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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.
Ray tracing is great for specular (not spectacular...) reflections, i.e. light interacting with mirror-like, non-diffusing surfaces. It produces highlights, (perfect) refraction, (perfect) reflections and hard shadows. Anything else is not the domain of ray tracing. You can have fuzzy effects with ray tracing, but they come at an extreme processing power cost. Some effects are practically impossible to calculate with ray tracing. Ray tracing can contribute a small part of the rendering equation (the specular part) to photorealistic images, but it does not by itself create photorealism.
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.
Tracing Rays Through the Cloud is a pretty good example of what was "next-gen" 6 years ago. None of the imagery there was generated real-time (just read the paper), but was still a good read about what goes into ray tracing. Intuitively we know what it is, but what it means for computation with reflective/refractive surfaces is a ton of work.
Of course, I won't believe it's real-time until it can render a house of mirrors at 60fps+.
Oh yeah, so many Linux features we had 10 years before windoze.
In 1/5th the memory space.
Who did 24bit color first, not VGA Windows shit in the 80s.
Ray tracing's got what games crave.
It's got rays.
More GPU and CPU and that will be perfect for every type of surface in a computer game.
The need for more extreme processing is what will grow GPU and CPU sales.
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...can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkhBlmKtEAk
Looks quite impressive even without the post filter in my opinion.
What's wrong (to NVIDIA's eyes) with OpenGL?
When I was in college, I took two semesters of graphics - but this was in the late DOS era. Early OpenGL existed, but because this was a real theoretical college class on graphics - we built a real raytracer from pure math from c-code and assembler rather than trying to stick to some arbitrary industry standard.
Cubes, spheres, torus, lighting, reflections, we did it all, piece by piece in glorious 640x350. It was ugly, and eerie, but really fascinating in terms of seeing pure mathematical expressions becoming 3d objects, pixel by pixel.
Since then, I've worked in several jobs frequently involving 'proper' graphics, even worked on a bunch of professional shipped games (mostly gameplay and systems, occasionally worked everywhere though) - and I can appreciate the need to use all the tricks that we do to make origami worlds, everything angled to the camera, but I really did enjoy creating worlds of actual objects, and having the camera pull its own shell of perspective out of the scene instead.
Which is how most assets are sort of created, actually, in the asset creation tools. You model the object, rip the polygons out how you can, create meshes and surfaces, and then try and cheat on everything to make it seem like the 'real' object again as cheaply as you can get away with. It's not quite raytracing outside a few tools, but it's an interesting hybrid.
Raytracers are a cool educational tool - but I can also see why they're only really trotted out when CPU manufacturers want to push for a race to buy more CPUs. They don't scale as well as modern techniques - and although there's some neat tricks you can do when you have your assets really 'present' mathematically (Demoscene stuff does this occasionally), it's usually not a better tradeoff than using the abstraction tools available to make it all work faster.
Ryan Fenton
"And as always they showcase the technology with a scene that would have rendered just as well with current rasterizer+lightmap techniques that people have gotten used to over the last 20 years."
Yes, and 20 years ago it would probably have taken a couple of hours to render a single frame on a top spec PC, not 60fps real time you clueless gimp.
More features to turn off in the settings so I can improve frame rates and actually see what I'm supposed to be looking at.
There are no stupid questions, just stupid people.
As opposed to OpenGL where you had the ATI version, the Nvidia version, and going further back the Solaris and IRIX versions.
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Yeah, you have to love the graphic towards the bottom:
"Board Industry Support"
API: Microsoft.
That's it. The only option. Not very "broad".
Intel was trying to push this when it was clear they weren't making headway in the GPU space and also to push a heavier reliance on CPUs over GPUs (or at least in conjunction with) but it never seemed to gain any traction and was just relegated to tech demos.
https://www.geek.com/games/int...
https://www.hpcwire.com/2010/0...
I guess we'll see how Nvidia does.
Twinstiq, game news
Between both major graphics card manufacturers (AMD) and (NVIDIA) it's usually not uncommon for either to work directly with Microsoft to introduce new DirectX features. The new Vulcan type rendering engines for example are major contributions by AMD. Unfortunately when it comes to raytracing, the main issue is that the amount of processing required for anything better than a simple scene is too much to run in realtime for just about any modern system. If there's glassy / refractive objects, the amount of processing shoots through the roof even more. So neat but probably not immediately usable for gaming. This might however be good for production.
Pretty sure I haven't heard of a Volta based console.
Consoles will be relevant in the discussion when they launch a console that will support this tech. Until then it's a PC ray-traced world.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Your eyes only collect already traced rays. The sun raytraces everything in the solar system.
Computer raytracing actually works backwards - rays are cast from the perspective of the camera, and those that end up at a light source contribute to the image.
I'm an MCSE who detests Windows and uses Linux exclusively... and even I think your post is do you think MS should be releasing extensions to graphics API's for competing platforms??
Why is it that every demonstration of ray tracing results in every surface looking like velvet? The secular reflections from small bumps in the textures are just insane. Is it because they were dialed up on purpose or is it some effect of raytracing that needs to be fixed with something like anti-aliasing?
I remember around 2006 (when AMD has just acquired ATI ?) Intel was making a lot of noise of running the graphics directly on the CPU, hence the GPU-less machines was their big prediction.
They were mentioning real-time ray-tracing as the next big thing in graphics and their CPUs were obviously the natural thing to do it. Here is an example from 2007:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
AMD and Nvidia immediately pointed out that their GPUs were much better for this job, and then nothing happened. Now I see they bring it up again, let's see if it is more than just vaporware.
Ray-tracing doesn't seem necessary, games have impressive looking lighting already, they've gotten good at faking it. I'm skeptical about real time ray-tracing being able to handle high polygon counts and be able to output at 4k.
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Zobeid says, "there must be no progress except on my terms! No Progress I say!!"
Here's a clue. This is an Nvidia technology. OMG, they left AMD out!
In a world where companies bring value-added and proprietary technologies to the table, this is what happens. Making technologies universal and commodities happens through competition.
If you wait for standards committees, cooperative ventures, FOSS, Vulkan, and everyone to get their shit together, progress takes years longer and sometimes stops entirely. Is that what you want? Because you shouldn't want that.
Proprietary standards are imperfect but at least DirectX works well across all of Windows. And Microsoft has made a profitable space where games can be sold and played, and money comes in to fund additional development. The forcing mechanism is competition which makes AMD, Linux, Vulkan, OSX want to catch up.
But yes, let's wait another 50 years for real-time ray tracing, for some mythical Open Source graphics hardware to appear. Also, we need open source CPUs, and all those missing graphics drivers. Can't have the current motherboards and chipsets, that's clearly untrustworthy, no one knows how they are built! Also, Linux is too much of a compromise for me, I insist upon having the original GNU operating system, currently at version 0.35 after 20 years of development!
I actually found that demo video pretty unimpressive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... to link directly.
Oh sure, it's PRETTY but there are some odd artifacts:
- the table edges at 0:08+ flicker oddly
- 0:47 the light effect from the source looks hemispherical, but the device itself wouldn't be?
- the coffe cup with saucer at 1:08 has a weird glowy base
These may be explicable, but they seemed odd in a tech demo.
-Styopa
Turns out raytracing isn't the holy grail of gaming graphics, although it's been hyped for so long that it seems like it. I always thought Pixar films were raytraced, but they were actually rasterized. Cars was their first film that used raytracing at all, and even then it was only during the big race (due to all the reflections, presumably). I do know that shows like Babylon 5 and I believe ST:TNG did use raytracing, though. Nvidia shows off 'realtime raytracing' every few years but it never takes off, presumably better overall results are still achieved via rasterization; sure, you can get sexy shadows and reflections, but your poly count will be at early PS3-era levels. Also, there are problems with raytracing and meshes that animate, like, say, humans, that make it much slower. This is why you almost always see it done with static meshes like cars or buildings. Turns out raytracing isn't even the ultimate rendering technology; Path Tracing is closer, if not theoretically perfect.
It's also worth noting that a form of raytracing has been in use in realtime graphics for a while, called relief mapping, which has made it into games.
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No thanks. I wills tick to gaming on Windows 7, that doesn't spy on me.
Developers target platforms with significant market share and mainstream graphical support. Mainstream support for Win 7 as an OS ended in 2015. OEM Win 7 system installs for the consumer market in 2014. Four years is a long time in this business.
No. While at first glance the video demo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70W2aFr5-Xk) is very pretty it's clear they've gone overboard to make everything they possibly can reflective. That in itself defeats the attempt to be photorealistic.
Aside from the ultra-reflectivity of everything in the scene the most annoying glitch on display was the bursty behaviour of the blooms on the metal edges of the tables, evident because they've used a (relatively) low-poly mesh for something that should be smooth curves.
The need to drive up GPU and CPU sales is necessary.
Microsoft will help along with the high polygon counts and 4K game marketing.
The must have games and GPU thats ray-tracing 1.0 ready.
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No, I'm saying the tech probably isn't there yet, I doubt they can do real time hi-res ray-tracing on consumer level hardware.
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But the need to buy a new GPU just in case a new game needs that support will drive up sales.
Just one more must have new selling point to hype for consumer level hardware.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"