AMD Navi 23 ‘NVIDIA Killer’ GPU Rumored to Support Hardware Ray Tracing, Coming Next Year

[melmac]

Except you don't need RT cores to do ray tracing. nVidia claim to have worked on this tech for 10 years yet non of their research papers on Ray Tracing going back 10 years mention any sort of specialized hardware only the need for more FLOPS. nVidia really loves their closed ecosystem and are willing to use hardware as the lock even when it isn't necessary. I personally am not interested in this approach when it comes to gaming market because locked ecosystems leads to higher prices and no consumer in their right mind wants this.

It's not locked though. It uses Microsoft's Directx(DXR) DXR would call AMD's solution if AMD had any solution to call. The Quake II redone to be completely Ray Traced uses Vulkan. Again, IF AMD had a Ray TRacing solution up and running, the Vulkan API would use it when playing on an AMD GPU.

Why are people still getting this wrong?

 

[melmac]

+1!

The tensor cores on the RTX cards are designed for machine learning, where NVidia took a computation die and used it as a gaming die. It is like they were desperately looking for a way to use the cores and RTX was the result.
Keep in mind that the RTX dies are absolutely massive for their TFLOPs due to tensor cores, so they just passed that cost onto the consumer.

For example, RTX2080's 13.6B transistors and 545mm2 die vs. GTX1080ti's 11.8B transistors and 471mm2 die. The 1080ti has ~10% better performance. Go figure.

They don't use the Tensor cores for Ray Tracing.

 

[chaparral]

So perhaps show some restraint? Is the need to play games at 4K really so important it's worth any cost?

I also look at it as if am not willing to fork out the price for a high end GPU then I might as well just play games on a console and put up with the lower quality console graphics

One the main reasons I use a PC to game on is due to they have the best graphics but that only comes with the big outlay for a high end GPU

 

[Phixsator]

It's not locked though. It uses Microsoft's Directx(DXR) DXR would call AMD's solution if AMD had any solution to call. The Quake II redone to be completely Ray Traced uses Vulkan. Again, IF AMD had a Ray TRacing solution up and running, the Vulkan API would use it when playing on an AMD GPU.

Why are people still getting this wrong?

I'm well aware of DXR, perhaps you misunderstood me or i were perhaps not clear enough in my point? I did start that post by saying you didn't need RT cores to do ray tracing and I do see the whole RTX solution as a way to try and monopolice Ray Tracing as a brand specific feature.

 

[melmac]

I'm well aware of DXR, perhaps you misunderstood me or i were perhaps not clear enough in my point? I did start that post by saying you didn't need RT cores to do ray tracing and I do see the whole RTX solution as a way to try and monopolice Ray Tracing as a brand specific feature.

So you know that it's not a closed, locked ecosystem, right? It's just you mentioned it a few times in your last post in regards to Ray Tracing. It's about as closed and locked as Adaptive Sync. IF AMD had a solution, be it software or hardware, the game would use that, as Microsoft's DXR supports both hardware and software Ray Tracing solutions.

Ray Tracing doesn't need RT cores. Why does that matter? That's how Nvidia went about it. AMD can come up with their own solution. But, until then, Nvidia does have a monopoly, their's is the only brand that has it. If AMD had the only Ray Tracing solution out, don't you think they would market the hell out of it too?

 

[D.P.]

I'd like to see something clarified. RTX cards are either faster or they have RTX, not both. A 2070S is faster than a 5700XT until you turn RTX on, then it's slower.

I see it time and again, people arguing that more FPS is worth the Nvidia tax then cite RTX when it gets close as further justification, promptly tanking the superior frame rate!

Which is it? More fps is better or RTX? Sadly we can't have both...yet

if you want to compare apples and oranges.

in reality if you are not a troll you could cmspre RTX on both both cards, and in this case the the 2079s would destroy the 5700XT. it is because of that AMD don't bother releasing RTX drivers.

 

[Rroff]

It is like people complaining because turning on hardware physics reduces framerate...

I'm well aware of DXR, perhaps you misunderstood me or i were perhaps not clear enough in my point? I did start that post by saying you didn't need RT cores to do ray tracing and I do see the whole RTX solution as a way to try and monopolice Ray Tracing as a brand specific feature.

Sure you don't "need" RT cores to do ray tracing but something along those lines is the only way to accomplish it as things stand - doing it on general compute cores is around 6 times slower and the approach that Crytek have used while admirable and would have been a big thing even 3-5 years ago (when something even close to what they are doing with RTX in realtime was a complete fantasy) is ultimately a dead end involving a lot of special case optimisation compared to "pure" ray tracing techniques.

The actual API support for it in DXR and Vulkan's RT extensions don't care what hardware is underneath - you have bunch of functions an application developer can invoke with their input data and the API basically tells the drivers go away and get me results for this without doing anything that locks it to RTX hardware - it can even be run on Pascal's shaders as demonstrated with Quake 2 but they just aren't capable of the performance needed. Nothing stopping AMD doing similar...

Not aimed at you but I'm getting a bit bored with the same tedious negative responses that are trotted out by people because they either don't understand what is going on and/or because AMD can't do it yet - when you actually notice the techniques in action in Quake 2 RTX and understand how that can be applied to more modern applications it is almost mind blowing that we are pretty much there now not still waiting for another 10 years into the future.

They don't use the Tensor cores for Ray Tracing.

From what I can make out although Tensor cores could be used and are part of the solution in OptiX it seems most applications are using a variation of spatiotemporal variance guided filtering that runs on the compute shaders for denoising - while it could be accelerated on Tensor cores significantly it apparently results in an overall contention for resources on the GPU which needs to be hand tuned to avoid and potentially being trained for the task to get best results which developers don't want to spend time on. Although there was talk of using the Tensor cores to optimise some parts of the BVH process (I assume by using machine learning techniques) again from what I can see there is no such functionality currently active in any of the games I have access to the source of.

 

[Troezar]

@Rroff I think everyone would love to see ray tracing. The only issues I see are companies trying to market it as proprietary and the argument that high framer is king whilst extolling the virtues of RTX, currently a frame rate killer.

I'm looking forward to whoever can bring high frame rates and ray tracing at the same time. Raising the performance bar is always a good thing, just look at what AMD have done for CPU's.

 

[Rroff]

@Rroff I think everyone would love to see ray tracing. The only issues I see are companies trying to market it as proprietary and the argument that high framer is king whilst extolling the virtues of RTX, currently a frame rate killer.

I'm looking forward to whoever can bring high frame rates and ray tracing at the same time. Raising the performance bar is always a good thing, just look at what AMD have done for CPU's.

I'm a big frame rate junky and would for multiplayer always choose that but for single player what something like a proper ray tracing implementation brings I'd happily take some sacrifice for framerate wise within reason. Wish I had a Turing card and external capture setup so I could get some footage of some of the stuff I'm playing with in action but with a 1070 and ~10 FPS at best with decent quality settings it isn't really possible to capture any useful video from it and static screenshots don't do it justice.

 

[TNA]

I'm a big frame rate junky and would for multiplayer always choose that but for single player what something like a proper ray tracing implementation brings I'd happily take some sacrifice for framerate wise within reason. Wish I had a Turing card and external capture setup so I could get some footage of some of the stuff I'm playing with in action but with a 1070 and ~10 FPS at best with decent quality settings it isn't really possible to capture any useful video from it and static screenshots don't do it justice.

Won’t be long now mate, you will have a 3070 to do it with

 

[Rroff]

Won’t be long now mate, you will have a 3070 to do it with

I'm doing a fair bit of RTX based stuff at the moment so close to breaking down and getting a 2080S or Ti but trying to hold off.

 

[TNA]

I'm doing a fair bit of RTX based stuff at the moment so close to breaking down and getting a 2080S or Ti but trying to hold off.

Yeah, would be sad if you end up with one of those when you waited all this time and now new tech is being released this year you break.

 

[LoadsaMoney]

del

 

[GAC]

more leaked guesswork on a card that isnt aimed at us

just wait 3 weeks for the announcement in march for actual info from amd

 

[Satchfanuk]

if you want to compare apples and oranges.

in reality if you are not a troll you could cmspre RTX on both both cards, and in this case the the 2079s would destroy the 5700XT. it is because of that AMD don't bother releasing RTX drivers.

I think you mean compare Ray Tracing (RT) on both cards. RTX is a brand name, not a feature. Ray Tracing is the feature.

 

[D.P.]

I think you mean compare Ray Tracing (RT) on both cards. RTX is a brand name, not a feature. Ray Tracing is the feature.

Nvidia uses RTX as branding but RTX is now used as a common acronym for ray tracing, so the 2 can be used inter changeable. Especially since nothing Nvidia has done with their ray tracing uses proprietary APIs. The RTX code path can be used by AMD if they created a Microsoft DXR compatible driver.

 

[bru]

Nvidia uses RTX as branding but RTX is now used as a common acronym for ray tracing, so the 2 can be used inter changeable. Especially since nothing Nvidia has done with their ray tracing uses proprietary APIs. The RTX code path can be used by AMD if they created a Microsoft DXR compatible driver.

Sorry DP but he is correct. It's the Freesync thing all over again but the other way round this time, Nvidia want RTX to be the standard way of talking about ray tracing but it is just their branding for it. As it stands we have no idea how AMD will brand their version.

 

[melmac]

Not aimed at you but I'm getting a bit bored with the same tedious negative responses that are trotted out by people because they either don't understand what is going on and/or because AMD can't do it yet.

Agreed.

From what I can make out although Tensor cores could be used and are part of the solution in OptiX it seems most applications are using a variation of spatiotemporal variance guided filtering that runs on the compute shaders for denoising - while it could be accelerated on Tensor cores significantly it apparently results in an overall contention for resources on the GPU which needs to be hand tuned to avoid and potentially being trained for the task to get best results which developers don't want to spend time on. Although there was talk of using the Tensor cores to optimise some parts of the BVH process (I assume by using machine learning techniques) again from what I can see there is no such functionality currently active in any of the games I have access to the source of.

Good info. My understanding of it is that they can't use the Tensor cores for denoising because it cause a bottleneck/delay in the pipeline. The RT cores can do the Ray tracing and the denoising at the same time as other stuff is going on, but, if you used the tensor cores for the denoising, they would have to wait until everything else was finished.

 

[D.P.]

Sorry DP but he is correct. It's the Freesync thing all over again but the other way round this time, Nvidia want RTX to be the standard way of talking about ray tracing but it is just their branding for it. As it stands we have no idea how AMD will brand their version.

I agree it is their branding, but if you ever actually followed any game develop discussions the industry now use the acronym "RTX" to describe ray tracing in general. This is of course Nvidia's master plan all along. Just like when people say they are going to hoover their living room, they don;t specifically mean the brand Hoover, it is just a verb.

 

[MissChief]

I bought a 2070Super over a 5700XT because I have a G-Sync only screen. And as much as it pains me, I have history with AMD's drivers being awful and keep reading here and elsewhere they still have problems. If I didn't have a G-Sync only screen and I could trust AMD drivers I'd have had no issue buying an AMD card, just not right now.