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Graphics programmers have been predicting this revolution for almost as long as I can remember. It's quite exciting that so many of the big players seem to beli
by psyc 9y ago
Graphics programmers have been predicting this revolution for almost as long as I can remember. It's quite exciting that so many of the big players seem to believe it is almost time.
- agumonkey 9y agoIn the days of ML based AI, seeing raytracing + revolution is both refreshing and funny :)
- make3 9y agoActually, raytracing is a domain with strong potential for AI, as there is a lot of work using ML models to de-noise ray-traced scenes in real time. Edit: Yeah, NVidia actually just announced a big project on that exact subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkhBlmKtEAk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkhBlmKtEAk
- agumonkey 9y agoHa, I would never have guessed this use case. Very fortunate for Nvidia to provide both GPU and NPU cores for the task :)
- WorldMaker 9y agoI was also wondering if the brief tangent in the article here that the DXR used more Compute than Graphics cores (given availability) may also indicate that they are using something of an ML approach to the Raytracing renderer here? Obviously, it's hard to extrapolate from just a press release, but with Microsoft's big ML kick of the last few years, breakthroughs in ML steps in raytracing might seem like a reason for the press release.
- electricslpnsld 9y agoPixar is also using Machine Learning to denoise path traced images: http://graphics.pixar.com/library/MLDenoisingB/paper.pdf http://graphics.pixar.com/library/MLDenoisingB/paper.pdf
- vardump 9y ago> Graphics programmers have been predicting this revolution... Mostly it has seemed like it's been everyone except the actual graphics programmers.
- Tobba_ 9y agoYep. There's a billion and a half reasons you wouldn't use full-blown path tracing for games. It'll always perform worse regardless of what you do, the frame budgeting is likely going to be a total nightmare, the tree search you need to trace rays requires too much branching to map well to GPUs (it's perfectly possible, just another absolute nightmare as your complexity goes up), console GPUs are (and have always been) extremely underpowered in terms of compute (but good with textures), etc. Limited uses? Sure. Otherwise hell no. It's never been more than a gimmick GPU vendors use to show off (in real-time, offline rendering is something else entirely).
- bhouston 9y agoMaybe GPU vendors will offer specialized spatial look up trees or something .
- Tobba_ 9y agoTo clarify: that's more of a problem in programming the GPU in a portable manner, and that may or may not turn into a problem depending on the implementation. GPUs can do loops that run a different number of times per thread just fine, at the cost of having to wait for the slowest to finish. Things start to turn sideways if you want diverging branches though (at least AMD kind of has support for this, but it's limited). If you want animations to work there's a good chance your search would become pretty complicated and you run the risk of smacking into that. Also, I doubt GPU vendors would add special-purpose hardware like that. They'd much rather just add some new shader instructions to help doing it.
- monocasa 9y ago> Also, I doubt GPU vendors would add special-purpose hardware like that. They'd much rather just add some new shader instructions to help doing it. The PowerVR guys added special purpose hardware for doing spatial lookups for raytracing.