NVIDIA 4000 Series

[Dirk Diggler]

I never get the comparison to oled/HDR, they are completely different technologies setting out to achieve completely different things.

The comparison isn't that they are similar, it's that OLED is instantly noticeable with zero FPS compromise and no proprietary restrictions. RT has never impressed me, and the fact that you're having to explain the benefit sort of makes the point IMO.

 

[Grim5]

The comparison isn't that they are similar, it's that OLED is instantly noticeable with zero FPS compromise and no proprietary restrictions. RT has never impressed me, and the fact that you're having to explain the benefit sort of makes the point IMO.

Actually they are kind of similar. HDR aims to increase image contrast and color volume, areas where OLED is significantly better than LCD in as well.

 

[Nexus18]

I forgot about that^ Remember watching it and was amazed at the workload time saved for the devs. Granted they still have to do the manual labour version too because the game has to have the option to use RT or not (for now) - But in the near future when all GFX cards can do RT with some form of speed whether FSR/DLSS/XeSS or whatever, then we will see RT used with no option to turn it off and games can be released faster too from all that massive time saved not having to bake in lighting.

Although Lumin in UE5 kind of flips that on its head, not true RT, lighting but just as good and real time?

Which = big money savings too, less developers or/and less work hours required.

IIRC, UE 5 lumen method is just software accelerated RT, it's still ray tracing based at its core.

EDIT:

Unreal Engine 5 Lumen vs Ray Tracing: Which One is Better?

Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 was one of the most popular game engines of the last generation. It was widely used by AAA giants like EA, Ubisoft, and Microsoft, as well as tons of indie studios. With Unreal Engine 5 and its Lumen and Nanite technologies, Epic is looking to extend its dominance in the...

www.hardwaretimes.com

Okay, so before we begin, let’s make one thing very clear. Lumen is based on ray-tracing, albeit a more optimized, hybrid form of it to allow more widespread adoption, across different graphics architectures without the need to own a $1,000 GPU.

Lumen is Unreal Engine 5’s new fully dynamic global illumination and reflections system that is designed for next-generation consoles. Lumen is the default global illumination and reflections system in Unreal Engine 5. It renders diffuse interreflection with infinite bounces and indirect specular reflections in large, detailed environments at scales ranging from millimeters to kilometers.
From the developers

By default, Lumen uses software ray-tracing (doesn’t utilize RT cores/accelerators), a highly optimized form of it. It uses multiple forms of ray-tracing including screen-tracing (SSRT), Signed Distance Fields (SDFs), and Mesh Distance Fields (MDFs) in parallel to calculate the global illumination of the scene depending on the objects, their distance from the screen, and certain other factors.

I read a very good post on reddit the other day about RT, probably a bit too long for most people though!

Reddit - Dive into anything

www.reddit.com

Spoiler

Pre-rendered (aka "baked") lighting might have been the way to go when games were level based and had very restricted environments with static lighting. Open worlds would be a PITA to be pre-lit just for their size alone. And don't forget dynamic lighting with day-and-night cycles, as well as weather effects. "Pre-rendered" lighting is a thing of the past.

The difference between current-gen "conventional" lighting and ray-tracing is the need of shadowmaps. Conventional rasterized shadows are typically a projection of those shadowmaps that are being generated on time. There's been some pretty interesting filtering techniques like PCSS Percentage Closer Soft Shadows or even HFTS Hybrid Frustrum Traced Shadows. This was peak Shadow Technology with games like Assassin's Creed Unity and Tom Clancy's The Division in 2014 and 2016, respectively. But did you notice, where those developments were headed? Hybrid gibberish Traced Shadows. You can only do so much with shadowmaps. Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands shows this impressively. The "Very High" shadow quality setting uses conventional shadowmaps. Up until this setting, only shadowmap size and quality get improved. The sadows themselves are "hard", meaning they represent the exact edges found in the shadowmap. Only the "Ultra" setting introduces soft shadows, that are dependent on distance and geometry. This setting looks substantially better, to the point of me not wanting to drop to "Very High", even at severe performance costs.

So, conventional rasterized shadows can be easily improved by improving the quality of the shadowmap generation. But this comes with diminishing returns, as shadowmap resolution increases. Only soft shadow filtering introduces a further increase in visual fidelity (and realism). Still, lighting will look flat, as there are only two states: shadow or no shadow, with the exception of softened edges. To overcome these limitations, you now need Ambient Occlusion (e.g. HBAO Horizon Based AO, SSAO Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) to darken contact areas and otherwise occluded (blocked from direct sunlight). HBAO and SSAO are rough approximations and therefore tend to either over- or underdo the supposed effect. HBAO is considered higher quality, but comes at an also higher cost compared to SSAO. This technique, on the other hand, is relatively fast, but has the disadvantage of being a screen-spaced effect, that is oblivious towards any geometry or lighting that is outside of the current frame. This can result in odd lighting changes when moving the camera in certain scenarios. Nonetheless, AO helps softening shadows, grounding geometry and increasing the realism of a rendered scene. Yet, what it can't do, is illuminating areas.

That's where we're heading to the subject of Global Illumination, or GI. Ths is an effect that occurs when light bounces off of surfaces and onto others. This indirect lighting is what makes scenes shine in terms of realism and also why Ray Tracing is so important. All of the above mentioned effects (shadows, Ambient Occlusion) have been widely implemented with current rasterization technolgy. Global Illumination, however, is sort of a wet dream. With baked lighting, artists could implement these light bounces, most notable when bright and colorful objects diffusely reflect onto darker surroundings. With dynamic lighting, the only possibilty to come even a tiny bit close to this, is combining shadows, ambient occlusion and geometry data from a scene to approximate areas that could/should experience global illumination effects. Most applications are simply brightening darker areas in close proximity to light or illumniated areas in post-processing, with a roll-off to create a sense of depth to a scene. It doesn't come close to how light actually behaves. Which leads to the an often overlooked topic: reflections.

Reflections have been around in computer graphics for a long time and they pretty much still work the same way. You create a scene, you have a reflective surface, you calculate vertices from the camera to the corners/boundaries of the reflective surface and then reflect and extend them towards the camera again. The resulting mirrored frame is then being projected onto the reflective surface. This fairly simple concept can be "cake" if you copy the current scene behind the mirror and make it translucient. It can, however, be quite demandung as well, if you have to create the same scene two times only to display the second instance on a reflective surface. Reflection quality is therefore highly selective and adjustable, since higher fidelity comes with higher complexity and cost. Older games sometimes used "pre-rendered" mirrors, that only included the static world, so you couldn't see your avatar in the mirror. Lame. It's not all about mirrors, though. It's every reflective surface. Cars are mostly easy, since their metallic paint is somewhat of a colored mirror and especially sky domes can be easily reflected. The same goes for puddles or wet asphalt. You just sprinkle in some coarse filters for the surface texture and you get a fairly good looking reflection. But the more you think about it, the more complex those reflections can become. And even more so if you factor in Global Illumination and the reflection of light sources.
All of this leads to only one possible step forward: Ray Tracing (with PBR physical based rendering as a bonus). With this step, you can do all 3 (or 4, depending on how you count them) of the beforementioned topics with one solution. Ray-traced shadows, ray-traced reflections and ray-traced Global Illumination, with Ambient Occlusion being the by-product of the latter. Also, screen-space effects are a thing of the past with these, as off-camera scene geometry and surfaces are not excluded from the path tracing. This streamlines and simplifies the artistic efforts in creating scenes. Whether it is important to you or whether you'd even notice the difference att all is besides the point, that Ray Tracing objectively creates more realistically lit and shaded environments. We're just not fully there, yet, since most current Ray Tracing implementations only include a selection of ray-traced effects, e.g. only shadows and reflections or tend to have restrictions in path lengths/bounces or ray count to compensate for calculation time. If you ever laid your hands on a path traced renderer and actually rendered with PB materials and the like, you'll know just how much of a difference this can make and at what cost a single still image can come.

Ray Tracing may have been only a gimmick with 2000 series and of limited use or only playable with DLSS with 3000 cards, but someday, GPUs will have enough horsepower to come pretty close to realtime Ray Traced Global Illumination with physical based rendering. Simply dismissing Ray Tracing as

one of the most overmarketed, overrated technologies

is small-minded, a vast oversimplification and does not do the technolgy any justice.

The comparison isn't that they are similar, it's that OLED is instantly noticeable with zero FPS compromise and no proprietary restrictions. RT has never impressed me, and the fact that you're having to explain the benefit sort of makes the point IMO.

Yeah sorry, wasn't just referring to your post in general, I've seen a lot of people compare HDR to ray tracing, iirc, we even had a poll of what you would rather have..... i.e. people (not saying specifically you) seem to think they achieve similar things, when they don't, they don't even work in anywhere the same way.

Reason I'm explaining it is because people don't understand it as proven by comments like "it's a gimmick" It's far from a gimmick, again, hence why everyone from all brands and every developer studio is jumping on it regardless of who is sponsoring it.... Ray tracing is also not properietary based either.... hence why ray tracing works on amd (including consoles) and intel hardware.

 

[Chuk_Chuk]

And whilst not gaming, here is a recent statement from the first film (outside of pixar films) to use it, which shows the benefit it brings:

Australian Film is World's First to Use Real-Time Ray Tracing in Production

A technology mostly found in video games is making its way into film production.

petapixel.com

The one thing that people always say as well, is they want more dynamic environments and environments to react to how your surroundings change etc. RT allows this to be achieved.

This article does not relate to the first paragraph of your post. Most Films have not used pre-baked lighting in a very long time (i think in over a decade).

This article is comparing real-time RT and the removal of green screens to traditional offline rendering. The dynamic enviroment they are referring to is being able to cast the light on the actors and props using these huge displays which is something that you can't do with a green screen.

So there is no comparison with regards to time saved by games developers.

I'm also wondering if they are including final render time of the offline render in the time saved.

I forgot about that^ Remember watching it and was amazed at the workload time saved for the devs. Granted they still have to do the manual labour version too because the game has to have the option to use RT or not (for now) - But in the near future when all GFX cards can do RT with some form of speed whether FSR/DLSS/XeSS or whatever, then we will see RT used with no option to turn it off and games can be released faster too from all that massive time saved not having to bake in lighting.

Although Lumin in UE5 kind of flips that on its head, not true RT, lighting but just as good and real time?

In the grand scheme of the game development timeline, the time saved will be imperceptibleto gamers.

 

[Quartz]

I'm worried about the reduced incremental improvements. It used to be that the high end became mainstream in 2-3 years. Now we're looking at 6-8 years. That's too long. That applies to both AMD and Nvidia.

A long while ago, when the 20 series came out, I wrote that RT would only mature and become affordable to the masses (xx50 and xx60) with the third generation (i.e. the 40 series). I'm now seeing maturity, but Nvidia are pricing themselves out of the mainstream market when their 12 GB 4080 is apparently actually a 4060 Ti.

I do hope AMD and Intel step up and give Nvidia the kicking they deserve.

 

[mrk]

Yeah I think all would have been fine if the pricing structure was on point. The reason for this will likely be as suspected, too much overstock of 30 series cards, and there not actually being a mid-range or entry level 40 series card for this new gen, so they want people to buy that excess 30xx stock which satisfies their view of entry/mid range.

 

[Mr Jack]

A long while ago, when the 20 series came out, I wrote that RT would only mature and become affordable to the masses (xx50 and xx60) with the third generation (i.e. the 40 series). I'm now seeing maturity, but Nvidia are pricing themselves out of the mainstream market when their 12 GB 4080 is apparently actually a 4060 Ti.

Nvidia haven't announced their mainstream cards yet. The 4090 and 4080 were never going to be mainstream cards. If the prices and performance of the 4050/60/70 are there then it will be real time RT for the masses.

 

[Chuk_Chuk]

Nvidia haven't announced their mainstream cards yet. The 4090 and 4080 were never going to be mainstream cards. If the prices and performance of the 4050/60/70 are there then it will be real time RT for the masses.

The die number and size says otherwise.

 

[Darujhistan]

Nvidia haven't announced their mainstream cards yet. The 4090 and 4080 were never going to be mainstream cards. If the prices and performance of the 4050/60/70 are there then it will be real time RT for the masses.

The 4060ti is already announced as the 4080 Gimped Edition...

 

[Mr Jack]

The die number and size says otherwise.

You can engage in the silliness of arguing that a card is "really" a 4060 - as if they meant anything at all - or you can just wait and see what actually gets announced.

 

[Poneros]

RT became affordable to the masses in Jan 2019, when the 2060 launched. Hasn't really been rivalled since, and I wouldn't really hold out hope on 4050/60, they will be expensive too.

 

[Chuk_Chuk]

You can engage in the silliness of arguing that a card is "really" a 4060 - as if they meant anything at all - or you can just wait and see what actually gets announced.

The 4080 12GB has a die size of 295mm2 (For comparison, the RTX 3050 has a die size of 276mm2.)

How much can Nvidia cut down a 295mm2 die, to make 3 other SKUs?

I like AdoredTV's theory about the 5000 series being released when the stock of 3000 cards has been cleared and the price of lovelace cards needs to be dropped. The 5070 would literally be the 4080 12GB but priced properly.

 

[Darujhistan]

You can engage in the silliness of arguing that a card is "really" a 4060 - as if they meant anything at all - or you can just wait and see what actually gets announced.

It is really a 4060ti though.

 

[gpuerrilla]

The comparison isn't that they are similar, it's that OLED is instantly noticeable with zero FPS compromise and no proprietary restrictions. RT has never impressed me, and the fact that you're having to explain the benefit sort of makes the point IMO.

I agree. Some people promote what they think is 'better'. Rarely is it the actual case.

 

[gpuerrilla]

Nvidia haven't announced their mainstream cards yet. The 4090 and 4080 were never going to be mainstream cards. If the prices and performance of the 4050/60/70 are there then it will be real time RT for the masses.

Alright Jack!

Unless the 4070 ends up costing half of the gimped edition 4080 or comparitively spec for spec is considerably better performance its make believe until we see it. Just look how pants the 3050 was and they still overcharge for it!

 

[Nexus18]

I agree. Some people promote what they think is 'better'. Rarely is it the actual case.

Eh... It has got nothing to do with promoting what is better..... It's a clear fact that ray tracing is better when you look at what it sets out to achieve..... Hence why the industry wants and is using it, hence why all companies applicable are getting behind it. Not rocket science.

Are you still going to be saying that rasterization is better in 10+ years time... Well knowing you, you probably will

 

[Raelgun]

Eh... It has got nothing to do with promoting what is better..... It's a clear fact that ray tracing is better when you look at what it sets out to achieve..... Hence why the industry wants and is using it, hence why all companies applicable are getting behind it. Not rocket science.

To be honest, when it comes to you, I don't think you care about the developers as opposed to being hard on Nvidia.

Most of the pc releases coming are trash and more so with ray tracing, and getting really old games released with ray tracing is ******* weak and shows how bad of a place pc gaming really is right now. I am convinced you are living in some kind of disillusioned world and really grasping at some weird thing to justify the 4000 series, the price is bad and Nvidia are asshats for trying to standardise it.

 

[Raelgun]

Also what it says to achieve, there is no big game in ray tracing only, with no exclusive ray tracing, the benefits for it from a developer point of view is null and void

 

[mrk]

Is this real life?

 

[gpuerrilla]

To be honest, when it comes to you, I don't think you care about the developers as opposed to being hard on Nvidia.

Most of the pc releases coming are trash and more so with ray tracing, and getting really old games released with ray tracing is ******* weak and shows how bad of a place pc gaming really is right now. I am convinced you are living in some kind of disillusioned world and really grasping at some weird thing to justify the 4000 series, the price is bad and Nvidia are asshats for trying to standardise it.

Exactly. There are forumites out there that are likeminded after all! *cheers*