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> as to why AMD can't create a similar dedicated ray-tracing functionality in their chips? They do and it works well. > out how Meta and Google are doing this

> as to why AMD can't create a similar dedicated ray-tracing functionality in their chips? They do and it works well. > out how Meta and Google are doing this themselves. Meta and Google develop products everywhere all the time. The author doesn't play or develop games, so it's okay that he doesn't really know anything or can meaningfully comment on it. He just took what Huang said and Ctrl+C Ctrl+V'd it. WHY DO PEOPLE CARE ABOUT RAYTRACING? Photoreal gets financing. For your game, for your crypto thing, whatever. Raytracing makes photoreal demos at pre-financing costs. Also essential reason why Unreal Engine is appealing. Unity is for people who make games, Unreal is for people who finance games. WHY DO PEOPLE CARE ABOUT AI-GENERATED CONTENT? The Darwinian force here is the same: people believe you can make a game (or whatever) out of DALL-E or whatever dogshite. They don't believe you when you say you would hire an artist in Indonesia for the same cost (or whatever). So you'll get financed by saying one and not the other. The reasons why don't really matter. It's idiosyncratic. You're going to spend the money however it is. Just like every startup. Also the AI generation thing attracts people who think they're the smartest, hottest shit on Earth. That attitude gets financing. Doesn't mean it reflects reality. DO THESE TECHNOLOGIES MATTER? I don't know. What does Ben Thompson know about making fun video games? It's so complicated. I doubt Big Corporate or VC capital is going to have financed the innovative video game that uses raytracing or AI generated content. It's going to be some indie game developer.

411111111111111 4y ago
> Also essential reason why Unreal Engine is appealing. Is that why unreal engine deprecated ray tracing? You're honestly quiet clueless considering your phrasing. I bet you haven't worked in a large studio working with unreal engine either.
- gamdevthrowaway 4y ago
  > Is that why unreal engine deprecated ray tracing? Unreal Engine didn't deprecate ray tracing, they are using the same DirectX DXR APIs in a different place. But I think you already know that. > I bet you haven't worked in a large studio working with unreal engine either. Have you?
  - 411111111111111 4y ago
    > Unreal Engine didn't deprecate ray tracing, They literally did. They found that Lumen looked better and used less performance then hardware ray tracing. At least thats what they said in a developer interview a few month ago. > Have you? No, I haven't. My day job isn't even in the game industry. I've only dabbled a little after I bought my first VR headset. The either was because you were dissing the article author by saying they weren't a game dev, with the argument that UE is only used because it looks shiny to management, with is pure nonsense.
    - cypress66 4y ago
      That's incorrect. Lumen supports both software and hardware raytracing. Software rt lumen is lower quality, often faster, supports any hardware and has some pretty big limitations. Hardware rt lumen is higher quality, often slower, needs hardware support and has a lot less limitations.
      - 411111111111111 4y ago
        I cannot find the interview I remembered so you're both almost certainly right wrt hardware ray tracing. I still think that their original premise about unreal engine is nonsense however.
TillE 4y ago
> I doubt Big Corporate or VC capital is going to have financed the innovative video game that uses raytracing Sorry, you don't believe that a AAA game developer is going to take full advantage of the latest high-end GPU capabilities? That's the one thing they have reliably done for the past 25+ years.
- Jasper_ 4y ago
  Uh, AAA game developers not using NVIDIA-developed tech? Yes. Tessellation was a huge fail that didn't deliver on performance. Geometry shaders were another huge fail. Mesh shaders are shaping up to be pretty unimpressive. Pretty much all of NVIDIA's middleware (Ansel, Flow, HairWorks, WaveWorks, VXGI) haven't really caught on fire; usually they're placed into the game through NVIDIA paying developers large sums of money, and usually ripped out upon the next game release. What instead happens is that game developers are developing large bunches of tech in-house that exploit new features like compute shaders, something NVIDIA has struggled to keep up with (lagging behind AMD in async compute, switching compute/graphics pipelines has a non-zero cost, lack of FB compression from compute write). I say all of this as a graphics developer working inside the games industry. Ben makes a bunch of historical errors, and some pretty critical technical errors, that I consider it to be almost a puff piece for NVIDIA and Jensen. (NVIDIA definitely did not invent shaders, programmability is a blurry line progressing from increasingly-flexible texture combiners, pioneered by ArtX/ATI, NVIDIA looooved fixed-function back then. And raytracing really does not function like however Ben thinks it does...)
  - gamdevthrowaway 4y ago
    > something NVIDIA has struggled to keep up with (lagging behind AMD in async compute, switching compute/graphics pipelines has a non-zero cost) Someone who knows what he is talking about. Like Ben Thompson could write an e-mail to any of the 10,000 people who know something about this and just ask, right?
- gamdevthrowaway 4y ago
  The keyword there was innovative, I'm sorry. Like imagine Portal, an innovative rendering game - now, is there something innovative that is going to be done with a raytracing feature like accelerated screen space reflections? No, probably not, people could render mirrors for ages. It's going to be like, one guy who creates cool gameplay with the hardware raytracing APIs, just like it was a small team that created Portal.

411111111111111 4y ago

> Also essential reason why Unreal Engine is appealing. Is that why unreal engine deprecated ray tracing? You're honestly quiet clueless considering your phrasing. I bet you haven't worked in a large studio working with unreal engine either.

gamdevthrowaway 4y ago
> Is that why unreal engine deprecated ray tracing? Unreal Engine didn't deprecate ray tracing, they are using the same DirectX DXR APIs in a different place. But I think you already know that. > I bet you haven't worked in a large studio working with unreal engine either. Have you?
- 411111111111111 4y ago
  > Unreal Engine didn't deprecate ray tracing, They literally did. They found that Lumen looked better and used less performance then hardware ray tracing. At least thats what they said in a developer interview a few month ago. > Have you? No, I haven't. My day job isn't even in the game industry. I've only dabbled a little after I bought my first VR headset. The either was because you were dissing the article author by saying they weren't a game dev, with the argument that UE is only used because it looks shiny to management, with is pure nonsense.
  - cypress66 4y ago
    That's incorrect. Lumen supports both software and hardware raytracing. Software rt lumen is lower quality, often faster, supports any hardware and has some pretty big limitations. Hardware rt lumen is higher quality, often slower, needs hardware support and has a lot less limitations.
    - 411111111111111 4y ago
      I cannot find the interview I remembered so you're both almost certainly right wrt hardware ray tracing. I still think that their original premise about unreal engine is nonsense however.

TillE 4y ago

> I doubt Big Corporate or VC capital is going to have financed the innovative video game that uses raytracing Sorry, you don't believe that a AAA game developer is going to take full advantage of the latest high-end GPU capabilities? That's the one thing they have reliably done for the past 25+ years.

Jasper_ 4y ago
Uh, AAA game developers not using NVIDIA-developed tech? Yes. Tessellation was a huge fail that didn't deliver on performance. Geometry shaders were another huge fail. Mesh shaders are shaping up to be pretty unimpressive. Pretty much all of NVIDIA's middleware (Ansel, Flow, HairWorks, WaveWorks, VXGI) haven't really caught on fire; usually they're placed into the game through NVIDIA paying developers large sums of money, and usually ripped out upon the next game release. What instead happens is that game developers are developing large bunches of tech in-house that exploit new features like compute shaders, something NVIDIA has struggled to keep up with (lagging behind AMD in async compute, switching compute/graphics pipelines has a non-zero cost, lack of FB compression from compute write). I say all of this as a graphics developer working inside the games industry. Ben makes a bunch of historical errors, and some pretty critical technical errors, that I consider it to be almost a puff piece for NVIDIA and Jensen. (NVIDIA definitely did not invent shaders, programmability is a blurry line progressing from increasingly-flexible texture combiners, pioneered by ArtX/ATI, NVIDIA looooved fixed-function back then. And raytracing really does not function like however Ben thinks it does...)
- gamdevthrowaway 4y ago
  > something NVIDIA has struggled to keep up with (lagging behind AMD in async compute, switching compute/graphics pipelines has a non-zero cost) Someone who knows what he is talking about. Like Ben Thompson could write an e-mail to any of the 10,000 people who know something about this and just ask, right?
gamdevthrowaway 4y ago
The keyword there was innovative, I'm sorry. Like imagine Portal, an innovative rendering game - now, is there something innovative that is going to be done with a raytracing feature like accelerated screen space reflections? No, probably not, people could render mirrors for ages. It's going to be like, one guy who creates cool gameplay with the hardware raytracing APIs, just like it was a small team that created Portal.