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NVIDIA To Announce RTX Technology

D3K said:
It's not something that can be delivered in a driver. Just like you couldn't make dx11 cards run dx12.
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I’m not implying this new technology. I’m implying if this is on the new horizon the current cards are end of life? So you get a 1 year run?
 
D3K said:
Do you have examples of where this was used in game engines?

I've just ran a full ray-trace on a simple lamp with a green glass shade and reflective brass, and it took 40secs with no background other than white.

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Sure I can give examples of game engines.

Unreal Engine 4 and Unity already support Ray Tracing via PowerVR mobile GPU’s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xcf35d3z890
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkuO9rXBtM0

https://www.imgtec.com/blog/ray-traced-shadows-vs-cascaded-shadow-maps/
In the blog they had a 50% memory reduction and a 50% speed up by doing hybrid ray tracing.

This was all done on a mobile class GPUs so I see no reason why NVidia on a full desktop GPU cannot only do the same but put in a more powerful solution. For Desktop PC gaming I am really looking forward to having a play with NVidias method.

PowerVR have posted a lot of blogs and videos on ray tracing for gaming which shows the potential and benefits NVidia should have.
 
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Pottsey said:
It can be done via a driver and old GPU's can support it if NVidia choose to go down that path.
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Possibly but Power VR were using their own gpu, vulkan, and android, which means they're getting these gains by circumventing communication with the os layer.

I've ran suntemple and it wasn't great. Think I did it on a 980 tho, could try on 1080ti.

This partnership with MS for a dx api is unknown, it could either be an extension of dx or a means to fully bypass windows with minimal overhead. If it's the latter it won't work on older cards.

They have said it's optimised on Volta for RTX, so by extension the gameworks version should work on older cards. Either way it's not going to be a nice experience by the sounds of it.
 
D3K said:
Possibly but Power VR were using their own gpu, vulkan, and android, which means they're getting these gains by circumventing communication with the os layer.

I've ran suntemple and it wasn't great. Think I did it on a 980 tho, could try on 1080ti.

This partnership with MS for a dx api is unknown, it could either be an extension of dx or a means to fully bypass windows with minimal overhead. If it's the latter it won't work on older cards.

They have said it's optimised on Volta for RTX, so by extension the gameworks version should work on older cards. Either way it's not going to be a nice experience by the sounds of it.
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That doesn't have to be the case PowerVR did the latter and it still worked on older cards and even none PowerVR GPU's. I see no reason why NVidia cannot choose to do the same thing. If anything the word optimized for Volta suggests it will work on everything only that it will work on Volta better.
 
Expanding DirectX 12: Microsoft Announces DirectX Raytracing:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12547/expanding-directx-12-microsoft-announces-directx-raytracing

A good article delving deeper into things.


yZApI4C.png


For today’s reveal, NVIDIA is simultaneously announcing that they will support hardware acceleration of DXR through their new RTX Technology. RTX in turn combines previously-unannounced Volta architecture ray tracing features with optimized software routines to provide a complete DXR backend, while pre-Volta cards will use the DXR shader-based fallback option. Meanwhile AMD has also announced that they’re collaborating with Microsoft and that they’ll be releasing a driver in the near future that supports DXR acceleration. The tone of AMD’s announcement makes me think that they will have very limited hardware acceleration relative to NVIDIA, but we’ll have to wait and see just what AMD unveils once their drivers are available.

Though ultimately, the idea of hardware acceleration may be a (relatively) short-lived one. Since the introduction of DirectX 12, Microsoft’s long-term vision – and indeed the GPU industry’s overall vision – has been for GPUs to become increasingly general-purpose, with successive generations of GPUs moving farther and farther in this direction. As a result there is talk of GPUs doing away with fixed-function units entirely, and while this kind of thinking has admittedly burnt vendors before (Intel Larrabee), it’s not unfounded. Greater programmability will make it even easier to mix rasterization and ray tracing, and farther in the future still it could lay the groundwork for pure ray tracing in games.

Unsurprisingly then, the actual DXR commands for DX12 are very much designed for a highly programmable GPU. While I won’t get into programming minutiae better served by Microsoft’s dev blog, Microsoft’s eye is solidly on the future. DXR will not introduce any new execution engines in the DX12 model – so the primary two engines remain the graphics (3D) and compute engines – and indeed Microsoft is treating DXR as a compute task, meaning it can be run on top of either engine. Meanwhile DXR will introduce multiple new shader types to handle ray processing, including ray-generation, closest-hit, any-hit, and miss shaders. Finally, the 3D world itself will be described using what Microsoft is terming the acceleration structure, which is a full 3D environment that has been optimized for GPU traversal.
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Though even with the roughly one year head start that Microsoft’s closest developers have received, my impression from all of this that DXR is still a very long-term project. Perhaps even more so than DirectX 12. While DX12 was a new API for existing hardware functions, DXR is closer to a traditional DirectX release in that it’s a new API (or rather new DX12 commands) that go best with new hardware. And as there’s essentially 0 consumer hardware on the market right now that offers hardware DXR acceleration, that means DXR really is starting from the beginning.
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Nvidia RTX:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1254...tracing-acceleration-for-volta-gpus-and-later

AMD is working on a similar tech:

https://hexus.net/tech/news/graphics/116354-amd-nvidia-working-closely-microsoft-dxr-api/

AMD collaboration

HEXUS received an email bulletin from AMD about its own work on Microsoft's DirectX Raytracing API. It said that it was "closely collaborating with Microsoft," on the future of the API. More specifically it is helping to "define, refine and support the future of DirectX12 and ray tracing". Without mentioning any of its own hardware/software technologies, AMD said that it "remains at the forefront of new programming model and application programming interface (API) innovation based on a forward-looking, system-level foundation for graphics programming." AMD hinted that it would have more to share about PC-based ray tracing techniques in the future.
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Am all for graphic improvements so long has the performance is there for both sides. GameWorks has very bad reputation for looking worst than what devs can already do or the performance is just very bad on both sides of the fence.

Been playing FarCry 4 again now that I have the power to max this game fully out I was playing around with GameWorks stuff and I not surprised to see performance lower for an effect that looks so much worst!

What images look best here :D GodRays
2018.03.19-07.31_01.png


2018.03.19-07.31.png
 
I welcome the idea but.....

D3K said:
Do you have examples of where this was used in game engines?

I've just ran a full ray-trace on a simple lamp with a green glass shade and reflective brass, and it took 40secs with no background other than white.

Normal modelling view vs. Ray Traced
YoBAgWF.png
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The difference between the two images is matte vs glossy surface with reflections, and more transparency/different colour of the second image.
Look at Need for Speed reflections. They have been present in the NFS games for a decade, if not more, and without any ray-tracing.
NFS Carbon, NFS Underground, etc.





 
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