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PowerVR demo real time ray tracing graphics at 1280 × 720, 30fps.

Couldn’t be done?

Some months now Cryengine has been using Raytracing for Voxel GI, at least a year for real time reflections :p

They are a bit late, when I have the time i'll whip up a Demo for you if you like.
 
4 x GR6500 just to get 30fps in 1080p.

1gb VRAM each too.

Incidentally, GR6500 card that is this demonstration was to be a have 1GB equipped with dedicated memory.

Queue the xgb VRAM is not enough at X by X crowd.

still a long way to go.
 
4 x GR6500 just to get 30fps in 1080p.

1gb VRAM each too.



Queue the xgb VRAM is not enough at X by X crowd.

still a long way to go.
Tile based cards don't need as much VRAM or as much bandwidth. The same thing was said about the old desktop cards which often ran with slower ram and less of it as they do not suffer from the ram problems AMD and NV have. PowerVR need a fraction of the bandwidth and RAM that AMD or NV need.

You say x4 just to get 30fps in 1080p well last I have seen 4 AMD or x4 NV cards is a slide show at 1080p doing ray tracing and this was 4 PowerVR smartphone class GPU's running at a estimated 600mhz with low spec ram in a desktop. Its a low spec card running ray tracing faster then the highest spec NV Titan card. The efficiency of the chip at ray tracing is amazing being leaps & bounds faster then anything I have seen before. I have not seen a single card that can run anything near https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0keJiuEKdg before. What's really impressive is, as its low end RAM and only a 600mhz chip it can scale down and run in smartphone/tablets energy brackets or Smart TV/consoles.




Couldn’t be done?

Some months now Cryengine has been using Raytracing for Voxel GI, at least a year for real time reflections :p

They are a bit late, when I have the time i'll whip up a Demo for you if you like.
Please I haven't seen any of that. Not in real time and not entire 600 million polygons scenes ray traced at 1080p. Part of my comment about couldn't be done need clarifying. I find impressive it impressive due to the low specs they are using. 600mhz core with slow RAM (relatively speaking, they didn't use anything like GDDR5). There is no reason this cannot run in a tablet which is more what I mean by people saying it couldn't be done.
 
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Please I haven't seen any of that. Not in real time and not entire 600 million polygons scenes ray traced at 1080p. Part of my comment about couldn't be done need clarifying. I find impressive it impressive due to the low specs they are using. 600mhz core with slow RAM (relatively speaking, they didn't use anything like GDDR5). There is no reason this cannot run in a tablet which is more what I mean by people saying it couldn't be done.

Ok, i'll knock something up, its will take a while tho :)
 
Ok, i'll knock something up, its will take a while tho :)
Thanks, I just had a very quick read into it (5mins) and it appears as though CryEngine 3 does a very limited version of ray tracing for local reflections only. But if I missed more due to limited time looking into it please correct me. Still a step in the right direction for ray tracing, hopefully I can find some time to looking into CryEngine some more.
 
If they demoed it with a camera that could be controlled (rather than the static camera or the on-rails cameras in the videos above), then I think the demo would be more impressive and would grab more attention. As it is it doesn't look any different to a 3D Studio Max rendering.

I want to believe that it'll be good as we need some innovation in GPUs (rather than the bigger, faster mentality we have at present), but struggling to see it at the minute.
 
How long until nVidia buys this out and locks down this tech like Physx?

no point, looking at the demo's nvidia (and AMD) can already do stuff that whilst it might not be 100% true raytracing, is just as visualy impressive

nvidia have real time ray tracing demos going back to 2011-2012

1280x720@30fps makes it pointless for gaming, and that is running x4 of these, even if they used x1 as a coprocessor it's not going to be able to keep up with a modern GPU
 
How long until nVidia buys this out and locks down this tech like Physx?

AMD/ATI wanted to buy Physx back int he day but did'nt want to pay the asking price.

Anyways on topic this is RELAY impressive bit of hardware (eps considering the size and power of the chip) I wonder if they will licence the tech like they do currently with there SGX chip. Would be nice if this raised the eyebrows of AMD/Nvidia and so a lesser degree Intel (they already shown a strong interest in the past in ray tracing.
 
Thanks, I just had a very quick read into it (5mins) and it appears as though CryEngine 3 does a very limited version of ray tracing for local reflections only. But if I missed more due to limited time looking into it please correct me. Still a step in the right direction for ray tracing, hopefully I can find some time to looking into CryEngine some more.

Some examples where i'm already using it, i'm going to set up something purposely to demonstrate it, something along the lines of an enclosed area with lots of brightly coloured interactive physics entities moving around, lights and perhaps some smoke, something you can move around it, interact with... dunno yet but its not going to be done over night :)

All of these things are partially complete, some just starting ecte....

 
Once again things to point out that make it all a bit obvious. Current desktop level gpus don't have any outright dedicated ray tracing hardware. When you add something in hardware rather than doing it on software(via non dedicated shaders) you would get a dramatic increase in performance. Top desktop gpus don't have it because it's still not ready for it, you would have to take away 'normal' gpu features in size to add in ray tracing hardware. So AMD could have come along and changed the architecture for Fiji which may have made ray tracing applications run 100 times faster than they do today, taking up half the core. Meaning it would be 100 times faster in the exact zero ray traced games that are out, and 50% slower in the 100% of all games that are out.

When mobile gaming consists of games that don't tax the existing hardware at all to begin with, you can double the gpu transistor count with a die shrink within the same size and power budget and put half of transistors towards ray tracing without effectively changing any current gaming performance because every single game is lowest common denominator, mostly able to run on phones with 1/4 of the power and without lots of settings.

It's a different market with different targets and different goals.

Then the biggest problem, ray tracing itself... is not that big a deal.

1990-1995 graphics vs ray tracing was night and day, in quality and performance. Today the graphical difference is a tiny fraction of what it once was and the designers make as much difference as the graphical capabilities of the chips.

Nvidia/AMD gpus are able to run games way faster that look significantly better than Fallout 4, yet Fallout 4 runs like crap and looks like ass... designers. They put in just horrible textures, with ray traced lighting, those textures still look like ass. The general design of the world is quite good which saves it, but the lacking graphical quality is there for all to see. They even tacked on an attempt at god rays. Had that been done by ray tracing and had it been done with perfect performance, the game wouldn't look much different as it's the textures that are the problem. Arguable if god rays are 'better' lighting (in regards to Fallout 4 specifically, the implementation is poor) or not, but they don't make the textures look better.

Ray tracing has since the early 90s been held up as a bullet to end all graphical issues in gaming, to bring us real world looking games and is completely unmatched. Despite the fact that absolutely none of that is true, this belief has stuck around. Ray tracing is not the silver bullet to bring gaming to photo realism and the performance still isn't there at all. The PC ecosystem is still no where near mobile and the ability to just switch over half a gpu to ray tracing won't work well. It will happen akin to tessellation, very small unit added on a new process with minimal ray tracing added in a very few games then step by step move towards Nvidia ******* everyone with crappy overdone implementations :p
 
Both Nvidia and AMD have programmable Stream Processors, lots and lots and lots of them even at the low end, AMD actually call theirs Stream Processors but CUDA cores are the same thing.

Both are also capable of A-Synchronous compute, The Hawaii and Fiji cards to an extraordinary high degree.

The problem on the Desktop isn't the hardware. admittedly its only recent that Desktop hardware vendors have been designing A-Synchronous GPU's, tho Nvidia are still somewhat behind with Maxwell.

Cryeninge and Unreal Engine are developing the technology now because the Desktop technology is heading in the right direction, expect to see a lot more of it in the near future.
CryEngine even has A-Synchronous Voxel Global Illumination.
 
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Pottsey still on a one man mission to increase PowerVR's shares :p

That demo really didn't impress me, why not demo a realistic environment like a forest or something to show off how good it is, also at a resolution and frame-rate we'd find acceptable in the current times.

I understand this could be good for mobile gaming, but I'm certainly not excited by it at the moment for desktop gaming.
 
Tough crowd!

Pretty impressive they got that running in real-time :) Hopefully development will accelerate quickly with this, as Real Time Ray Tracing is pretty awesome.
 
Tough crowd!

Pretty impressive they got that running in real-time :) Hopefully development will accelerate quickly with this, as Real Time Ray Tracing is pretty awesome.

I quite like it but the limitations are showing and 1280x720 @ 30fps is a little meh but I can see the potential and would like to see more of it.
 
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