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> Alas the tantalizing prospect of real time raytracing seems to be backburnered under the AI hype onslaught. Can you elaborate on this? Is that because ray tr

> Alas the tantalizing prospect of real time raytracing seems to be backburnered under the AI hype onslaught. Can you elaborate on this? Is that because ray tracing needs only simple vector units, while AI is driving tensor-type architectures?

AkBKukU 2y ago
Not OP, but to provide some historical perspective, RTX hardware raytracing is very firmly a gimmick and it isn't AI nonsense that's going to be the end of it. It's going to go the way of PhysX, 3D Vision, and EAX audio. Cool, but complicated and not worth the effort to game devs. Game designers have to make all the lighting twice to fully implement RT, and it's just not worth the effort to them. Nvidia's own site[1] lists a total of 8 Full RT compatible games, half of which they themselves helped port. There are far more games that "use" it, but only in additional to traditional lighting at the same time to minimize dev costs. Based on that and past trends, I would personally predict it to be dropped after a generation or two unless they can reuse the RT cores for something else and keep it around as a vestigial feature. [1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/nvidia-rtx-games-engines-apps/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/nvidia-rtx-games-e...
- sgift 2y ago
  "Full RT" means the game uses 100% raytracing for rendering (in some mode), which currently needs still far too much power to be a mainstream thing and is only added in a few games to show the prowess of the engine (IIRC a review of the Cyberpunk 2077 Full RT mode only a 4090 is really able to provide the power needed). The important entry is "yes", which shows far more entries and means there's Raytracing enhancements in addition to rasterization. So, no, it's quite the opposite of what you stated: RT gets more important all the time, is not a gimmick and there's zero reason to assume it will be dropped in the future.
  - jorvi 2y ago
    It is a gimmick in that you have to sacrifice far too much performance. An RTX 4080 will need to run at 1080+upscaling+framegen to get above 60 (!) FPS with ray tracing. No thank you, I’ll take buttery smooth real 120 FPS at 4K. Especially because games have gotten so good at faking good lighting. Maybe with the RTX 6xxx series it’ll be viable.
    - josephg 2y ago
      It does look fabulous though. I have a 4090 and absolutely turn RT on for cyberpunk. Even with a 4090 I use upscaling for a good frame rate. But the resulting image quality is just spectacular. That game is really beautiful.
      - jorvi 2y ago
        No contest there, it looks really great! But for me, not enough to go back to “choppy” gameplay.
    - sgift 2y ago
      Personally, I'd rather vote 120fps and 4k as gimmick. If I had to choose between Raytracing or 120fps? Always Raytracing.
      - jorvi 2y ago
        You could argue 4K as a gimmick if you’re sitting at TV distances, but the difference between 60 and 120 FPS is extremely jarring. Try playing at 120 and then mid-session capping it at 60.
- FloatArtifact 2y ago
  I would hardly say it's a gimmick. Now that frameworks like epic's unreal engine and others implemented for the developer. I don't see these technologies going away. One can hope that nvidia's dominance lessons overtime. I believe the next big thing is generative AI for NPCs as soon as the models are optimized in the hardware for the average GPU. Let's see what the next generation of Intel AMD and arm produce. Windows branding of an AI is going to make this possible. It's going to take years though for the market to be saturated with hardware capable for developers to pay attention.
- rowanG077 2y ago
  You do realize that RT greatly simplifies the job artists and engineers have to do to make a scene look well lit? The only reason it's done twice currently is because GPUs aren't powerful enough yet. RT will simplify game production.

AkBKukU 2y ago

Not OP, but to provide some historical perspective, RTX hardware raytracing is very firmly a gimmick and it isn't AI nonsense that's going to be the end of it. It's going to go the way of PhysX, 3D Vision, and EAX audio. Cool, but complicated and not worth the effort to game devs. Game designers have to make all the lighting twice to fully implement RT, and it's just not worth the effort to them. Nvidia's own site[1] lists a total of 8 Full RT compatible games, half of which they themselves helped port. There are far more games that "use" it, but only in additional to traditional lighting at the same time to minimize dev costs. Based on that and past trends, I would personally predict it to be dropped after a generation or two unless they can reuse the RT cores for something else and keep it around as a vestigial feature. [1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/nvidia-rtx-games-engines-apps/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/nvidia-rtx-games-e...

sgift 2y ago
"Full RT" means the game uses 100% raytracing for rendering (in some mode), which currently needs still far too much power to be a mainstream thing and is only added in a few games to show the prowess of the engine (IIRC a review of the Cyberpunk 2077 Full RT mode only a 4090 is really able to provide the power needed). The important entry is "yes", which shows far more entries and means there's Raytracing enhancements in addition to rasterization. So, no, it's quite the opposite of what you stated: RT gets more important all the time, is not a gimmick and there's zero reason to assume it will be dropped in the future.
- jorvi 2y ago
  It is a gimmick in that you have to sacrifice far too much performance. An RTX 4080 will need to run at 1080+upscaling+framegen to get above 60 (!) FPS with ray tracing. No thank you, I’ll take buttery smooth real 120 FPS at 4K. Especially because games have gotten so good at faking good lighting. Maybe with the RTX 6xxx series it’ll be viable.
  - josephg 2y ago
    It does look fabulous though. I have a 4090 and absolutely turn RT on for cyberpunk. Even with a 4090 I use upscaling for a good frame rate. But the resulting image quality is just spectacular. That game is really beautiful.
    - jorvi 2y ago
      No contest there, it looks really great! But for me, not enough to go back to “choppy” gameplay.
  - sgift 2y ago
    Personally, I'd rather vote 120fps and 4k as gimmick. If I had to choose between Raytracing or 120fps? Always Raytracing.
    - jorvi 2y ago
      You could argue 4K as a gimmick if you’re sitting at TV distances, but the difference between 60 and 120 FPS is extremely jarring. Try playing at 120 and then mid-session capping it at 60.
FloatArtifact 2y ago
I would hardly say it's a gimmick. Now that frameworks like epic's unreal engine and others implemented for the developer. I don't see these technologies going away. One can hope that nvidia's dominance lessons overtime. I believe the next big thing is generative AI for NPCs as soon as the models are optimized in the hardware for the average GPU. Let's see what the next generation of Intel AMD and arm produce. Windows branding of an AI is going to make this possible. It's going to take years though for the market to be saturated with hardware capable for developers to pay attention.
rowanG077 2y ago
You do realize that RT greatly simplifies the job artists and engineers have to do to make a scene look well lit? The only reason it's done twice currently is because GPUs aren't powerful enough yet. RT will simplify game production.