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Crytek Shows 4K 30 FPS Ray Tracing On Non-RTX AMD and NVIDIA GPUs (techspot.com)
dryriver writes: Crytek has published a video showing an ordinary AMD Vega 56 GPU -- which has no raytracing specific circuitry and only costs around $450 -- real-time ray tracing a complex 3D city environment at 4K 30 FPS. Crytek says that the technology demo runs fine on most normal NVIDIA and AMD gaming GPUs. As if this wasn't impressive already, the software real-time ray tracing technology is still in development and not even final. The framerates achieved may thus go up further, raising the question of precisely what the benefits of owning a super-expensive NVIDIA RTX 20xx series GPU are. Nvidia has claimed over and over again that without its amazing new RTX cores and AI denoiser, GPUs will choke on real-time ray tracing tasks in games. Crytek appears to have proven already that with some intelligently written code, bog ordinary GPU cores can handle real-time ray tracing just fine -- no RTX cores, AI denoiser or anything else NVIDIA touts as necessary.
Wait a fucking minute. "Only" costs around $450? If I tried to spend $450 on a video card for gaming, my wallet would jump up and slap me on the head. Visa would call me and ask if my credit card had been stolen.
You are welcome on my lawn.
They just implement raytracing most favourable to their architecture.
Since they have lot of area dedicated to neural network acceleration they use a neural network to denoise, then they don't bother trying to find any more efficient algorithms for legacy hardware. They have BVH acceleration, so they don't bother trying to find any more efficient ray acceleration structures for legacy hardware. Etc etc.
They don't lie, they just don't really try to make things shine on older/competitor hardware ... and since their embedded devs are the ones implementing it at Epic/Unity/etc neither do those engines.
Real-time ray tracing on mobile can supposedly be done via patented method - ref: Venturebeat article
which sounds like a lot, but I paid $300 for a Voodoo Rush in 95. That's $500 in today's money and it wasn't a big deal back then.
I'm not sure if it's the $229 GTX 1060 6gbs or just plain the worse economy (it is a lot shittier, You could make $12/hr starting at a call center in my dirt poor town back then, which is $20/hr now for a job a high school dropout could get, now the same job pays $9.50/hr, or about $5.70/hr in today's money) but these prices didn't used to seem all that nuts.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Turing (Nvidia) has exactly ZERO ray tracing units. All 'ray' algorithm maths calculations are done on the standard shader cores- same as with this demo on the AMD Vega 56. So what gives?
An ex-Nvidia engineer post on Beyond3d gave the game away. This engineer was partially responsible for the so-called 'ray tracing' enhancement on Turing. Put simply, this is what Turing does:
a = b + c * d
say the above is a ray maths calc (obviously it is not). The '+' and '*' are the maths operations done on the usual shaders. What every tech site misses is that there is another issue- the process that gets the VARIABLES to the shader ALU blocks.
What Nvidia did with Turing was to add tiny ASIC circuits that allow the VARIABLES that represent triangles and rays to be more efficiently moved to the STANDARD shader units from the other units (like geometry). No RT 'cores' (there are no such thing in Turing) but a tiny logic hack that allowes the GPU to be reconfigured to move certain kinds of data much faster to the shader cores.
However the significance of this is that if one arranges for ray/triangle data to be held in a more efficient form on a 'normal' GPU, the same ray 'acceleration' can be achieved.
Not that even on Turing does REAL-TIME ray tracing happen. Real ray tracing needs far too many 'bouncy' rays per screen pixel to ever be possible on any ordinary GPU- and the problem with real ray tracing is MEMORY COHERENCE, not the maths of the ray/triangle collision.
Turing 'ray tracing' is actually simple ray algorithms applied to real-time reflection maps (NOT true reflection) and shadows. Metro Exodus tried a very very basic form of ray averaging for lighting, which was no better than simply using more traditional light sources.
And the tensor cores on Turing? Well unlike the non-existent ray tracing cores, the Tensor cores are real and use vast numbers of transistors. Why are the Tensor cores real- and the main reason Turing exists? Because Nvidia spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing new crypto currency mining algorithms to run exclusively on Tensor. However, crypto currency collapsed between Turing's design and release. Nvidia's future GAMING GPUs will not have tensor cores.
Turing was 100% designed to displace AMD in the PC crypto currency mining space. Nvidia lost an absolute fortune with Turing cos of the collapse (and Nvidia actually reported this fact at its investor conferences in 2018).
PS all practical 'ray' algorithms can be far better done (faster, less energy) using traditional raster algorithms. Light probe lighting methods with voxel data sets do the real time lighting more than good enough. Real time reflection maps do not need 'ray tracing' to deploy in reflection enhancement. Same applies to shadows- where good enough is better than extreme GPU power/processing requirements.
Indeed, with shadows, the minor improvements to near shadows are not the issue- the issue is shadows being disabled beyond a certain z-distance- something ray methods actually make worse. Better shadows = MORE shadows and shadows across more of the scene.
Nvidia has always been full of it. To see them exposed as the frauds they are _this_ quickly is very nice.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Come on, man; Crytek isn't going to piss away their credibility for nothing.
Since they have lot of area dedicated to neural network acceleration they use a neural network to denoise
And it looks like crap as you would expect.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
The biggest lie they ever told is that their stock value is worth ten times annual revenue, which explains why they were willing to outbid Intel for Mellanox, because they were basically paying half price.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
What nvidia means by "ray tracing" with their RTX thing and the AI denoiser is actually path tracing, which uses incoherent rays and actually does simulate light bounces in a physically accurate way. Effects like depth of field, soft shadows, caustics, ambient occlusion, and diffuse interreflection are a natural result of the path tracing algorithm, but have to be specially accounted for in other algorithms like ray tracing. A good reference for this is Physically-Based Rendering, by Matt Pharr. Because the rays in a path tracer are incoherent, it's an inherently noisy algorithm that requires many samples to reduce variance to acceptable levels. That's where the AI denoiser comes in - it's able to take a noisy image made with fewer path-traced samples and reduce variance to an acceptable level in realtime.
The guys over at brigade also have an actual realtime path tracer, and while the work is world-class and draw-droppingly impressive, you can see how noisy it still is.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these rendering Natalie Portman, stoned and petrified, with a bowl of hot grits and a greased up Yoda doll shoved up my ass.
In Soviet Russia, beowulf cluster of Natalie Portmans with hot grits down pants feeding Yoda dolls imagines you!
[Hmm. Soviet Russia sounds damn good...]
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
This video shows "classical" raytracing
What nvidia means by "ray tracing" with their RTX thing and the AI denoiser is actually path tracing,
Whether its "classical" raytracing or "path" tracing,
I bet 99% of the game players can't feel the difference
They don't lie, they just don't really try to make things shine on older/competitor hardware
That's an over simplification. So far there's nothing that shines on older hardware about what NVIDIA is doing and this demo is no exception. What is being shown here is ray tracing of reflections. Rays come from the camera to analyse reflection and refraction of surfaces. This has been demonstrated on traditional hardware in real time many times before (I believe Intel showed it off 4 years ago on standard but top end hardware), and it is the least computationally intensive part of ray tracing any scene.
So far no one has demonstrated path tracing of lighting in any way that doesn't absolutely cripple performance without dedicated hardware, which is precisely what NVIDIA's work is about.
Apart from reflections the rest is just single bounce dynamic GI with a couple of rays per pixel and lots of hacks, it's not like NVIDIA has the power to do Monte Carlo light transport with thousands of multi-bounce rays per pixel and order dependent effects.
Crytek does cone tracing with lots of hacks to also do single bounce dynamic GI, either way a very coarse approximation of physical lighting.
Why is it the case that objects in videos that show off graphics capabilities always look shiny, brand-new, crisp, all the time? Even when they are supposed to be old and dusty, they manage to look very shiny, brand-new and crisp.
um actually... Nvidia is releasing an update for older graphics cards to enable ray tracing on them. https://games.slashdot.org/sto...
...into the trash that will go.
Companies do get to lie a lot if they are that way inclined, ethically. Have you ever read an Nvidia 10-Q report? Promotional does not begin to describe it.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
It's not that frame rate is more important than resolution. It's that both need to be good enough; for you, 1080 is good enough a lot of the time. I tend to run 2560x1440 at about 100-120 fps. That 4K monitor could still have been a good choice since you could render at lower resolutions, if you used it for other work that did benefit (perhaps video, CAD, or many windows). Just not at all costs (such as too steep a downgrade in refresh rate).
> Ah played with Enlightenment, have you?
Pfft. 20 years ago, I went on a multi-week holy
quest to try and find a way to make Enlightenment work with networked X11 and a headless Linux box. It was an act of hopeless futility (Enlightenment needed capabilities that X11 can't provide over a network, and I later discovered that for various unintuitive reasons, networked X11 usually has worse performance than VNC).
BTW, for anybody who's wondering, networked X11 is NOT the Linux equivalent of RDP with Windows. It's roughly ANALOGOUS to it, but they're products of different eras. Networked X11 hasn't aged gracefully AT ALL, and BOTH RDP and the entire architecture of Windows display drivers evolved hand in hand to support each other.
Sadly, there really is no RDP-equivalent on the horizon for Linux. VNC sucks, but it's perceived as "good enough" because there's nobody willing to finance & shepherd 10 calendar years of development into Linux video architecture to
come up with a new standard that's simultaneously high-performance, networkable, and yet capable of being used in stripped-down form on lesser hardware. Both X.org and Wayland have struggled to fully replace legacy X11, and Wayland's developers EXPLICITLY decided ~5 years ago that RDP-like networkability was off the table, and not even an 'aspirational' long-term goal, while X.org decided to settle for maintaining legacy compatibility with some minor tweaks to improve security.