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[IbizaPocholo]

https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-to-announce-rtx-technology

On Monday NVIDIA will announce RTX technology. This is a real-time cinematic rendering for game developers. Together with RTX, NVIDIA is also announcing Ray Tracing for Gameworks, which enables real-time Area Shadows, Glossy Reflections and Ambient Occlusion in game development. This technology is already available in early access.

NVIDIA has partnered up with Microsoft to create a new API for RTX, which will be supported by major game engines, such as Unreal Engine, Unity, and Frostbite.

Three developers are already participating in the development of RTX: EA Games, Remedy, and 4A Games.

 

[Zannegan]

I find this really interesting. My tech knowledge is limited, more or less, to broad strokes, but I know pure ray tracing has traditionally been so computationally expensive that what benefits it gave just weren't enough compared to what could be faked through other techniques. While this sounds like a blended technique with ray tracing used for certain things in the scene, it's neat to see them putting out hardware that's at least partially optimized to use ray tracing. It's also interesting that Microsoft is in on this. I wonder if that means that the XBox 4K could have NVidia hardware and use better/more efficient ray tracing as its unique hook/angle/gimmick. It would certainly be one way to stand out when both boxes will probably be playing games at native 4K.

 

[Agent_4Seven]

Oh, look, a bunch of new useless Gameworks shit (which no one be able to use with acceptable performance - locked 60 FPS at all times) and one of the purposes of which is to tank performance even on high-end hardware for years to come.

 

[Shifty]

I wonder how configurable this will be. From the developer standpoint, are we talking a few more boxes to check in the graphics settings page, or the ability to define our own raytracing kernel?

If it's the latter, I'd love to get back to fiddling with the space-warping light-bending nonsense that I dabbled in during my uni years.

Oh, look, a bunch of new useless Gameworks shit (which no one be able to use with acceptable performance - locked 60 FPS at all times) and one of the purposes of which is to tank performance even on high-end hardware for years to come.

We shall see. Modern game engines already use raytracing/raymarching for certain simple graphics tasks (ex. parallax occlusion mapping, various other types of heightfield techniques) without cratering performance. Don't let that chip on your shoulder cloud your judgement

My prime concern is that they don't lock it behind proprietary builds of the stuff it's integrated with like some of their other features. A lot of their unreal stuff so far (the fluid/gas simulation from the funhouse demo, for example) has been locked behind custom builds of the engine when it could have been implemented as a plugin. Right pain in the arse.

 

[Armorian]

Oh, look, a bunch of new useless Gameworks shit (which no one be able to use with acceptable performance - locked 60 FPS at all times) and one of the purposes of which is to tank performance even on high-end hardware for years to come.

There is no problem if those effects can be turned on/off, and they always are. I welcome graphical techniques beyond what's possible on consoles.

 

[thelastword]

I think things are really ramping up, so soon we will have appropriate solutions on both Nvidia and AMD cards....GPU-OPEN also has a very interesting solution to raycasting, so the future for effects in games looks to be very rich across the board....

 

[Agent_4Seven]

We shall see. Modern game engines already use raytracing/raymarching for certain simple graphics tasks (ex. parallax occlusion mapping, various other types of heightfield techniques) without cratering performance. Don't let that chip on your shoulder cloud your judgement

As you've mentioned already, these are for the most part simple (or relatively simple) graphics tasks and raytracing/raymarching were not used at full force so far to tank performace to unacceptable levels, but there's a bunch of expensive Gameworls specific stuff which doing just that. Gameworks was never about performance or optimization and never will be, it's there to just say this to you - "Oh, you like these effects, don't ya? Well fuck you! You won't be able to use them cuz there's no hardware powerfull enough to run it acceptably, but we love to watch you and your hardware suffer".

There is no problem if those effects can be turned on/off, and they always are. I welcome graphical techniques beyond what's possible on consoles.

What's the point in them if no one can use them with acceptable performance and without lowering GFX options to low or medium even on 3000$ PCs?

 

[onQ123]

 

[Dee Dah Dave]

Real time ray tracing would cut out so much bullshit in the current graphics pipeline. All the shit they are having to fake would be gone. Still a LONG way away though for consumer end products and games.

Ideally I think we need a breakthrough in hardware that is custom tailored to performing the types of calculations needed. We gonna have to move away from silicon for that though I think.

 

[Shifty]

What's the point in them if no one can use them with acceptable performance and without lowering GFX options to low or medium even on 3000$ PCs?

There are benefits to be had for cinematics and non-game rendering even if performance doesn't end up being viable for gameplay stuff. Cranking up the graphics settings during an in-engine cutscene, for instance, or using a modern real-time renderer as a replacement for traditional non-real-time CGI.

Unreal in particular has been pushing for the latter lately- lots of new features targeted as the visualization industry with the intent of competing with industry-standard renderers like Mental Ray or Octane. There's definitely something to be said for being able to make a change and see the result immediately, rather than having to wait hours for your scene to render.

 

[Agent_4Seven]

There are benefits to be had for cinematics and non-game rendering even if performance doesn't end up being viable for gameplay stuff. Cranking up the graphics settings during an in-engine cutscene, for instance, or using a modern real-time renderer as a replacement for traditional non-real-time CGI.

I've absolutely nothing against pre-rendered in-game cinematics / cut-scenes and I REALLY like what CD did in Rise of the Tomb Raider for example - they (cut-scenes) look absolutely amazing, but hardware is way far beyond such level of visuals in the actual game and during gameplay so there's no point in any of this being in the game, well, at least until there'll be hardware that can actually run the game with such visuals acceptably with constant 60.

 

[llien]

Aside from "how to leverage your dominant market position and pwn everyone 101", heyho, ray tracing, I saw you in my dreams!

As far as I understand, it will be used for secondary effects only, as an optional "enhancement" that would allow to cripple the competitor and owners of older nvidia cards.

 

[shpankey]

Is this the God Rays thingy I've heard techies talk about? Or is that something else?

 

[Codes 208]

Is this the God Rays thingy I've heard techies talk about? Or is that something else?

Different things. Ray tracing is basically using lighting and shadows in a realistic manner to give the illusion of an almost perfect realism. God rays (or volumetric light scattering) is using a lighting effect where the light from a lightsource casts the illusions of actual lighting effects like this

 

[Leonidas]

It's about time new GPU tech comes to PC, since this tech is optimized for Volta GPUs hopefully this means we'll see some new GPUs releasing soon...

 

[uncleleeroy]

cool looks great

 

[pottuvoi]

Is this the God Rays thingy I've heard techies talk about? Or is that something else?

If it's anything like Nvidia Optix it's a library to shoot rays and find intersections and have it GPU accelerated.
In simplest for ray tracing is creating a ray from point to an other and testing if there is anything occluding the ray. (IE. ray sphere intersection.)

If it's fast and easy to use you can use it to improve shadows, reflections etc. (And yes, god rays are something this can be used.)
Question in the end is that is it fast enough to use instead of old ways of trickery.

 

[DemonCleaner]

after all the shit Nvidia was pulling recently, it's good to see that they still are also able to provide innovation that furthers realtime rendering.



this is fucking amazing. would be stoked if one console manufacturer would go with an Nvidia GPU this time again, to implement this into their product.

 

[Allandor]

So, it is all about some standardized ray-"sort of"-tracing for some effects and not for the whole picture? So nothing really new.
The Problem with full ray-tracing always was the resolution. 4k does not make that easier ^^.

I really want to know, what hardware they needed for the tech demos and if it really was real-time.

 

[ph33rknot]

Oh, look, a bunch of new useless Gameworks shit (which no one be able to use with acceptable performance - locked 60 FPS at all times) and one of the purposes of which is to tank performance even on high-end hardware for years to come.

this is most likely for future games and bc we may not be able to use it now but if the game engine already supports it what's stoping them from upgrading bc games later

 

[mckmas8808]

So, it is all about some standardized ray-"sort of"-tracing for some effects and not for the whole picture? So nothing really new.
The Problem with full ray-tracing always was the resolution. 4k does not make that easier ^^.

I really want to know, what hardware they needed for the tech demos and if it really was real-time.

Great question.

 

[DemonCleaner]

So, it is all about some standardized ray-"sort of"-tracing for some effects and not for the whole picture? So nothing really new.
The Problem with full ray-tracing always was the resolution. 4k does not make that easier ^^.

I really want to know, what hardware they needed for the tech demos and if it really was real-time.

it's not quite clear if they are using it just for some effects. as an example it wouldn't make any sense to ray trace your shadows and then use some old AO technique as AO comes for free after tracing your light path. not sure if that logic automatically would apply for shading though, as you would have to account for absorbed and reflected light spectra.

i think its very likely that the remedy demo is realtime, as you can see a lot noise remaining on some objects (e.g. the metal stand of the orb thingy). there seems to be a section on the GPU die that will work as a denoising ASIC to get the few sample ray trace to an accaptable quality.

in this video nvidia shows off conventional realtime rendering techniques against their raytraced conterparts (video runs much to fast... use pause):



WOAHHH

 

[rokkerkory]

Cool can't wait

 

[DemonCleaner]

next gen is gonna be neat

 

[sertopico]

So, it is all about some standardized ray-"sort of"-tracing for some effects and not for the whole picture? So nothing really new.
The Problem with full ray-tracing always was the resolution. 4k does not make that easier ^^.

I really want to know, what hardware they needed for the tech demos and if it really was real-time.

Yeah, from one side they announced this a few days ago but on the other hand nobody is talking about the HW used to make these tech demos run. I've got a hunch, that we won't be able to go past 1080p to get this tech working, so, what's gonna happen with all the ppl who bought 2k and 4k monitors?

 

[AnimalFather]

Nextbox will have a Nvidia card???

 

[magnumpy]

nvidia already provides the gpu for nintendo switch, why not nvidia for the next xbox and playstation? of course that gets into business decisions and everything, they've done fine with ati so far, but I wouldn't count them out...

 

[LittleAngryDog]

Does anyone know if the next generation will reach the Global Illumination or Ray Tracing??? If it is possible to render GI this will already be a great advance. Ray Trancing seems a little distant from reality until I see how powerful the architecture of the new consoles will be. While this does not happen I think it will be a bit difficult to believe just because of these Tech Demos with DirectX 12.

If we are lucky it may be the same as happened in 2012. The tech demo Samaritan made in UE3 needed 3x GTX 580 or a GTX 680. The graphic result of that tech demo seemed impossible for the time. But today we have overcome it all very easily.



Recent Games

 

[Dee Dah Dave]

Utililising ray tracing for the full scene at 4K resolutions is still years away for even the highest end gaming GPU’s. On consoles it’s even further.

 

[Alexander DeLarge]

Oh, look, a bunch of new useless Gameworks shit (which no one be able to use with acceptable performance - locked 60 FPS at all times) and one of the purposes of which is to tank performance even on high-end hardware for years to come.

Yep this is my reaction. Gross, I don't want studios going in the direction of DirectX. Open standards are worth supporting and AMD just unveiled their Vulkan-based (entirely platform neutral) ray tracing solution and based on years of precedent, GPUOpen features won't hurt the competition.

nVidia and Microsoft are unnecessarily stifling competition and I fundamentally disagree with both of those companies' business practices as of late.

 

[DemonCleaner]

im nearly shitting myself from excitement. i've been dreaming of realtime raytracing becoming a thing since i was a temp at a small tv cgi production firm 20 years ago and now this is happening:



nextgen will fuckin' rock.

 

[DemonCleaner]

Open standards are worth supporting and AMD just unveiled their Vulkan-based (entirely platform neutral) ray tracing solution and based on years of precedent, GPUOpen features won't hurt the competition.

nVidia and Microsoft are unnecessarily stifling competition and I fundamentally disagree with both of those companies' business practices as of late.

i feel what your saying. but to be honest, MS and nvidia are not to blame for this situation. it's idiotic consumers who didn't value such ideals and just fell for cheap marketing smoke and mirrors when they still had a realistic choice between competitors which led us to the GPU market situation shitshow we have now. pc master race my arse...

 

[DemonCleaner]

pro forma - RTG and vulcan are also on board:

 

[LittleAngryDog]

im nearly shitting myself from excitement. i've been dreaming of realtime raytracing becoming a thing since i was a temp at a small tv cgi production firm 20 years ago and now this is happening:



nextgen will fuckin' rock.

This required 4x GTX Titan V to run the Star Wars cutscene at 1080p 30fps. What makes you think that it will be possible to run something at this technical level at 4k 30fps on a miserable console with something between 10 to 15Tflops of GPU?

To render this tech demo in 4k 30fps according to the calculations would be needed 20x Titan V which means 300Tflops, because each Titan V has 15Tflops. The good thing is that we do not have to render Ray Tracing in real time to reproduce these lighting effects. Today we can emulate these visual results with rasterization or Global Illumination(if the new generation supports). So nowadays we do not need Ray Tracing to overcome or compare the final result of the games with the CGi made years ago. It's interesting how art direction can make all the difference in a game.

Regarding the polygonal counting, animation and texture of the characters you can rest assured that this will be perfectly possible in the next generation. But forget about watching Ray Tracing in a game for the next 18 years. In 2038/2039 the PS7 will be able to run this at 8k 30fps. The problem is that the resolution consumes a lot of GPU resources with each generational jump. If PS6 continued to run 4k we would already see Ray Tracing in real time. The problem is that the PS6 will probably run 8k. Then this project will be postponed to a PS7 (If the PS7 does not have as goal to render 16K resolution).

In my opinion the consoles should target the 4k with good Anti Aliasing from now on and only invest in features, assets and new graphics technologies. Otherwise we will see generational leaps slow as a turtle for the rest of the life.

Just out of curiosity let's figure out how much it would take to run this Star Wars cutscene.

16x GTX Titan V = 4K, 30fps, Star Wars Ray Tracing Tech Demo(240 Tflops)
32x GTX Titan V = 4K, 60fps, Star Wars Ray Tracing Tech Demo(480 Tflops)
64x GTX Titan V = 8K, 30fps, Star Wars Ray Tracing Tech Demo(960 Tflops)
256x GTX Titan V = 16K, 30fps, Star Wars Ray Tracing Tech Demo(3,840 Tflops)

 

[IbizaPocholo]

https://wccftech.com/tim-sweeney-aaa-ray-tracing-consoles/

Speaking to MCVUK magazine (issue 935, May 2018) Epic Co-Founder and programming legend Tim Sweeney said that studios starting new triple-A projects should definitely think about it.


Related NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready 397.31 WHQL Drivers Now Available – Enables NVIDIA RTXTM Technology on Volta GPUs, Full Support For Vulkan 1.1 and More

It turns out that at around 25 teraflops operations per second, ray tracing becomes the best way to produce realistic looking pixels.
The demo we showed in partnership with ILMxLab is the first step in that direction. Part of the scene is rendered and part is ray traced, all the shadows and reflections come from ray tracing, and like movies, game engines are going to adopt this.
You’re going to see more and more ray-traced elements in our scenes, and I think ten years from now you might find nothing but ray tracing in our engines. Everybody who’s starting a triple-A project, they all should be thinking about ray tracing.​

When asked about the likelihood of seeing this technology supported by next-generation console hardware, he seemed fairly confident it could happen.

It’s not coming to your smartphone anytime soon. But GPUs move fast. You might find within two years that you have that amount of computing power in a single GPU. And suddenly it becomes possible at high-end.​

 

[IbizaPocholo]

https://videocardz.com/76902/nvidia-introduces-adaptive-temporal-antialiasing-with-ray-tracing

 

[Armorian]

https://videocardz.com/76902/nvidia-introduces-adaptive-temporal-antialiasing-with-ray-tracing

SSAA is the best and TAA comes second, ATAA looks like TXAA v2 (with even more blur)

I'm currently playing GOW on PS4, 1080p on my 1080p native tv and IQ is amazing, I can't find any jagged edges. TAA version used by Sony FP devs is the best thing right now.