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New startup says it can do Ray tracing 13x faster than Nvidia (no fake frames)

Quartz said:
Looks like it requires lots and lots of RAM.
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it has 2x DDR5 SODIMM ram slots ;)

Zeus-1c26-032-PCIe-Card-Info-1024x536.webp
 
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It's clearly a science and render farm GPU, nothing to do with games. They could potentially release this thing as some RT co-gpu running alongside standard GPU but that's years away. They might as well run out of monies by then if no big investments. It's not that we can't make faster RT GPU, it's that all current games (even so called full PT ones) are still hybrid with a lot of raster in it and that won't change anytime soon.
 
I don't think it is a gaming card first maybe 2027 or later, it looks like a render farm card coming out first and it is 1 to 2 years away at least, could be more.
 
Tinek said:
It's clearly a science and render farm GPU, nothing to do with games. They could potentially release this thing as some RT co-gpu running alongside standard GPU but that's years away. They might as well run out of monies by then if no big investments. It's not that we can't make faster RT GPU, it's that all current games (even so called full PT ones) are still hybrid with a lot of raster in it and that won't change anytime soon.
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That reminds me of my first 3D graphics card (Orchid Righteous 3D, using the 1st gen Voodoo GPU). That only did 3D, so you needed a second graphics card for 2D. It was expensive. But it succeeded despite those things because it brought something new to the table...and it gained software support quickly. When I bought mine the only thing that ran on it was a demo that came on a CD with the card, but that was jaw-dropping for the time, a whole new thing. Enough to get game developers interested.

This card...maybe. But raytracing isn't a completely new thing and game development is a much slower and more conservative thing nowadays and (as you say) this card isn't even aimed at gaming. So maybe not.

However...if there's a click when the raytracing card takes up the strain, well, I'm in :)
 
The only conceivable way they could achieve such a feat would be if their using a ASIC processor even that's the case I have doubts about it's viability for real world use.
 
The company will get bought by Nvidia for a few billion, shut down and the staff either integrated into the bloated shell of team Green, or simply laid off. The tech will disappear, never to be seen again while nvidia will continue to dribble 10-20% performance uplifts every 2-3 years for the rest of time and people will still queue or frantically refresh websites for the few dozen cards they actually manufacture.
 
Tinek said:
It's clearly a science and render farm GPU, nothing to do with games. They could potentially release this thing as some RT co-gpu running alongside standard GPU but that's years away. They might as well run out of monies by then if no big investments. It's not that we can't make faster RT GPU, it's that all current games (even so called full PT ones) are still hybrid with a lot of raster in it and that won't change anytime soon.
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"SKUs: Zeus 1c (120W, single slot) and 2c (250W, 2-slot) are consumer GPUs. Zeus 4c is a datacenter GPU. All are optimized for rendering, HPC, and gaming. No other cards needed!"
 
Developing drivers that work with the majority of games is likely just as time consuming as getting the hardware out the door.

The amount of custom 'per game' code is mind-blowing because of bugs or shortcuts in the code which is left for the GPU manufacturer to fix in their drivers
IIRC about 6 years ago Nvidia mentioned in a Q&A that their drivers contain almost 5x as much code as Windows and it's likely to have increased quite a bit since then.
 
Pyr0m@nI@]{ said:
"SKUs: Zeus 1c (120W, single slot) and 2c (250W, 2-slot) are consumer GPUs. Zeus 4c is a datacenter GPU. All are optimized for rendering, HPC, and gaming. No other cards needed!"
Click to expand...
Sure and they shown that working in practice? Or just threw anything on the wall to see what sticks to get more funding? As far as they described that GPU, there's pretty much no raster capabilities, no traditional gaming compute (they use mostly fp64 which is for science and enterprise use, not gaming) and no AI acceleration mentioned. Their whole paper seems to be about render farms and science simulations, with close to 0 about gaming. It looks too be pure RT accelerator card with scientific compute capabilities but with no upscaling, AI etc. Even if it's very fast in RT they compare it to 5090 with baseline of 30fps - that's not what gamers want, that's at best good for some tech demo or work, especially with no good upscaling. I'll remain very sceptical.
 
Tythus said:
Odds are it’s either BS, finely massaged test that even a toaster could run or they’ve dumped all raster etc performance and it’s an ASIC that just does rays and nothing else
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Yeah that was my thought, that it could be true (at a stretch) if it's an ASIC/fixed function, and therefore can ONLY do path tracing.
It also seems to be reliant at least in part on SODIMM RAM, so would be massively bandwidth starved for real time applications - not an issue for static rendering (or even animated when you can pre-load all the assets)

Maybe, just maybe, you could stick 256-512GB of RAM on one when density increases and pre-load all assets for the whole game :cry:

The fact it has both an RJ45 BMC management interface and a 400gbps (!) SFP network port further confirms we won't be gaming on one any time soon!

Edit: Had a quick look and I can't see this saving us any money any time soon, given that a single QSFP 400 transceiver module is around £1500 on it's own!
videobits.co.uk

QSFP-DD 400Gbps - VideoBits

videobits.co.uk videobits.co.uk
 
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