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Poll: Ray Tracing - Do we care?

Ray Tracing - Do you care?

  • Total voters
    183
  • Poll closed .
Tech Radar seem to care:
''we did get to play multiple PC games at 4K...Shadow of the Tomb Raider looks stunning with ray tracing turned on. Thanks to Nvidia’s RTX technology, shadows do indeed look more realistic – with different intensities everywhere depicted in a stony ruin in the rainforest. We also just gawked at the walls, looking them shimmer as light reflected and refracted off of them.
In terms of frame rate, Shadow of the Tomb Raider ran at a mostly consistent 50-57 fps, which is impressive giving the game is running on a single GPU and in such an early state – on top of all the new ray tracing techniques.
We also played a variety of other PC games that shall not be named, and saw performance run in excess of 100 fps at 4K and Ultra settings.''
https://www.techradar.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-ti
 
Safetytrousers said:
Tech Radar seem to care:
''we did get to play multiple PC games at 4K...Shadow of the Tomb Raider looks stunning with ray tracing turned on. Thanks to Nvidia’s RTX technology, shadows do indeed look more realistic – with different intensities everywhere depicted in a stony ruin in the rainforest. We also just gawked at the walls, looking them shimmer as light reflected and refracted off of them.
In terms of frame rate, Shadow of the Tomb Raider ran at a mostly consistent 50-57 fps, which is impressive giving the game is running on a single GPU and in such an early state – on top of all the new ray tracing techniques.
We also played a variety of other PC games that shall not be named, and saw performance run in excess of 100 fps at 4K and Ultra settings.''
https://www.techradar.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-ti
Click to expand...

Not going to take any of that seriously as there is nothing to compare their results to.

What is very dodgy is the lack of any synthetic benchmark, something almost everybody does when they get their hands on a new card. Although something like Timespy Extreme is not the same as using a proper game it is a very good guide to raw GPU performance and is a fair comparison to all cards.
 
Safetytrousers said:
Tech Radar seem to care:
''we did get to play multiple PC games at 4K...Shadow of the Tomb Raider looks stunning with ray tracing turned on. Thanks to Nvidia’s RTX technology, shadows do indeed look more realistic – with different intensities everywhere depicted in a stony ruin in the rainforest. We also just gawked at the walls, looking them shimmer as light reflected and refracted off of them.
In terms of frame rate, Shadow of the Tomb Raider ran at a mostly consistent 50-57 fps, which is impressive giving the game is running on a single GPU and in such an early state – on top of all the new ray tracing techniques.
We also played a variety of other PC games that shall not be named, and saw performance run in excess of 100 fps at 4K and Ultra settings.''
https://www.techradar.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-ti
Click to expand...


AWPC said:
Shadow Of The Tomb Raider uses Ray Tracing for shadows only apparently :rolleyes: does anyone even care about shadows that much anyway :(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlKGctu7OC8
Click to expand...

So are Techradar talking up the ray tracing lighting on the walls as shimmering as a win for ray tracing... when it's not using ray tracing for anything but shadows? Also, the shadows have different intensities... something that is exceptionally easy to do and has been done in games for what, a decade or more?

So maybe Techradar do think it's important, and maybe Techradar are talking out of their behinds. THere was nothing in the video I saw of the Tomb Raider demo that really stood out to me as something I haven't seen before.
 
drunkenmaster said:
So are Techradar talking up the ray tracing lighting on the walls as shimmering as a win for ray tracing... when it's not using ray tracing for anything but shadows? Also, the shadows have different intensities... something that is exceptionally easy to do and has been done in games for what, a decade or more?

So maybe Techradar do think it's important, and maybe Techradar are talking out of their behinds. THere was nothing in the video I saw of the Tomb Raider demo that really stood out to me as something I haven't seen before.
Click to expand...

You mean like NVLINK on a consumer GPU?

Thought you be treading carefully at this point rather than poo-pooing more things that aren’t to market yet lol.
 
Silent_Scone said:
You mean like NVLINK on a consumer GPU?

Thought you be treading carefully at this point rather than poo-pooing more things that aren’t to market yet lol.
Click to expand...

SEriously, you're back doing this again.

Okay, NVLink is what feature in Tomb Raider how... right, it's not a feature of Tomb Raider at all. Second, NVLink, it's nothing particularly useful in any way shape or form. NVLink is still as before, it's built upon PCI-E and ratifying newer versions of PCI-E happens more quickly when you don't have to make it an industry standard. Multiple companies have created interconnects using pci-e, most companies stick with something consumer friendly. Using NVlink for an sli connector sounds like a complete gimmick. Two consumer gpus don't need huge bandwidth to sync up gpus, it's presumably a single link and used probably more for the ability to send out a bunch more proprietary Nvlink bridges rather than reusing their last sli bridges.

I also didn't poo-poo anything to do with the hardware. The game simply doesn't look ground breaking in shadows or lighting, making it an unimpressive demo of ray tracing.
 
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drunkenmaster said:
SEriously, you're back doing this again.

Okay, NVLink is what feature in Tomb Raider how... right, it's not a feature of Tomb Raider at all. Second, NVLink, it's nothing particularly useful in any way shape or form. NVLink is still as before, it's built upon PCI-E and ratifying newer versions of PCI-E happens more quickly when you don't have to make it an industry standard. Multiple companies have created interconnects using pci-e, most companies stick with something consumer friendly. Using NVlink for an sli connector sounds like a complete gimmick. Two consumer gpus don't need huge bandwidth to sync up gpus, it's presumably a single link and used probably more for the ability to send out a bunch more proprietary Nvlink bridges rather than reusing their last sli bridges.

I also didn't poo-poo anything to do with the hardware. The game simply doesn't look ground breaking in shadows or lighting, making it an unimpressive demo of ray tracing.
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RE NVLINK 2.0:
drunkenmaster said:
This has precisely nothing at all to do with SLI. It's also got very little to do with desktop, it categorically will never be used to provide more/faster access to system memory so not a huge amount of use in a desktop system. the only way it would be seen on desktop is like a pci-e switch as you get now.
Click to expand...
 
drunkenmaster said:
So are Techradar talking up the ray tracing lighting on the walls as shimmering as a win for ray tracing... when it's not using ray tracing for anything but shadows? Also, the shadows have different intensities... something that is exceptionally easy to do and has been done in games for what, a decade or more?

So maybe Techradar do think it's important, and maybe Techradar are talking out of their behinds. THere was nothing in the video I saw of the Tomb Raider demo that really stood out to me as something I haven't seen before.
Click to expand...
Well first Shadows are not exceptionally easy they are often faked none dynamic, inaccurate and multiple dynamic lights are not only intensive to do on a GPU but they do not scale well and each extra one has a stacking negative effect on the FPS. If that was not bad enough its intensive on the game developers time.

Shadows are one of those things that should be easier and faster to do via ray tracing. Ray Tracing shadows are not about each individual shadow looking better it’s about being more accurate and more dynamic with where the shadows are. Shadows done correctly via Ray Tracing can not only boost FPS but lower memory usage and lower bandwidth while saving developers time.

Think of a dance floor in a dark club room with a lights. The current method fakes it big time and is very intensive. The shadow will look ok but will not be accurate. Many objects will not even cast a shadow or the shadow will move around badly if a light source moves. There will be a limit on multiple dynamic light shadows as the scaling is so bad in the current way. Ray Tracing scales massively better for this so you can have multiple dynamic lights for everything. Turn on RT and suddenly each individual person and bottle of beer has a shadow and its accurate for that light source, 100% dynamic light shadows and in the correct spot and the dev doesn’t have to spend hours faking it with the old method. It’s a win, win.

Just talking about the memory and bandwidth needed for cascaded shadows not the entire screen, you can get around a 50% reduction in memory usage and memory bandwidth needed by switching to RT. While at the same time a 50% reduction in the time it takes to render the shadows.

The benefits of hybrid Ray Tracing are
Shadows
Reflections
Transpacrency
Better Scaling with multiple dynamic lights.

The other benefit is RT scales better with extra GPU cores. We are hitting the point where more GPU cores is providing less of a performance increase for none RT screens. Going forward as more cores are added RT should see a relatively larger performance boost. For example if you increase the core count by 10% you should see a larger performance increase towards RT then you would towards the none RT screen.
 
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HDR is where its at right now ;) That should be the focus. Look at proper HDR it makes a stunning difference in games which support it but you obviously need a proper HDR display to go with that along with a HDR PC (must include an Intel GPU! & Intel SGX so that eliminates any AMD CPU due to Intel's Playready 3.0 DRM nonsense on Windows 10).
 
AWPC said:
it makes a stunning difference in games which support it but you obviously need a proper HDR display to go with that along with a HDR PC (must include an Intel GPU! & Intel SGX so that eliminates any AMD CPU due to Intel's Playready 3.0 DRM nonsense on Windows 10).
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Meh, you can save money by just turning the monitors contrast setting up to 100 and it will look just as **** for free :p
 
You people are going on about ray tracing,HDR,high FPS displays - its bad enough getting midrange cards that can run a decent looking game on highish settings at 60FPS on qHD displays,and those displays are even available for £200.
 
ubersonic said:
Going off your video, Vega is ~= to a GTX1080 (as the 580 numbers in that vid match the numbers from the chart, and the Vega numbers match the GTX1080's in that vid).
Click to expand...

I tend to ignore pretty much anything AthlonXP1800 writes. I take a look at his posts, laugh and move on.
 
Safetytrousers said:
Tech Radar seem to care:
''we did get to play multiple PC games at 4K...Shadow of the Tomb Raider looks stunning with ray tracing turned on. Thanks to Nvidia’s RTX technology, shadows do indeed look more realistic – with different intensities everywhere depicted in a stony ruin in the rainforest. We also just gawked at the walls, looking them shimmer as light reflected and refracted off of them.
In terms of frame rate, Shadow of the Tomb Raider ran at a mostly consistent 50-57 fps, which is impressive giving the game is running on a single GPU and in such an early state – on top of all the new ray tracing techniques.i
Click to expand...

I don't know do I believe the Tech Radar figures. Several sites have said the games they demoed were running at 1080p with Ray Tracing on and they weren't able to reach 60fps, mostly running between 30 and 50fps. The developers of both SoTR and Battlefield V acknowledged that poor performance and say it will get better. Yet, Tech Radar somehow managed to get a game demo at 4k running smoothly at 50-57fps with full on Ray Tracing?
 
Random Guy Esq. said:
Technically, hugely impressive I felt. But aesthetically, I thought the whole thing was overdone - bright, shiny, in your face. I understand they have to highlight the changes, but I hope going forward that developers are more subtle.
Click to expand...

Here's a personal opinion I put to a friend which, for me, sums up this entire malarky. See what you think...

If I can see the movement and muzzle flash of enemies behind me reflecting in the car I'm crouching next to, and as a result I don't get shot by those crafty buggers, then Ray Tracing is worth it because that's not only an immersive graphical feature but a great gameplay mechanic. And maybe then I'd drop over a grand on a graphics card because it will tangibly improve my experience.

If a game mechanic and experience is built around light, shadow and reflectivity, then Ray Tracing is worth it because the experience is greatly enhanced.

But you'd have to be an utter moron to drop that sort of money just because some visual frosting is generated in a fancier way.
 
Silent_Scone said:
RE NVLINK 2.0:
Click to expand...

You dug up a quote showing me correct? Is NVlink being used to provide faster or more access to system memory(the context of that post that you left out)? Nope, it's using pci-e, NVlink is being used as... a pci-e switch. To provide a lane for SLI communication, thereby removing any and all benefit that NVlink was created for.

But way to take it out of context and then also completely misunderstand it AND still get it wrong. I see not much has changed in your posting style or understanding of this area of technology.
 
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