Poll: Ray Tracing - Do we care?

[NinjaCool]

Ray Tracing has always been something that would eventually arrive in games once the hardware was fast enough.

Remember this old Amiga demo?

Even back in 1986 on an Amiga 1000 with 512K memory they were playing around with a Ray Tracing method which simulated rays of light.

 

[bemaniac]

Essentially if you have a 1080ti and want 2080ti performance just scale to 80% and you'll get the same image result as this new DLSS. It's marketing.

 

[bru]

Ray Tracing is nothing new and its never needed special proprietary hardware to run.

I don't understand why now we need massive dedicated hardware to do the same thing done 10 years ago.

Can anyone explain that?

Come on humbug you know as well as a lot of the rest of us that everything that has been able to ray trace effectively before has either been super computer expensive or take along time to render each frame.

These cards can do it in real time, even if it is only at a lowish frame rate, they from what we have seen so far they are far more capable and 'cheaper' ( I cannot believe I just typed that ) than anything that has been able to do raytracing before

 

[Gregster]

Ray Tracing has always been something that would eventually arrive in games once the hardware was fast enough.

Remember this old Amiga demo?

Even back in 1986 on an Amiga 1000 with 512K memory they were playing around with a Ray Tracing method which simulated rays of light.

I certainly do. There was a demo by Fairlight from 2013 which stood out massively to me and showed what realtime RayTracing could do. Amazing for the time.

 

[Shocky-FM]

You would think nvidia would do some research and figure out what their customers actually want rather than add features most users don't want, not until it's ready at least.

Fact is, they don't care what we want, they have such a dominate position that it's no risk to them.

 

[Rifte]

I believe that most PC gamers are simplistic with their approach.

The faster it can push frames, the better.

This is why FPS performance has been the benchmark of a great GPU for as long as I can remember.

Sure it looks nice, but until the hardware catches up it wont be the deciding factor for me.

If I invest in this next gen it wont be because of ray tracing, it will be because its faster than my 1080ti.

 

[bru]

Will it be an on or off switch or will it be a slider that can give us control over how much performance we lose.

Yes I know realistically it is either ray traced or not, but the same could be said for tessellation or anti aliasing and we get a range of options for those. Bad example I know but you get what I'm trying to say hopefully.

 

[StarShock]

Will it be an on or off switch or will it be a slider that can give us control over how much performance we lose.

Yes I know realistically it is either ray traced or not, but the same could be said for tessellation or anti aliasing and we get a range of options for those. Bad example I know but you get what I'm trying to say hopefully.

I imagine at the very least there will be a low, medium and high setting. Just based on the fact that the 3 RTX cards have different numbers of RT cores. Otherwise the RTX 2070 is going to be seriously gimped if anyone wants to use it for ray tracing

 

[Shocky-FM]

Unless the feature can be forced over existing games without support I'm not that interested.

If it's only available per in-game settings in future titles it will have limited or no benefit to us right now.

 

[Gregster]

Not sure if this has been posted but a good information vid and explains a bit about what RT is and the issues it has and the pluses it has.

 

[ubersonic]

DLSS is either going to be one of two things.

1: Just as good as MSAA (or /dream as good as the old FSAA/SSAA), giving a groundbreaking revolution in performance.
2: Just another MSAA alternative that promises the same quality but fails, a la FXAA/CMAA/TXAA/etc.

 

[orbitalwalsh]

So with that in mind is it relatively safe to assume that Tomb Raider will probably see a lot more optimisation vs the recent reports of it running in HD at 30-50fps. Presumably it should run pretty well if all this hardware does its job correctly. Or is it the case that the slowest part of the chip ends up dictating performance, presumably in this instance the RT cores.

This also raises a load more questions, what does 10 gigarays equal? Does resolution have an effect on this? If so how do the shaders affect it, do they just sit around doing not much if its RT limited at 1080p? Is it a choice of RT or disabling RT and then having a really fast 4k game? To make the most of this tech does a game have to be specifically designed for the architecture, ie making to most of each section of the chip? How did they decide how many cores of each section was the right amount?

Interesting times.

I have a feeling, could have just been all done on the Cuda cores, just because its a short time span to code RT for use on RT Cores or for DX12-RT. not even sure how far Windows has got with it or if Raider use it etc.

if it is the case of 2080ti using brute stretch in rendering RT with Cuda cores at 1080p and 30fps, thats very VERY impressive ....

 

[4K8KW10]

Come on humbug you know as well as a lot of the rest of us that everything that has been able to ray trace effectively before has either been super computer expensive or take along time to render each frame.

These cards can do it in real time, even if it is only at a lowish frame rate, they from what we have seen so far they are far more capable and 'cheaper' ( I cannot believe I just typed that ) than anything that has been able to do raytracing before

Lowish framerate and lowish quality. The shown video was with mediocre quality.

You would think nvidia would do some research and figure out what their customers actually want rather than add features most users don't want, not until it's ready at least.

Fact is, they don't care what we want, they have such a dominate position that it's no risk to them.

We want 10-bit colours and nvidia to fix its fake colours representation.

 

[Gregster]

Lowish framerate and lowish quality. The shown video was with mediocre quality.



We want 10-bit colours and nvidia to fix its fake colours representation.

The vid looked good to me and what is wrong with NVidia colour representation? What card do you have and what settings do you have?

 

[melmac]

DLSS to me is the most interesting feature of the new cards. Ray tracing is just too demanding at present. DLSS looks like it could have a massive impact on game performance. I should add a positive impact.

 

[nashathedog]

I mentioned this over on Bit-Tech, I'm interested to see if it gives a performance boost by using DLSS instead of normal AA. I don't know about PUBG, but I'm not sure anything can save the performance of Ark
I also wondered if, since it's based off prediction, if there would be cases of the prediction messing up.

That's what I've been wondering about too, how good are it's prediction? I never took much notice of this around the time of the RTX announcement as they made it all about the ray Tracing so I need to do some reading on DLSS when I get the time. It sounds like it has potential.

My worry is related to AMD, were they caught off-guard by the direction Nvidia are pushing things & how much will AMD's gpu performance suffer because of it?

For all we know Navi could have taken a completely different direction meaning it needs to be redesigned from the ground up which will push it even further back,
Also, how reliant will upcoming Nvidia games be on these features? I can see it being the new Gameworks so far as AMD are concerned.

 

[HangTime]

I believe that most PC gamers are simplistic with their approach.

The faster it can push frames, the better.

This is why FPS performance has been the benchmark of a great GPU for as long as I can remember.

Periodically you get new features coming along that get people interested as opposed to it just doing the same thing, but faster. Some examples:

-The early 3d cards like 3dfx were actually slower in many cases than lower resolution software rendering (i.e. 640x480 slower than 320x200 sw). But they looked a lot better due fancy features like bilinear filtering, lens flares / coronas, coloured lighting, making higher resolution more accessible (of course 640x480 software was a lot slower)
-Nvidia championed the drive for 32bit colour when 3dfx were still churning out 16bit/"22bit" cards - I personally wasn't that swayed by it (because I would stick with 16bit for performance reasons) but I know quite a few were
-New DX versions often carried new features like bump mapping, pixel shaders etc that got people interested even if the performance wasn't groundbreaking. I know there's a few on here that had Matrox G400 Max for example, great image quality but wasn't that competitive in terms of framerate

Of course, it is all quite tightly related in any case, generally speaking you can trade off visuals for performance in all cards, and a card that looks better will usually only look better because it has enough grunt to enable features out of reach of other cards. People make these compromises all the time, if framerate was really that important most people would be running lower resolutions with no AA etc.

That said, for me it is a key driver and I can't see myself using features like this for actual game play, as I turn down graphics settings as it is.

 

[PiKe]

The selling point here is going to be with competitive play, nobody is going to want to be at a disadvantage to someone else who does have an RTX that is able to see enemy reflections in windows, puddles or car bodies.

 

[beany_bot]

The selling point here is going to be with competitive play, nobody is going to want to be at a disadvantage to someone else who does have an RTX that is able to see enemy reflections in windows, puddles or car bodies.

I think the competitive advantage will still lie with those at 240FPS rather than with ray tracing on at 20FPS... So I wouldn't worry about that.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I think the competitive advantage will still lie with those at 240FPS rather than with ray tracing on at 20FPS... So I wouldn't worry about that.

Unless they get their opponents to use RTX(and they don't) and then throw a grenade at them,and their FPS tumbles and they go and whack them all!