Did AMD just kill off RTX

[Jimmy Weirdarms]

Ray Tracing adds zero extra enjoyment to gaming.

Enjoyment? Sure, that's unrelated to graphics prowess, I enjoyed playing on my C64 in the 80s

But it can add some stuff. Currently water reflections in some games are really bad due to the fudged rasterisation techniques employed. Hopefully some of this stuff can be cleared up with RT in the medium term.

 

[Rroff]

Enjoyment? Sure, that's unrelated to graphics prowess, I enjoyed playing on my C64 in the 80s

But it can add some stuff. Currently water reflections in some games are really bad due to the fudged rasterisation techniques employed. Hopefully some of this stuff can be cleared up with RT in the medium term.

It is kind of like 120/144Hz versus 60Hz in that respect - you don't fully appreciate what you are missing until you get used to the better version.

 

[D.P.]

With the lackluster support of RTX in games and now it is confirmed AMDs RDNA 2 will have hardware rayracing, is RTX all but dead? AMD will have have mass RT adoption through the consoles and their RDNA 2 GPUs will become the de facto place to game with raytracing.

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/02...ocid=Platform_soc_omc_xbo_tw_Video_lrn_2.24.1

Your post is completely nonsensical and contradictory. You claim Ray tracing is dead and then link to an article suggesting AMD is supporting ray tracing in hardware.

If the console supporting ray-tracing then ray-tracing on the PC will become even more popular and nvidia will be well prime to take advantage of this already being 1 generation ahead of AMD

 

[D.P.]

The XBox runs a depreciated version of Windows 10,and DXR is MS software.

AMD,Nvidia and Intel are working together towards using a standardised Vulkan raytracing API too:
https://www.pcgamer.com/real-time-ray-tracing-could-get-a-boost-from-standardized-support-in-vulkan/

Khronos will be adopting Nvidia's Vulkan extensions as the standard RTX on Vulkan. The same always happened on OpenGl. This is further evidences form the fact that Khronos want to maintaina close compatibility with DX so the MS DXR API will be the bases for Vulkan RTX, which is exactly what Nvidia did with vulkan.

 

[LambChop]

/sarcasm

It was the only thing deserved of such a headline.... a sarcastic pandered response.

 

[D.P.]

I don't think it changes how Nvidia cards work, just kills off the RTX brand as a selling point and levels the playing field rather than the Nvidia only raytracing support in games we have currently.

This is also nonsense. Nvidia has used the GeForce brand for a long time, just because ATI/AMD came along with hardware TnL GPUs back in the day and AMD matched Nvidia's DX feature set didn't do anything to kill the Gerforce branding.


AMD finally offering hardware accelerated ray tracing will likely only ever increase the support of ray-tracing in games and strengthen the RTX branding of ray-tracing support.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Khronos will be adopting Nvidia's Vulkan extensions as the standard RTX on Vulkan. The same always happened on OpenGl. This is further evidences form the fact that Khronos want to maintaina close compatibility with DX so the MS DXR API will be the bases for Vulkan RTX, which is exactly what Nvidia did with vulkan.

You mean RT not RTX as no other company will call it RTX and I doubt Nvidia extensions will be standard for AMD based consoles as microarchitecture is different. Nvidia extensions are added to suit Nvidia GPUs. DXR is what you are taking about which is agnostic.

Intel is probably working on raytracing too and also in the mobile space Imagination already demoed it,so I doubt they would be either.

Also Vulkan is based on AMD work done on Mantle,but with major modifications to make it hardware agnostic.

 

[Jimmy Weirdarms]

I doubt Nvidia extensions will be standard for AMD based consoles.

The "nvidia extensions" are looking likely to be adopted as part of the vulkan standard, which seems to have been missing RT until they made their extensions (VKRay), and are already underneath DXR, the microsoft standard API.

There doesn't seem to be any other nvidia-specific extension here.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The "nvidia extensions" are looking likely to be adopted as part of the vulkan standard, which seems to have been missing RT until they made their extensions (VKRay), and are already underneath DXR, the microsoft standard API.

There doesn't seem to be any other nvidia-specific extension here.

Nvidia extensions for their own GPUs? So how do other GPUs which don't share the same design work then?

Why do you think AMD and Intel are working with Khronos Group - they are adding their own extensions so their own GPUs will work.

I would imagine it's Microsoft who did most of the software heavy lifting work and only worked with Nvidia as they had the first compatible hardware.

Edit!!

The whole point of Nvidia Windows extensions under DXR is so it can use Nvidia specific RT hardware. If not it will fall back to software only rendering which is agnostic.

So are people saying basically DXR is essentially mostly Nvidia work and MS put their own branding on it? Because I would find it weird if MS would like it's work shared with a competing API.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I had a look into the claims:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-DXR-To-Vulkan

Big "open-source" achievements aren't too common for NVIDIA or Microsoft much less together, but thanks to their open-source work on the DXC DirectXCompiler it's possible to easily convert HLSL DXR shaders to SPIR-V for Vulkan.

NVIDIA has written a new technical blog post on bringing HLSL ray-tracing to Vulkan with the same capabilities of DirextX Ray-Tracing. This effort is made feasible by Microsoft's existing open-source DirectXCompiler (DXC) with SPIR-V back-end for consumption by Vulkan drivers. Last year NVIDIA contributed to the open-source DXC support for SPV_NV_ray_tracing. This in turn with the open-source tooling allows converting DXR HLSL shaders into SPIR-V modules for Vulkan.

For now this DirectX Ray Tracing to Vulkan depends upon NVIDIA's NV_ray_tracing extension until the cross-vendor Vulkan ray-tracing extension(s) are finalized and published.

For those wanting to learn more about this current NVIDIA-led approach with Microsoft's open-source DXC compiler, see the NVIDIA developer blog. "The NVIDIA VKRay extension, with the DXC compiler and SPIR-V backend, provides the same level of ray tracing functionality in Vulkan through HLSL as is currently available in DXR. You can now develop ray-tracing applications using DXR or NVIDIA VKRay with minimized shader re-writing to deploy to either the DirectX or Vulkan APIs. We encourage you to take advantage of this new flexibility and expand your user base by bringing ray tracing titles to Vulkan."

So Nvidia and MS ported DXR shaders over to Linux but look at what is bolded. Looks indeed like MS is being much less Windows centric now. Nvidia extensions are temporary until replaced by a proper cross vendor set of extensions....which hints the current implementation probably is meant for Nvidia which makes entire sense. Also VKRay and DXR seem to be mentioned as competing with each other.

So I can see what people meant by extensions now,but it also means what we see now is only temporary anyway.

It also means I can't see AMD doing hardware based RT for a while as the software stack isn't developed enough.

 

[Jimmy Weirdarms]

Also VKRay and DXR seem to be mentioned as competing with each other.

Yes, VKRay is Vulkan extensions for RT. So far only nvidia has had any RT to speak of, so they have defined extensions, which are likely to be brought into the Vulkan standard.

Vulkan is a competing API to DirectX, which has DXR, yes. It is cross platform and aims to be just as hardware agnostic as DirectX, but also cross-platform.

DXR is a standard defined by microsoft, there are no 'nvidia extensions' to this, the nvidia drivers provide a DXR implementation using nvidia RTX hardware at the back end.

So how do other GPUs which don't share the same design work then?

Well, they provide their own drivers which also fulfill the DirectX DXR API. It's not proprietary nvidia extensions to the API that are suddenly going to be made obsolete when it's standardised or when AMD come along. Each just provides their own drivers to fulfill the DX API requirements.

Similarly with Vulkan, there are RT extensions to the API (called VKRay), and drivers will be made to fulfill the requirements of the API.
The RT extensions are nvidia-only right now, but they aren't that way because nvidia went ahead and just made their own proprietary thing separate to what Vulkan had defined - they are made that way because Vulkan didn't have an RT API at all, so nvidia went ahead and added them. It looks like Intel and AMD will feed into standardising this, and Khronos will eventually publish that standard, but there's no reason to think it will be *very* different from what nvidia have already defined, or that somehow nvidia have been evil and written proprietary extensions to things.

 

[humbug]

Microsoft Confirms the Xbox Series X Will Leverage 12 TFLOP RDNA 2 GPU with H/W Accelerated RT Ray Tracing and VRS

https://www.techspot.com/review/1870-amd-radeon-rx-5700/

5700XT is 9.7 TFlops.

24% higher performance than a 5700XT, in a consol, and Hardware Accelerated Ray Tracing.

 

[Chrisc]

https://www.techspot.com/review/1870-amd-radeon-rx-5700/

5700XT is 9.7 TFlops.

24% higher performance than a 5700XT, in a consol, and Hardware Accelerated Ray Tracing.

i dont really like the TFlops argument, didnt the Vega64 have 12TFlops?

 

[TheRealDeal]

https://www.techspot.com/review/1870-amd-radeon-rx-5700/

5700XT is 9.7 TFlops.

24% higher performance than a 5700XT, in a consol, and Hardware Accelerated Ray Tracing.

That figure comes from the boost clock and not the gaming clock. The sustained clocks out of the box are usually around 1800mhz and give the 5700xt 9.2 Tflops.

 

[melmac]

The whole point of Nvidia Windows extensions under DXR is so it can use Nvidia specific RT hardware. If not it will fall back to software only rendering which is agnostic

Actually, in DXR the software rendering is not agnostic. It depends entirely on Nvidia/AMD enabling support for it.

 

[humbug]

i dont really like the TFlops argument, didnt the Vega64 have 12TFlops?

Yes, different architecture, in raw compute performance Vega64 has the 5700XT beat by that difference.

Yet it humiliates the Vega64 in games, because in terms of gaming IPC RDNA is much higher than Vega, its actually about equal to Turning, maybe slightly less.

If we knew the clock speed of that XBox-X RDNA2 GPU we could use that TFlops number to calculate how many shaders it has.

That figure comes from the boost clock and not the gaming clock. The sustained clocks out of the box are usually around 1800mhz and give the 5700xt 9.2 Tflops.

Ah yes of course, thx

 

[humbug]

1600Mhz + 12% = 1808Mhz: 2560 Shaders + 12% = 2867 Shaders: 2867 Shaders @ 1600Mhz = 9.2 TFlops

9.2 TFlops + 30% = 11.96 TFlops: 2867 Shaders + 30% = 3727 Shaders.

I'm going to stick my neck on the line and predict the XBox-X GPU is a 60 CU GPU (3840 Shaders) running at around ~1600Mhz.

To confirm: 3840 Shaders X 1600Mhz = 6,144,000 X 2 Flops per Cycle FP32 = 12,288,000 (12.29 TFlops)

 

[BigBANGtheory]

That feels about right imho I wonder what the final price will be?

 

[gpuerrilla]

In Uk? I would go with £549.99

 

[KillBoY_UK]

Yet it humiliates the Vega64 in games, because in terms of gaming IPC RDNA is much higher than Vega, its actually about equal to Turning, maybe slightly less.

You can only reason compare IPC of a GPU within the same vendor as nvidia and AMDs architectures are very different (not like there both x86 cores like in the CPU world). You can only really compare performance per watt between the vendors. IMO anyways