Possibly Raytracing for Everyone

[Thorgs]

I just browsed through the Release Notes of the new Geforce Driver and found this part.

Yes it is a Nvidia Card only feature it looks like and yes it only works in Vulkan.

 

But this is great News potentially for everyone. Because having it implemented on a Software level in Vulkan means we will have some backwards-compatibility with older Hardware, Linux Support and it makes Vulkan a much more interesting API then Direct3D for developers.

 

And for the AMD side it even better news. I am sure AMD has something up its sleeve and it could be something like Raytracing.

Having Nvidia supporting more and more Vulkan features on its own Cards/Drivers gives AMD a good chance to close the gap because of the way AMD's GPU communicate on a more Hardware level with the API then through the driver.

This was a disadvantage for AMD in the past with DX11 but with Vulkan and maybe even DX12 this is a totally different Story.

 

Most likely the Software Version of Raytracing will not perform as good as if it would run in the dedicate Cores.

 

But in comparison to Nvidia's PhysX i think Raytracing has a bigger chance of being adapted by developers in the environment of Vulkan than PhysX ever had to its launch and because Raytracing never was a Nvidia only feature.

 

Maybe you might notice but i am more hyped about Vulkan in general than Raytracing, this is becuase of the impact a good Hardware close API will have on the industry.

 

 

 

[Deus Voltage]

 

[Crunchy Dragon]

-Moved to General Discussion-

 

Post is not Tech News-compliant:

 

[DocSwag]

AMD already has ray tracing stuff in their driver stack. But this ray tracing is going to be many times slower than Turing because it doesn't have the dedicated hardware.

[Thorgs]

2 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

AMD already has ray tracing stuff in their driver stack. But this ray tracing is going to be many times slower than Turing because it doesn't have the dedicated hardware.

Yes, that was what i was thinking. We don't relay know the performance impact of it in games for now. Maybe a "Ultra" Setting of ray tracing is overkill for almost very normal Setup and low is the way to go. And maybe low dos run some how fine on non RTX Cards too.

[homeap5]

32 minutes ago, Thorgs said:

Most likely the Software Version of Raytracing will not perform as good as if it would run in the dedicate Cores.

Most likely it will be used for creating interesting static image screenshots from games.

Who cares if game runs at 3 FPS if screenshot looks great?

 

[DocSwag]

16 minutes ago, Thorgs said:

Yes, that was what i was thinking. We don't relay know the performance impact of it in games for now. Maybe a "Ultra" Setting of ray tracing is overkill for almost very normal Setup and low is the way to go. And maybe low dos run some how fine on non RTX Cards too.

I just can't see it being that useful in game if settings are lowered that much. Maybe for professional stuff? IDK

[agent_x007]

Also, double topic : LINK.

[DildorTheDecent]

>Everyone

 

There's more to nvidia than Pascal, Volta and Turing.

 

Although I'd love to see a Titan X try and give RT a go.

[GoodBytes]

All graphics card can do ray tracing. Ray tracing is nothing new, and done in the movie industry and sometimes in pre-redered videos in games.

The problem is that you need massive computational power. That is why it is not used in games, as it is impossible to do it in real time, while making the game playable and understandable.

 

The advantage of the RTX is more for developers than gamer. Developers don't need to spend days on end trying to lighting tricks to convince us of basic realism things such a reflections, and actually focus on other things on the game.  The gamer gains ore realistic visuals with still playable frame rates, which can be applied to any game graphical direction and style. Even if the game looks like a Mario game, you can actually have proper water reflections, proper mirror reflections, better and easier to implement global illuminations and so on. Now, it is probably useless in competitive games, as many gamer plays the game at minimum settings to get 500fps, and the game is so fast moving that you don't pay attention to anything. But on other games where art style matters to set the mood and the feel of the environment portrait by the artists, it is a lot of work saved, and you get more realistic and better results.

[D13H4RD]

Any graphics processor can do Ray Tracing. 

 

The problem is that because Ray Tracing requires heaps of computational power, you won't be measuring performance in frames per second but in seconds per frame instead. 

 

The draw for the RTX 20 is that they feature dedicated hardware specifically designed for real-time Ray Tracing. It's worth noting that it's not entirely Ray Tracing as it's more of a hybrid between rasterization and Ray Tracing, but having dedicated hardware means that the GPU is much more capable of doing the calculations needed for Ray Tracing in real time without a performance dip to the point where games are unplayable. 

[kilgore_T]

 

play the gigarays right now