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AMD cards don't yet have any raytracing support, right? I know it's a young technology, but they shouldn't be dragging their feet on it if they want to make a s

by _bxg1 7y ago

AMD cards don't yet have any raytracing support, right? I know it's a young technology, but they shouldn't be dragging their feet on it if they want to make a serious push for the top.

pixelpoet 7y ago
Please see my comments at the bottom (lol) about implementing a commercial GPU renderer from scratch with OpenCL (i.e. Nvidia, AMD and Intel, on Win Mac and Linux). It's definitely possible to do it yourself in many cases, and while Nvidia have their amazing RTX technology now, for the sake of not having a GPU computing monopoly it's important to push for open standards support. There is DXR supporting multiple vendors, which is sort of one step forwards and two steps back (Windows-only)...
alkonaut 7y ago
I’d like a card that is a 2080 but instead used all the extra transistors compared to a 1080 for traditional rendering, not raytracing. Raytracing might be a thing in the future but now it’s just a gimmick that uses silicon that could have churned out more frames instead.
- QuixoticQuibit 7y ago
  The RT hardware takes up a small fraction of die area based on some articles I read a year ago. Furthermore, RT isn’t a gimmick: it’s literally the holy grail of graphics. Ask yourself why AMD, Intel, and consoles are all moving to it this year.
  - alkonaut 7y ago
    It is the holy grail, but in current games it’s mostly a high cost effect that offers very little. In many games you pay a huge fps penalty for something you basically need circled in screenshots to notice. I don’t doubt it will be fantastic once it’s actually usable in the sense that people will choose to enable it. I fear next gen consoles, like current top end PCs, will have settings where you choose 4K/60fps/raytracing and you can enable two of them, or possibly just one. In priority order, raytracing is a distant third of those. I think they are all moving to it because they know they need to get there eventually, and they need consumers to pay for it all the way.
  - ahartmetz 7y ago
    Regarding the holy grail point, I like to exagerrate and say that rasterization is based on glorified sprite rotoscalers. It is not used because it models how light works, it is used because it allows fast hardware implementations. On the software side, it's lots of hacks until it looks mostly believable.
SCdF 7y ago
Real time ray tracing hardware is in a funny place right now. Firstly, it's not really as impressive as it sounds. You aren't going to be playing a game where you explore a house of mirrors any time soon. Control is a really good implementation, and it's so good it makes it really clear how quickly it falls over. Better than not ray tracing, but nowhere near non-real time traditional ray tracing. Secondly, at least with the current generation of RTX, the performance hit you take is criminal. We're talking 40%. If you're most people, who buy a graphics card to a budget based on your requirements (say 1440p/60, or 1080p/144, or whatever), supporting ray tracing means you either need to massively over spend (in my calculations about 6 months ago, I would have had to double my budget), or drop your quality presumptions in resolution and framerate drastically. Which brings us to third: support. RTX has been out for over a year, and there is really only 2-3 games where RTX makes any kind of interesting visual difference, and really only 1 (Control) that you're actually going to actively notice after playing for more than 5 minutes. AFAICT then, RTX is useful as a fun demo to play around with for a few minutes, before disabling it and getting your framerate back so you can actually play the game, and for absurdly rich people (which is convenient for nVidia, because absurdly rich streamers have normalised 1080p gaming on 2080tis for awhile now). I am looking forward to seeing the shape real time ray tracing takes on consoles, because I presume that will determine the true shape for the next decade or so.
- hnuser123456 7y ago
  >Secondly, at least with the current generation of RTX, the performance hit you take is criminal. We're talking 40%. I never really understood this argument. If you really need tons of frames for a competitive game, just turn it off. Otherwise, the games that implement it correctly show a marked visual improvement, that can't be computed any faster as far as we know. It's like saying 4k renders 4x slower than 1080p, so it's not worth it unless you can get the same frames. You can, it's just a premium technology and you'll need to budget accordingly. (this ignores the games that half-ass their raytracing and make almost no perceptible improvement, which to be fair is most of them) I do agree though, that Control (and Metro Exodus) are the best examples. Every other RTX title just uses it for reflections, which are neat but not as much of a categorical upgrade as RTGI, imo. People who spend serious chunks of time gaming (but who also remember what reality looks like...) will increasingly notice the inaccuracy or lack of ambient occlusion and shading overall. This time last year, RTX, in popular discussion, was a joke. I'm seeing more and more people who've looked into it, can see the objective improvement, and are ready to adopt it once as it enters their budget range. It would definitely be a sore sport if Navi had even worse raytracing performance than the RTX series, or none at all. As the hardware proliferates, there will be more and more reason to developers to look into implementing it at its best. Crazy idea: Maybe we could train a neural network on before/after images of raytraced scenes and implement it with a constant, minimal penalty, like DLSS, or maybe that requires too large of a network or maybe it results in a trippy mess.

by _bxg1 7y ago

AMD cards don't yet have any raytracing support, right? I know it's a young technology, but they shouldn't be dragging their feet on it if they want to make a serious push for the top.

pixelpoet 7y ago

Please see my comments at the bottom (lol) about implementing a commercial GPU renderer from scratch with OpenCL (i.e. Nvidia, AMD and Intel, on Win Mac and Linux). It's definitely possible to do it yourself in many cases, and while Nvidia have their amazing RTX technology now, for the sake of not having a GPU computing monopoly it's important to push for open standards support. There is DXR supporting multiple vendors, which is sort of one step forwards and two steps back (Windows-only)...

alkonaut 7y ago

I’d like a card that is a 2080 but instead used all the extra transistors compared to a 1080 for traditional rendering, not raytracing. Raytracing might be a thing in the future but now it’s just a gimmick that uses silicon that could have churned out more frames instead.

QuixoticQuibit 7y ago
The RT hardware takes up a small fraction of die area based on some articles I read a year ago. Furthermore, RT isn’t a gimmick: it’s literally the holy grail of graphics. Ask yourself why AMD, Intel, and consoles are all moving to it this year.
- alkonaut 7y ago
  It is the holy grail, but in current games it’s mostly a high cost effect that offers very little. In many games you pay a huge fps penalty for something you basically need circled in screenshots to notice. I don’t doubt it will be fantastic once it’s actually usable in the sense that people will choose to enable it. I fear next gen consoles, like current top end PCs, will have settings where you choose 4K/60fps/raytracing and you can enable two of them, or possibly just one. In priority order, raytracing is a distant third of those. I think they are all moving to it because they know they need to get there eventually, and they need consumers to pay for it all the way.
- ahartmetz 7y ago
  Regarding the holy grail point, I like to exagerrate and say that rasterization is based on glorified sprite rotoscalers. It is not used because it models how light works, it is used because it allows fast hardware implementations. On the software side, it's lots of hacks until it looks mostly believable.

SCdF 7y ago

Real time ray tracing hardware is in a funny place right now. Firstly, it's not really as impressive as it sounds. You aren't going to be playing a game where you explore a house of mirrors any time soon. Control is a really good implementation, and it's so good it makes it really clear how quickly it falls over. Better than not ray tracing, but nowhere near non-real time traditional ray tracing. Secondly, at least with the current generation of RTX, the performance hit you take is criminal. We're talking 40%. If you're most people, who buy a graphics card to a budget based on your requirements (say 1440p/60, or 1080p/144, or whatever), supporting ray tracing means you either need to massively over spend (in my calculations about 6 months ago, I would have had to double my budget), or drop your quality presumptions in resolution and framerate drastically. Which brings us to third: support. RTX has been out for over a year, and there is really only 2-3 games where RTX makes any kind of interesting visual difference, and really only 1 (Control) that you're actually going to actively notice after playing for more than 5 minutes. AFAICT then, RTX is useful as a fun demo to play around with for a few minutes, before disabling it and getting your framerate back so you can actually play the game, and for absurdly rich people (which is convenient for nVidia, because absurdly rich streamers have normalised 1080p gaming on 2080tis for awhile now). I am looking forward to seeing the shape real time ray tracing takes on consoles, because I presume that will determine the true shape for the next decade or so.

hnuser123456 7y ago
>Secondly, at least with the current generation of RTX, the performance hit you take is criminal. We're talking 40%. I never really understood this argument. If you really need tons of frames for a competitive game, just turn it off. Otherwise, the games that implement it correctly show a marked visual improvement, that can't be computed any faster as far as we know. It's like saying 4k renders 4x slower than 1080p, so it's not worth it unless you can get the same frames. You can, it's just a premium technology and you'll need to budget accordingly. (this ignores the games that half-ass their raytracing and make almost no perceptible improvement, which to be fair is most of them) I do agree though, that Control (and Metro Exodus) are the best examples. Every other RTX title just uses it for reflections, which are neat but not as much of a categorical upgrade as RTGI, imo. People who spend serious chunks of time gaming (but who also remember what reality looks like...) will increasingly notice the inaccuracy or lack of ambient occlusion and shading overall. This time last year, RTX, in popular discussion, was a joke. I'm seeing more and more people who've looked into it, can see the objective improvement, and are ready to adopt it once as it enters their budget range. It would definitely be a sore sport if Navi had even worse raytracing performance than the RTX series, or none at all. As the hardware proliferates, there will be more and more reason to developers to look into implementing it at its best. Crazy idea: Maybe we could train a neural network on before/after images of raytraced scenes and implement it with a constant, minimal penalty, like DLSS, or maybe that requires too large of a network or maybe it results in a trippy mess.