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.

Comments

Fuck me.

[PopeRatzo]

Crytek has published a video showing an ordinary AMD Vega 56 GPU -- which has no raytracing specific circuitry and only costs around $450

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.

Re: Fuck me.

[PopeRatzo]

Get a better job.

It has nothing to do with how much money I have or don't have. They're bragging about this $450 video card being able to do 30fps at 4k (but only if you have it attached to a PC that already cost you over $1000.. Before I do that, I'd buy a $450 PS4 Pro and spend the balance on an eight-ball of coke and take your mom out for a nice dinner and then anal sex.

All raytracing is not equal

[igotmybfg]

This video shows "classical" raytracing, in which rays are traced coherently, and it has long been doable in realtime on a GPU because it is trivially parallelizable. It looks impressive because it can do mirror- and glass-type effects (specular reflection and refraction), but there is more to photorealism than just those effects. In particular, while ray tracing does simulate light bouncing around a scene, it doesn't do so in a physically-accurate way.

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.