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Ray Tracing GPUs announced from PowerVR

Pottsey

Pottsey

Pottsey

Soldato
Joined
29 May 2006
Posts
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The first of the ray tracing news is started to hit as expected. No real surprise apart from the name which I am not sure about. Specs are

  • Ray tracing: 300 MRPS (million rays per second) and 100 MDTPS (million dynamic triangles per second) at 600 MHzShading:
  • Four Unified Shading Clusters (USCs), with 128 ALU cores delivering in excess of 150 GFLOPS (FP32) or 300 GFLOPS (FP16) at 600 MHz
  • PowerGearing G6XT for advanced power management and dynamic resource allocationPVR3C™ triple compression technologies (PVRTC and ASTC for texture compression, PVRIC for frame buffer compression, PVRGC for geometry compression)Deep Color support for very high image quality at Ultra HD resolutions and beyond - See more at:

http://www.imgtec.com/News/Release/index.asp?NewsID=853

Unity game development has full ray tracing support. see http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/17/u...to-make-thousands-of-3d-games-more-realistic/

I am looking forward to seeing the 3rd gen of the desktop ray tracing card.

EDIT: For comparison the 2nd gen low end desktop card was 50 million rays per second. The high end card 100million. That’s an impressive improvement is orders of magnitude faster then what NVidia or AMD are have.
 
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http://www.anandtech.com/show/7870/...vr-wizard-gpu-family-rogue-learns-ray-tracing

I'm too lazy but someone could rehost and post the two comparison images...

and my argument ends about how much difference there is between ray tracing hybrid mode and no ray tracing. Even more so when the non ray traced scene is pretty simplified with lots of missing shadows and a fairly basic scene with no characters, I would class that as "meh" graphics for the current times, miles behind what can be done on desktops.

The diner itself, the sidewalk, the tree, the road, almost nothing looks better or more realistic other than the car itself which frankly actually sticks out like a sore thumb from the rest of the scene now. The non ray traced scene feels better because everything matches, the car is the only thing that looks semi realistic reflection/light wise and as such just doesn't match the actual scene it's in.

The table it should be highlighted, looks less good. For some reason the top of the table and the legs look the same colour/brightness which isn't realistic.

Even the car, it's an exceptionally poor quality car texture in the first image, desktop graphics have moved lightyears ahead of that. But that is the issue I keep getting at, the car done in ray tracing is as good as it gets, the car without ray tracing is how car textures could look on a desktop a decade ago. In reality you can make a car look 80-90% of the way towards the ray traced version in good engines now, this reduces the gap between non ray traced and ray traced.

Rasterization has moved on every year for the past 20 years, ray tracing was effectively perfect 20 years ago and hasn't moved on, the gap is very small now and even smaller when you see how it will be used, in a limited way which is actually making it stick out as not quite fitting the scene.

The ray traced image is better, but not significantly better, the entire scene isn't magically brilliant or real world or photo realistic, and the very very obvious selective usage of effects is... very obvious.

Interesting tech, sure, monumental leap forwards in graphical quality... nope.

I also wish you'd understand and more accurately portray things like Unity engines "full ray tracing support". If by full you mean it can help their designers PREVIEW non final effects before baking the effects into the game, which is what the engine had before(just slower) and most(bigger) game design engines have these days with huge numbers of top engines moving to ray tracing years ago to do the prebaked lighting effects that you seem to insist don't happen(even though it happens on both desktop and mobile games and will do for years to come).

You even linked to a video of the woman using the engine where they talk about quicker previewing before baking the final effects into the scene. Ray tracing isn't new in terms of game design, and a few games have attempted to add partial ray tracing in already, which is effectively what games doing ray casting have done and then UE4 tried to add in GI which was using voxel octrees to try and obtain a limited scope of view to do limited ray tracing in. They seem to have removed it for consoles and it's a bit unclear if this is still in the PC version or not.

Ray tracing is great, one of the biggest things it will help is collision detection and the like in the future but not in hybrid builds, not when it's being used in a heavily limited way, and like I keep saying, ray tracing vs 20 year old graphics was night and day laughable difference. Today the difference is pretty damn small and ray tracing won't magically improve an entire game.
 
Not got time to make a full post now, will do another day when I have time. I just wanted to quickly say a few things.

It is far more than just helping design and PREVIEW none final effects before baking the effect in game although that is one of the uses for the technology via the desktop card. In addition to that it’s about full real time interactive ray tracing in games. See
http://www.imgtec.com/News/Release/index.asp?NewsID=854 There are two major advantages the desktop card lets you do the ray tracing in real time for previews which is a first and massively helps devs create levels. The 2nd is the GPU lets you play games with ray tracing which look better.

I disagree with your post but not got time right now to make decent counter points :( One of the things you missed is everything automatically now has correct shadows, lighting and reflection and looks x10 better. Hours of dev time now removed all for better shadows and lights. How is that not a massive step forward?

You just need to read all the endorsements from all the big names to see this is something major. “John Carmack ‏@ID_AA_Carmack 1h
I am very happy with the advent of the PVR Wizard ray tracing tech. RTRT HW from people with a clue!” Just one of the many big names behind this.


http://cdn02.androidauthority.net/w...ay-Tracing-rasterized-rendering-4-710x398.jpg

http://cdn04.androidauthority.net/w...VR-Ray-Tracing-hybrid-rendering-4-710x399.jpg

http://blog.imgtec.com/wp-content/u...es_PowerVR-Ray-Tracing-hybrid-rendering-1.jpg
A great example of the massive step forward in life like reflections. Put that in a game like Real Racing 3 and it will look far better than any PC racing game. Just think this http://www.hardwareluxx.de/images/stories/newsbilder/aschilling/2012/real-racing-3-1.jpg with ray tracing will be amazing.


Different angels from the same tech demo.

http://blog.imgtec.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Caustic_boat.png


EDIT:
“More importantly, these blocks do not affect the shading performance of the traditional graphics pipeline because they do not use up shading GFLOPS to perform ray tracing-related tasks.”
Just spotted the above. So if the ray tracing chip is doing all the lights and shadows all the power the Rasterization GPU would have spent on lights and shadows is free for other graphic effects. Win, win.
 
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Since it's not in consoles, probably won't make much smoke on end user's machines and games. Needs the right price and implementation in order not to end up like Ageia (which in my opinion, would have been much better for video games than this).
 
I'm pretty sure unity5 doesn't 'raytrace', they're only using it to do fast beast lightmap previews as far as i know.
Should still be a nice improvement to the usability though.
 
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Well, if you compare it with the movies from here , the difference would be smaller in favor of Ray Trace. Until the hardware will hit the market and be adopted by users at a nice rate, it could be to late to really matter.
 
Calin Banc said:
Since it's not in consoles, probably won't make much smoke on end user's machines and games. Needs the right price and implementation in order not to end up like Ageia (which in my opinion, would have been much better for video games than this).
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What if Apple and Amazon adopt it for console/TV box both companies are working on? It can also be used for AI.



smilertoo said:
I'm pretty sure unity5 doesn't 'raytrace', they're only using it to do fast beast lightmap previews as far as i know.
Should still be a nice improvement to the usability though.
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At the moment it’s only for previews if you are using the desktop ray tracing card to edit. But once consumer devices arrive with ray tracing then it will be for use in apps/games.

“With the availability of our newly announced PowerVR Ray Tracing GPU IP, we continue to work together with Unity to ensure that their game engine takes full advantage of ray tracing hardware once it arrives in consumer devices.”

“In addition, Unity Technologies and Imagination have entered into a longer-term strategic collaboration to blend ray tracing capability seamlessly into the gameplay experience, enabled by consumer devices that integrate Imagination’s newly announced PowerVR Wizard Ray Tracing GPUs (graphics processors). Integrating ray tracing directly into the game engine through this hardware IP solution will lead to interactive game graphics that will look as realistic as CG movies do today. The PowerVR Wizard IPprovides programmable ray tracing, accessible within the shaders running on the PowerVR GPU, enabling all mobile developers to trace rays freely within their existing applications, even in combination with existing rasterization methods. - See more at: http://www.imgtec.com/News/Release/index.asp?NewsID=854#sthash.k9x5heBp.dpuf”



Calin Banc said:
Well, if you compare it with the movies from here , the difference would be smaller in favor of Ray Trace. Until the hardware will hit the market and be adopted by users at a nice rate, it could be to late to really matter.
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The problem with scenes like that is it takes a massive amount of dev hours and it falls apart a bit once you make it interactive. Once you introduce a player who’s moving lights about a lot of those pre baked lights and shadows look wrong, bad or are missing. Ray tracing fixes all that and removes a large chunk of dev hours which in tower lowers game development costs.

Ray tracing really comes into its own with interactive movement that's when it looks better.
 
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Apple has a very low market and it's damn expensive, won't go, at least not on a desktop size. Mobile... I don't know, or care, hand held devices are not for serious gaming.

Just look at newer versions of DX or at least how many games really used the new tech available since DX9. Consoles are the weakest link. People like them because they are cheap to buy (although can get more expensive on a long run than a PC) even with crappy fps at under 30 and max or under 720p resolution.

Now, if they DO manage to get some significant backing from the devs and the prices are right (forget 4-500 euros, won't sell at all), then perhaps... Otherwise I'm with drunkenmaster, what you have already is pretty darn close and most won't care about the differences. I certainty won't if it requires more than 100 bucks to buy such a thing.
 
drunkenmaster said:
and my argument ends about how much difference there is between ray tracing hybrid mode and no ray tracing. Even more so when the non ray traced scene is pretty simplified with lots of missing shadows and a fairly basic scene with no characters, I would class that as "meh" graphics for the current times, miles behind what can be done on desktops.
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I agree the Rasterization graphics in that demo are miles behind desktops it’s also miles behind what mobiles can do. The point of the demo wasn’t the rasterization graphics it was to go alongside the talks about ray tracing at GDC 2014. It was to demonstrate some points to go along with the speeches, not to look as good as possible.

From a technology point of view the demo is amazing it’s the first good real time ray tracing demonstration running on a single chip that I am aware off. That is a massive step forward and orders of magnitude faster than anything before. It’s over 6x faster than the last gen desktop single chip not even counting the extra shader performance. Over 100x more efficient then then best GeForce chip doing the same job.

The point of the demo was not only to prove real time ray tracing is possible which is a massive achievement and step forward. But it was to show the advantages of ray tracing over pre baked graphics, which I feel the demo does a very good job off.

The focus of the demo was how devs no longer have to pre bake every single light/shadow as it’s all done automatically. It was also how the ray tracing shadows and lights are better than standard pre baked lights and the areas the devs missed are automatically covered in correct shadows. One of the big points that will not show up in screenshots is the way the lights, reflections and shadows interact. But I assume you have not seen this? Have you seen the demo in motion or only basing your view on screenshots?

The reflections in motion with interactive light sources is miles ahead of anything a rasterization desktop GPU can pull off. The car and the way it reflects lights looks far better than any Rasterization graphics I have seen. Seeing the demo go from daylight to nighttime is pretty good and a giant step forward.

You get all these improved lights, shadows and reflections all for less dev development time and it frees up the GPU from doing these effects so you have more GPU power for everything else. How can you say that’s not a leap forward?
 
Conceptually a leap forward yes, but a terrible demo in the images drunken posted. Actually I like the first image more - the car may be super shinily reflective in the second but the rest of the scene looks worse, from the totally see-through windows (cloudy in top image looks better) to the loss of 'it's sunny' on the front of the building (in some parts but not others) to the shadows from the dim indoor light cast onto the pavement that is in full sunlight (shouldn't be any visible shadow there)
 
Orangey said:
Is that realtime ingame etc? Lighting does look very nice.
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As far as I am aware it was all real-time in game. Some of the slides from the talk can be found here http://imgur.com/a/8zHHE#17 but it doesn't mean a lot without the speech.

Has some nice info.

http://blog.imgtec.com/wp-content/u...es_PowerVR-Ray-Tracing-hybrid-rendering-4.jpg

http://blog.imgtec.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/13_Ray-tracing-in-games_Ray-traced-soft-shadow.jpg
It looks like shadows are vastly improved.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/Alex...tical_techniques_for_ray_tracing_in_games.php
Has a lot of nice info talking about the advantages or ray tracing.
 
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