti/Titan RTX for BFV but Nvidia just isn't interested in doing that for a pure compute/scientific card never designed or intended to run games.

 

Tensor cores do the de-noising, that's common across all Nvidia architectures with Tensor cores, they don't actually do ray casting. DXR doesn't actually require RT cores to do Ray Tracing.

[CarlBar]

Wait so we've got confirmation that BFV dosen;t use the T cores? I thought that was still unknown, makes a lot of their performance issues very interesting then.

 

Do we also have any confirmation it's using the Tensor cores ethier? their development build on the Titan V didn't.

[leadeater]

18 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

Wait so we've got confirmation that BFV dosen;t use the T cores? I thought that was still unknown, makes a lot of their performance issues very interesting then.

 

Do we also have any confirmation it's using the Tensor cores ethier? their development build on the Titan V didn't.

There was an article on it a while ago that went in to it, I don't remember the full specifics but BFV is using an implementation that does not require an Nvidia GPU and only needs DX12 DXR support. Far as I remember from the explanation both the ray casting and de-noising is done in Shaders not in RT or Tensor.

 

Better to find that actual article and confirm though.

[Tech Enthusiast]

The interesting part is not that it runs on a Titan V. 

Since DXR is a clean DX12 thing, no one that knows how this works was expecting ANY GPU not to "run" it.

 

The point is that a Titan V runs it well. Very well actually.

Granted: The same User confirmed less impressive results on other maps, but we are still talking about playable framerates, which where sold as not being possible without RT cores. And honestly, since RT has been done for a good while now, we never saw any "playable" implementation up to now. I mean, it is not like people doing this for work did not try to make it go faster or something. 

 

It seems like Tensor Cores are indeed very capable of RT work. The real question is: How capable are they really? Could RTX go without RT by having more Tensor?

More Tensor would make it vastly superior in other tasks as well,...

[leadeater]

6 minutes ago, Tech Enthusiast said:

It seems like Tensor Cores are indeed very capable of RT work. The real question is: How capable are they really? Could RTX go without RT by having more Tensor?

More Tensor would make it vastly superior in other tasks as well,...

The Tensor cores aren't doing it, it's all pure Shader (CUDA cores).

 

6 minutes ago, Tech Enthusiast said:

And honestly, since RT has been done for a good while now, we never saw any "playable" implementation up to now. I mean, it is not like people doing this for work did not try to make it go faster or something. 

Probably because past efforts were to replace Raster with RT where this is Post Processing effects/another layer over Raster. The RT cannot be done without dedicated hardware still hold true, BFV would be sub 1 FPS pure RT.

[mr moose]

3 hours ago, Bcat00 said:

Really don't understand why all the hate, can't people just be happy they aren't sitting on their asses?

 

 

Unfortunately not,  It just goes to show how little tech enthusiasts actually understand the industry or the products. 

 

You don't have to understand thee inner workings of these cards or this technology to see it is amazing.  If you read some the posts around here you could be forgiven for thinking that only AMD are allowed to develop new technologies and push things like RT.

 

 

 

 

[leadeater]

6 minutes ago, mr moose said:

If you read some the posts around here you could be forgiven for thinking that only AMD are allowed to develop new technologies and push things like RT.

We'd die of old age if we had to wait for them to put out new tech like RT cores. What's the last actual hardware tech RTG has put out first/developed? HBM GPU memory controller? Async Compute Engine (ACE)?

[mr moose]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

We'd die of old age if we had to wait for them to put out new tech like RT cores. What's the last actual hardware tech RTG has put out first/developed? HBM GPU memory controller? Async Compute Engine (ACE)?

 

 

I thought the ability to crossfire any card from the same series rather than needing identical cards was a good idea,  Don't know how well it worked in the end though, by the time I considered adding a second card it was still cheaper to buy a new one that performed better than the two old ones (based on FPS).