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AMD May Add Ray Tracing Feature in Navi 20 GPU
- jandrese 8y agoThe article seems pretty speculative. AMD might introduce ray tracing features, they might be faster than nVidia's 20x series cards. Hold off on your purchase cowboy! The included graphs of nVidia gobbling up market share over the past year aren't helping either.
- beenBoutIT 8y agoGood advice. The idea that 'AMD might be really great soon' may never be true for consumer GPUs. Although AMD does a great job in consoles like the PS4.
- tracker1 8y agoOf course, depending on how well the Navi core works, it could just be a software hack, not dedicated cores. Given how poorly (relatively speaking) the RTX does with ray tracing features enabled, I'm not sure it's really at much of an advantage. I do hope that the AMD cards are competitive and they've been a lot better than NVidia at open drivers. Here's hoping they make an impact. Planning to upgrade to a Zen 2 processor when they come out, and if AMD is competitive at least on price, may switch or keep my 1080 and pass my old computer off with a different gpu.
- dragontamer 8y agoBased on when and where AMD's money came from (sales of the Zen CPU), it is unlikely that Navi got the infusion of money needed before its design was complete. AMD was still losing lots of money back in 2016 when Navi's design would have been largely completed. AMD began to make money in 2017 and 2018, but an infusion of cash that late in the game won't have major effects on the GPU's architecture. Navi engineering-samples would have had to have first taped out in 2018. The next GPU in 2020 will be the first one made where the design started with AMD's renewed R&D effort (funded by the success of its Zen CPU). My overall expectations of Navi would be that its a slightly improved Radeon VII architecturally (a few new assembly instructions here and there... but nothing majorly different). It would still be a GCN architecture. EDIT: And Navi is expected to be far smaller (and therefore slower) than the Radeon VII. --------- Of course, AMD may surprise me. But that's what I expect purely based on the financials of the company.
- xfalcox 8y agoThe rumors say that a lot of engineers where moved from the two last GPU archs (4xx, 5xx, Vega) so they could put most workforce behind Navi. I'm hopeful for a good card that I can run natively on Linux.
- metildaa 8y agoIts interesting to watch AMD at work, for one GPU generation they spent $300 million for everything, including design, marketing and the single production run of silicon. Meanwhile, Intel is spending ~$4 Billion on its iGPU architecture alone for the next gen and has been spending heavily since ever to try and improve, with much worse results.
- wmf 8y agoRumors say that Sony (and probably MS) paid for Navi and the PC version is basically a bonus. I don't know what that predicts since the PS5 hasn't been announced yet.
- xfalcox 8y agoI'm exactly at the same place as you. Running a 4670k with a GTX 1080, and just waiting for Ryzen 3850X (or the equivalent) to drop so I can switch. Looks like I will have to keep the GTX 1080 until 2020 if I want to use AMD for the GPU.
- kllrnohj 8y agoNvidia already enabled RTX on the 10-series line of GPUs because the whole feature is just a "software hack" in the first place. RTX hardware has cores that are faster at running the software, but at the end of the day it was always "just" software in the first place. See also Crytek doing real-time raytracing on a Vega 56: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nqhkDm2_Tw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nqhkDm2_Tw
- sprash 8y agoNobody cares about the RTX feature. Gamers always prefer higher framerates over improved indirect lighting which is in practice rather subtle. Envrionment mapping was the king so far for a reason. Psycovisually accurate reflections are the least important thing to look for. AMD should ignore the RTX move by Nvidia completely and focus on reintroducing their old VLIW architecture for shaders wich saved almost an order of magnitude in power consumption.
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 8y ago> Nobody cares about the RTX feature. Gamers always prefer higher framerates over improved indirect lighting which is in practice rather subtle. You seem to like absolutes … Let me prove you wrong: I care about nicer looking reflections and realistic soft shadows.
- Dylan16807 8y agoYou're not always running games that struggle to run at your screen's max framerate. And some people would turn down other shading effects to get better lighting.
- maccio92 8y agoRTX is more than just lighting. reflections and shadows as well and other things
- vokep 8y agoNobody cares about it until its normal and expected. We just need to get past the hurdle of it, once a bunch of raytracing cards are out in the wild (as now are), more games will be made with such effects, and this will push more need for raytracing hardware, until we almost entirely abandon raster. Honestly raster feels inherently "unreal", a drawing as opposed to a real space. While raytrace feels like recreation of reality.
- _bxg1 8y agoRaytracing isn't just some expensive gimmick to make lighting look better. It's the entire future of real-time graphics. Right now it's used sparingly, but in a few years it's going to replace the great majority of rasterization use-cases altogether. This will drastically simplify graphics programming and allow for things we never thought possible. I dearly hope AMD gets on board because competition is good, but the train won't wait for them.
- ars 8y agoI'm waiting for GPU's that can output a holographic interference pattern. It looks like random noise, but makes a 3d image if you shine a laser through it. I think ray tracing actually has advantage here as a precursor to the information needed to calculate the interference pattern.
- ajconway 8y agoLight-field displays may become a thing in a not-so-distant future. https://www.roadtovr.com/creal3d-light-field-display-ar-vr-ces-2019/ https://www.roadtovr.com/creal3d-light-field-display-ar-vr-c...
- mhh__ 8y agoTo somone familiar with ray tracing algorithms: How much efficiency can be gained in using different (invented in the future) algorithms n' tricks (e.g. The kind of stuff that modern game engines use that didn't exist when CG was in it's infancy) or is real time raytracing purely limited by the hardware (By which I mean in general rather than current hardware)?
- foota 8y agoMy understanding is that nvidia uses some machine learning to fill in holes in low sample # maps generated by raytracing, so presumably this could be improved?
- mattnewport 8y agoI think it's fairly unlikely that someone is going to come up with a revolutionary new algorithm that would make the actual tracing of rays dramatically faster. People have been researching better acceleration structures and optimization tricks for decades at this point. There is probably a decent amount of scope for incremental improvements via hardware acceleration though. There is also quite a bit of scope for figuring out clever ways to get the maximum value out of a given number of rays cast. This includes high level engine architecture and lower level improvements to things like denoising algorithms and smarter importance sampling. I think there's still a lot of room to better exploit temporal coherence for realtime ray tracing.
- elihu 8y agoI think the biggest potential area for algorithm-driven improvement isn't so much coming up with clever ways to trace rays faster, but rather coming up with ways to generate better quality output within a given rays-per-second budget. Machine-learning-based denoising algorithms are a good example of that.
- jammygit 8y agoBack on the team liquid forums, we used to call this an announcement of a possible future announcement. Will read the article when it is an actual one.
- shmerl 8y agoI think ray tracing will be handled well enough by generic GPU hardware simply using APIs like Vulkan. Nvidia probably oversold their dedicated components, and AMD will try to go the more straightforward way to compete. Which is good, if same thing can be achieved with portable cross-GPU approaches. GPU lock-in is bad and only wastes developers' time.
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- dragontamer 8y agoA huge portion of ray-tracing is fulfilled by generic GPU hardware. Its the bits that NVidia RTX accelerates that makes the difference. The coarse bounding-box check, as well as the ray/triangle intersection check, has DEDICATED hardware on NVidia RTX series (2060, 2070, 2080, and 2080 Ti). This means that NVidia's RTX cards can determine if a ray is intersecting a triangle, or a rectangle, with less power and at higher speeds than other GPUs. That's a very important operation in the overall Raytracing problem. Future GPUs will need to implement this hardware-accelerated intersection check if they wish to be as fast (or faster) than RTX cards. Alternatively, maybe there's an algorithm to do it as fast in software, but that seems unlikely to me.
- Jasper_ 8y agoRay-triangle intersection is a very small part of the overall problem. Surface shading is considerably expensive, and raytracing makes it worse as you don't have any coherent materials or texture access like you did in rasterization. NVIDIA's model also makes it difficult to sort rays by material.
- dragontamer 8y ago> Ray-triangle intersection is a very small part of the overall problem. Its a small part, but a very memory-latency part of the problem. GPUs typically are very bad at memory-latency. Dedicated units would be able to traverse the BVH tree far more efficiently than a typical GPU shader design. The BVH Tree is your typical tree, pointer-chasing on a GPU is way slower than on a CPU, especially with something like the BVH tree which is far larger than can fit in a cache. A typical shader would just be stuck waiting for memory, while RTX Cores can likely process a ton of them in parallel. Hard to say for sure: NVidia didn't say how its RTX Cores work at the assembly level. But it isn't hard to imagine dedicated units that are more efficient than a typical design.
- lanevorockz 8y agoPlease do, Ray Tracing is not something that is really hard to implement and has pretty good impact for gamedevs. Unifying how light is handled can make lots of prebaked light data disappear, making iterations of models / levels more consistent.