Ray Tracing will get performance boost ?

[PoliczkiProLinga]

https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-unveils-directx-raytracing-12-promises-major-leaps-in-path-tracing-performance/

 

 

 

If this is true, then Ray Tracing might finally be much easier to enjoy in modern hardware, due to new OMM (Opacity Micromaps) and Shader Execution Reordering (SER). 

 

Inside the video they showed boost from 55Fps up to 90Fps in Path Traced demo tool, but only as a static image so who knows . Also they mentioned about Alan Wake 2 being "updated" with this new DXR 1.2, and I'll be looking at it soon, but not sure if those features are there yet as Launch day is set to be Soon. 

 

Nevertheless if that's true, and those features are gonna be used in upcoming titles (or updated in old one), then it's might be new time for Ray Tracing. 

 

But I will believe when I see. 

[Eigenvektor]

A performance boost is certainly welcome, but the magic word here is "up to". It'll help in specific scenarios, like Alan Wake 2's dense forest, but not necessarily in others.

 

That said, they mentioned the GPU time on a 4090 running 1440p in Alan Wake 2 went down from 16.8 ms (~59.5 fps) to only 10.2 ms (~98 fps) in their example scene, which is definitely something.

[PoliczkiProLinga]

2 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

A performance boost is certainly welcome, but the magic word here is "up to". It'll help in specific scenarios, like Alan Wake 2's dense forest, but not necessarily in others.

 

That said, they mentioned the GPU time on a 4090 running 1440p in Alan Wake 2 went down from 16.8 ms (~59.5 fps) to only 10.2 ms (~98 fps) in their example scene, which is definitely something.

Since I got my Laptop with 5070Ti, also every RT boost is welcome. It might not be as significant as with 4090, but also why not ? Besides, any few FPS more (like 10-20) still will be a good point, when base frame oscillating around 55-60ish FPS. 

 

At least MS will make Nvidia's Ray Tracing playable

[Eigenvektor]

38 minutes ago, PoliczkiProLinga said:

At least MS will make Nvidia's Ray Tracing playable

I know you're joking, but Nvidia neither invented RT , nor did they make the first RT hardware. They're simply the first to have commercial success with it (which is not surprising, given their market share). Nevertheless, it's still early days for doing RT in real time, so I'm sure there are more improvements to come in both software and hardware. AMD also filed several patents that promise performance improvements.

[PoliczkiProLinga]

15 hours ago, Eigenvektor said:

I know you're joking, but Nvidia neither invented RT , nor did they make the first RT hardware. They're simply the first to have commercial success with it (which is not surprising, given their market share). Nevertheless, it's still early days for doing RT in real time, so I'm sure there are more improvements to come in both software and hardware. AMD also filed several patents that promise performance improvements.

The first ray Tracing was made way earlier than 2006, when first animation movie was made with RT (Cars from Pixar). But yeah Nvidia made it possible in real time (sort of), and also invented or more precisely bring to modern hardware, Upscaling and Frame Gen which was common in TVs years before RTX series. 

 

But now with 5000 series, which seems to be more efficient in RT than previous generations, and decent improvement in software level (DXR 1.2) can bring new life into modern GPU segments to run RT in real life at the level when you don't have to run DLSS Performance at 1440p to run proper RT. 

 

Yet we will see if that's true, and how long Devs will take to implement it into their games. 

[Eigenvektor]

5 hours ago, PoliczkiProLinga said:

The first ray Tracing was made way earlier than 2006, when first animation movie was made with RT (Cars from Pixar).

Multiple decades earlier than Cars even. Depending on how you want to look at it, the first ray traced computer generate image came either in 1968⁽¹⁾ (Arthur Appel) or 1980 (Turner Whitted). Turner Whitted actually released a short film including the technology in 1979, before he published the paper on it in 1980.

 

I remember playing some "real time" RT demo a long time ago. It ran on the CPU and I think you could at best get something like 15 fps while running it at 320x200. But I can't for the life of me remember what it was called and no amount of Google searches turns up anything

 

It's still impressive we've gone from hours to days per frame (Cars) to something that can run at 60+ fps (with compromises and on top level hardware, but still). But then again, it's been almost 20 years since Cars.

 

6 hours ago, PoliczkiProLinga said:

But now with 5000 series, which seems to be more efficient in RT than previous generations, and decent improvement in software level (DXR 1.2) can bring new life into modern GPU segments to run RT in real life at the level when you don't have to run DLSS Performance at 1440p to run proper RT.

I really hope it becomes viable on lower end cards as well, but I'm not holding my breath. I wouldn't even mind using DLSS/FSR Performance if it could get me to 60 fps.

 

The improvements made in DXR 1.2 are really impressive, but how many more of these types of improvements are coming down the line? How many can be done in software alone, without requiring a new generation of GPUs first? If I'm not mistaking the DXR 1.2 improvements still require compatible hardware.

 

________________________________________

1) More strictly speaking ray casting, since it didn't include light bounces/recursion yet, that came in 1980

[PoliczkiProLinga]

On 6/2/2025 at 7:12 PM, Eigenvektor said:

The improvements made in DXR 1.2 are really impressive, but how many more of these types of improvements are coming down the line? How many can be done in software alone, without requiring a new generation of GPUs first? If I'm not mistaking the DXR 1.2 improvements still require compatible hardware.

 

________________________________________

1) More strictly speaking ray casting, since it didn't include light bounces/recursion yet, that came in 1980

Sorry for the late response, and thanks for replay . As Far as I know, DXR 1.2 is just un update for all DX12 Ultimate (RT Hardware support) GPUs. It's good to see any improvements related to RT in my opinion. And these days with DLSS 4 and Ray Reconctruction, you can run even 1080p  DLSS Quality + RR and get still very decent image quality.

[starsmine]

On 6/2/2025 at 7:12 AM, PoliczkiProLinga said:

The first ray Tracing was made way earlier than 2006, when first animation movie was made with RT (Cars from Pixar). But yeah Nvidia made it possible in real time (sort of), and also invented or more precisely bring to modern hardware, Upscaling and Frame Gen which was common in TVs years before RTX series. 

A bugs life used RT for a couple of scenes. 

Cars may be the first where all frames used it, but pixar was using it in the 90s. 

DXR (direct X raytracing) was also in the API before RTX GPUs came out, and honestly, doing it on the 2000 series made took a lot of wind out if its sales in terms of performance for... no good reason as the 2000 cards are not good at it. 

[RockstarArthur]

This is great news since I am a fan of path tracing having played with it in games like Cyberpunk and Alan Wake 2 and the fps drops were somewhat jarring. Looking forward to how they practically execute it.