Did AMD just kill off RTX

[Jimmy Weirdarms]

RTX is defined by MS as the following:

So a Nvidia specific technology for its own GPUs to work under DXR. If you have a problem with that e-mail MS?

It *is* the GPU.

:facepalm:

Nvidia extensions only work on Nvidia hardware. You can use as much flowery language as you and your mates want,but the Khronos Group unfortunately don't agree with you - the Nvidia specific extensions will be replaced by extensions which support a wider range of hardware

Which is exactly what I said

It is so blatantly obvious Nvidia would be making sure it made its extensions work for only its own GPUs,its not going to AMD's or Intel's work for them,hence why Khronos Group is working together to enable support.

\

It is obvious it would work for them, it's not obvious that it wouldn't work for others if it captures the RT space well enough.

 

[humbug]

You don't even need to use DXR to do ray tracing in a game - but good luck with being able to do something like RTX has brought to the table at anything approaching the same level of features and performance as the RT hardware enables this generation never mind next.

Many many years ago I implemented the first stage in a DX7 engine:

Spoiler

2 FPS LOL at very reduced quality just doing the very most basic light and shadow pass. I later found a technique to bring that up to around 300 FPS (

) but then it dropped to 2 FPS again trying to do proper lighting with stuff like reflections hah (this is the very most rudimentary first stage in implementing ray tracing) and purely misusing the fixed function pipeline on the GPU no compute shaders, etc.

I'm certainly no expert on the subject and only dabbled out of curiosity but there is so much utter BS talked about ray tracing from people with no intention in educating themselves on the subject usually agenda driven

You don't even need to use DXR to do ray tracing in a game - but good luck with being able to do something like RTX has brought to the table at anything approaching the same level of features and performance

Challenge accepted

Give me a couple of days...

 

[EastCoastHandle]

Correct you can have a program that can run RT any way you like but you are not going to have it in a game running DX on Windows without MS.

 

[b00merang69]

Not sure WTF that has to do with Windows or towards me, again your not going to get it officially supported in Windows without MS and it will be tied DX no doubt.

 

[Gerard]

Who gives a **** in all honesty?

About the most sensible post in this thread amid all the circle jerking.

 

[EastCoastHandle]

Not sure WTF that has to do with Windows or towards me, again your not going to get it officially supported in Windows without MS and it will be tied DX no doubt.

Huawei is a pretty well know mobile giant. It's ray tracing being developed for mobile games. I'm not sure WTF you are on about RT being tied into MS only.

 

[b00merang69]

You really are not to clever are you?

Where did I or anyone else in this thread apart from you think that?

I know who the in "hot water" Chinese phone manufacturer are thank you very much!

I said to get it in Windows it will be part of DX and that is only going to happen with MS consent/participation.

I can go and look at RT videos from decades ago.

 

[SpudMaster]

You really are not to clever are you?

too

 

[EastCoastHandle]

I've read that OpenRL might make it's way into consoles but I've not found any real proof of that.
Imagination seems to be spearheading the way for it's use in Ray tracing. But I've not found anything other then that so far.
https://www.imgtec.com/powervr-ray-tracing/#gaming

 

[D.P.]

I've read that OpenRL might make it's way into consoles but I've not found any real proof of that.
Imagination seems to be spearheading the way for it's use in Ray tracing. But I've not found anything other then that so far.
https://www.imgtec.com/powervr-ray-tracing/#gaming

I doubt it because OpenRL is not a complete graphics API but a standalone ray-tracing API. For the next couple of generations at least ray-tracing will have to be hybrid with existing rasterization techniques, so this means an extension to DX12 or Vulkan. DX12 ray tracing API (DXR) is no open source but is a published industry standards, while the Vulkan ray tracing extension form Nvidia are open source so OpenRL has little value here.


It is theoretically possible that Sony.MS will use PowerVR tech to do the ray-tracing but this isn't an plugin kind of technology, it needs deep integration with the GPU. Therefore it would be up to AMD to do that and I see no reason why they would license PowerVR.

The thing about ray-tracing is is is damn simple. The hard part of making a dynamic spatial partition of the 3D data so you can effectively cull object that don;t interact with a ray. This is done by the CUDA cores on Turing.

 

[Rroff]

The thing about ray-tracing is is is damn simple. The hard part of making a dynamic spatial partition of the 3D data so you can effectively cull object that don;t interact with a ray. This is done by the CUDA cores on Turing.

Yeah at its core it is largely very simple vector maths the problem largely being the sheer volume of calculations required - especially with multiple bounce passes.

 

[Grim5]

Yeah at its core it is largely very simple vector maths the problem largely being the sheer volume of calculations required - especially with multiple bounce passes.

it's going to be very interesting now that consoles do dxr rt. I think PCs will just run higher versions of RT quality compared to consoles but we'll see.

 

[D.P.]

Yeah at its core it is largely very simple vector maths the problem largely being the sheer volume of calculations required - especially with multiple bounce passes.

The good thing is the algebra is really incredibly simple. For anyone with eh most basic coding and maths you can produce a ray-tracer in a couple of hundred lines:
https://github.com/ssloy/tinyraytracer/wiki/Part-1:-understandable-raytracing


The big crux is as you say, you need to really be able cast billions of rays per frame. The good thing is, every ray is entirely independent so it is infinitely parallelizable.

 

[D.P.]

it's going to be very interesting now that consoles do dxr rt. I think PCs will just run higher versions of RT quality compared to consoles but we'll see.

Another nice thing about Ray-tracing is that if you have more power you can simply fire more rays and get better quality, or do the same quality faster. It is not like some special hardware that can help render a particular effect which you either support or dont. I consoles have basic version of RT harwdare, equivalent to todays Turing (look at Wolfenstein to see what can be done), then future PC hardware will run the same code path at a higher quality or faster with no or minimal changes form the developer. E.g., some effects requiring bouncing rays multiple times but due to computation this gets limits to say 2 bounces. On the PC they could let it go to 4 or 8 bounces etc.


It is the ability of ray-tracing to scale easily with increased hardware, and the fact that faster hardware simply makes better images without changing much is the appeal behind RT and why Nvidia want future GPU wars to be about RT. It is much easier to double RT performance than Razerisation, ad new effects and graphics can be made using the same hardware instead of requiring dedicated silicon.

 

[nashathedog]

The fact that we have confirmation the consoles will support ray tracing proves you wrong.

Why? All I'm saying is it will likely be fine running Microsofts DXR (as one example), As Humbug mentioned Nvidia have been given input & access to DXR development.

 

[D.P.]

Why? All I'm saying is it will likely be fine running Microsofts DXR (as one example), As Humbug mentioned Nvidia have been given input & access to DXR development.

Your claims was:

I don't think RTX as it works today is going anywhere

Which is just been proven nonsense since the consoles are confirmed in supporting ray-tracing it now means ray-tracing will be the standard for gaming and Nvidia's gamble with Turing has paid off. If the consoles did not have ray-tracing then nvidia would have a harder battle in getting developers on board.


From your post you don't seem to really understand what RTX is. RTX is just a brand name like geforce. Turing supports hardware accelerated ray-tracing, exposed through APIs like MS DXR. RTX in itself is just a brand, not an APi or a library. Every game that has been released supporting "RTX" really means it uses MS DXR (Or nvidia exensions on Vulkan, which will be renamed and used as the new Vulkan API for ray tracing) .

Any game that uses the Vulkan or DX12 ray-tracing API will work on Nvidia GPUs natively. There is no other way currently to enable ray-tracing on PX games so the fact the consoles exist with ray-tracing will only increase Nvidia's success with RTX

 

[EastCoastHandle]

I, for one, would really be interested in how this is going to work on console, exactly. From what we know so far AMD has already patented a hybrid method of RT:

-----------------
AMD's Patent






-------------
RTX

The Turing architecture used in GeForce RTX GPUs was designed from the start for DXR-type workloads. Pascal, on the other hand, was launched in 2016 and was designed for DirectX 12. As such, Pascal and older-generation GPUs were not designed like Turing.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/geforce-gtx-dxr-ray-tracing-available-now/

One thing I found interesting is that it says DXR-Type workloads and not simply Ray Tracing itself. I get the impression that DXR is specifically designed for RTX.

RT Cores on GeForce RTX GPUs provide dedicated hardware to accelerate BVH traversal and ray / triangle intersection calculations, dramatically accelerating the ray tracing process. On GeForce GTX hardware, these calculations are performed on the programmable shader cores, a resource shared with many other graphics functions of the GPU.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/geforce-gtx-dxr-ray-tracing-available-now/

These differences will be very interesting to see.

It's going to be interesting to see if consoles will be either:
-Stuck only doing a pick of RT reflections, shadows, lighting (global illumination), ambient occlusion or caustics
OR,
-Come close to RT'ing the entire scene including reflections, shadows, lighting (global illumination), ambient occlusion, caustics, etc.

This is something I will keep my eye on. In particular I will compare and contrast 2 engines which seems to be all the buzz: Slipspace Engine and CD Projekt RED Engine.

 

[Safetytrousers]

It doesn't help that in all the Nvidia marketing videos they show the comparison of games with and without Ray tracing as "RTX On" and "RTX off" So now people assume RTX On = Ray Tracing On.

I think the exact reason Nvidia have pushed RTX so hard even with little content for it, is to make Ray Tracing synonymous with their RTX.

 

[Rroff]

It's going to be interesting to see if consoles will be either:
-Stuck only doing a pick of RT reflections, shadows, lighting (global illumination), ambient occlusion or caustics
OR,
-Come close to RT'ing the entire scene including reflections, shadows, lighting (global illumination), ambient occlusion, caustics, etc.

Sadly it will probably be the first one Quake 2 does mostly the second one albeit lots of cheats, etc. and it is quite something to see in action despite the limitations due to the overall age of the engine.

 

[Grim5]

From your post you don't seem to really understand what RTX is. RTX is just a brand name like geforce. Turing supports hardware accelerated ray-tracing, exposed through APIs like MS DXR. RTX in itself is just a brand, not an APi or a library. Every game that has been released supporting "RTX" really means it uses MS DXR (Or nvidia exensions on Vulkan, which will be renamed and used as the new Vulkan API for ray tracing) .

Any game that uses the Vulkan or DX12 ray-tracing API will work on Nvidia GPUs natively. There is no other way currently to enable ray-tracing on PX games so the fact the consoles exist with ray-tracing will only increase Nvidia's success with RTX

Its amazing how anyone could still think that console games will run through a different Ray Tracing pipeline than Nvidia does on PC.
As you say, the consoles are support Microsoft DXR API on day one, the exact same API Nvidia is using.

It's going to be interesting to see if consoles will be either:
-Stuck only doing a pick of RT reflections, shadows, lighting (global illumination), ambient occlusion or caustics
OR,
-Come close to RT'ing the entire scene including reflections, shadows, lighting (global illumination), ambient occlusion, caustics, etc.

This is something I will keep my eye on. In particular I will compare and contrast 2 engines which seems to be all the buzz: Slipspace Engine and CD Projekt RED Engine.

Im pretty sure there was some slides from AMD a little while ago that highlighted that their first generation attempt at ray tracing would be limited in scope. They certainly won't be able to handle reflections, GI and shadows all ray traced at the same time, it was more a pick and choose. I know the consoles are also using ray tracing for their own proprietary 3D audio so they can bypass dolby licensing and on top of those I suspect the first console games with ray tracing will just be reflections only as thats the easiest to do.

Those AMD slides showed that their 2nd generation big boy ray tracing will come through using the "Cloud" to do ray tracing calculations and not the graphics card.