Nvidia RTX

Earliest one available to my knowledge will be Battlefield 5 which is due out in November.

 

My shipment date was moved another week. 27th now.

 

There is still a few components missing. Windows will not support this before the October update. That is when they add DXR support to directX. For now it is only available for insider preview builds.

 

Once they fall to regular customer price.

 

I like a 4x speed boost to gpu upgrades, so guess I'll wait for the 4080 sometime in the 2020's right

 

I ordered RTX 2080 ti cards at launch, but recently received an emailed saying they would be delayed a bit more. I'm guessing another week or so.

 

I wish it will be available for us in unity soon. As we cannot use baking, and spending a lot of performance to get at least some reflections or some realtime shadows... it could not hurt the performance much more and the results would be surely worth it! I wanted to go into voxel based lighting but this seems to be a much better option.

 

There has been some comits for real time raytracing support on the HD render pipeline. My guess is that Unity will talk about this at Unite next month

 

I do not hurry we have enough work and also, we still could not upgrade to 2018, because of broken shaders... so I would like to work, to have RTX ready for nvidia 3000 series

 

They working on implementig Microsoft's DXR...
https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/ScriptableRenderPipeline/pull/1985

 

PICA PICA update @ Siggraph 2018. Now supports transluscent shadows, both hard and soft:

http://on-demand.gputechconf.com/si...re-brisebois-pica-pica-and-nvidia-turing.html

 

I should be getting mine tomorrow Seems like nothing for Unity supports it yet... but guess that was a bit much to hope for. Maybe the

Maybe the Tensor Cores can be used for the Tensorflow machine learning project?
https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/ml-agents
https://www.tomshardware.co.uk/nvidia-tensor-core-tesla-v100,news-55600.html

 

Is the Nvidia RTX stack just a Hybrid step towards full path traced rendering?

In effect Nvidia is combining Ambient Occlusion, Shadow and Reflection casting into dedicated hardware. It still uses rasterisation and traditional 3d processing.

However, as GPU compute power grows we are getting closer to a tipping point where full path tracing is more efficient and manageable at higher resolutions than rasterisation.

Already forward and deferred rendering are hitting bandwidth/performance issues when applied to higher resolution displays e.g. 4k+.

So is path tracing a way to push beyond 4k and provide inherent ambient occlusion, shadow and reflection casting that will only need a change to the rendering APIs and GPU hardware stacks.

 

I think we are miles away from such a tipping point. Its easy to predict that it will happen one day, but that day could be a very long time away indeed and there are various hurdles that will probably keep us in the hybrid era for a long time to come. I wouldnt like to put a timeframe on this sort of thing at all for so many reasons, including unknowns such as how much further improvements to things like denoising AI will be able to offer in future, but also the various pains and barriers that likely exist on the journey towards full raytracing.

Lets at least wait and see how the first basic steps at moving a few key things to ray-tracing goes, and hope that not much performance is lost in terms of overall framerate when these things are switched on in supporting games. Because gamers can be funny about things that affect their perception of how well a game is performing, and we have seen in the past how sadly some parts of 'nvidia gameworks' (eg flex) are not fondly regarded by some because of their effects on overall framerate in certain games.

So yeah, I do not predict that a full raytracing era is close enough that it is worth pondering in a different way to how people have pondered that holy grail for decades already. Its not close, and if it was quite close then nvidia etc would just have skipped over the brief hybrid era.

The one area where I diverge from the above sentiment is that I think we will actually see some very interesting experiments in this era now that the hardware and suitable graphics API is available. There is not enough power in this generation to do full raytracing of full on, realistic looking scenes of the quality people expect, nowhere close. But that wont stop graphics programmers from experimenting with their own stuff and seeing just how far they can push things, in a much more limited context. I find it entirely plausible to imagine someone coming out with a 'fully raytraced game' in this era, but with a massive caveat about what the game actually consists of - if certain key aspects of the graphics and game scenes are kept exceedingly simple and all sorts of corners are cut, maybe it can be done. But it wont resemble stuff that looks like the real world, it will be a heavily stylized and primitive world, where clever use of the huge limitations is made central to the style.

 

I think that sentence rather skips over the amount of work that graphics programmers still have to do to implement these things in their game engines etc, they have to build the actual features you mention on top of the graphics APIs.

As for pushing beyond 4k, lets get 4k working performantly to everyones satisfaction first eh. And this is where we see the likes of nvidia DLSS attempt to cut corners in order to deliver 4k at good framerates with less raw GPU power required. And again its too early to say whether DLSS will be a success, and it comes with its own overheads and quality loss issues.

I dont think raytracing itself will magically overcome the barriers you are on about, quite the opposite in many ways. What it does offer is to make certain techniques that yield lush results, potentially practical for the first time. And it is entirely possible that graphics programmers will find other ways to utilise the raytracing acceleration to deliver other effects or features in the years ahead.

 

I absolutely agree. RTX is hybrid ray tracing, and full ray tracing is not going to happen in the near future.

 

Cool. Unity should implement Microsoft DXR support so they can get in on fun things like that.

 

HDRP has a branch for it on github.

But you can approximate these visuals without DXR at present pretty much the same at higher performance. DXR is unlikely to increase the performance of any game right now vs other approximations.

 

This. Benchmarks show that there is a 20 point decrease in FPS with DXR on the lowest setting available in BF5 using the 2080 Ti, but that with the lower tier cards the performance is basically cut in half. What would have been 60 FPS is now only 30 FPS. This is only reflections. They haven't even turned on the shadows or lighting.

Unless someone bought the 2080 Ti it's basically a no-brainer that they will switch off DXR. After all if they were happy playing with only 30 FPS they would be on a console and not a thousand plus gaming computer.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2018/11/19/nvidia-rtx-ray-tracing-benchmarks-in-battlefield-5

 

But the human eye can only see 30 FPS. Right? RIGHT!?!?!?

<ducksAndRuns>

 

Not 100% right... the human eye recognizes differences up to 1000 fps. But due to a brain interpolation feature you stop notice the frames switching, if the fps is over 24.

However that may be, I would take raytracing instead of FPS.

 

Sorry if that wasn't obvious - but I was memeing ;-) It's that console vs. pcmasterrace thing, where the console-peasants always say 30 FPS is enough but the enlightened master-racers know that no FPS is ever enough, you can always have more fun with more FPS.

As a VR-person, anything below 90 FPS is bad, and we need to render in stereo ... but at least not in 4K, yet ;-)

 

I watched somewhere, that too many frames incorrectly executed, in terms of graphics, can make person dizzy.
But don't remember where I had link from, forum, or just found.

 

I believe if the FPS is too high without motion blur then it can look dizzying (if the movement was fast enough that you'd get motion blur in real life)

 

Yep, that was exactly highlighted.

 

But its not just approximations though, that is why its relevant to experiment with, and while it might not be common for players to use it, although I must say I have for years and years played games at 30 fps or lower to get better visuals. Even now with my 2080Ti I still push it below 60 fps just to get a bit better visuals, unless actually causes lag. Even when its VR I am fine with it running 45 fps.

So what approximation alternatives do you mean? If they do not actually ray-trace, I have to say I do not really see much reason to use it, as its what to focus on in this regard. Might be 2 years away, but getting to know the workflows and how to optimize this takes time, so working with it now rather than when its already being used more overall... seems too late. But yes it is sad to see how its only used for reflections. On the other hand though, shadows are already rather well approximated, so reflections is what you gain the most from as I see it. There is a Quake 2 demo showing path tracing being done rather impressively, but it sure could use a denoiser, and then I have to wonder what happens if you use both the denoiser and real time path tracing done with RTX / DXR?

I will try taking a look at this HDRP, but, it sure is difficult to find anything about how to actually make use of RTX and begin to experiment with it. The denoiser also sure seems interesting, but I would argue that at the moment, it might be something that would be more interesting to use with old games. Like Quake 2 shows... imagine remakes giving some of the old games DXR features? That would be rather impressive I think.

Without being able to try out what the possibilities are though, well its not easy to find out what could be done with it. Seems like having the GPU right now and wanting to experiment with it is not enough... well maybe unless you used Unreal Engine 4, but I just dont like that engine. The way its workflows goes, how you work with it overall... its just not for me. Even though I am impressed with what can be done with it, I just keep being so annoyed by so many small things in it. Also how any change seems to cause the whole engine freezing while redoing shaders and stuff like that.

 

Oh its the new Render Pipeline. Ahh, had not considered it might actually do this... that sure is interesting. I will have to experiment with this tomorrow

 

Yeah it's just right now the main heavy use these cards get are with applications like substance for example, which have code paths for this - it accelerates things in a big way. But that's accelerating something that took 10 mins down to 1 minute. I am hoping Unity finds a away to implement something that will generally improve all kinds of baking as well.

GPU designers will release new revisions every so often, and they'll make sure its a little faster each time, justifying the upgrade cost best they can.

I think it will take a little longer before the tech is strong enough to be overall an improvement for action games (60fps, full res) but it's not for me to say yes or no - Unity are on the case regardless

It could be used in an amazing way right now for many games where 60fps or bust isn't important.

 

I don't really care about using this in a game. Maybe in 4-5 years if the tech is still around.

I would like for the GPU lightmapper to use it for offline baking though, since that is something I can potentially use now, regardless of adoption, and it could provide a big speed boost.

 

In 4-5 years, lightmapper will be real-time, no bake needed. I predict.

 

Meh, I don't like that. It will still be slower and look worse, so I think baking will stick around for quite a while longer.

 

Metro Exodus, coming out in February, will have global illumination and ambient occlusion through RTX. We'll have to see how this early attempt at it will hold up.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforc...traced-global-illumination-ambient-occlusion/

Spoiler: Video

 

Quake 2 just had a makeover

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/01/18/quake-ii-raytraced/

From what I've heard this is fully path traced, no raster. Kinda cool I guess

 

Quake 2 already had pathtracing from a year and a half ago. This is just the first time it hasn't been a noise-filled mess.

https://amietia.com/q2pt.html
https://www.pcgamer.com/check-out-quake-2-played-on-a-titan-xp-with-real-time-gpu-path-tracing/

 

But at the moment we get this kind of reflection.

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I'm wondering why cars are not reflected at all.

Is it possible to just use the denoiser without RTX?