Ray Tracing Hype

[TechSwagPimp1337]

I was watching the new Ray Tracing explanation at gamerscon, but it looked kind of familiar. Then it dawned on me that it was almost the same thing as the VXGI demo that came out with Maxwell GPU's. So it seems to me that Ray Tracing is not the first attempt to have more realistic lighting real time. Also, ray tracing may follow PhysX's path, and be such a niche product to implement that only 3 or 4 games will actually have it running well. I'd like to see Turing GPU's performance gain without using ray tracing features over Pascal's. My guess is that it won't be more than 20%.

[Crunchy Dragon]

We know from the livestream that at least 3 or 4 games will implement ray tracing.

 

I think they showed a (potentially incomplete) list towards the end of the stream of all the games that would implement it, it was a pretty broad range from what I recall.

[Sakkura]

VXGI was a type of global illumination, which he did refer to in general terms in today's speech. It comes with limitations that raytracing does not. VXGI in particular was just a more advanced implementation of global illumination, trying to circumvent a few of the limitations and improve performance, but raytracing is a more fundamental fix.

 

Microsoft has put raytracing in their APIs, and developers have been talking about it for years (John Carmack, I'm looking at you). It is the logical next step in computer graphics. Whether Nvidia's RTX approach will gain widespread adoption remains to be seen, but in one form or another raytracing is here to stay.