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.
The point he was making is that the visual benefits here are only a very minor part of what RTX (and Microsoft's DXR) actually achieve. Hence it's not surprising that it performs well.
Reflections are a minor benefit of ray tracing. Accurate lighting is where the real benefit is, and at the moment that gives crippling performance for the non-wealthy gamers.
You'd be wrong. Raytracing reflections compared to our classical ways of faking (screen space reflection) only shows differences in a few minor areas. Path tracing of lighting compared to general global illumination however makes a huge visual difference, so much so that many players actively complained about it in Metro Exodus due to the fact that hey realism actually sucks, and what did you think was going to happen on a moonlit night indoors, of course it looks much darker in the shadows than GI.
It's time the people in the USA actually got some consumer protection laws and ombudsmen to represent consumer interest so that *any* company is forced to actually address design flaws or other things they do that prevent their product from being fit for purpose.
No you missed my point. NVIDIA can't force a game without raytracing to suddenly have raytracing. That is something that is highly dependent on the game, and additionally due to the large performance hit is something that developers specifically make optional. All the driver updates in the world in this case don't "cripple" GTX cards. The choice is 100% the users.
Providing a completely optional feature which didn't exist prior is the exact opposite of crippling.
Just because you aren't focused on something doesn't mean it's irrelevant to normal humans. I'm happy you enjoyed the game. I enjoyed it too. I was also far more immersed in it when RTX made it look even more realistic.
Hell we're on Slashdot here. The Venn diagram of Slashdot users and Normal Humans doesn't have a lot of overlap.
The third is mostly bloat but hey why not implement a more and more complex canvas to support a platform that is nothing but template driven cookie sites.
You're a very jaded negative person. For your "template driven cookie sites" the rest of the world is busy using full embedded office applications. Just because you don't make use of the full functionality available doesn't mean it doesn't exist and doesn't need necessary resources available. One man's bloat is another's critical feature.
Impressive given that they render pages more and more slowly.
Except they don't. Direct comparisons have shown improvements in load times over the years, in many case quite dramatic ones. Did you miss the damn speed wars of the past 5 years?
to support poor an inefficient implementation
To claim something has a poor or inefficient implementation you need to first point to a feature comparable implementation that does it better. Do you have examples? The only three proper feature comparable web browsers are Edge, Firefox, and Chrome, and they are comparable in memory usage for a reason. The reminder will be missing some feature (see above comment about critical features).
Importing massive libraries and frameworks which eat tons of resources and carry thousands of bugs because a developer is too lazy to "reinvent the wheel" for a couple three or four line basic function.
Well since Chromium and Firefox are open source can you point to an example of developers of it being lazy? Or are you talking about web pages themselves when we started talking about browsers?
People contrast modern horribly inefficient abstraction practices with the tight asm instruction packing of early days where people were squeezing everything into a few k of ram with 1mhz processors using clever and unmaintainable tricks.
Those still exist, and computationally we're as efficient as we ever were. They are buried underneath modern GUI and fancy presentation (see above comment about critical feature). That's not developers being lazy, that's customer expectations. You want that to change, you're looking in the wrong place.
If you've ever done anything safety related, you'd know that the answer is always inherently safer design when that's an option.
Indeed it is. In this case it wasn't. Read up on the design history of the 737 MAX8, the entire series of aircraft is overdue for retirement, but development of the latest model was a reaction to a competitor stealing business based on their better platform.
Redesign takes time. Time is a luxury.
ummm... how about we kill no people?
Are you mad. Do you want to be out of a job?;-). There's no denying the development process was an accident waiting to happen. Everything about this model aircraft is rushed to market, you were never going to get ISD during it's development.
WTF. When the pilot wants full control then the pilot should get it.
Nope. 50 years of knowledge has shown that in perfectly characterisable cases a human should not be given control. The fundamental purposes of emergency systems is to remove control from humans, humans who typically are the initiating cause of the emergency.
For every Boeing 737 MAX8 you'll find 10s if not 100s of tragic accidents or near misses where pilots actively caused a stall.
Sorry, but the safety predictions were put out when these reactors were designed. Your argument is invalid.
Err no, you fundamentally don't understand the differences between knowing risk, and the process of designing layers of protection against risk. You're speaking directly to my point: They knew the risks and yet had no understood mechanism of managing them.
Except for Chernobyl. Like I said, you can't engineer out the sheer stupidity of that case.
I think Mac is plenty relevant and primarily relevent to graphics manipulation in the professional design world.
It most definitely is not "primarily" relevant, it's market share is dwindling every year and is a fraction of what it used to be, and with every move Apple is making the situation is getting worse. Yay Adobe finally supports off-loading on CUDA. Apple says: We're restricting the user of NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA drivers in Macs.
All that would have to happen to put Adobe out of business is for Apple to match Adobe's software.
Not even remotely. Firstly you would need to match an entire suite of professional grade tools, good luck with that. Secondly you have incredible network effect, you have retraining, you have to provide compatibility with many years past projects, and then you also need to show to the world that you're serious about the industry. With that last one Apple has been showing increasingly that it's not, dumbing down it's products and features to the point where it's actively driving people into the arms of Adobe rather than the other way around. Many people have not forgotten much less forgiven them for Final Cut Pro which was just one in a long line of punches to the groin Adobe gave to professional users.
But Adobe fucked Apple over and their install base for years.
You got that backwards. Adobe's slow releases and lack of support on Mac are predominantly due to the moving target Apple presented to them.
Apple, more often than not, releases quality software.
Errr no. Their professional tools have turned from quality software to children's toys. Functionality consistently removed, but hey the UI is now shiny.
Do you think it would cost more than $25M for Apple to secretly write from scratch a professional grade solution to all Adobe software subscribers
You're joking right? Tell me you're joking. Tell me you don't actually think $25m would cover the creative suite. Tell me you don't believe that simply writing software ensures success. Tell me you don't think that someone magically can come to the market and write software that is "better" (you can start by defining that term) than the industry standard.
I think Apple could do this for less $$, and have it ready for free in next year's new Macs with the new ARM platform, fucking Adobe dead once and for all.
I think carebears actually live in the clouds. We both have our weird fantasies.
To be fair today's speakers are expected to do real time room correction and beam steering while playing music standalone from an internet stream over your wifi connection.
Good luck coming up with something in browsers that explains their memory consumption.
How about pre-loading all functionality possible in case a page needs it so it is accessed faster? How about the few lines of code going through an full JIT compilation so it runs faster? How about the fact that we're not throwing text on a screen but rather rendering on a complex canvas that can these days do pretty much anything?
For all the complaints about memory usage increasing over the years, barring actual memory leaks you can almost linearly trend these increases with various performance increases in the browser itself.
Please, use all my RAM if the system is faster as a result. It's why I bought it.
This attitude needs to die, Moore's law is dead and we need to start optimizing applications again.
What do you think that cache is being used for? Preloading functions that may be used by the JS engine. JIT compilation where possible and loading in memory so it's faster when available.
For all the complaints about RAM usage of browsers one thing that has actually increased consistently with nearly every version is actually the raw computational performance. Page rendering has been getting faster, javascript performance is many orders of magnitude better than the days of low RAM Netscape.
Browsers are complex. They provide a functionality previously not even dreamt about, and for all the complaints they do so quite efficiently.
Surely nVidia's decision to enable their older cards to run ray tracing has nothing to do with Crysis demoing real time ray tracing on AMD GPUs [techspot.com] a couple days ago.
Unlikely. This was going to happen one way or the other anyway. Microsoft's DXR specifically has fallback modes when dedicated hardware isn't availble and this was announced back when RTX was first released as well. The timing here isn't even convenient since nothing a consumer can buy actually runs on the engine which has been demoed.
real time ray tracing can be done in software without the need for specialized hardware accelerators. This kinda makes the main selling point of the GeForce 20 series more or less moot.
Oh man I remember and early Slashdot post in the 90s talking about the fact that we don't need 3D Accelerators we just need to optimise our CPU rendering software. Along that time there were many people promising the earth too with newer better graphics that don't require dedicated hardware. The reality was always, just because you can, doesn't mean you should, and definitely doesn't mean it works nearly as good as having dedicated hardware to do it.
So, in other words, not enough people upgraded to the new RTX series video cards yet so they need to cripple the existing GTX series cards with a driver "update" that forces real time ray tracing down everyone's throats whether or not their card can support it.
Don't be daft, you can't enable ray tracing through a driver update. There is a long and complicated process getting games to support it and 100% of both games that support it offer it to be disabled due to crippling the performance of the games.
Calm down, drink a beer, and realise that for the long history of people accusing NVIDIA and AMD of crippling older cards through driver updates it has been proven completely false time and time again.
I remained unaware through the whole experience as to whether RTX was on and if it was, what difference it made.
Then you may not be paying attention. The difference is night and day. I don't use that in the traditional english way, I mean literally the difference is like standing in a room with a sun in it, or having the moon stream light through the window.
There's no doubt Metro Exodus is a gorgeous game. Absolutely amazing. The amount of detail they put into lighting and shadows as it was is breathtaking. However if you're creeping in the shadows, moving within buildings, hiding behind things at night, the difference is as obvious as a punch in the face. Running around in the desert at high noon shooting things.... well couldn't tell the difference in the slightest.
On the flip-side DLSS is a load of shit. If my choices were RTX on with DLSS or RTX off as the only two options to get a playable framerate, then the latter wins hands down, and ultimately framerate definitely matters. If I wanted a blurry screen I'd take off my glasses.
Look if you gushed anymore about AMD you'd need a diaper. Your response to "another reason to pass" is you advocate a 2x performance hit on other cards?
If the 2060 can raytrace without speed impact over the 1660 then it's quite a good reason to go for it in a high end system. Then you go on to say memory bandwidth is everything, which if you've looked at benchmarks can only mean that you're not actually interested in ever playing games as much as you just want GPUs to play with moving data around your RAM.
By all accounts Ray Tracing already cuts framerates in half. I can't imagine a world where this works.
Imagine a world where what works, raytracing on an old GPU? Some of us have 1080 Tis and 60Hz 1080p panels. If a modern game cut ray tracing in half we'd go from a hard 60fps to a hard 60fps. But you're right for the majority of gamers this won't work.
However I'm hopeful for some kind of granularity. So far there are two games on the market with raytracing enabled. One game has gone through an optimisation process where the visual quality not only improved but the frame rates increased by about 30-40% (Battlefield V). Secretly I'm hopeful Metro Exodus (which is already a drop dead gorgeous game) can be optimised so there's no 4x fps hit.
As it stands I'd happily play it with a 2x fps hit raytraced, but I'm not running a 1060.
Slashdot Mirror
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.
The point he was making is that the visual benefits here are only a very minor part of what RTX (and Microsoft's DXR) actually achieve. Hence it's not surprising that it performs well.
Reflections are a minor benefit of ray tracing. Accurate lighting is where the real benefit is, and at the moment that gives crippling performance for the non-wealthy gamers.
You'd be wrong. Raytracing reflections compared to our classical ways of faking (screen space reflection) only shows differences in a few minor areas. Path tracing of lighting compared to general global illumination however makes a huge visual difference, so much so that many players actively complained about it in Metro Exodus due to the fact that hey realism actually sucks, and what did you think was going to happen on a moonlit night indoors, of course it looks much darker in the shadows than GI.
Wait a fucking minute. "Only" costs around $450? If I tried to spend $450 on a video card for gaming
I'm sure you have actual hobbies you spend money on. Clearly gaming isn't one of them.
Someone get these idiots a dictionary.
It's time the people in the USA actually got some consumer protection laws and ombudsmen to represent consumer interest so that *any* company is forced to actually address design flaws or other things they do that prevent their product from being fit for purpose.
No you missed my point. NVIDIA can't force a game without raytracing to suddenly have raytracing. That is something that is highly dependent on the game, and additionally due to the large performance hit is something that developers specifically make optional. All the driver updates in the world in this case don't "cripple" GTX cards. The choice is 100% the users.
Providing a completely optional feature which didn't exist prior is the exact opposite of crippling.
Just because you aren't focused on something doesn't mean it's irrelevant to normal humans. I'm happy you enjoyed the game. I enjoyed it too. I was also far more immersed in it when RTX made it look even more realistic.
Hell we're on Slashdot here. The Venn diagram of Slashdot users and Normal Humans doesn't have a lot of overlap.
Please learn to quote, your post is hard to read.
The third is mostly bloat but hey why not implement a more and more complex canvas to support a platform that is nothing but template driven cookie sites.
You're a very jaded negative person. For your "template driven cookie sites" the rest of the world is busy using full embedded office applications. Just because you don't make use of the full functionality available doesn't mean it doesn't exist and doesn't need necessary resources available. One man's bloat is another's critical feature.
Impressive given that they render pages more and more slowly.
Except they don't. Direct comparisons have shown improvements in load times over the years, in many case quite dramatic ones. Did you miss the damn speed wars of the past 5 years?
to support poor an inefficient implementation
To claim something has a poor or inefficient implementation you need to first point to a feature comparable implementation that does it better. Do you have examples? The only three proper feature comparable web browsers are Edge, Firefox, and Chrome, and they are comparable in memory usage for a reason. The reminder will be missing some feature (see above comment about critical features).
Importing massive libraries and frameworks which eat tons of resources and carry thousands of bugs because a developer is too lazy to "reinvent the wheel" for a couple three or four line basic function.
Well since Chromium and Firefox are open source can you point to an example of developers of it being lazy? Or are you talking about web pages themselves when we started talking about browsers?
People contrast modern horribly inefficient abstraction practices with the tight asm instruction packing of early days where people were squeezing everything into a few k of ram with 1mhz processors using clever and unmaintainable tricks.
Those still exist, and computationally we're as efficient as we ever were. They are buried underneath modern GUI and fancy presentation (see above comment about critical feature). That's not developers being lazy, that's customer expectations. You want that to change, you're looking in the wrong place.
I've had a half-century of experience: yes, humanity is largely shitty.
Half? You sound like you're a lawn short of telling kids to get off the lawn.
Me, I also have half a century experience. It definitely sounds like you hang out with a shitty crowd. Humanity is just fine.
If you've ever done anything safety related, you'd know that the answer is always inherently safer design when that's an option.
Indeed it is. In this case it wasn't. Read up on the design history of the 737 MAX8, the entire series of aircraft is overdue for retirement, but development of the latest model was a reaction to a competitor stealing business based on their better platform.
Redesign takes time. Time is a luxury.
ummm... how about we kill no people?
Are you mad. Do you want to be out of a job? ;-). There's no denying the development process was an accident waiting to happen. Everything about this model aircraft is rushed to market, you were never going to get ISD during it's development.
WTF. When the pilot wants full control then the pilot should get it.
Nope. 50 years of knowledge has shown that in perfectly characterisable cases a human should not be given control. The fundamental purposes of emergency systems is to remove control from humans, humans who typically are the initiating cause of the emergency.
For every Boeing 737 MAX8 you'll find 10s if not 100s of tragic accidents or near misses where pilots actively caused a stall.
*Two* recent tragic *accidents*.
With double the emotion.
No oil change? No repair? Were you talking to some mythical voice in your head because you certainly weren't replying to me.
But hey sure I'll buy the fact that costs are reduced when people stop stealing mufflers.
Sorry, but the safety predictions were put out when these reactors were designed. Your argument is invalid.
Err no, you fundamentally don't understand the differences between knowing risk, and the process of designing layers of protection against risk. You're speaking directly to my point: They knew the risks and yet had no understood mechanism of managing them.
Except for Chernobyl. Like I said, you can't engineer out the sheer stupidity of that case.
I think Mac is plenty relevant and primarily relevent to graphics manipulation in the professional design world.
It most definitely is not "primarily" relevant, it's market share is dwindling every year and is a fraction of what it used to be, and with every move Apple is making the situation is getting worse. Yay Adobe finally supports off-loading on CUDA. Apple says: We're restricting the user of NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA drivers in Macs.
All that would have to happen to put Adobe out of business is for Apple to match Adobe's software.
Not even remotely. Firstly you would need to match an entire suite of professional grade tools, good luck with that. Secondly you have incredible network effect, you have retraining, you have to provide compatibility with many years past projects, and then you also need to show to the world that you're serious about the industry. With that last one Apple has been showing increasingly that it's not, dumbing down it's products and features to the point where it's actively driving people into the arms of Adobe rather than the other way around. Many people have not forgotten much less forgiven them for Final Cut Pro which was just one in a long line of punches to the groin Adobe gave to professional users.
But Adobe fucked Apple over and their install base for years.
You got that backwards. Adobe's slow releases and lack of support on Mac are predominantly due to the moving target Apple presented to them.
Apple, more often than not, releases quality software.
Errr no. Their professional tools have turned from quality software to children's toys. Functionality consistently removed, but hey the UI is now shiny.
Do you think it would cost more than $25M for Apple to secretly write from scratch a professional grade solution to all Adobe software subscribers
You're joking right? Tell me you're joking. Tell me you don't actually think $25m would cover the creative suite. Tell me you don't believe that simply writing software ensures success. Tell me you don't think that someone magically can come to the market and write software that is "better" (you can start by defining that term) than the industry standard.
I think Apple could do this for less $$, and have it ready for free in next year's new Macs with the new ARM platform, fucking Adobe dead once and for all.
I think carebears actually live in the clouds. We both have our weird fantasies.
Who doesn't use it or like it? The writer in TFS certainly uses it, I use it too. What's your point?
Are you telling me you can't earn $50 a month with these tools?
Nope. But some of us don't want to earn $50/month with these tools. We just want to use them as a hobby when we want.
To be fair today's speakers are expected to do real time room correction and beam steering while playing music standalone from an internet stream over your wifi connection.
Good luck coming up with something in browsers that explains their memory consumption.
How about pre-loading all functionality possible in case a page needs it so it is accessed faster?
How about the few lines of code going through an full JIT compilation so it runs faster?
How about the fact that we're not throwing text on a screen but rather rendering on a complex canvas that can these days do pretty much anything?
For all the complaints about memory usage increasing over the years, barring actual memory leaks you can almost linearly trend these increases with various performance increases in the browser itself.
Please, use all my RAM if the system is faster as a result. It's why I bought it.
This attitude needs to die, Moore's law is dead and we need to start optimizing applications again.
What do you think that cache is being used for? Preloading functions that may be used by the JS engine. JIT compilation where possible and loading in memory so it's faster when available.
For all the complaints about RAM usage of browsers one thing that has actually increased consistently with nearly every version is actually the raw computational performance. Page rendering has been getting faster, javascript performance is many orders of magnitude better than the days of low RAM Netscape.
Browsers are complex. They provide a functionality previously not even dreamt about, and for all the complaints they do so quite efficiently.
Surely nVidia's decision to enable their older cards to run ray tracing has nothing to do with Crysis demoing real time ray tracing on AMD GPUs [techspot.com] a couple days ago.
Unlikely. This was going to happen one way or the other anyway. Microsoft's DXR specifically has fallback modes when dedicated hardware isn't availble and this was announced back when RTX was first released as well. The timing here isn't even convenient since nothing a consumer can buy actually runs on the engine which has been demoed.
real time ray tracing can be done in software without the need for specialized hardware accelerators. This kinda makes the main selling point of the GeForce 20 series more or less moot.
Oh man I remember and early Slashdot post in the 90s talking about the fact that we don't need 3D Accelerators we just need to optimise our CPU rendering software. Along that time there were many people promising the earth too with newer better graphics that don't require dedicated hardware. The reality was always, just because you can, doesn't mean you should, and definitely doesn't mean it works nearly as good as having dedicated hardware to do it.
So, in other words, not enough people upgraded to the new RTX series video cards yet so they need to cripple the existing GTX series cards with a driver "update" that forces real time ray tracing down everyone's throats whether or not their card can support it.
Don't be daft, you can't enable ray tracing through a driver update. There is a long and complicated process getting games to support it and 100% of both games that support it offer it to be disabled due to crippling the performance of the games.
Calm down, drink a beer, and realise that for the long history of people accusing NVIDIA and AMD of crippling older cards through driver updates it has been proven completely false time and time again.
I remained unaware through the whole experience as to whether RTX was on and if it was, what difference it made.
Then you may not be paying attention. The difference is night and day. I don't use that in the traditional english way, I mean literally the difference is like standing in a room with a sun in it, or having the moon stream light through the window.
There's no doubt Metro Exodus is a gorgeous game. Absolutely amazing. The amount of detail they put into lighting and shadows as it was is breathtaking. However if you're creeping in the shadows, moving within buildings, hiding behind things at night, the difference is as obvious as a punch in the face. Running around in the desert at high noon shooting things .... well couldn't tell the difference in the slightest.
On the flip-side DLSS is a load of shit. If my choices were RTX on with DLSS or RTX off as the only two options to get a playable framerate, then the latter wins hands down, and ultimately framerate definitely matters. If I wanted a blurry screen I'd take off my glasses.
Look if you gushed anymore about AMD you'd need a diaper. Your response to "another reason to pass" is you advocate a 2x performance hit on other cards?
If the 2060 can raytrace without speed impact over the 1660 then it's quite a good reason to go for it in a high end system. Then you go on to say memory bandwidth is everything, which if you've looked at benchmarks can only mean that you're not actually interested in ever playing games as much as you just want GPUs to play with moving data around your RAM.
Each to his own I guess.
By all accounts Ray Tracing already cuts framerates in half. I can't imagine a world where this works.
Imagine a world where what works, raytracing on an old GPU? Some of us have 1080 Tis and 60Hz 1080p panels. If a modern game cut ray tracing in half we'd go from a hard 60fps to a hard 60fps. But you're right for the majority of gamers this won't work.
However I'm hopeful for some kind of granularity. So far there are two games on the market with raytracing enabled. One game has gone through an optimisation process where the visual quality not only improved but the frame rates increased by about 30-40% (Battlefield V). Secretly I'm hopeful Metro Exodus (which is already a drop dead gorgeous game) can be optimised so there's no 4x fps hit.
As it stands I'd happily play it with a 2x fps hit raytraced, but I'm not running a 1060.