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I think the reason for the lackluster reception NVIDIA has gotten to the current RTX designs is only in a small part caused by the actual poor design. Yes, real

I think the reason for the lackluster reception NVIDIA has gotten to the current RTX designs is only in a small part caused by the actual poor design. Yes, real-time ray tracing, the new feature in these cards, is so bad that it's barely usable — but we're used to that, v2 will be better. I have a lot of sympathy for NVIDIA engineers trying to improve the state of the art, it's never easy. However, the issue with NVIDIA is that they have adopted the antics of the game development space they cooperate with, and they have a poor attitude towards their customers as a result. So far as outright saying that their customers are stuck, so that the pricing doesn't matter, you'll just pay for it and get on with your life anyway. One major example of this is the banning of their 'gaming' cards from data centres via an EULA, because they couldn't sell their 10X-priced 'enterprise' cards, since they performed within 10% of each other. Another example is RTX, again. They've stopped producing their 10xx series cards to sell more RTXes at a higher margin, because, boy it turns out people still want and prefer older cards compared to the RTX ones, in consideration of the price-bloat that NVIDIA has saddled the RTX with.

izacus 8y ago
> Yes, real-time ray tracing, the new feature in these cards, is so bad that it's barely usable — but we're used to that, v2 will be better. I have a lot of sympathy for NVIDIA engineers trying to improve the state of the art, it's never easy. Can you explain this more? All the tests of RTX in actual games have been very positive and showed significant improvements in visual quality.
- dragontamer 8y ago
  The results I've seen show the $1200 GPU playing at 1080p resolution with less than 60FPS. RTX is clearly a compute-hog: its barely usable even if you pay for the best-of-the-best GPUs. I mean, not to knock Nvidia down or anything, raytracing is one of the most computationally difficult problems in existence right now. But from a practical and pragmatic perspective, you suffer a major loss in frame-rates and force the GPU to drop in resolution to make the jump to raytracing. Even if you spent $1200 on the card... ----------- I'm personally excited to see offline renderers use the RTX features to accelerate offline raytracing. That's probably the more important use of the technology. As it is, RTX isn't quite fast enough for "real time" yet. Just grossly accelerated offline raytracing (which is still impressive)
  - izacus 8y ago
    According to PC Gamer and Digital Foundry, the 2080Ti can drive Metro Exodus with RTX on at average 55fps with drops down to 30fps at 4K resolution so your claim seems grossly exaggerated - https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/YhDHpgGrAmpmnP4LUBEgvg.png https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/YhDHpgGrAmpmnP4LUBEgvg.png Also last I read, RTX really isn't designed for offline raytracing and doesn't really bring much to the table. Its use is in realtime.
    - dragontamer 8y ago
      https://www.hardocp.com/article/2019/01/07/battlefield_v_nvidia_ray_tracing_rtx_2080_ti_performance/3 https://www.hardocp.com/article/2019/01/07/battlefield_v_nvi... Battlefield V Ultra 1080p RTX on is ~63 FPS average (not minimum FPS, but average), which means it will regularly dip below 60 in practice. > Also last I read, RTX really isn't designed for offline raytracing and doesn't really bring much to the table. Its use is in realtime. On the contrary! RTX Cores are a hardware-accelerated BVH-traversal. That has HUGE implications for the offline rendering scene. See NVidia Optix for details: https://devblogs.nvidia.com/nvidia-optix-ray-tracing-powered-rtx/ https://devblogs.nvidia.com/nvidia-optix-ray-tracing-powered... IMO, this is the killer-feature of RTX. Accelerating those Hollywood Renders from hours-per-frame to minutes-per-frame. NVidia Optix takes industry-standard scene trees and can use the RTX Cores to traverse them for hardware-accelerated raytracing. Or more specifically: coarse AABB Bounds checking, which is a very compute & memory heavy portion of the Raytracing algorithm. Even if RTX is too slow for video games, any improvement to offline rendering is a huge advantage.
      - ykombinaught 8y ago
        Optix was developed a decade ago and doesn’t require RTX cards. It run on any Maxwell or newer card. It’s NVIDIA’s version of RadeonRays. What NVIDIA is trying to sell people is a denoiser. And are you sure RT Cores even exist or are they just tensorcores by a different name? https://youtu.be/3BOUAkJxJac https://youtu.be/3BOUAkJxJac
    - dkersten 8y ago
- rolleiflex 8y ago
  My impression from the analyses I've seen so far is that it barely improves the visual quality, since the game designers learned to fake it so well over the last two decades, and it comes at a significant cost to frame rate. In particular, good ray-tracing with acceptable noise levels comes at around 500 rays a point. RTX cards are capable of 2 rays a point. Here is a comparison of the regular global illumination vs RTX real-time raytracing, particularly take look at noise levels generated by RTX in the background. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuoER1DwYLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuoER1DwYLY
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    >In particular, good ray-tracing with acceptable noise levels comes at around 500 rays a point. RTX cards are capable of 2 rays a point. NVidia has that temporal denoising algorithm though. So noise is smoothed between space and time. When you have 60-frames per second, you can "recycle" old frame's raytracing data for the current frame. As long as the raytracing lights rarely change, it'd work out pretty well. The fast-moving lights would probably have to still use rasterization techniques, but the demos of the temporal-denoising algorithm from NVidia are very impressive. FYI: Blender Cycle's denoising is still kinda bad even at 1000 or even 5000 samples (at least, when you look at low-light areas close to walls). You gotta zoom in and look, but artistic CGI requires many, many samples before raytracing looks smooth. Its a major advancement for NVidia to come up with a raytracing denoising algorithm that works well for video games on only 1-ish samples per pixel.

izacus 8y ago

> Yes, real-time ray tracing, the new feature in these cards, is so bad that it's barely usable — but we're used to that, v2 will be better. I have a lot of sympathy for NVIDIA engineers trying to improve the state of the art, it's never easy. Can you explain this more? All the tests of RTX in actual games have been very positive and showed significant improvements in visual quality.

dragontamer 8y ago
The results I've seen show the $1200 GPU playing at 1080p resolution with less than 60FPS. RTX is clearly a compute-hog: its barely usable even if you pay for the best-of-the-best GPUs. I mean, not to knock Nvidia down or anything, raytracing is one of the most computationally difficult problems in existence right now. But from a practical and pragmatic perspective, you suffer a major loss in frame-rates and force the GPU to drop in resolution to make the jump to raytracing. Even if you spent $1200 on the card... ----------- I'm personally excited to see offline renderers use the RTX features to accelerate offline raytracing. That's probably the more important use of the technology. As it is, RTX isn't quite fast enough for "real time" yet. Just grossly accelerated offline raytracing (which is still impressive)
- izacus 8y ago
  According to PC Gamer and Digital Foundry, the 2080Ti can drive Metro Exodus with RTX on at average 55fps with drops down to 30fps at 4K resolution so your claim seems grossly exaggerated - https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/YhDHpgGrAmpmnP4LUBEgvg.png https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/YhDHpgGrAmpmnP4LUBEgvg.png Also last I read, RTX really isn't designed for offline raytracing and doesn't really bring much to the table. Its use is in realtime.
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    https://www.hardocp.com/article/2019/01/07/battlefield_v_nvidia_ray_tracing_rtx_2080_ti_performance/3 https://www.hardocp.com/article/2019/01/07/battlefield_v_nvi... Battlefield V Ultra 1080p RTX on is ~63 FPS average (not minimum FPS, but average), which means it will regularly dip below 60 in practice. > Also last I read, RTX really isn't designed for offline raytracing and doesn't really bring much to the table. Its use is in realtime. On the contrary! RTX Cores are a hardware-accelerated BVH-traversal. That has HUGE implications for the offline rendering scene. See NVidia Optix for details: https://devblogs.nvidia.com/nvidia-optix-ray-tracing-powered-rtx/ https://devblogs.nvidia.com/nvidia-optix-ray-tracing-powered... IMO, this is the killer-feature of RTX. Accelerating those Hollywood Renders from hours-per-frame to minutes-per-frame. NVidia Optix takes industry-standard scene trees and can use the RTX Cores to traverse them for hardware-accelerated raytracing. Or more specifically: coarse AABB Bounds checking, which is a very compute & memory heavy portion of the Raytracing algorithm. Even if RTX is too slow for video games, any improvement to offline rendering is a huge advantage.
    - ykombinaught 8y ago
      Optix was developed a decade ago and doesn’t require RTX cards. It run on any Maxwell or newer card. It’s NVIDIA’s version of RadeonRays. What NVIDIA is trying to sell people is a denoiser. And are you sure RT Cores even exist or are they just tensorcores by a different name? https://youtu.be/3BOUAkJxJac https://youtu.be/3BOUAkJxJac
  - dkersten 8y ago
rolleiflex 8y ago
My impression from the analyses I've seen so far is that it barely improves the visual quality, since the game designers learned to fake it so well over the last two decades, and it comes at a significant cost to frame rate. In particular, good ray-tracing with acceptable noise levels comes at around 500 rays a point. RTX cards are capable of 2 rays a point. Here is a comparison of the regular global illumination vs RTX real-time raytracing, particularly take look at noise levels generated by RTX in the background. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuoER1DwYLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuoER1DwYLY
- dragontamer 8y ago
  >In particular, good ray-tracing with acceptable noise levels comes at around 500 rays a point. RTX cards are capable of 2 rays a point. NVidia has that temporal denoising algorithm though. So noise is smoothed between space and time. When you have 60-frames per second, you can "recycle" old frame's raytracing data for the current frame. As long as the raytracing lights rarely change, it'd work out pretty well. The fast-moving lights would probably have to still use rasterization techniques, but the demos of the temporal-denoising algorithm from NVidia are very impressive. FYI: Blender Cycle's denoising is still kinda bad even at 1000 or even 5000 samples (at least, when you look at low-light areas close to walls). You gotta zoom in and look, but artistic CGI requires many, many samples before raytracing looks smooth. Its a major advancement for NVidia to come up with a raytracing denoising algorithm that works well for video games on only 1-ish samples per pixel.