AMD confirms that the RX 6000 series will support ray tracing in existing titles

[no_1_dave]

Do you think AMD hasn't provided any RT support to devs over the last 2 years? Somehow most of the console games have RT in some form and they have been developing them for quite a while I reckon.

I doubt AMD has provided any support when it comes to RT because AMD only uses the DX extensions to achieve it. Either the game engine supports Microsoft's DX Ray tracing which will likely carry on being the standard, or it supports NV's RT extensions which NV had to make because nothing existed to support RT in Vulkan.

Just because AMD only offers RT via Direct X doesn't mean Nvidia does not offer it. Nvidia has offered that from the start, they just had to make their own to also support Vulkan.

I don't understand why it's so hard for people to understand. As soon as somebody mentions that AMD are supporting an open standard fanboys try to shoot down Nvidia even though Nvidia have supported it all along. It boggles my mind

 

[otester]

Titles that use the Vulkan NV Ray extension (like Quake2 RTX) are Nvidia only for the moment unless AMD decides to support it.

 

[melmac]

I don't understand why it's so hard for people to understand. As soon as somebody mentions that AMD are supporting an open standard fanboys try to shoot down Nvidia even though Nvidia have supported it all along. It boggles my mind

It does indeed boggle the mind. And it doesn't seem to matter how often you point it out that Nvidia is using DXR and Vulkan just like AMD will. The next time Ray Tracing comes up, AMD will get praised for their open approach and Nvidia will get attacked.

 

[Rroff]

Titles that use the Vulkan NV Ray extension (like Quake2 RTX) are Nvidia only for the moment unless AMD decides to support it.

At the time most of these were developed the only [fully featured] ray tracing functions in Vulkan were nVidia extensions so either AMD will have to additionally support those, the application developers create an update or someone create a wrapper layer for existing Vulkan ray tracing titles to work on AMD.

There are provisional functions for vendor neutral ray tracing but still some way to go - as can be seen here it needs significant contribution from across the industry for an API like Vulkan:

https://www.khronos.org/registry/vulkan/specs/1.2-extensions/man/html/VK_KHR_ray_tracing.html

And AMD have been late getting in this game.

 

[4K8KW10]

Bin RT and focus time on actually making decent games, would be more welcome than a few shinies.

This is the truth and only the truth.
Ray-tracing is used only for unnecessary large amount of reflections - for example in Watch Dogs the ground is covered by water holes and only there you can see some light reflections.

Ray-tracing is not used to properly render photo-realistic objects as they appear in the real physical world.

What's the point in having reflections of animations?

https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/watchdogs-at-4k.18904545/page-5

This might just be the first true 4K game in terms of texture work & geometry detail. Gorgeous.

 

[Rroff]

Disagree - when you see the play of real time accurate light transport in a game that actually uses it properly and isn't 80-90% rasterised with a small token use of RT it brings another level to the visuals. There needs to be a big push to get over this hill.

 

[4K8KW10]

Disagree - when you see the play of real time accurate light transport in a game that actually uses it properly and isn't 80-90% rasterised with a small token use of RT it brings another level to the visuals. There needs to be a big push to get over this hill.

What about volumetric lighting and ambient occlusion which we have been having for many years?

Which games give more deep native ray-tracing?
What I see in Watch Dogs is so artificial and ugly.

 

[otester]

As someone who works with RT it's the future but we just don't have the horse power at the moment to do full path tracing in AAA grade titles, it's coming though, with AMD now being competitive it could be within 2 more gpu generations.

Having done limited small scale tests with full path tracing, the difference in quality is amazing, just fire up a sample scene in Blender and you can see the difference between RT on/off.

 

[Rroff]

Someone working on a project to "port" Quake 2 RTX to multi-vendor VK functions:

https://github.com/NVIDIA/Q2RTX/pull/73

So in theory there will be a variant of Q2RTX available at some point that can run on 6000 series GPUs.

 

[rolypolyman]

At the time most of these were developed the only [fully featured] ray tracing functions in Vulkan were nVidia extensions so either AMD will have to additionally support those, the application developers create an update or someone create a wrapper layer for existing Vulkan ray tracing titles to work on AMD.

There are provisional functions for vendor neutral ray tracing but still some way to go - as can be seen here it needs significant contribution from across the industry for an API like Vulkan:

https://www.khronos.org/registry/vulkan/specs/1.2-extensions/man/html/VK_KHR_ray_tracing.html

And AMD have been late getting in this game.

To be fair Rroff Amd have been late getting in the graphics card game in any way recently and have no where near the resources of Nvidia, never mind also competing in cpu's with Intel. Nvidia are pretty much focused on graphics cards. But Amd are here now and instead of embracing this huge shift from them we have the usual fanboy stuff all over this forum, I find it very sad to be honest, yes Amd are late but I'm sure things will improve further as they make lots more money.

 

[Rroff]

As someone who works with RT it's the future but we just don't have the horse power at the moment to do full path tracing in AAA grade titles, it's coming though, with AMD now being competitive it could be within 2 more gpu generations.

Having done limited small scale tests with full path tracing, the difference in quality is amazing, just fire up a sample scene in Blender and you can see the difference between RT on/off.

For a game, though it is nice to have, you don't need the full feature set/quality of say Blender or the plug-ins for other 3D editing/rendering software - stuff like caustics much of the time you can get away with fast approximation, some light scattering effects you can omit or limit to only 1 bounce pass, etc. and it will still look good and far better than games now - the nice thing is as well you can omit them for performance reasons and/or make them optional now and enable later for higher visual quality with minimal work later.

 

[otester]

For a game, though it is nice to have, you don't need the full feature set/quality of say Blender or the plug-ins for other 3D editing/rendering software - stuff like caustics much of the time you can get away with fast approximation, some light scattering effects you can omit or limit to only 1 bounce pass, etc. and it will still look good and far better than games now - the nice thing is as well you can omit them for performance reasons and/or make them optional now and enable later for higher visual quality with minimal work later.

Main feature of RT for me is natural lighting, so you get proper lighting in shaded areas rather than having to fake it with postfx in a non-RT workflow, Minecraft RT really demonstrates this quite well.

 

[Shaz12]

The ray tracing on the AMD cards might as well not exist as far as latest games go as the RTX 3080 barely breaks 60 fps on Watchdogs Legion with RTX AND DLSS on.

 

[zoffster1]

This is the truth and only the truth.
Ray-tracing is used only for unnecessary large amount of reflections - for example in Watch Dogs the ground is covered by water holes and only there you can see some light reflections.

Ray-tracing is not used to properly render photo-realistic objects as they appear in the real physical world.

I agree with this wholeheartedly. I recently got a 3090 and tried out "RTX on". To say I was underwhelmed is an understatement. I actually preferred it off because it just makes things ridiculously reflective like the game devs are keen to say "look here! shiny surface! look look!" Real life is NOT that shiny.

The tech and the way it is used in games needs a few years to mature. Until then I have 0 interest in ray tracing.

 

[otester]

The ray tracing on the AMD cards might as well not exist as far as latest games go as the RTX 3080 barely breaks 60 fps on Watchdogs Legion with RTX AND DLSS on.

That raises the question of what sort of FPS the 6800XT can expect under the same scenario with RT turned on, I'd guess it'd be 40 at best.

 

[Rroff]

Main feature of RT for me is natural lighting, so you get proper lighting in shaded areas rather than having to fake it with postfx in a non-RT workflow, Minecraft RT really demonstrates this quite well.

Yeah - Quake 2 RTX is somewhat limited in terms of scattered light, etc. for performance reasons but still adds a nice extra amount of lighting detail from it.

This is still work in progress and a bit rubbish at the moment but:

Spoiler

First image as rendered when playing, second is photomode though some noise due to the limits of the implementation.

 

[bemaniac]

Metro Exodus will or will not have RT on 6000 series?

 

[Quartz]

I didn't realise that Nvidia had already started tacking on their proprietary BS to ray tracing.

They hadn't. It's called being the first. The APIs came after Nvidia came out with RT.

 

[melmac]

Metro Exodus will or will not have RT on 6000 series?

It will have.

 

[LoadsaMoney]

They hadn't. It's called being the first. The APIs came after Nvidia came out with RT.

Yeah theres nothing proprietary to Nvidia.