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

[PrincessFrosty]

Doesn’t seem to make much difference at the moment. As long as you’re on PCIe you’re all good.

It doesn't. I have 2x Samsung 960 Pro 512Gb in RAID 0 (striped for speed) and max out the PCI-e 4x 3.0 bandwidth of 4GB/sec sequential read/write, it has next to no impact on loading vs an SATA constrained SSD maxing out at like 700MB/sec. Benefits in games are really rare, the only decent one I've seen is streaming assets in Subnautica which has tile based biomes that stream in as you swim into them which can lead to severe stutter and the drive basically eliminates that. That probably has more to do with bad streaming in the engine than anything else.

But...if you're putting money into storage now, you will want to consider NVMe drives very closely, possibly even PCI-e 4.0 and faster up to 8GB/sec drives like the Samsung 980 with 7GB/sec sequential reads. The reason for this is around Jan Microsoft have plans to release DirectStorage for windows, which is the same technology they use for the new Xbox. It's gives GPUs direct access to NVMe storage allowing them to access the data directly rather than going through the CPU and asset decompression can happen on the GPU, this frees up CPU cores during asset loading and should massively speed up game load time.

The end game of this technology is to really start to do away with loading times and make asset streaming so fast that you don't really need loading zones in games, it all becomes very much seamless. The PS5 is pushing a similar thing but have their own version. Nvidia already support this in the 3000 series with RTX IO which is their integration with this technology and I'd 100% expect AMD to do something similar to have their own integration. My bet is we'll start to see the first games take advantage of this on the PC as soon as 2021 as long as MS don't delay the windows update. Since the consoles support it I'd expect engine adoption to happen super fast.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-is-coming-to-pc/

 

[4K8KW10]

People will then just start arguing over some irrelevant point in my post and/or attack me instead of what I'm saying - so I won't waste my time. If anyone cares they can look at my posting history and see how often I was right with things like the capacitor issue, use of Samsung 8nm on the 3080/90 when everyone was claiming 7nm TSMC, etc. etc. if people want me posting proof then they need to bring these threads up to something a bit more approaching speakers corner. Instead half the time it is like a bunch of howling monkeys in here.

I absolutely agree with you. I don't see why anyone would attack you so aggressively for a thing that is out of their competence and don't care about it, really.

 

[KentMan]

People will then just start arguing over some irrelevant point in my post and/or attack me instead of what I'm saying - so I won't waste my time. If anyone cares they can look at my posting history and see how often I was right with things like the capacitor issue, use of Samsung 8nm on the 3080/90 when everyone was claiming 7nm TSMC, etc. etc. if people want me posting proof then they need to bring these threads up to something a bit more approaching speakers corner. Instead half the time it is like a bunch of howling monkeys in here.

The classic defence of someone who has no proof, classic smokescreen and blaming everyone else, check my unblemished history yada yada..

Stop making assumptions and passing them off as facts if you dont want to be called out for it.

No one minds if you acknowledge your speculating, infact you would probably be applauded for it, rather than condescendingly passing it off as truths and then putting up a classic "i cant be bothered with this anymore" defence when asked to prove it.

Not if you want to retain any credibility

 

[Rroff]

he only decent one I've seen is streaming assets in Subnautica which has tile based biomes that stream in as you swim into them which can lead to severe stutter and the drive basically eliminates that. That probably has more to do with bad streaming in the engine than anything else.

The engine really falls apart in the later stage of the game in that respect I guess it has a lot of stored information about what you've done by that point it has to process through.

It would be nice to see games take what Subnautica did but to a higher level - there is something that sticks with you about that experience and the way the world streams rather than loading points is part of it.

The classic defence of someone who has no proof, classic smokescreen and blaming everyone else, check my unblemished history yada yada..

Stop making assumptions and passing them off as facts if you dont want to be called out for it.

No one minds if you acknowledge your speculating, infact you would probably be applauded for it, rather than condescendingly passing it off as truths and then putting up a classic "i cant be bothered with this anymore" defence when asked to prove it.

Not if you want to retain any credibility

I know what you are doing - only interested in undermining my credibility because you don't like what I'm saying and will keep chipping away hoping to find that one chink - I've been through all this before in this section so many times and even when I actually bother in response to posters like you to go to the effort of showing my full proof it won't satisfy you because it isn't what you actually want to see.

 

[4K8KW10]

The classic defence of someone who has no proof, classic smokescreen and blaming everyone else, check my unblemished history yada yada..

Stop making assumptions and passing them off as facts if you dont want to be called out for it.

No one minds if you acknowledge your speculating, infact you would probably be applauded for it, rather than condescendingly passing it off as truths and then putting up a classic "i cant be bothered with this anymore" defence when asked to prove it.

Not if you want to retain any credibility

Would you please stop before it gets too late?

You want information of confidential character in the contracts between the corps.
Just accept it as a truth.

 

[KentMan]

The engine really falls apart in the later stage of the game in that respect I guess it has a lot of stored information about what you've done by that point it has to process through.

It would be nice to see games take what Subnautica did but to a higher level - there is something that sticks with you about that experience and the way the world streams rather than loading points is part of it.



I know what you are doing - only interested in undermining my credibility because you don't like what I'm saying and will keep chipping away hoping to find that one chink - I've been through all this before in this section so many times and even when I actually bother in response to posters like you to go to the effort of showing my full proof it won't satisfy you because it isn't what you actually want to see.

No i am actually adult enough to hold my hands up and admit i am wrong when i need to.

All i ask for is proof, nothing else. As this helps to understand what to expect from products, helps build a picture of what to expect pricewise.

If you choose to think this is just everyone aiming personal attacks at you, then maybe the Internet is not for you

 

[Rroff]

Just accept it as a truth.

I don't ask anyone to just accept it as truth on the merit of my posts in isolation alone.

But it is hilarious how far less substantial information is accepted as truth in these threads because it is what the poster wants to believe yet they have a problem with what I'm saying because it isn't what they want to read.

As I said if the tone of these threads was raised I'm happy to raise my game but I'm not going to waste my time in what all too often resorts to playground bickering - anyone who cares can see my level of credibility for themselves from my previous history as to when I've been right or wrong and I usually say when I'm speculating/guessing anyhow.

If you choose to think this is just everyone aiming personal attacks at you, then maybe the Internet is not for you

Great start...

 

[PrincessFrosty]

The engine really falls apart in the later stage of the game in that respect I guess it has a lot of stored information about what you've done by that point it has to process through.

It would be nice to see games take what Subnautica did but to a higher level - there is something that sticks with you about that experience and the way the world streams rather than loading points is part of it.

Yeah it's a fantastic game, and insane experience as a regular game and especially in VR, but the technology it's built on isn't technically very good at asset streaming, they'd probably need to pre-cache adjacent biome assets to the one you're in and refresh that cache as you pass between them, only spread out over 20-30 seconds rather than all at once, that'd probably do it. But honestly this is the sort of thing that DirectStorage seeks to fix, developers really shouldn't be wasting their time working around engine or asset limitations they should just be creating beautiful worlds. Hopefully that's in our near future for gaming.

 

[Rroff]

Yeah it's a fantastic game, and insane experience as a regular game and especially in VR, but the technology it's built on isn't technically very good at asset streaming, they'd probably need to pre-cache adjacent biome assets to the one you're in and refresh that cache as you pass between them, only spread out over 20-30 seconds rather than all at once, that'd probably do it. But honestly this is the sort of thing that DirectStorage seeks to fix, developers really shouldn't be wasting their time working around engine or asset limitations they should just be creating beautiful worlds. Hopefully that's in our near future for gaming.

I don't know if my setup has some advantages (using X79 platform so quad channel memory and other IO beefed up compared to your average consumer platform) but I never really saw the stutter and late asset pop in other people complained about unless I tried video recording which obviously hits IO and then I saw the kind of pop in / delayed LOD changes other people talked of. Though later in the game it started to fall apart a bit in that respect.

Personally I really hate obviously tiled textures - completely immersion breaking - so the ability to stream resources and have unique texturing over entire surfaces, etc. I'm a big fan of.

Seems to be something both AMD and nVidia are working towards though - I'm not sure what the actual implementation is but the 6000 series firmware stuff that was leaked has additional IO features listed which is probably for stuff like this or some other related feature we haven't seen yet.

EDIT: Would love to see a game like Subnautica that was fully ray traced and had 4x the asset detail - that would be mind blowing in VR.

 

[KentMan]

Yeah it's a fantastic game, and insane experience as a regular game and especially in VR, but the technology it's built on isn't technically very good at asset streaming, they'd probably need to pre-cache adjacent biome assets to the one you're in and refresh that cache as you pass between them, only spread out over 20-30 seconds rather than all at once, that'd probably do it. But honestly this is the sort of thing that DirectStorage seeks to fix, developers really shouldn't be wasting their time working around engine or asset limitations they should just be creating beautiful worlds. Hopefully that's in our near future for gaming.

Do you see this infinity cache if it does exist on RDNA2 cards being a big thing? In my extremely limited understanding the assets would be cached into the gpu for faster access right? Surely that could help improve fps as stuff will get loaded faster?

 

[EastCoastHandle]

I haven't seen this fever pitch discussion attempting to denounce the performance of Radeon gpus before release in quite a few generations now.

Let's see, the last few generations the gpus were laughed at scorned and mocked. I don't recall them denouncing performance this heavy handed. As it apparently was no real threat to competition.

But this is a bit different. Something I haven't seen since the old ATI days. Just going by that alone looks like we will see some real competition.

 

[gpuerrilla]

Do you see this infinity cache if it does exist on RDNA2 cards being a big thing? In my extremely limited understanding the assets would be cached into the gpu for faster access right? Surely that could help improve fps as stuff will get loaded faster?

Not nvidia mate. People wont experience it, maybe 10% frequenters on here. Can report back though how it is with the version they come up with akin to StoreMI but on GPU side?

 

[PrincessFrosty]

I don't know if my setup has some advantages (using X79 platform so quad channel memory and other IO beefed up compared to your average consumer platform) but I never really saw the stutter and late asset pop in other people complained about unless I tried video recording which obviously hits IO and then I saw the kind of pop in / delayed LOD changes other people talked of. Though later in the game it started to fall apart a bit in that respect.

Personally I really hate obviously tiled textures - completely immersion breaking - so the ability to stream resources and have unique texturing over entire surfaces, etc. I'm a big fan of.

Seems to be something both AMD and nVidia are working towards though - I'm not sure what the actual implementation is but the firmware stuff that was leaked has additional IO features listed which is probably for stuff like this or some other related feature we haven't seen yet.

They must support it somehow if not in the new GPU launch then at least in driver updates later on. I don't think it requires special hardware, basically DirectStorage implementation is done in windows and then to see maximum benefit for streaming things like textures all AMD/Nvidia need to do is enable asset decompression on the GPU itself, why to my understanding is what RTX IO is, it's all software as far as I know. Basically with Subnautica I went from a SATA SSD to NVMe config you see in my sig, so really all that changed was a 6x increase in storage bandwidth.

Do you see this infinity cache if it does exist on RDNA2 cards being a big thing? In my extremely limited understanding the assets would be cached into the gpu for faster access right? Surely that could help improve fps as stuff will get loaded faster?

Infinity cache to my understanding is the cache on the actual GPU itself, which will have super fast access times, if you make that a lot larger then more data that is repeatedly requested from vRAM can simply be stored on the GPU itself causing less demand on the memory bandwidth to pull this data from the vRAM. I've read rumors about them using a 256bit memory bus which is smaller than something like the 3080, and so they'd normally have to run that memory a lot faster to get the memory bandwidth as high as they need it (memory bandwidth is essentially bus width multiplied by memory speed) and so it could be that infinity cache is to help them target a smaller bus width.

DirectStorage is more to do with assets streaming from the NVMe SSD across the PCI-e bus straight into vRAM. It has just occurred to me that infinity cache might not be very helpful in those circumstances, often assets are stored compressed on disk and the slow down we see in loading today is in the decompression of those assets on the CPU before they're passed to vRAM (in classic loading) where as DirectStorage allows SSD -> vRAM direct access, but the GPU itself will have to do any decompressing of those assets. And that's going to be heavy on memory bandwidth on the vRAM as these assets stream into the GPU for decompression and then the final result streams back to vRAM, massive cache locally for that probably wont help because decompression is lots of unique data being used once, and not the same pieces of data being used over and over. Lower memory bandwidth (IF that's what they end up with, not confident enough to say this) might make that slower.

I think they're using GDDR6 which is slower? I'm not sure I've not done that much big Navi research, but if they do have slower vRAM and a smaller bus width then my guess is infinity cache is designed to overcome that shortfall by lowering demand on memory bandwidth. But i'd bet DirectStorage takes a hit because of that.

 

[Rroff]

I haven't seen this fever pitch discussion attempting to denounce the performance of Radeon gpus before release in quite a few generations now.

Let's see, the last few generations the gpus were laughed at scorned and mocked. I don't recall them denouncing performance this heavy handed. As it apparently was no real threat to competition.

But this is a bit different. Something I haven't seen since the old ATI days. Just going by that alone looks like we will see some real competition.

You haven't been around here long then - happens every ATI/AMD launch since at least 2005 when I was first aware of these forums.

 

[Rroff]

Yeah it's a fantastic game, and insane experience as a regular game and especially in VR,

A little while ago I tried to simulate what some of it would look like with ray tracing in Quake 2 RTX but the geometry engine in Q2 is just far too limiting

Spoiler

I might have another go at making something playable when I've had time to mod in support for at least some form of meshes for environment scenery, etc.

Personally I think Subnautica is one game that would really benefit from path tracing.

 

[MissChief]

AMD really are keeping this under wraps very well, there’s been very few leaks. Almost to the point there’s little point in coming here until the 28th.

 

[EastCoastHandle]

You haven't been around here long then - happens every ATI/AMD launch since at least 2005 when I was first aware of these forums.

Lol, I've known of this forum for quite sometime.

And no, it wasn't this toxic by a long shot. As a matter of fact I recall, for example, the community here giving out advice on how to overclock hbm on fury even though that card was no real competitor. Leading up to it release was no real surprise.

So again, using this as a metric it does appear that RDNA 2 is shaping up to be a real competitor. We will see soon enough.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

A little while ago I tried to simulate what some of it would look like with ray tracing in Quake 2 RTX but the geometry engine in Q2 is just far too limiting

Spoiler

I might have another go at making something playable when I've had time to mod in support for at least some form of meshes for environment scenery, etc.

Personally I think Subnautica is one game that would really benefit from path tracing.

That's cool as hell, I'd be all over a path traced Subnautica that's for sure. Even if it meant dropping things like 4k expectation and just dumping down to like 720p with some DLSS. Especially at night because it has some really cool light sources on the plants and fish that make night scenes look painfully beautiful. If we could have that with some cool water refraction going on, that'd be something seriously impressive.

 

[Rroff]

Lol, I've known of this forum for quite sometime.

And no, it wasn't this toxic by a long shot. As a matter of fact I recall, for example, the community here giving out advice on how to overclock hbm on fury even though that card was no real competitor. Leading up to it release was no real surprise.

So again, using this as a metric it does appear that RDNA 2 is shaping up to be a real competitor. We will see soon enough.

If you think this is toxic... this is nothing compared to how toxic it used to be around 10 years ago or so - they actually banned several people and were closing multiple threads daily at one point. I've actually got several users on ignore from back then and I never put people on ignore.

I think you've missed a big slice of this section's history somehow.

EDIT: Even in 2017 this was necessary https://www.overclockers.co.uk/forums/threads/graphics-cards-strikes.18766760/

 

[EastCoastHandle]

If you think this is toxic... this is nothing compared to how toxic it used to be around 10 years ago or so - they actually banned several people and were closing multiple threads daily at one point. I've actually got several users on ignore from back then and I never put people on ignore.

I think you've missed a big slice of this section's history somehow.

Not at all. I do recall differences of opinion. And any action happens all the time. There are sticky threads. I just think you see things a bit differently. Perhaps over exaggerating. As the option is available to block people at will, for any reason.

As it stands now if the rumors hold to be true AMD GPUs are shaping up to be a real competitor. Which would explain, to me, this vehement narrative denouncing AMD before its released.

Like I said before, I'm not saying that the nay sayers are new. It's fever pitch of it trying to quell expected excitement of the possibility through "bad faith" type of comments that drew my attention. And you certainly don't need to be here umpteen years to see it, imo.