AMD raytracing.

[gravdestroyer]

I know a while back AMD filed a patent for a software and hardware based raytracing solution. Has there been any news on this? If they will eventually get it then I might  get am RX5700XT now. 

[RejZoR]

They are planning on using fixed function ray trace acceleration which means Navi probably won't get RT treatment at all.

[Tonberry]

But their Navi RIS is much better than RTX DLSS

 

https://www.techspot.com/article/1873-radeon-image-sharpening-vs-nvidia-dlss/

[Cypher-Jackson]

3 hours ago, RejZoR said:

They are planning on using fixed function ray trace acceleration which means Navi probably won't get RT treatment at all.

Any possibility you could explain what fixed function ray trace acceleration is?

Is that like RTX running on 10-series pascal?

[RejZoR]

1 hour ago, Cypher-Jackson said:

Any possibility you could explain what fixed function ray trace acceleration is?

Is that like RTX running on 10-series pascal?

NVIDIA is using RT cores and tensor cores to do RTX. While RT cores are somewhat focused on ray tracing, they are not exclusive to this operation. You can technically program them to do other things too as far as I understand their tech and they can change and adapt RT computation if changes are needed via drivers (someone correct me if I'm wrong). AMD is planning on using HW RT acceleration (based on little leaks that we got so far), a dedicated ray tracing computation GPU unit that only does ray tracing and nothing else. In a nutshell, that's really all most gamers crave for anyway and may in the end be faster because it's so focused feature on hardware level. It might be a downside if DXR changes in the meanwhile and fixed function can't adapt to it in any way, but I guess that's the tax you pay for using fixed function units in GPU. You can imagine this like DirectX 7 that had fixed function rendering and DirectX 8 that brought pixel shaders which were programmable and allowed more things to be done visually without having to add dedicated pixel processing unit to the GPU. Something along those lines.

 

What Pascal cards do and could technically be also done on any Radeon card is simply use general purpose compute function to compute ray tracing. Radeon cards even had this exposed for a short while and were able to run DXR just like Pascal cards, but AMD blocked that in driver because performance was poor (just like it is on Pascal if we're realistic). But it works so you can see it, although at 5-10fps...

[Cypher-Jackson]

2 hours ago, RejZoR said:

NVIDIA is using RT cores and tensor cores to do RTX. While RT cores are somewhat focused on ray tracing, they are not exclusive to this operation. You can technically program them to do other things too as far as I understand their tech and they can change and adapt RT computation if changes are needed via drivers (someone correct me if I'm wrong). AMD is planning on using HW RT acceleration (based on little leaks that we got so far), a dedicated ray tracing computation GPU unit that only does ray tracing and nothing else. In a nutshell, that's really all most gamers crave for anyway and may in the end be faster because it's so focused feature on hardware level. It might be a downside if DXR changes in the meanwhile and fixed function can't adapt to it in any way, but I guess that's the tax you pay for using fixed function units in GPU. You can imagine this like DirectX 7 that had fixed function rendering and DirectX 8 that brought pixel shaders which were programmable and allowed more things to be done visually without having to add dedicated pixel processing unit to the GPU. Something along those lines.

 

What Pascal cards do and could technically be also done on any Radeon card is simply use general purpose compute function to compute ray tracing. Radeon cards even had this exposed for a short while and were able to run DXR just like Pascal cards, but AMD blocked that in driver because performance was poor (just like it is on Pascal if we're realistic). But it works so you can see it, although at 5-10fps...

Thanks, thats actually a fantastic in-depth answer! 

I found I could get my 1080ti to run Quake II RTX at ~25 FPS with ray tracing on max at 720p. The effects are really fascinating.

It's interesting that future DirectX versions may be able to do ray tracing without any dedicated hardware infrastructure. 

[RejZoR]

The input lag is horrendous on Pascal cards and even at 720p it felt weird. Not to mention it was hurting my eyes for some reason, must have been the soft edges from 720p. I mean, the faster graphic cards are becoming, the better DXR runs even on cards without any ray tracing units. Which is why even cards like Pascal run ray tracing reasonably well. Something pretty much unthinkable like 5 years ago.

[hollyh88]

i would hold off on any buying if you do it for ray tracing only. 

Currently though the nvidia gpu's have the upper hand when it comes to ray tracing. 
Ray tracing will eventually be mainstream as more and more developers start to use the technology. such as the newest and very popular upcoming gamy called cyperpunk.