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[svbarnard]

I really dont wanna have to wait for 10th generation of video game consoles to enjoy real time ray tracing in my video games.

Listen I can't Imagine Microsoft saying this in march of 2018 "In addition, while today marks the first public announcement of DirectX Raytracing, we have been working closely with hardware vendors and industry developers for nearly a year to design and tune the API. In fact, a significant number of studios and engines are already planning to integrate DXR support into their games and engines" and then releasing a nextgen console in 2020-21 that doesn't have dedicated hardware support for real time ray tracing. That CEO of Nvidia Jensen Huang really has convinced me it's the future of video games and it's going to be a mainstay of nextgen consoles.

So for all you who are saying nextgen consoles won't have ray tracing at all, I bet you're wrong.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/directx/2018/03/19/announcing-microsoft-directx-raytracing/

 

[ThatStupidLion]

nice idea for a thread - poor execution for thread title.

i'm optimistic, but maybe not as much as you are.

maybe in 2 gens it'll be standard, or 1.5 gen theyll add it to the PS5 Pro

we'll see though! exciting stuff for the future of gaming

 

[Dee Dah Dave]

You just made it.

Now ask for it to be closed and reopened in 10+ years when ray tracing has any real chance of mainstream use!

 

[onQ123]

I'm just going to post my old comments here

Predict: Next gen console tech (9th iteration and 10th iteration edition) [2014 - 2017]

Revenge of Cell, the DPU Rises *spawn*

 

[JimboJones]

Would be odd if it wasn't there in some form, they really need to differentiate next gen from this gen.

 

[AV]

List of things the vast majority of consumers aren't going to do:

A. Know what Ray Tracing is

B. Be able to notice it

C. Give a flying fuck either way

There are still plenty of people outside of the "core" gaming sphere for whom the above list applies for 4K. Telling them they need to spend £500 (YMMV) on a new box "because it has better lighting" isn't gonna work. Even I don't feel like I need a new box right now. This generation still has a lot of life left in it.

 

[Ar¢tos]

Resuming players demands:
-15Tf+ Gpu
-32gb RAM (hbm2 or 3)
-4k native @ 60fps
-Ray tracing
all this for 400-500$

The reality:
A 1200$ card made with Ray tracing in mind can't sustain 60fps at 1080p, let alone think of 4k.

I'm sorry but the math doesn't work.
The console would have the size of 3 George Foreman grills taped together, a 1500w Psu and each Sony employee would have to sell a kidney, a liver lobe and a cornea to compensate the cost difference.

Also including some sort of Ray tracing in a mid gen wouldn't work. If the game has to run on the base console, no dev is going to waste time and money doing ray-tracing for a small percentage of the install base.
It's time to be realistic and considerably lower next-gen expectations.

 

[onQ123]

List of things the vast majority of consumers aren't going to do:

A. Know what Ray Tracing is

B. Be able to notice it

C. Give a flying fuck either way

There are still plenty of people outside of the "core" gaming sphere for whom the above list applies for 4K. Telling them they need to spend £500 (YMMV) on a new box "because it has better lighting" isn't gonna work. Even I don't feel like I need a new box right now. This generation still has a lot of life left in it.

If a console has Ray-tracing hardware devs will make games differently & consumers will notice.

 

[Snoopycat]

Man is this going to be on the Switch?

 

[bitbydeath]

I asked in another thread and never got a response. Raytracing can be performed on non-raytracing hardware, we saw it used on PS3 (Warhawk clouds) What are the benefits of it being raytracing hardware over non if both can use the same tech?

 

[Kenneth Haight]

Man is this going to be on the Switch?

Only on the switch Pro, coming this Holiday for £3000, pre order now

 

[Alx]

I'm not too excited about ray tracing. The promise is prettier graphics, which we always get anyway even if it's through technical "cheats" sometimes. Except for scenarios with complex light reflections, I think old methods are good enough, for a fraction of the cost.

I asked in another thread and never got a response. Raytracing can be performed on non-raytracing hardware, we saw it used on PS3 (Warhawk clouds) What are the benefits of it being raytracing hardware over non if both can use the same tech?

Like for all techs, a dedicated hardware can do stuff faster and more efficiently. Like you can do 3D rendering on a CPU, but a GPU is better at it.

 

[SonGoku]

Resuming players demands:
-15Tf+ Gpu
-32gb RAM (hbm2 or 3)
-4k native @ 60fps
-Ray tracing
all this for 400-500$

The reality:
A 1200$ card made with Ray tracing in mind can't sustain 60fps at 1080p, let alone think of 4k.

I'm sorry but the math doesn't work.
The console would have the size of 3 George Foreman grills taped together, a 1500w Psu and each Sony employee would have to sell a kidney, a liver lobe and a cornea to compensate the cost difference.

Also including some sort of Ray tracing in a mid gen wouldn't work. If the game has to run on the base console, no dev is going to waste time and money doing ray-tracing for a small percentage of the install base.
It's time to be realistic and considerably lower next-gen expectations.

I have a gut feeling minimum we'll get 13TF, 24GB GDDR6/HBM and 3gz 8 core ryzen
Best case scenario if stars align sort of deal: 15tf, 32gb and 12 core ryzen
Anything less and it will feel like an incremental update, the 4Kish standard will eat a lot of the extra power and what's left wont be enough to produce visuals that convince the masses next gen has arrived and isn't just another pro revision.

if they need to launch late 2020/2021 to make this happen then so be it.

 

[magnumpy]

well nothing says next gen like "real time ray tracing" XD

it's the only thing that could justify a new generation. anything less is a joke. might have to wait a few years for the cost to come down, but come on this is a feature that is very compelling

 

[Shin]

Op did you only recently find out about RT?
Because it's been around for ages (through concept art and demos) and though nVidia is using it now for marketing and trying to make a big deal put of their engine the new GPU still ain't powerful enough.
As it has always been the case with RT, it's too taxing and from the looks of it still is for the new RTX line.
nVidia might trigger a desired effect and make RT the new focus for GPU's moving forward, but you just might have to wait till gen 10 for it to be viable in console space IMO.

I think it's Ars Technica that wrote an article about the this ordeal yesterday.
It's a good read, on mobile so too lazy to go searching.

 

[Leonidas]

The best chance real-time ray-tracing has appearing on a next-gen console is if nVidia is designing a next-gen console GPU as they have 2 out of the last 3 gens. No one knows what GPU the next-Xbox is using so it could happen...

I don't know if AMD has the capability, even two years into the future, to do what nVidia has accomplished with Turing, it's hardware accelerated ray-tracing architecture.

 

[svbarnard]

Op did you only recently find out about RT?

Are you calling me a liar?

 

[onQ123]

The best chance real-time ray-tracing has appearing on a next-gen console is if nVidia is designing a next-gen console GPU as they have 2 out of the last 3 gens. No one knows what GPU the next-Xbox is using so it could happen...

I don't know if AMD has the capability, even two years into the future, to do what nVidia has accomplished with Turing, it's hardware accelerated ray-tracing architecture.

Why do y'all think Next Gen Consoles need to have Nvidia GPUs to have Ray-tracing? most likely the Ray-tracing hardware on the Nvidia GPU is from another company also

 

[General Lee]

The problem with having dedicated ray-tracing hw is that the cost of it is high, and even with these monster GPUs from Nvidia, they currently only manage to make limited use of it while performance in those demos we saw was atrociously bad. How console makers could possibly implement a fast enough solution to be useful even at 7 nm is beyond me. Ray-tracing may be a thing eventually, but for a <$500 console it seems impossible. If AMD and Intel join Nvidia in making PC GPUs with support through Microsoft's API, we might see wider adoption in AAA titles on PC, but ultimately it's the consoles that the developers aim for, so all this expensive dedicated hw will be just for some tacked on upgrades we saw in the demos. And if AMD/Intel don't want to waste massive amounts of die space for ray-tracing, they could easily just put in more generic cores and end up faster in every other use case, which most of us want right now.

 

[Ridaxan]

If the new consoles (using AMD hardware as is the expectation) doesn't support the ray-tracing features then we're going to be in another scenario like we had with PhysX back in the day. Tacked on features that the average consumer doesn't even notice or care for.

 

[baphomet]

Maybe in 15 years you'll have consoles with basic ray tracing like the rtx line. Even if console makes went all out with like $700 boxes you wouldn't be getting ray tracing.

 

[Leonidas]

If the new consoles (using AMD hardware as is the expectation) doesn't support the ray-tracing features then we're going to be in another scenario like we had with PhysX back in the day. Tacked on features that the average consumer doesn't even notice or care for.

Consoles not being able to take advantage of new GPU technology will not stop PC graphics technology from evolving. PC always gets new GPU features before consoles, this is no different. Ray-tracing has come to PC GPUs in 2018. Ray-tracing will come to consoles some time in the future, will it be 2020? 2026? Who knows, but it will happen one day on consoles too, it will just be years after, maybe many years after it has appeared on PC.

The discerning gamer will notice the difference. I imagine the average console gamer will not care because they buy whatever console they buy and be happy with the results(PS2 and Wii lacked many graphics features but were the best selling consoles of all time).

 

[JimmyRustler]

Tomb Raider barley managed to pull off 30 fps on 1080p with RT enabled with a 1.300 EUR graphics card.

Raytracing won't be thing for quite some time when it comes to consoles. Maybe with a PS5pro or something.

 

[keraj37]

I asked in another thread and never got a response. Raytracing can be performed on non-raytracing hardware, we saw it used on PS3 (Warhawk clouds) What are the benefits of it being raytracing hardware over non if both can use the same tech?

Of Course, and we saw it not only on PS3. Ray Tracing is very old (relative to the computer age we are living in) rendering technic.

In the end it is nothing more then 3D math with some algorithms depending on what you raytrace (light for example). In terms of standalone rendering, ray tracing is a standard since 90s.
Here is example of old rendering from that time:

Actually real time ray tracing can be done on ancient machines like c64:


And recently there is nice mod turning quake 2 engine into supporting raytracing one (actually q2 here uses path tracing which is much more demanding):

 

[tkscz]

I have a gut feeling minimum we'll get 13TF, 24GB GDDR6/HBM and 3gz 8 core ryzen
Best case scenario if stars align sort of deal: 15tf, 32gb and 12 core ryzen
Anything less and it will feel like an incremental update, the 4Kish standard will eat a lot of the extra power and what's left wont be enough to produce visuals that convince the masses next gen has arrived and isn't just another pro revision.

if they need to launch late 2020/2021 to make this happen then so be it.

To get this tech at affordable prices with it being able to go on a console sized board you'd have to wait until 2022 or 2023. Even then, it'll be some sort of cheap ray tracing compared to what the PC is doing.

Of Course, and we saw it not only on PS3. Ray Tracing is very old (relative to the computer age we are living in) rendering technic.

In the end it is nothing more then 3D math with some algorithms depending on what you raytrace (light for example). In terms of standalone rendering, ray tracing is a standard since 90s.
Here is example of old rendering from that time:

Actually real time ray tracing can be done on ancient machines like c64:


And recently there is nice mod turning quake 2 engine into supporting raytracing one (actually q2 here uses path tracing which is much more demanding):

That does make quake look a lot better.

 

[Endless Fluff]

Tomb Raider barley managed to pull off 30 fps on 1080p with RT enabled with a 1.300 EUR graphics card.

Yeah, No. Tomb Raider was running between 30-70fps with Ray Tracing, but Tomb Raider is not optimized. What the devs did was merely implement RT and turned the feature on. There has been no optimization done at all.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/compu...responds-to-rtx-2080-ti-performance-concerns/

Battlefield shows how well it can be implemented. Sure, you won't be running 144hz, but 60fps should be doable if its optimized well enough.

 

[Golgo 13]

Not to sound like a dick, but Ray Tracing can go away for a long, long time.

First off, it's not that great. It's overhyped as fuck and currently it's way too resource intensive for me to even give a shit. By the time it becomes manageable and implementable, other, better technologies will have surpassed it.

PC gamers desperately need some exciting new tech to grab ahold of, but this isn't it.

 

[SonGoku]

To get this tech at affordable prices with it being able to go on a console sized board you'd have to wait until 2022 or 2023. Even then, it'll be some sort of cheap ray tracing compared to what the PC is doing.



That does make quake look a lot better.

13tf, 8 cores and 24gb seem pretty conservative for late 2020 and beyond
The only bleeding edge part being ram, just like 8gb gddr5 was in 2013

I wasn't talking about raytracing being included btw

 

[Cosmogony]

I'm surprised no one has asked CDPR whether CP2077 will support RTX or not. The game is everyone's darling, and rightly so, and RTX the new bell and whistle. Journalists attending Gamescom, please do take note.

 

[gspat]

Real time ray tracing has been a possibility for a few years now on consoles.

The tools have been around for quite some time now, AMD just released version 2 a few months ago.

The problem is, AMD never has had the financial clout to force devs of game engines to add the libraries in.

AMD knew damn well that the future was in using asynchronous compute, so they switched to it and have been pushing it as hard as they could. Nvidia kept to the old ways and didn't have to falter by changing internal architecture, That's why they have gone so far ahead in performance. No-one was interested in parallelizing their workflow.

With turing, I'm seeing the beginnings of a changeover to asynchronous compute from nvidia. They actually have the clout to force it. Actually they're innovating on it with adding the AI stuff to it.

To make Real time raytracing work effectively with what we have for hardware, it needs alot of optimization to work sort of well.

I'm not sure if AMD can do anything decent AI wise with their CUs, but their going to need something similar.

 

[Bradamante3D]

I asked in another thread and never got a response. Raytracing can be performed on non-raytracing hardware, we saw it used on PS3 (Warhawk clouds) What are the benefits of it being raytracing hardware over non if both can use the same tech?

We also saw it being used in Wolfenstein 3D.

Is this even a serious question? You are asking what the benefit of faster cars is over slower cars?

 

[tkscz]

13tf, 8 cores and 24gb seem pretty conservative for late 2020 and beyond
The only bleeding edge part being ram, just like 8gb gddr5 was in 2013

I wasn't talking about raytracing being included btw

Oh! In that case then I can see where you're coming from with 24GBs of RAM. Though if they went with HBM2 (or 3 by that point). They wouldn't need as much to be as or even more efficient. 16GBs of HBM2 or 3 would be one hell of a boost from 8GBs of GDDR5.

 

[Spukc]

Only on the switch Pro, coming this Holiday for £3000, pre order now

You forgot to mention the 10 minute battery life

 

[michaelius]

Not going to happen - those raytracing games are rumored to run at 30-60fps @ 1080p on 775mm^2 silicon gpu costing 1000+ $.

Even with 7nm die shrink this isn't going to be viable for consoles in next generation.

 

[vpance]

Sorry OP. It's gonna be baked lighting and reflections for another 6 years.

 

[SonGoku]

Oh! In that case then I can see where you're coming from with 24GBs of RAM. Though if they went with HBM2 (or 3 by that point). They wouldn't need as much to be as or even more efficient. 16GBs of HBM2 or 3 would be one hell of a boost from 8GBs of GDDR5.

its barely double, i feel it needs to be at least 24gb to make a generational jump

 

[tkscz]

its barely double, i feel it needs to be at least 24gb to make a generational jump

Architecture is far more important than numbers. HBM2 is much faster and more efficient RAM than GDDR5. Fewer HBM2 memory dies are better than more GDDR5. 16GBs of HBM2 would be equal to about 24GBs of GDDR5 (though I might be off as last I remember 4GBs of HBM2 was the equivalent of 8GBs of GDDR5).

 

[CJY]

Considering threadripper, and the amazing stuff AMD is doing over there, I wouldn't rule out the possibility of PS5 having 16 cores. That would be insane.

 

[iconmaster]

So far my impression of Nvidia's ray demos has been, "That's cool but I'm not sure I'd have noticed the difference if you weren't pointing it out to me." Like screen-space reflections not catching off-screen light sources. Definitely less accurate without ray tracing but you'd probably never notice while playing the game.

 

[The Scrivener]

As a poster said above, as a non-techie consumer I have no idea what ray tracing is other than it sounds like it will be written all over the box as a console seller.

"PS6 - The only true Ray-Tracing console. Bundled with critically acclaimed arcade titles Super Tray Racing and the fluid FPS Space-ray Tracer V!"

 

[ISee]

As a poster said above, as a non-techie consumer I have no idea what ray tracing is other than it sounds like it will be written all over the box as a console seller.

"PS6 - The only true Ray-Tracing console. Bundled with critically acclaimed arcade titles Super Tray Racing and the fluid FPS Space-ray Tracer V!"

To make it very simple: it's the simulation of light rays. Imagine a ray of light flying from its source (sun, light bulb, fire, etc) and hitting an object. The ray of light has a certain set of physical characteristics (like intensity, colour etc.) and the object it hits also has a specific set of characteristics (reflectiveness, absorption, colour etc). Now a new ray gets created with the object as the source, but with new (mixed) characteristics and it hits a new object. /Repeat.
You can create, realistic shadows, material surfaces, illuminations techniques, object occlusion etc. this way. It's a big step into photo realistic graphics, but also very expansive. Even on those new GPUs.

 

[keraj37]

To make it very simple: it's the simulation of light rays. Imagine a ray of light flying from its source (sun, light bulb, fire, etc) and hitting an object. The ray of light has a certain set of physical characteristics (like intensity, colour etc.) and the object it hits also has a specific set of characteristics (reflectiveness, absorption, colour etc). Now a new ray gets created with the object as the source, but with new (mixed) characteristics and it hits a new object. /Repeat.
You can create, realistic shadows, material surfaces, illuminations techniques, object occlusion etc. this way. It's a big step into photo realistic graphics, but also very expansive. Even on those new GPUs.

True, but it is relevant to mention that ray tracing technic is doing what you described in opposite direction - not dispathing rays from light source but from camera (each pixel on screen) until it hits the light sources or not.

 

[Kururu]

I fixed the thread title for you.

 

[PuppetMaster]

My prediction. The huge amount of processing power some devs will use for ray tracing, other devs will find a clever ways to use the same power for traditional rasterization and get even better results. Thus the very best looking games next gen will not be ray traced.

At best there will be some hybrid engines where some ray tracing is used very sparcely. But not as the primary lighting model outside of toy cases.

 

[Ar¢tos]

Considering threadripper, and the amazing stuff AMD is doing over there, I wouldn't rule out the possibility of PS5 having 16 cores. That would be insane.

There is no die space for 16 cores. Eurogamer has an article about the potential specs of the PS5 where they say that a 7nm Zen core is about the size of a ps4 Jaguar core, so 8 cores is the expected amount to maximise space for Gpu.

 

[svbarnard]

There is no die space for 16 cores. Eurogamer has an article about the potential specs of the PS5 where they say that a 7nm Zen core is about the size of a ps4 Jaguar core, so 8 cores is the expected amount to maximise space for Gpu.

How come we went from 3 cores to 8 cores with this generation? I think we are easily going to see a 16-core CPU.

 

[svbarnard]

My prediction. The huge amount of processing power some devs will use for ray tracing, other devs will find a clever ways to use the same power for traditional rasterization and get even better results. Thus the very best looking games next gen will not be ray traced.

At best there will be some hybrid engines where some ray tracing is used very sparcely. But not as the primary lighting model outside of toy cases.

Is it possible to do proper a reflection in the mirror with rasterization because I think that would be the main use point of Ray tracing for this hybrid approach.

 

[svbarnard]

I fixed the thread title for you.

Punkass bitch!!! Yur not a mod r u?

 

[hargwood]

Why do we need tracing though? Gaming studios have art and graphic design covered

 

[Ar¢tos]

How come we went from 3 cores to 8 cores with this generation? I think we are easily going to see a 16-core CPU.

Because 3 PowerPC cores at 90nm are probably the same size of 8 x86 cores at 28nm.
There was obviously a tech shrink from gen 7 to gen 8.
People seem to forget that die and wafer space is much more limited on a console compared to gaming pc.
Also, the more cores you have the harder, longer and more expensive the optimization of a game is.