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Does anyone know how they are offering better raytracing performance? Are there new api’s or something?
by gabcoh 8y ago
Does anyone know how they are offering better raytracing performance? Are there new api’s or something?
- bearjaws 8y agoThis is exactly what im wondering, with the next gen consoles confirmed for AMD CPU/GPU I doubt there will be much Ray Tracing tech in the next generation, which means we're looking at 3-5 years before this tech can be mainstream. These GPUs will be antiquated by the time Ray Tracing can gain any real traction...
- xxs 8y agoI would presume some games (and engines) will have an option to enable "real" and/or off-screen shadows/reflections. Other than that it feels like a pure gimmick. Even in the demo of Lara Croft the fps drop is noticeable during the explosion sequence.
- Rebelgecko 8y agoI believe that lots of games already do ray tracing/casting when they render (especially for things like lighting and reflections), so there can be benefits even before games switch to 100% ray tracing.
- penagwin 8y agoFor the most part it really isn't "ray tracing", it's _close_ but almost everybody "cheats" because of the performance gains. Even if some games do using ray tracing for some things, the developers would have to update their game to support the features of a currently very expensive and uncommon card. Not to mention most gamers have a GTX 1060 or less according to steam to give you an idea of what the current "mainstream" is at.
- sscotth 8y agoI agree. It won't become mainstream until the next gen of consoles are able to take advantage, because developers will still be required handle the current generation. However, the demand from from developers themselves could be enough for console manufacturers to make sure it is available in their next iteration. Where have you seen that next gen consoles are confirmed for AMD? Also, if there is Nvidia tech here that AMD can't replicate, it doesn't mean that AMD can't license it.
- jryan49 8y agoIt looks like the major API players (Vulcan and DirectX) are going to be implementing ray tracing extensions: https://developer.nvidia.com/rtx/raytracing https://developer.nvidia.com/rtx/raytracing
- bitL 8y agoMicrosoft DXR
- Keyframe 8y agoThere's a dedicated core for it, called RTCore.
- dnautics 8y agomy understanding could be wrong, but I believe doing raytracing well requires better branching architecture, which traditionally gpus are pretty bad at.
- corysama 8y agoThere is a new API. It’s currently pretty opaque. There’s a comment from a former ex-Nvidia employee I can’t find that explains that the new chips have hardware support for ray-triangle intersection tests and some sort of bounding-volume-hierarchy traversal built in.