Nvidia Raytraces the Moon Landing

[Mira Yurizaki]

15 minutes ago, TechyBen said:

Amazing is going from solid screen to a folding screen. Never seen that before (though IIRC there were examples at times, just really rare/expensive). Ray Tracing is old hat. Yep it's now reaching gaming... but as said, quadros and Titans existed before... it's just now slightly peaking over the extremely costly side.

So just because it's old, it's not amazing when it can finally be out of the realm of people with deep pockets and into the hands of consumers?

 

In that case, folding screens aren't amazing either. Flexible displays, which is the basic tech needed for folding displays, have been around since the 70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_display

 

I mean the tech here isn't ray tracing in general. It's ray tracing suitable enough to be used in real-time applications. Which is always the case with graphics. Sure you can bake things in, but you're limiting yourself to what you can do in the game world.

 

EDIT: I guess if you really want to get technical, we should call this path tracing for real time applications.

 

After all, the original Wolfenstein 3D was technically a ray traced game.

[TechyBen]

15 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

So just because it's old, it's not amazing when it can finally be out of the realm of people with deep pockets and into the hands of consumers?

 

In that case, folding screens aren't amazing either. Flexible displays, which is the basic tech needed for folding displays, have been around since the 70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_display

Yep. As I said, they have been around. I said they were old. I did not say consumers having them was amazing.

The current folding displays are still plastic, easily scratched/torn/dented. They are nothing special, just economically viable for mass market now. That's great. The use case might be amazing (if it changes how people use laptops/tablets etc).

 

As said. Every SpaceX launch and landing is amazing. But it's about 1 a week now. It's not really comparable to the moon landings for example, is it?

 

Every part of our PCs is progressing every day to new tech. Colours, refresh rate, fps, compute, cores, memory, etc. Every piece is amazing. Remember when GPUs advertised transistor count in the millions? The RTX Titan has 18.6 Billion. Seen the Gamers Nexus video from LTT Expo on old computers? They 100s and 1000s of times slower. It is amazing on the progress we have made. A Nforce2 compared to a 1080ti? Fantastic! But compared to the 1080ti, the RTX2080 is a progressive improvement.

 

You could bake in the Minecraft ray tracing before, but now it can be done dynamically (instead of pre-production as in Frostbite engine etc). So that's a great improvement and progress. That's what I was expecting from day one.

 

PS, I guess I'm saying the raytracing is amazing, the Nvidia RTX/GPU is not. The Raytracing in realtime is great. The "it's a custom solution/RTX feature" is buzzwords and consumer lock in. Same with PhysX. Custom silicon is custom silicon, and more compute is more compute (see AMD quickly trying to catch up, and not actually failing, because it's not an impossible task, just one never bothered with, so I expect them to trail behind, but be able to follow).

 

See LTT latest "2 CPU $5k pc", it did 4k video, and maxed out. Now Phones can do 4k video. Custom silicon + incremental improvements on node size every year. By the same metric, those phones might use more power doing other compute, that the 4k chip/custom decoders are not capable of (some older hardware did not like the changes from other codecs as the hardware only decoded 1 type... smart TVs etc).