Ray Tracing

[IT Troll]

Just started playing Control as my first RT enabled game. I think it will take some time for gaming brain to adjust as I keep shooting my own reflection at the moment.

 

[TNA]

I deffo max all RT settings soon as I boot a new game up, Im all about the visuals always have been and RT adds some nice effects. Can't wait to see what Cyberpunk will offer with them on, I personally think it'll be a show case.

I am like this too. That is why I like RT. Hopefully games next year have better implementations of it though.

Like you I can’t wait for Cyberpunk 2077 and to see how well they implemented it. I am optimistic. If their recommended specs are right I will be able to play it 4K60 with RT maxed out. I assume that is with DLSS on though, but I am cool with that

 

[Kaapstad]

That's probably down to today's games rather than RT. Games now require the attention span of a gold fish and so the atmosphere built by a properly lit and shadowed environment is lost. Hardware manufacturers have gotten behind E-Sports as it sells hardware, but doesn't produce good games.

Minecraft and Quake 2 RTX are probably the best examples of RT so far, while control isn't bad it still looks like it's been bolted on as an afterthought. People look at WDL and decide RT is not worth it and I have to agree in that poop train of a title they are correct. It's not that RT itself is done badly, but more the gameplay. Metro Exodus was somewhat held back by Turing in what it could do and Battlefield V was a train wreck that proved 'it just didn't work' before making the game playable.

Fingers crossed Cyberpunk will show some impressive effects and I'm looking forward to seeing MSFS updated.

Personally I'd like Theif, Dues Ex, System Shock, Dead Space, Alien and even a Skyrim RT edition.

What sort of games do you enjoy?

Mostly strategy games like Civ and RTW

 

[Born_2_Kill_83]

I am like this too. That is why I like RT. Hopefully games next year have better implementations of it though.

Like you I can’t wait for Cyberpunk 2077 and to see how well they implemented it. I am optimistic. If their recommended specs are right I will be able to play it 4K60 with RT maxed out. I assume that is with DLSS on though, but I am cool with that

Watch for hype

 

[Wrinkly]

Mostly strategy games like Civ and RTW

I've just gone back to playing Everquest after almost a decade. Scared to install the latest Civ as I know it would eat my life.

 

[Kaapstad]

I've just gone back to playing Everquest after almost a decade. Scared to install the latest Civ as I know it would eat my life.

The latest Civ is not that good so I stick to playing Civ 5.

 

[Rroff]

Not that it changes much (right now) but Vulkan now has an official, non-vendor specific, ray tracing extension.

https://www.khronos.org/blog/vulkan-ray-tracing-final-specification-release

Today, Khronos® has released the final versions of the set of Vulkan®, GLSL and SPIR-V extension specifications that seamlessly integrate ray tracing into the existing Vulkan framework. This is a significant milestone as it is the industry’s first open, cross-vendor, cross-platform standard for ray tracing acceleration - and can be deployed either using existing GPU compute or dedicated ray tracing cores. Vulkan Ray Tracing will be familiar to anyone who has used DirectX Raytracing (DXR) in DirectX 12, but also introduces advanced functionality such as the ability to load balance ray tracing setup operations onto the host CPU. Although ray tracing will be first deployed on desktop systems, these Vulkan extensions have been designed to enable and encourage ray tracing to also be deployed on mobile.

nVidia and AMD have released beta/developer drivers today supporting it.

 

[Grim5]

Good stuff, I really want to see more Vulkun games, Direct X has become an overgrown ape

 

[gpuerrilla]

I was shocked to see even on my vega box DirectX12.. and the lack of games using it after all the years. All the features and benefits its meant to offer. At least if vulkan is progressing there is another option!

 

[opethdisciple]

I assume this is the official RT thread..

Vulkan can now do ray tracing!!

 

[K1LaW8tt5]

I was shocked to see even on my vega box DirectX12.. and the lack of games using it after all the years. All the features and benefits its meant to offer. At least if vulkan is progressing there is another option!

I agree dx12 has been terrible especially when you still have some reviews recommending not to use it in some cases and to revert to dx11 to fix "issues". how long has it been?

 

[KillBoY_UK]

I was shocked to see even on my vega box DirectX12.. and the lack of games using it after all the years. All the features and benefits its meant to offer. At least if vulkan is progressing there is another option!

With it being more to the metal is requires much more mana hours and skills to implement and to get the most out of it. It just doesn't make sense a lot of the time from a development point of view

 

[gpuerrilla]

I agree dx12 has been terrible especially when you still have some reviews recommending not to use it in some cases and to revert to dx11 to fix "issues". how long has it been?

Too long.

With it being more to the metal is requires much more mana hours and skills to implement and to get the most out of it. It just doesn't make sense a lot of the time from a development point of view

Well what can you do, the Manufacturers get panned if its in the drivers and features there, and so you move it to the devs (DX12) and they just block it as ahh take too much time and effort that. Whats the selling feature here then? DX12 - but we dont use it... I mean really poor tbh.

 

[RBImGuy]

RT atm is a novelty and not ready for games and gamers.
Buy amd hardware for 1080p and 1440p and enjoy fast game fps with rasterization.

 

[aoaaron]

RT atm is a novelty and not ready for games and gamers.
Buy amd hardware for 1080p and 1440p and enjoy fast game fps with rasterization.

Totally disagree. RT on Spiderman PS5 looks fantastic.
Its here and I'm happy for it if its used properly.

I cannot personally stomach 1080p anymore. It looks awful compared to 4K but I do game on a 77'' display. 1440p lacks a lot of detail but I can make do with it if I activate a sharpening filter of some sort.

 

[KillBoY_UK]

Too long.



Well what can you do, the Manufacturers get panned if its in the drivers and features there, and so you move it to the devs (DX12) and they just block it as ahh take too much time and effort that. Whats the selling feature here then? DX12 - but we dont use it... I mean really poor tbh.

As always it depends on your project, If your a big AAA studio that wants to push the graphical bar or you have a CPU heavy game then you would look into the cost/benifit analysis .

Say you a smaller studio making Torchlight 3 or making a Esport game then DX12 makes little sense, DX11 will be a better bet.

DX12 never was and never will be silver bullet or outright replacement for DX11.

 

[no_1_dave]

Some of you don't seem to appreciate all the current RT games are made with Turing in mind. Once more and more multiplatform games with RT are made,it will mean all those games will have to be coded with the RT method AMD is using,and it should improve relative to Nvidia,even if Nvidia is still faster overall. For example RDNA2 is developed for inline RT(DXR1.1),so we need to wait and see in the 12 months how actual RT performance pans out.

Current RT is done though DX (and 3 titles in Vulkan).

The Devs don't program it with a card in mind, they simply program the Direct X instructions and the graphics card (both AMD and Nvidia) spits out the image. How the calls are handled on the card is down to the hardware and the drivers. If one company's card handles it faster than another company's card that is nothing to do with the devs, it's down to the hardware and drivers.

The only way AMD will improve RT performance is if there is any wiggle room in their drivers. I guess they could also pay game companies to reduce some less noticeable RT effects when their card is detected so it looks as though they perform better (*cough* like the did with tessellation back in the day *cough*), but I would hope they wouldn't stoop to that.

Plus the fact RDNA 2 first Gen Ray tracing is actually better than Nvidia first gen RT.

The 6800XT is vastly more powerful than a 2080TI but can barely match it with RT on? That is not better. With the card being so much more powerful RT should also be higher.

All the current RT games will have been developed on Nvidia hardware as it was the only game in town. Now AMD has its own hardware,developers will need to work on it too. I do think Nvidia will be ahead,but AMD should in theory get a bigger improvement as Nvidia and developers have already done a degree of the legwork with Turing.

As per the reply to your other post. Developers don't implement it differently for any brand of card. It's simply implemented through Direct X

AMD cut costs when making their card by not having an equivalent to Nvidia's Tensor cores. They're charging basically the same price for the 6800XT as the 3080, however Nvidia have included Tensor cores which can offload the RT and DLSS from the main graphics pipeline on the GPU. It's great that AMD have caught up, but their card is cheaper to make due to lacking the Tensor cores so in turn lacks RT performance (and likely DLSS performance when they implement their solution). With this in mind the 6800XT should have come in approx £100 under the 3080 to make it worth losing those features.

RT atm is a novelty and not ready for games and gamers.
Buy amd hardware for 1080p and 1440p and enjoy fast game fps with rasterization.

The majority of people who spend £700+ on a GPU want their games to look pretty and that's what RT currently does. It makes no sense spending £700+ on a GPU and not being able to turn on a setting that arguably makes the biggest visual difference