7 ms·

By all accounts RTX delivers negligible visual improvement for games, for a huge performance hit. The technology is a lot more interesting in professional 3D m

By all accounts RTX delivers negligible visual improvement for games, for a huge performance hit. The technology is a lot more interesting in professional 3D modelling where light baking and rendering can be done much faster.

twtw 8y ago
Can't help but think of this: > The only real performance advantages the GeForce3 currently offers exist in three situations: 1) very high-resolutions, 2) with AA enabled or 3) in DX8 specific benchmarks. You should honestly not concern yourself with the latter, simply because you buy a video card to play games, not to run 3DMark. > The GeForce3 is consistently a couple of frames slower than the older GeForce2 cards > Between now and the release of the GeForce3's successor, it is doubtful that there will be many games that absolutely require the programmable pixel and vertex shaders of the GeForce3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/742 https://www.anandtech.com/show/742
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  "between now and the release of the successor" being about a year, so that sounds pretty accurate. It would help if there was more explanation of what the RTX units are actually good at. Not every GPU innovation actually ends up widely used. It would be amusing if they lost out by being not programmable enough...
- llampx 8y ago
  Nobody is arguing that ray tracing is not going to be good, or that its not eventually going to be supported by more games. I think most people are just saying that the push will come from developers when the fps hit isn't so bad, and when more console hardware supports ray tracing.
gmueckl 8y ago
The hardware raytracing support is a huge step in the right direction for real time graphics. The shaky jenga tower of hacks on top of the rasterization pipeline that is in the current generation of rendering engines is barely sustainable. Fast raytracing provides an alternative that is much closer to the actual physical model of light transport in the real world and does not require as many nasty approximations and cheats as rasterization for the same quality. Mind you that you are seeing the early generation of hardware based real time raytracing now and it already can beat the quality of rasterization. There is still a ton of room for improvements. One or two hardware generations from now we may finally see realtime generated images for which the term photorealistic is not just a silly marketing hype. They could truly fool you.
- saiya-jin 8y ago
  For a gamer, Nvidia's latest card offering is vastly disappointing. Technology that is not there and won't be there for maybe next 6 years (if they stick to 3 year release cycle), offering some shiny surfaces at best, at massively increased price. I really hope AMD will come with some good cheaper competition. Gamers want fast framerates, high polygon count, high textures much more than some currently-useless raytracing. Solve those into near-reality quality in at least 1440p resolution, and then we can talk about these gimmicks. I'll happily skip this (and next) gen and will be OK with some 1080 card.
  - gmueckl 8y ago
    I don't get the ridiculous pricing of the current generation of nVidia chips, either. But this generation of hardware is at the same time an important step towards getting rendering algorithms that have vastly superior quality while having a much simpler structure. I know that anybody that works on high quality real time renderers and knows what they are doing wants this switch to happen.
    - ahartmetz 8y ago
      Heck, I've only read papers about most rasterization based "realism" tricks and I want this switch to happen. Polemically speaking, current realtime rendering pipelines are based on sprite rotoscalers and the end user being too busy to notice the errors. Raytracing is based on how light works.
      - gmueckl 8y ago
        The literature conveniently neglects to mention how fiddly and difficult it is to implement that stuff reliably. Debugging the rendering pipeline is not exactly easy, especially when the data is not just positions and colors, but more abstract stuff. Also, there's tons of edge cases that need hacks and workarounds, crazy driver bugs etc...
    - ksec 8y ago
      Buying an 800mm2 Die along with 12GB GDDR6 Memory for $999 isn't really ridiculous. Try getting Intel or AMD to sell you an 800mm2 CPU Die for $999. As a matter of fact I thought it was reasonably priced in terms of Die Size and Transistors. Now whether those 800mm2 perform up to our expectation is an entirely different matter.

twtw 8y ago

Can't help but think of this: > The only real performance advantages the GeForce3 currently offers exist in three situations: 1) very high-resolutions, 2) with AA enabled or 3) in DX8 specific benchmarks. You should honestly not concern yourself with the latter, simply because you buy a video card to play games, not to run 3DMark. > The GeForce3 is consistently a couple of frames slower than the older GeForce2 cards > Between now and the release of the GeForce3's successor, it is doubtful that there will be many games that absolutely require the programmable pixel and vertex shaders of the GeForce3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/742 https://www.anandtech.com/show/742

Dylan16807 8y ago
"between now and the release of the successor" being about a year, so that sounds pretty accurate. It would help if there was more explanation of what the RTX units are actually good at. Not every GPU innovation actually ends up widely used. It would be amusing if they lost out by being not programmable enough...
llampx 8y ago
Nobody is arguing that ray tracing is not going to be good, or that its not eventually going to be supported by more games. I think most people are just saying that the push will come from developers when the fps hit isn't so bad, and when more console hardware supports ray tracing.

gmueckl 8y ago

The hardware raytracing support is a huge step in the right direction for real time graphics. The shaky jenga tower of hacks on top of the rasterization pipeline that is in the current generation of rendering engines is barely sustainable. Fast raytracing provides an alternative that is much closer to the actual physical model of light transport in the real world and does not require as many nasty approximations and cheats as rasterization for the same quality. Mind you that you are seeing the early generation of hardware based real time raytracing now and it already can beat the quality of rasterization. There is still a ton of room for improvements. One or two hardware generations from now we may finally see realtime generated images for which the term photorealistic is not just a silly marketing hype. They could truly fool you.

saiya-jin 8y ago
For a gamer, Nvidia's latest card offering is vastly disappointing. Technology that is not there and won't be there for maybe next 6 years (if they stick to 3 year release cycle), offering some shiny surfaces at best, at massively increased price. I really hope AMD will come with some good cheaper competition. Gamers want fast framerates, high polygon count, high textures much more than some currently-useless raytracing. Solve those into near-reality quality in at least 1440p resolution, and then we can talk about these gimmicks. I'll happily skip this (and next) gen and will be OK with some 1080 card.
- gmueckl 8y ago
  I don't get the ridiculous pricing of the current generation of nVidia chips, either. But this generation of hardware is at the same time an important step towards getting rendering algorithms that have vastly superior quality while having a much simpler structure. I know that anybody that works on high quality real time renderers and knows what they are doing wants this switch to happen.
  - ahartmetz 8y ago
    Heck, I've only read papers about most rasterization based "realism" tricks and I want this switch to happen. Polemically speaking, current realtime rendering pipelines are based on sprite rotoscalers and the end user being too busy to notice the errors. Raytracing is based on how light works.
    - gmueckl 8y ago
      The literature conveniently neglects to mention how fiddly and difficult it is to implement that stuff reliably. Debugging the rendering pipeline is not exactly easy, especially when the data is not just positions and colors, but more abstract stuff. Also, there's tons of edge cases that need hacks and workarounds, crazy driver bugs etc...
  - ksec 8y ago
    Buying an 800mm2 Die along with 12GB GDDR6 Memory for $999 isn't really ridiculous. Try getting Intel or AMD to sell you an 800mm2 CPU Die for $999. As a matter of fact I thought it was reasonably priced in terms of Die Size and Transistors. Now whether those 800mm2 perform up to our expectation is an entirely different matter.