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PowerVR Wizard GPU does real-time ray tracing at 10x lower power than Nvidia GTX
- transfire 11y agoPhotorealism in video games is around the corner, brothers.
- alexvoica 11y agoI didn't have time to cover it in the video but ray tracing makes a huge difference for foveated rendering in VR. Maybe I'll write about it when I have some time.
- xlm1717 11y agoAwesome. This is coming just as VR is reaching mainstream popularity. Coming up to an exciting time in terms of entertainment technology!
- mrec 11y agoIntriguing, particularly if the lower-power claim here proves out. So far nothing meeting the Oculus reqs (970 GTX or better) will fit in a SFF PC, much less a laptop. Part of that is physical size, but 100W+ TDP for a graphics card alone is never going to be acceptable to most people, if only because of cooling problems and fan noise.
- chx 11y agoThe R9 Nano will fit into an SFF. The rest is obviously true.
- CyberDildonics 11y agoYou are talking about ray tracing the first hit and then shading the resulting fragments normally I'm guessing?
- Devid2014 11y agoYear 2006: Photorealism in video games is around the corner... Year 2016: Photorealism in video games is around the corner... Year 2026: Photorealism in video games is around the corner...
- deelowe 11y agoI think there are cases where we are there now: http://www.gamesradar.com/star-wars-battlefront-photorealism-mod/ http://www.gamesradar.com/star-wars-battlefront-photorealism...
- Devid2014 11y agoNo we are still not there and will not be for a long time. But with time we will get closer and closer.
- onetimePete 11y agoNo we wont, its no longer paying off to invest that much. Write a bunch of new shaders - nobody notices anything. Write a good procedural content generator- suddenly applause. The gfx-race is over- it died a horrible death on the plateau beneath uncanny valley. Its a real shame, cause the technology invented is just so neat- but that is how it is.
- deelowe 11y agoBattlefront just won a ton of awards due to tech they created for that game that makes the terrain look amazingly realistic. It seems like people still notice.
- Htsthbjig 11y agoHave you seen the clothing of the man who fires? Clothes is one weak point with real time CG today. Another is grass, trees. There is a reason there is no green in those pictures, and they try to only draw people in rigid suits.
- Millennium 11y agoPhotorealism in video games has arrived. It's arrived at least 6-7 times, depending on how you count console generations. Even 16-bit consoles were called photorealistic in their day, and then their successors were, and then THEIR successors were, and so on. It's almost as though we're asymptotically approaching a carefully-chosen marketing-driven goal that can never actually be reached, but towards which we can continually make (ever-tinier) steps.
- pcwalton 11y ago> Photorealism in video games has arrived. It's arrived at least 6-7 times, depending on how you count console generations. That's a very good point. Seems to me that it applies equally well to movies: the first 3D animated movies were thought photorealistic in their day, but nowadays they look pretty dated.
- ZenoArrow 11y agoWhat you say may be true, but there's a difference between 16-bit photorealism and the photorealism possible today, and the difference is that it's possible to find rendered images that are hard to distinguish from real life today. In the 16-bit era? Not so much. To give some examples, take a look at these images created in Blender: http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/24-photorealistic-blender-renders/ http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/24-photorealistic-blende...
- jheriko 11y agoits important to remember that path tracing for photorealism is considerably more expensive than raytracing. its like raytracing every pixel hundreds, thousands or even more times, and doing some extra work on-top.
- eric_h 11y agoThanks for that link - there are some absolutely fantastic images in there.
- potatolicious 11y agoMost of those are pretty evidently distinguishable from real life... The issue here - and the point being made - is that we are already at the stage where many CG images can fool even close observers, and we've been here for some time. We've been passing around these "CGI OR REAL?!!!!" images for a few years at least, and when they are first created people really can't tell the difference, but yet somehow when people get used to the tech and revisit these images a few years down the line they look obviously synthesized. Ditto older movies like Jurassic Park, whose cutting edge CGI of the time were convincing even when viewing frame-by-frame, but to savvy eyes appears downright obvious today. So clearly "photoreal" is something we haven't reached yet. IMO the indicator that we've reached "true photoreal" is when an image rendered 5 years ago still holds up to fresh eyes.
- AndrewKemendo 11y agoI think it's pretty much here: http://www.pcgamer.com/star-wars-battlefront-graphics-mod-makes-the-game-look-like-a-movie/ http://www.pcgamer.com/star-wars-battlefront-graphics-mod-ma...
- Gravityloss 11y agoI'd use semi-realtime path tracers as a benchmark: https://home.otoy.com/render/brigade/showcase/ https://home.otoy.com/render/brigade/showcase/
- CyberDildonics 11y ago'Semi' real is a very long way from real time when it comes to ray tracing. Because of the exponential requirements for convergence, it is easy to impress people with interactive but noisy tracing. When you wait for it to converge however, the parts that take a long time to converge still take a long time to converge.
- Gravityloss 11y agoI meant the visual quality
- CyberDildonics 11y agoThen why not go all the way and compare it to movie visual effects?
- vardump 11y agoIt arrives when path-tracing or at least some good GI (global illumination) approximation can be accurately solved in real time. Ray-tracing has a pretty limited use for photorealism, unless you have a lot of shiny surfaces and such. It can't model diffuse light bouncing off surfaces.
- CyberDildonics 11y ago> Ray-tracing has a pretty limited use for photorealism, unless you have a lot of shiny surfaces and such. It can't model diffuse light bouncing off surfaces. You mean real time ray tracing as it stand now correct? Ray-tracing in a general sense can simulate photography as a whole, just not efficiently (for now).
- zardo 11y agoWell, it can't simulate all effects from photography. Anything to do with diffraction can't be simulated by a ray, for that you need waves.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- CyberDildonics 11y agoMicro effects are typically already simulated by shaders. Ray tracing could in theory simulate interaction between a frequency of light and the frequency of of medium although the situations where that would be practical would be exotic.
- alkonaut 11y agoMany use ray tracing and path tracing interchangeably and consider path tracing to be a form of Ray tracing (Old school RT would be called Whitted Ray Tracing). Single bounce ray tracing isn't very interesting, what we want is real time global illumination such as with park tracing. For simple scenes this is possible on a gpu today, at least with low res and a reasonable amount of noise. If this chip can do with a million triangles what a gpu does today with a hundred, then it's very interesting (not saying it can). Real time gpu PT today: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4lfGWr https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4lfGWr
- theandrewbailey 11y agoPhotorealism might be what everyone is looking for, but ultimately it doesn't matter. Many pretty games have come and gone in 5 years, but they've all been out-sold (and out-played) by Minecraft.
- deelowe 11y agoK. What about GTA V and Battlefront? It's almost like there are many factors involved in launching a successful product.
- bitwize 11y agoSo is the mainstream Linux desktop.
- TD-Linux 11y agoIronically the demo is on desktop Linux... actually it's on a MIPS Loongson board which is interesting. I haven't been able to find one at a sane price.
- huuu 11y agoPhotorealism in video games is already there in the form of path tracing: https://home.otoy.com/render/brigade/ https://home.otoy.com/render/brigade/
- scotty79 11y agoI'd love to see any progress in animation. Currently they just do motion capture and it still looks like crap (interpolating animation frames doesn't help the cause either).
- yason 11y agoThe funny thing in photorealism is that the amount of sharp detail isn't particular high. We easily consider 80's television broadcast photorealistic: none of the films and series aren't criticized because they looked to unrealistic and artificial. Yet a measly low-resolution broadcast with even more inaccurate and distorted chrominance channel can produce video that is for all practical purposes realistic. For still images, photorealism is even simpler. Even a painter can produce photorealistic paintings you couldn't easily distinguish from photographs.
- anon4 11y agoThe painter has the advantage that he's a human drawing an image that will be perceived photorealistic by other humans, so his own "is this photorealistic yet" function is the same as mine and yours, i.e. he can alter the image until it looks photorealistic, even if it is not objectively photorealistic.
- exDM69 11y agoThis isn't anywhere close to doing a full scene with ray tracing, just some shadows and added reflections. The prettier looking demos are all static geometry. There's one demo with moving objects but all static meshes. No mention how expensive is the preprocessing that they do (building BVHs or other acceleration structures). This may be a very interesting piece of hardware but it's not something that will revolutionize gaming over night. Rasterization with post processing tricks may be "cheating" but it still subjectively looks better than any raytracing based technology so far (in anything close to real time). Raytracing is mainly interesting for shadows, which can't be accurately simulated with rasterization. There are pretty shadow mapping tricks but no "one size fits all" solution exists.
- berkut 11y agosigh Why does pretty much all the marketing and examples of "groundbreaking" new/faster tech for raytracing/pathtracing always just show outside IBL-lit scenes? These are easy to resolve (generally within 32 progressions with MIS for diffuse surfaces). Similarly, they rarely show anything other than perfectly specular glass, or pretty rough microfacet surfaces, which with indirect caustics off (which they obviously have in the above examples), again is pretty trivial to resolve. Indoor scenes with many lights (lots of them sometimes occluded) with lots of indirect illumination is going to be a lot slower, and for games I would have thought this is important: I don't see how this latter scenario is workable in real time, without lots of cheats.
- dogma1138 11y agoIf you gonna cheat just give up on RT - this is what precomputed shadow maps, light maps, speculate maps etc are for together with various cheats to clip shadows when they overlap or already at max "darkness" same thing with lights when you have multiple lights sources you usually approximate by stacking the combine illumination values for light sources of the same direction. I really don't understand why are they chasing RT. Also would be nice to know how well they can actually compute shaders, do tessellation and many other things because this is one heck of a fluff piece and I can remember at least 1 of these past 20 years that proclaimed that real time RT in hardware is here.
- winterismute 11y ago> Also would be nice to know how well they can actually compute shaders, do tessellation and many other things because this is one heck of a fluff piece and I can remember at least 1 of these past 20 years that proclaimed that real time RT in hardware is here. The chip iterates on "standard" GPU designs made to performed rasterization, therefore it has everything in place to launch compute jobs or do tessellation. In addition, they have some additional hardware for raytracing. From one of the previous GDC presentations it was more or less clear that you could programmatically activate raytracing with a configurable number of rays and those rays will deliver additional lighting contributions to the objects of the scene.
- toast42 11y agoAssuming the claims are correct (5x performance, 10x less power), what's stopping this from going mainstream?
- jsheard 11y agoThe results aren't good enough to compete in games. Gamers don't care if the reflections and shadows are more authentic if the shading as a whole regresses by several generations. Just compare the subjective quality of their "accurate rendering" to what that Nvidia GPU they showed can do with cheap approximations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAAPTiuFdwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAAPTiuFdwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slc--V2pi5c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slc--V2pi5c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfZD22zMnUY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfZD22zMnUY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwEuSxAEXPA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwEuSxAEXPA
- givinguflac 11y agoThe results aren't good enough to compete in games that require an expensive dedicated graphics card that costs more than the device this gpu will go in. FTFY. Compared to any current phone/tablet GPU, it's going to be a big step up.
- jsheard 11y agoGoing by their claim of "10x lower power than 980ti" this PowerVR card is burning through 25 watts, so it being a visual step up from Snapdragon and Apple SoCs which draw 3-4 watts for the CPU and GPU combined isn't particularly impressive.
- ssmoot 11y agoFrom the article: > The PowerVR GR6500 is a mobile GPU. Its die size, GFLOPS performance, bandwidth requirements and power consumption mean that it is comparable to the GPUs already available in smart phones today. But compared with a console GPU or looking towards the smart phones and handheld devices of the future, we see a roadmap that scales in capabilities and performance well beyond the GR6500’s specifications. The PowerVR Ray Tracing technology is fundamentally scalable and the efficiency actually increases as we move to more and more powerful cores.
- _Codemonkeyism 11y agoHow times change, roughly 20 years ago I did real time ray tracing of some spheres (can't get simpler) on a DEC Alpha cluster and was amazed (low resolution).
- Moral_ 11y agoImgtec's linux drivers are also pure garbage in the security sense. I would never install one of their drivers, it would essentially be the same as installing a backdoor.
- winterismute 11y agoIf you want to know a bit more about the details of the platform, these 2 presentations from GDC 2014 are still some valid material: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020741/New-Techniques-Made-Possible-by http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020741/New-Techniques-Made-Pos... http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020688/Practical-Techniques-for-Ray-Tracing http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020688/Practical-Techniques-fo...