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NVIDIA RTX Technology To Usher In Real-Time Ray Tracing Holy Grail of Gaming Graphics (hothardware.com)
HotHardware writes: NVIDIA has been dabbling in real-time ray tracing for over a decade. However, the company just introduced NVIDIA RTX, which is its latest effort to deliver real-time ray tracing to game developers and content creators for implementation in actual game engines. Historically, the computational horsepower to perform real-time ray tracing has been too great to be practical in actual games, but NVIDIA hopes to change that with its new Volta GPU architecture and the help of Microsoft's new DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API enhancements. Ray tracing is a method by which images are enhanced by tracing rays or paths of light as they bounce in and around an object (or objects) in a scene. Under optimum conditions, ray tracing delivers photorealistic imagery with shadows that are correctly cast; water effects that show proper reflections and coloring; and scenes that are cast with realistic lighting effects. NVIDIA RTX is a combination of software (the company's Gameworks SDK, now with ray tracing support), and next generation GPU hardware. NVIDIA notes its Volta architecture has specific hardware support for real-time ray tracing, including offload via its Tensor core engines. To show what's possible with the technology, developers including Epic, 4A Games and Remedy Entertainment will be showcasing their own game engine demonstrations this week at the Game Developers Conference. NVIDIA expects the ramp to be slow at first, but believes eventually most game developers will adopt real-time ray tracing in the future.
quote: "and the help of Microsoft's new DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API enhancements."
There's a red flag. Is this going to be yet another graphics "standard" for Windows only?
On one hand this technology is very exciting for any PC gamer. On other hand, MS locked new DirectX to Windows 10. As such, if you want this or that new feature enabled you could only do that on Win10. No thanks. I wills tick to gaming on Windows 7, that doesn't spy on me.
The run of the mill for the past few years is that graphics cards are for mining the cryptocurrency flavour of the month and creating magical AI bots. This is the first time in years I have seen an article that refers to the use of graphics cards for actual graphics.
First of all, anyone who signs their post is a douche. That goes double for anyone using a signature that's a carbon copy of their user ID. Second, this is real-time, motherfucker. All that bullshit you did when you hit puberty is irrelevant.
1). Feel free to walk down the hall and create that open standard. In the meantime Nvidia and Microsoft have already done it. Maybe this is the kick in the creative ass you need;
2). The benefit is to the customers. You are acting like this is a proxy battle over which board member gets elected. Whoever does this, the customers benefit;
3). You literally added nothing to the GP comment.
FOSS fanatics don't get it. Since there is no practical way to create binary compatibility between Linux, OSX, Windows, etc., different graphics APIs have little impact on game porting overall. Let's not pretend that portable Java games exist, please.
No, this is really just a thinly veiled attack on Microsoft by people who... hate Microsoft! Surprise. These people want someone else to succeed and usually, they want Linux.
Linux is great. It's some of the people who advocate for Linux who aren't great. This is a great example of their myopia.
1). Pretend that Microsoft is the villain here when this is clearly an Nvidia initiative;
2). Pretend that DirectX is a Giant Problem, when in reality DirectX has been a huge success and brought a lot of sanity to game design;
3). Suggest that RT ray tracing is good, but "just not this way", and that being first to market (a coup under almost any circumstances) is "taking advantage of consumers".