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

[RBImGuy]

One of the big problems is having to accommodate hardware that can't do it at all - something like Quake 2 where they can strip out pretty much any reliance on DX11 or 12, etc. features to make the game look good without ray tracing is far more feature rich at the same performance level as games that are trying to mix in both techniques with token RT features that don't interfere if you have to turn them off. To accommodate both non-RT and/or hybrid and a full path traced renderer for the same game would require significant developer time to support both branches sadly.

console a good ground to get things started.

There are various strategies that can be deployed to reduce the overhead (rays doing nothing). AMDs approach is extremely flexible (traversals controlled by shaders) and that's where i believe big navi has an upper hand despite being weaker synthetically. I could think of 2 optimisations while writing this post:

• label bounding volumes.. on whether they contain reflective surfaces.. so that the primary ray query ignores these boxes while testing for reflection.. for games that allow only RT reflections option
• index bounding volumes with minimum distance from camera, if the max ray threshold is less than the indexed distance you can skip the volume without testing

Ampere, on the other hand seems to be too rigid with RT acceleration.
Maybe amd will be able to spring a surprise, who knows?

way over my head and I am so fast

People wanging on like RT makes much difference! Gimmick

RT a gimmick still.
Few games, hardware needed goes beyond peoples budget.
None of the games I play has RT nor will have it anytime soon.
RT isnt a deciding factor for gamers.

zen3 however as a cpu is if you game at 360hz e-sport.
then big navi is as you still want a cool fast gpu to not burn your psu down.
AMD is really changing the gaming landscape.

 

[Rroff]

People wanging on like RT makes much difference! Gimmick

I hope to see it become a difference. People vastly underestimate what it can do when properly supported and implemented - often getting hung up on early implementations where it is overly shiny and using that to detract from the technology as a whole.

Thanks. I'm assuming they used this form of raytracing in crysis, so i'll check out some benchmarks

The Crytek implementation is pretty ugly (not visually) ultimately - even 5 years ago it would have been praise worthy but now it is just one leg in the past. It might look impressive superficially, especially in tech demos where you can hide where it works less well, but when you actually start to look at the detail there are significant compromises involved that have no place in the future.

 

[gpuerrilla]

People wanging on like RT makes much difference! Gimmick

Nutshell.

 

[Phate]

I disagree about it being a gimmick. Seeing the effects of it on the gameplay trailers from the next gen games, I am really looking forward to seeing what it can do and how lighting will improve in games over the next generation.

 

[Phate]

https://twitter.com/LisaSu/status/1315648926993854466

Btw - just to bring convo back on track, this to me says that their Radeon 6000 series is "big navi" rather than one specific GPU - thats how I read it anyway?

 

[Chuk_Chuk]

The Crytek implementation is pretty ugly (not visually) ultimately - even 5 years ago it would have been praise worthy but now it is just one leg in the past. It might look impressive superficially, especially in tech demos where you can hide where it works less well, but when you actually start to look at the detail there are significant compromises involved that have no place in the future.

Are you able to elaborate or point me in the direction of an article that details the pitfalls of its implementation?

 

[Rroff]

https://twitter.com/LisaSu/status/1315648926993854466

Btw - just to bring convo back on track, this to me says that their Radeon 6000 series is "big navi" rather than one specific GPU - thats how I read it anyway?

The position of the comma tends to separate those two. The last bit is building hype for the 6000 series.

EDIT: Though in the presentation she says "6000 series which we now affectionately call Big Navi" - I wonder if they are doing that because the 6000 series is purely a big core or whether they are doing that to distinguish between Navi 1x and Navi 2x - it seems quite ambiguous.

Are you able to elaborate or point me in the direction of an article that details the pitfalls of its implementation?

I don't think anyone has done a deep dive to compare both - very generalised Crytek's approach uses a lot of work around to avoid the performance issues of ray tracing such as building extremely simplified versions of the scene, restricting some effects to screen space only or mixing in screen space with full scene, using voxel structures to represent or guide the ray tracing which in some scenarios mean it can only be done for static scenery, etc.

 

[EastCoastHandle]

I also believe that ray tracing is still a gimmick.

Let's not forget that ray tracing isn't bringing anything new that rasterization techniques cannot do. I think that gets lost in translation. I get the impression that some believe that ray tracing brings to the table something that we've not already seen in games now which is not true. Its just a 2nd option (imo).

Right now from what we've seen from ray tracing in games is it only looks different. It's not realistically better then what rasterize techniques offer.

The whole point of ray tracing is to make things look realistic not just different. Which is where its just a gimmick right now. Granted we now have Hardware that can implement its use. However we still need the ability to see a difference and its approach to realism in these games that's being used in.

And we're talking the entire scene not a few streamed assets. Which is the achilles heel of the use of Ray tracing right now. And only compliments rasterized games. It's not set apart. As its still too costly.

As it stands now the best we will get out of it is what we see out of consoles. Which isn't saying much. Unless you want to reflect non-reflective objects. Or, globally illuminate putting Bloom to shame. Or, shadows that just don't look much different at all versus what's used before.

All of which takes a microscope to notice the subtle differences most of the time in pc games.

 

[Chuk_Chuk]

I don't think anyone has done a deep dive to compare both - very generalised Crytek's approach uses a lot of work around to avoid the performance issues of ray tracing such as building extremely simplified versions of the scene, restricting some effects to screen space only or mixing in screen space with full scene, using voxel structures to represent or guide the ray tracing which in some scenarios mean it can only be done for static scenery, etc.

So you dislike the the cheats used in this implementation? As opposed to the cheats used in other implementations?

 

[Rroff]

Let's not forget that ray tracing isn't bringing anything new that rasterization techniques cannot do. I think that gets lost in translation. I get the impression that some believe that ray tracing brings to the table something that we've not already seen in games now which is not true.

That is a horrible distortion of the truth - older techniques have no light transport - things like scattering and other radiosity effects are either impossible to do or very fake using multiple light probes, real time accurate indirect lighting even in the better attempts like Frostbite engine look horribly fake when you compare them against ray tracing. Never mind things like caustics (which in non-ray tracing implementations are simply approximated with projector effect - even if caustics in the kind of ray tracing we will see in games for awhile will be fast approximation but they will at least be using light transport) or proper full scene reflection.

When you actually see the effect of having actual light transport in action in real time in a proper implementation of path tracing it is like night and day to the best of old techniques.

So you dislike the the cheats used in this implementation? As opposed to the cheats used in other implementations?

Depends on the type of cheats used - cheats to make light transport work even if approximated are a whole another league to cheats that try and work around actually using ray tracing in the first place as much as possible which generally require a lot of special casing to control behaviour and/or performance for ideal effect - which somewhat goes against the ultimate goal of ray tracing.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

I also believe that ray tracing is still a gimmick.

Let's not forget that ray tracing isn't bringing anything new that rasterization techniques cannot do. I think that gets lost in translation. I get the impression that some believe that ray tracing brings to the table something that we've not already seen in games now which is not true. Its just a 2nd option (imo).

Rasterization has to use tricks to fake effects which are correctly simulated with ray tracing, so for example global illumination where light bouncing picks up the colour of the surface it has reflected off and colours the next surface it hits, that cannot be done with rasterization, all you can really do if you want it done in real time is fake it by spawning new fake light sources that have the colour of some nearby object. Reflections that include details which are outside of the field of view also cannot work with rasterization. Ultimately the cost and developer time to implement techniques to fake these subtle effects is getting hard and harder with rasterization and the end goal is moving rendering to fully ray traced scenes like we see with minecraft and quake. That transition is going to ultimately take many generations of video cards increasing the amount of rendering power we have access to in order to achieve that, and so implementations need to be stepping stones where we do it in small amounts at first with heavy optimizations and ease into doing it more and more.

 

[Rroff]

Rasterization has to use tricks to fake effects which are correctly simulated with ray tracing, so for example global illumination where light bouncing picks up the colour of the surface it has reflected off and colours the next surface it hits, that cannot be done with rasterization, all you can really do if you want it done in real time is fake it by spawning new fake light sources that have the colour of some nearby object. Reflections that include details which are outside of the field of view also cannot work with rasterization. Ultimately the cost and developer time to implement techniques to fake these subtle effects is getting hard and harder with rasterization and the end goal is moving rendering to fully ray traced scenes like we see with minecraft and quake. That transition is going to ultimately take many generations of video cards increasing the amount of rendering power we have access to in order to achieve that, and so implementations need to be stepping stones where we do it in small amounts at first with heavy optimizations and ease into doing it more and more.

Quake 2 (last update) actually scares me how far it has come - even though it is missing some effects i.e. light scattering off a transparent surface (i.e. water) doesn't happen (though I think that is more something the developer never got around to implementing - so I had to fake it in some test scenes using underwater lights purporting to be reflected light) while they do have fast approximation of caustics through a transparent surface. Only the sun light has proper simulation of bounced light and even then the number of bounces is heavily constrained with other emissive sources even more constrained in terms of how many additional rays after the first hit will be generated and very limited transport of the colour of previous bounces.

But just seeing the play of light throughout the scene in a way that older techniques can't even come close to is quite something - I've spent a lot of time building test scenes in Quake 2 RTX but it is let down a bit by the older geometry engine in the game which lacks support for things like static meshes and minimum brush resolution is like 1 inch hah.

 

[humbug]

Depends on the type of cheats used - cheats to make light transport work even if approximated are a whole another league to cheats that try and work around actually using ray tracing in the first place as much as possible which generally require a lot of special casing to control behaviour and/or performance for ideal effect - which somewhat goes against the ultimate goal of ray tracing.

Or in other words optimization.

You do realize when you walk into a room with no windows everything outside that room disappears? What does it matter if a reflection in a distant puddle is a screen space reflection if it doesn't look any different anyway? In Cryteks demo can you tell me which reflections are not fully Path Traced?

All games are full of "Cheats" if they werent they wouldn't look half as good or your performance would be atrocious.

 

[EastCoastHandle]

That is a horrible distortion of the truth - older techniques have no light transport - things like scattering and other radiosity effects are either impossible to do or very fake using multiple light probes...

Rasterization has to use tricks to fake effects which are correctly simulated with ray tracing, so for example global illumination where light bouncing picks up the colour of the surface it has reflected off and colours the next surface it hits, that cannot be done with rasterization, all you can really do if you want it done in real time is fake it by spawning new fake light sources that have the colour of some nearby object. Reflections that include details which are outside of the field of view also cannot work with rasterization.

...

Thanks for providing the detail necessary to prove the point that is just a second option. As you demonstrated it doesn't change the fact of what you see in global illumination. It doesn't change the fact of how you see Shadows, etc. These options aren't new when rt is used. The end results are the same. How rt is used now only compliments rasterized games.

We are aware of how Ray tracing actually works and how it works differently from rasterized games. However that is not the point, and far from it. It is the end result and its implementation in current games which is the focal point not the techniques used. Which becomes irrelevant and lost in the details as the end result is always the same.

It just compliments rasterized games using only a few features of rt. Even now when some of those features are used the game still needs to be downsample as the average midrange hardware isn't capable.

Now if the day comes in which a game is truly, completely Ray traced that brings a higher level of realism to the seems that it presents then we can talk. And, no cb2077 doesnt count. But I seriously doubt it would be on this generation of Hardware LOL.

 

[Rroff]

Thanks for providing the detail necessary to prove the point that is just a second option. As you demonstrated it doesn't change the fact of what you see in global illumination. It doesn't change the fact of how you see Shadows, etc. The end results are the same.

I mean this in a way intended to prod you to do some research but that opinion only comes from complete ignorance.

 

[humbug]

If i told you this scene contains both Ray Traced Reflections and Screen Space Reflections, now that you know this can you tell me which is which in this scene?

 

[EastCoastHandle]

I mean this in a way intended to prod you to do some research but that opinion only comes from complete ignorance.

Oh, we got name-calling now...
You're own anger is self defeating. And the point still stands. Rt implementation didn't create shadows, global illumination etc. Again, its just a secondary option as demonstrated in the above picture when it comes to games. And no I'm not talking about pics and demos.

 

[Chuk_Chuk]

Depends on the type of cheats used - cheats to make light transport work even if approximated are a whole another league to cheats that try and work around actually using ray tracing in the first place as much as possible which generally require a lot of special casing to control behaviour and/or performance for ideal effect - which somewhat goes against the ultimate goal of ray tracing.

Apart from quake and minecraft what other games don't remove objects from the scene when doing reflection calcualtions?

Surely it is more important to get playable frame rates so people can actually use the tech (while the hardware catches up) rather than being overly concerned as to what cheats are being used and ending up with a feature that most users will turn on just to take a screenshot before tuirning it off to play the game?

 

[humbug]

Just for fun, anyone?

 

[Rroff]

Oh, we got name-calling now...
You're own anger is self defeating. And the point still stands. Rt implementation didn't create shadows, global illumination etc. Again, its just a secondary option as demonstrated in the above picture when it comes to games. And no I'm not talking about pics and demos.

No anger in my reply - I simply don't have my head in it or the time right now to go into enough detail myself - ray tracing is fully capable of effects far beyond what we can do with traditional techniques once you have light transport in the equation and the opinion you are proclaiming only comes from ignorance of the potential.

Apart from quake and minecraft what other games don't remove objects from the scene when doing reflection calcualtions?

Surely it is more important to get playable frame rates so people can actually use the tech (while the hardware catches up) rather than being overly concerned as to what cheats are being used and ending up with a feature that most users will turn on just to take a screenshot before tuirning it off to play the game?

Aside from Quake 2 AFAIK nothing has a proper implementation of path tracing or a similar level of full scene integration (I don't think even Minecraft has the same feature set) - all the games I'm aware of it is just used as token effects and often badly - and in that respect the criticism is fair enough but extrapolating that to doing down ray tracing in games the way certain posters are is another matter.