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Nobody cares about the RTX feature. Gamers always prefer higher framerates over improved indirect lighting which is in practice rather subtle. Envrionment mappi

by sprash 8y ago

Nobody 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 ago
You'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 ago
RTX is more than just lighting. reflections and shadows as well and other things
vokep 8y ago
Nobody 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 ago
Raytracing 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.
- AJ007 8y ago
  - It makes things easier for level designers by not requiring them to bake light maps and then spend a lot of time looking for & fix light leaks. - It isn't just visual, ray tracing can be used for collision detection. Anyone interested should take a look at the free, 600+ page Ray Tracing Gems book: http://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracinggems/unofficial_RayTracingGems_v1.4.pdf http://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracinggems/unofficial_R...
- pizza234 8y ago
  > in a few years it's going to replace the great majority of rasterization use-cases altogether There's no ground to be (so) sure of that. Given the current high cost, and more or less subtle effect, the prediction is uncertain, although very desirable. If in "the future" there will be a way to make RT cheap, definitely, it will be the way (I'd be very happy of that). If not, it will be another option, as it doesn't make sense to shove everybody's throat a feature that sucks 30/50% of the framerate. Additionally, as of now, we're talking about typically 30/50% of performance loss just for a single RT effect - eg. Metro Exodus uses it only for Global illumination, while Battlefield uses it only for reflections. What's going to be the performance hit for games using multiple RT effects?
  - _bxg1 8y ago
    There's nothing about raytracing as a technique that puts a hard ceiling on efficiency/cost reduction. Any new technology is going to be expensive at first, and then presuming there's demand, will be made exponentially cheaper. Quake 2 has already been made to ditch rasterization altogether and use only raytracing: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/quake-ii-rtx-ray-tracing-vulkan-vkray-geforce-rtx/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/quake-ii-rtx-ray-t... It was the rasterization state of the art 22 years ago. So I'd say it will take a maximum of another 22 years to render today's AAA geometries in real-time with raytracing. Though given how much more money there is today in the gaming industry, plus the way AI augments that curve, I would take a guess that it'll be closer to 5 years.
    - Dylan16807 8y ago
xiphias2 8y ago
Although I'm not a gamer I'm excited that there's something new happening, and I wanted a CUDA card for programming anyways, so I went for the RTX. Most gamers were complaining that it doesn't do 60 FPS, but I couldn't care less about FPS. I want something beautiful.
- admax88q 8y ago
  I bet you do care about FPs. If you truly didn't care about FPS then you would be ray tracing on your CPU already.
  - xiphias2 8y ago
    Ok, sure, what I wrote was an overstatement. But high FPS is mostly important for multiplayer first person shooters. Of course it would be amazing to have movie quality real time rendering in 120 FPS, but that is right now technologically impossible. At the same time NVIDIA and hopefully AMD are at least trying to catch up with the techniques that movies are using for a long time, while I see games stopped at some point. I watch new movies in IMAX whenever I can because I just love to see the new animations, even though I'm surrounded with teenagers and I feel that the stories are predictably dumb for me.
pitaj 8y ago
1) Some people prefer higher quality, especially in single-player games with cinematic stories 2) Higher framerates up to a point. That point is probably about 200Hz. If GPU speeds increase to the point where everyone has 200fps capability, then RTX will be an important bump in quality. I think it's actually very good timing on NVIDIA's side to start pushing this now, so by the time that GPUs get powerful enough, the technology will be well-established. 3) Higher resolutions are also on the horizon. Ultrawide monitors, 1440p, 4k, etc are coming. Resolution has a very high impact on fps, an impact that can be larger than RTX-ON.
TomVDB 8y ago
> Nobody cares about the RTX feature. Gamers always prefer higher framerates over improved indirect lighting which is in practice rather subtle. You're extrapolating the opinion of a subset of gamers (high speed twitch gaming) to everybody. When I played Skyrim, I set the image quality as high as possible. Same with the Witcher 3. There are plenty of games where 144fps is not necessary to do well. As for ray tracing: it's not a huge surprise that it will stumble a bit out of the gate initially. Be we already see in Metro that it can look great. Give it some time for developers to know how to best use it and gamers to want it. I think it's unavoidable. > AMD should ... focus on reintroducing their old VLIW architecture for shaders wich saved almost an order of magnitude in power consumption. Let's ignore the "order of magnitude" hyperbole, because that's just silly. There is no evidence that the old VLIW ISA would do much better in perf/W than GCN. And it's very easy to prove that a non-VLIW ISA can do much better than GCN: Nvidia did just that. AMD switched from the old VLIW ISA to GCN because the writing was on the wall that shaders were transitioning from transitional vector calculations to generic compute shaders. If perf/W is your concern, moving to an instruction set that make it much harder to fill all the ALU slots is just the opposite of what you should be doing.
elihu 8y ago
Indirect lighting isn't a subtle effect, it's the difference between something looking real and looking fake. A lot of games go to great lengths to make the lighting look sort-of-natural, but this takes a lot of manual effort by artists and it's usually mostly static. Real-time global illumination gets you realistic lighting without extra manual effort, and it enables dynamic lighting effects such as light pouring into a dimly lit room when a door is opened or the sun changing position in the sky over time. Ray tracing also has secondary uses, like determining visibility between arbitrary points in the scene or doing collision detection.
guidedlight 8y ago
It’s a gimmick now, but it will undoubtedly included as the killer feature of the next generation of consoles. AMD is the supplier of choice for console hardware, so they likely have no choice in the matter.
shadofx 8y ago
RTX provides a unified lighting model that "just works" out of the box. It's a feature that caters to AAA game artists, who want to spend more time doing art and less time rebaking textures for 2 minutes each time they change something and writing custom shaders for the cartesian product of every lighting scenario and every dynamic character model, not just to ensure things look realistic, but also to ensure entities in the world aren't lost in insufficient lighting. Gamers would probably prefer RTX not exist, but the decision to make a game mostly comes from within the company, and when management realizes just how many expensive GLSL-proficient shader devs they can replace with passion-fueled artists willing to slave for pennies...

by sprash 8y ago

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 ago

You'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 ago

RTX is more than just lighting. reflections and shadows as well and other things

vokep 8y ago

Nobody 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 ago

Raytracing 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.

AJ007 8y ago
- It makes things easier for level designers by not requiring them to bake light maps and then spend a lot of time looking for & fix light leaks. - It isn't just visual, ray tracing can be used for collision detection. Anyone interested should take a look at the free, 600+ page Ray Tracing Gems book: http://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracinggems/unofficial_RayTracingGems_v1.4.pdf http://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracinggems/unofficial_R...
pizza234 8y ago
> in a few years it's going to replace the great majority of rasterization use-cases altogether There's no ground to be (so) sure of that. Given the current high cost, and more or less subtle effect, the prediction is uncertain, although very desirable. If in "the future" there will be a way to make RT cheap, definitely, it will be the way (I'd be very happy of that). If not, it will be another option, as it doesn't make sense to shove everybody's throat a feature that sucks 30/50% of the framerate. Additionally, as of now, we're talking about typically 30/50% of performance loss just for a single RT effect - eg. Metro Exodus uses it only for Global illumination, while Battlefield uses it only for reflections. What's going to be the performance hit for games using multiple RT effects?
- _bxg1 8y ago
  There's nothing about raytracing as a technique that puts a hard ceiling on efficiency/cost reduction. Any new technology is going to be expensive at first, and then presuming there's demand, will be made exponentially cheaper. Quake 2 has already been made to ditch rasterization altogether and use only raytracing: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/quake-ii-rtx-ray-tracing-vulkan-vkray-geforce-rtx/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/quake-ii-rtx-ray-t... It was the rasterization state of the art 22 years ago. So I'd say it will take a maximum of another 22 years to render today's AAA geometries in real-time with raytracing. Though given how much more money there is today in the gaming industry, plus the way AI augments that curve, I would take a guess that it'll be closer to 5 years.
  - Dylan16807 8y ago

xiphias2 8y ago

Although I'm not a gamer I'm excited that there's something new happening, and I wanted a CUDA card for programming anyways, so I went for the RTX. Most gamers were complaining that it doesn't do 60 FPS, but I couldn't care less about FPS. I want something beautiful.

admax88q 8y ago
I bet you do care about FPs. If you truly didn't care about FPS then you would be ray tracing on your CPU already.
- xiphias2 8y ago
  Ok, sure, what I wrote was an overstatement. But high FPS is mostly important for multiplayer first person shooters. Of course it would be amazing to have movie quality real time rendering in 120 FPS, but that is right now technologically impossible. At the same time NVIDIA and hopefully AMD are at least trying to catch up with the techniques that movies are using for a long time, while I see games stopped at some point. I watch new movies in IMAX whenever I can because I just love to see the new animations, even though I'm surrounded with teenagers and I feel that the stories are predictably dumb for me.

pitaj 8y ago

1) Some people prefer higher quality, especially in single-player games with cinematic stories 2) Higher framerates up to a point. That point is probably about 200Hz. If GPU speeds increase to the point where everyone has 200fps capability, then RTX will be an important bump in quality. I think it's actually very good timing on NVIDIA's side to start pushing this now, so by the time that GPUs get powerful enough, the technology will be well-established. 3) Higher resolutions are also on the horizon. Ultrawide monitors, 1440p, 4k, etc are coming. Resolution has a very high impact on fps, an impact that can be larger than RTX-ON.

TomVDB 8y ago

> Nobody cares about the RTX feature. Gamers always prefer higher framerates over improved indirect lighting which is in practice rather subtle. You're extrapolating the opinion of a subset of gamers (high speed twitch gaming) to everybody. When I played Skyrim, I set the image quality as high as possible. Same with the Witcher 3. There are plenty of games where 144fps is not necessary to do well. As for ray tracing: it's not a huge surprise that it will stumble a bit out of the gate initially. Be we already see in Metro that it can look great. Give it some time for developers to know how to best use it and gamers to want it. I think it's unavoidable. > AMD should ... focus on reintroducing their old VLIW architecture for shaders wich saved almost an order of magnitude in power consumption. Let's ignore the "order of magnitude" hyperbole, because that's just silly. There is no evidence that the old VLIW ISA would do much better in perf/W than GCN. And it's very easy to prove that a non-VLIW ISA can do much better than GCN: Nvidia did just that. AMD switched from the old VLIW ISA to GCN because the writing was on the wall that shaders were transitioning from transitional vector calculations to generic compute shaders. If perf/W is your concern, moving to an instruction set that make it much harder to fill all the ALU slots is just the opposite of what you should be doing.

elihu 8y ago

Indirect lighting isn't a subtle effect, it's the difference between something looking real and looking fake. A lot of games go to great lengths to make the lighting look sort-of-natural, but this takes a lot of manual effort by artists and it's usually mostly static. Real-time global illumination gets you realistic lighting without extra manual effort, and it enables dynamic lighting effects such as light pouring into a dimly lit room when a door is opened or the sun changing position in the sky over time. Ray tracing also has secondary uses, like determining visibility between arbitrary points in the scene or doing collision detection.

guidedlight 8y ago

It’s a gimmick now, but it will undoubtedly included as the killer feature of the next generation of consoles. AMD is the supplier of choice for console hardware, so they likely have no choice in the matter.

shadofx 8y ago

RTX provides a unified lighting model that "just works" out of the box. It's a feature that caters to AAA game artists, who want to spend more time doing art and less time rebaking textures for 2 minutes each time they change something and writing custom shaders for the cartesian product of every lighting scenario and every dynamic character model, not just to ensure things look realistic, but also to ensure entities in the world aren't lost in insufficient lighting. Gamers would probably prefer RTX not exist, but the decision to make a game mostly comes from within the company, and when management realizes just how many expensive GLSL-proficient shader devs they can replace with passion-fueled artists willing to slave for pennies...