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It's not the world's first ray-tracing GPU. Imagination Technologies had one ages ago. https://www.imgtec.com/legacy-gpu-cores/ray-tracing/ https://www.imgtec.
by kayamon 8y ago
It's not the world's first ray-tracing GPU. Imagination Technologies had one ages ago.
https://www.imgtec.com/legacy-gpu-cores/ray-tracing/ https://www.imgtec.com/legacy-gpu-cores/ray-tracing/
- ShroudedNight 8y agoI also remember ray-tracing being a primary use-case for the Radeon 4870 ten years ago: https://www.techpowerup.com/64104/radeon-hd4800-series-supports-a-100-ray-traced-pipeline https://www.techpowerup.com/64104/radeon-hd4800-series-suppo... Besides the increase in raw compute, what is materially different this time around?
- ah- 8y agoTheir denoising looks interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yy18s-FHWw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yy18s-FHWw
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mattnewport 8y agoHardware acceleration of BVH traversal and tight integration with the shader cores to allow efficient scheduling of shader execution and new ray generation when ray hits are detected.
- brandonjm 8y agoWhile the 4800 series Radeon cards supported fully ray-traced pipelines it wasn't necessarily dedicated to it. These have a section of the chip entirely dedicated to ray-tracing computations and acceleration.
- jdietrich 8y agoI can't find any evidence that they actually brought it to market.
- 0xcde4c3db 8y agoI'm not sure whether this is the reason in this case, but it's worth noting that NVIDIA marketing (ab)uses the term "GPU" in a very particular way. Basically, their definition is contrived to make the GeForce 256 the first GPU ever. > NVIDIA invents the graphics processing unit, putting it on a path to reshape the industry. GeForce 256 is launched as the world's first GPU, a term NVIDIA defines as "a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines that is capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second. [1] [1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/about-nvidia/corporate-timeline/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/about-nvidia/corporate-timeline...
- aidenn0 8y agoThat's only mildly off-putting to me since nvidia marketing invented the term GPU.
- 0xcde4c3db 8y agoThey definitely popularized it, but they didn't invent it. The graphics chip of the PlayStation was referred to as the "GPU" at least as far back as 1995, and I don't think NVIDIA had any involvement in its development or marketing (although the company was founded early enough for that to have been possible).
- rocky1138 8y agoThe Atari Jaguar also had a GPU, and this was in 1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Jaguar#Processors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Jaguar#Processors
- garmaine 8y agoIt had a "Tom" chip. The question is to whether they called it a GPU. I think they called it DSP back then. Even 3Dfx, the chief competitor to NVIDIA, made “graphics cards” or “3D accelerators” not “GPUs”. At least in that fight NVIDIA used the GPU term first, to emphasize that hey did transformation and lightning as well as rasterization. Although it wasn’t until a few generations later with the first register programmed GeForce architectures that we had anything resembling what we call GPUs today.
- inferiorhuman 8y ago> It's not the world's first ray-tracing GPU. Imagination Technologies had one ages ago. Caustic Graphics as well, IIRC.
- TomVDB 8y agoDid Imagination acquire Caustic Graphics?
- inferiorhuman 8y agoYep
- bhouston 8y agoCaustic Technologies had this in 2000 and then Arm bought them. I believe the date of 2018 as the release by NVIDIA is actually related to the Caustic Technologies patents expiring.