Unity and Nvidia RTX Raytracing and AI on GPU?

Well, I am still talking about a hybrid approach where some stuff is still done in traditional non-raytraced way. But for my scenarios at least, some of the 'fake' methods for achieving particular things in the renderer will be abandoned completely in favour of proper ray-tracing & denoising.

Are you talking about rewriting some traditonal 'fake it' methods so they are still using 'fake' methods but make use of the accelerated ray-tracing methods instead of older, slower ray-tracing stuff? I dont have any predictions about that, it will be interesting to see what uses people make of these gpu features in future, beyond the 'obvious' stuff that everyone has understandably gravitated towards at this stage.

 

Most fake method, either bake (which is fast by moving complexity to precomputing) or use a structure that tries to go around the memory locality of gpu and therefore are expensive or approximate. Most of them have adventage over traditional raytracing like dealing better with low frequency aspect of raytracing (ie no denoising). So the GI problem can be decomposed into a image frequency and memory access problem. RTX is good at high frequency random fragment access, texture based solution are great at coherent access and low frequency rendering. GI is mostly low frequency light, so the low hanging fruit is basically to get the old render hack and use rtx to have the random access of fragment. For example in SEGI you could skip the raymarching needed to find occlusion, which is the part that stress the shader.

 

Nvidia just showed RTX rendering on Unity in the Nvidia keynote.

 

Can't wait until 2022 when the Unity raytracing system is production ready.

 

The only date I care about at the moment is April 4th when the first experiemental version is due.

https://unity.com/ray-tracing

 

Except what state is the experimental version going to be in? Unity experimental versions are usually barely usable for ages.

 

Nice. Thought I wish AMD GPUs would also have support.

Does that mean 2019.1 will be released on April 4?

 

Thats not quite my experience, I have a great time with bleeding edge HDRP stuff most of the time. I'm not expecting miracles or polish, but I am expecting to be having a useful and fun time by April 4th.

 

"Having a great time" and "this can be used to make something" are pretty different things.

 

No, it means an experimental HDRP build with raytracing support will be released on April 4th. It says that much in the link.

 

What people are making also varies. There are people for whom early previews are extremely useful, and I am one of those people. I'm not arguing with anyone elses situation or opinion, but I know what mine is and am not afraid to say it.

Wahey tracing, I'll be having a party on April 4th.

 

There is already raytracing stuff on their github, what I am missing to be able to mess with it already is a custom build of the unity editor that has initial dxr support. For April 4th they will need to release that editor build, as well as whatever tidying up & releasing of HDRP raytracing github branch they are going to do.

 

So this is going to mean implementing an RTX and non-RTX (ie. traditional) lighting system for games, right? I guess its nice to have the technical capability, but I don't think I'd bother unless Nvidia paid me for it... (and presumably they paid Unity).

It would be useful for commercial/industrial productions, admittedly.

 

Well its a bit early to start judging exactly how much additional work that will be for people developing games etc using unity HDRP. Some, but not an insane amount for many projects would be my estimate, depending on what sort of lighting etc your game is using.

As for your comment on Nvidia paying them, we arent going to be privy to that sort of info about commercial relationships. But I can list a small bunch of reasons why I think Unity would always have wanted/felt the need to support this tech sooner rather than later. Its a similar story to VR and AR in some ways (including people moaning about why this exotic niche it is a priority at all). Unity cannot afford to fall well behind the competition, or make any large omissions that can create an impression of inferiority. Especially since they are not only targeting the game developers market these days, but also films, marketing etc. And just because nvidias RTX is the first, dont forget that its actually DXR that is the important layer as far as a big chunk of Unitys development work to support this stuff goes, so others may join the hardware accelerated party over time. Also, although I do not wish to make it sound at all trivial for Unity have supported this stuff, its not a completely insanely huge development task, I dont think its the same order of magnitude of challenge that some other key things Unity have on their plate are (eg their ECS, Jobs, runtime and compiler performance mission). HDRP in its totality is a fairly beefy mission, but adding this DXR stuff to it is quite achievable without an insane degree of mission creep. Also do not underestimate the value of bringing some 'shiny new stuff' wow to proceedings, it can be good for morale for the programmers who work on making this feature happen in Unity, and for developers who intend to harness the results.

 

Ha ha, I think it turns out that they trivialised how much of a mission it was to add raytracing stuff to HDRP more in the keynote than I did in that last post.

I was wondering if the great big screen in the BMW demo is a textured area light and indeed, unless I wasnt listening properly, they confirmed it was in the keynote. This makes me happy. I know we already have textured area lights in HDRP, but, you know, shadows for them etc!

 

Experimental on April 4th, full preview with 2019.3.

So yeah, it's going to take a while.

 

Agreed. I just hope that this translates into the same amount of effort for implementing it on our end.

Or, what I believe is much more likely, Nvidia provided them with engineers to assist with implementing it. That said it's irrelevant because Unity has little choice in the matter. Both of their major publicly available competitors - Unreal and CryEngine - have raytracing coming down their pipelines.

 

That's surprising the games looks good without RTX at 0:30

Definitively not the best game example to promote RTX they picked up LOL

The difference is that UE4 or Unity ray tracing will be based on RTX and Nvidia hardware mainly, while CryEngine created their own ray tracing solution more optimized and not needing a RTX Nvidia card to run.

 

Or probably unity has its own solution and was contractually/"good relationship" obligated to present nvidia first. Someone ask in a thread somewhere about raytracing and Seb Lagarde descended to say stay tunes for gdc with a gpu agnostic solution, there was also other intervention in another thread from unity employee saying so too.

 

It looks like CryEngine showcasing great result and performance on non RTX Nvidia 3D cards demonstrated it's not only about using specific RTX hardware.
Nvidia is now bringing their raytracing system to non RTX cards (1060 GTX 6Go minimum card).

BTW, i didn't seen anything presentation about some special raytracing on non RTX 3D cards from Unity GDC presentation ?

Anyway, it will be good to see who will offers the most performant ray tracing system running on not specific RTX 3D cards.
(Perhaps CryEngine will stay leader on this, like they have been with SVOGI).

 

Just reporting, I don't have internet at home anymore, i have just checked right now a condensed version of the keynote at "work"

 

Oops I was out of date about that too, already have area light shadows in some recent HDRP versions.

 

Where using RTX cards...
but on the blog, there is more info: LINK

Probably will be the pretty stable Unity 2019 LTS (in 2020-2021) or Unity 2020 that will ship in 2021. If they are able to include it into the Unity 2018, will be the year 2019-2020.
I think Unity needs to change branding year skipping one version year.
I put a [Feedback] on that: feedback LINK

 

Cryengine Ray Tracing on Vega 56 -> Article about the technology and comparison to RTX.

Will Unity raytracing work on none RTX hardware?

 

On april 4th it's won't work on AMD cards (https://unity.com/ray-tracing).
But maybe in future 2020 release it will.

 

DXR is hardware agnostic. The problem is that at this point only NVIDIA supports it.

 

Black is so hard to achieve! I do not like when there is a black shifting or black offset.



Anyway, thanks to Arcangelis for this Porsche BMW. He designed also the Modena.

 

It's what was said at GDC demo or in the blogs, it's based on RTX hardware to work.

CryEngine is still at advantage about graphics and optimization with raytracing able to work on both AMD and Nvidia 3D cards.
Anyway , that's great if more generalized raytracing approach coming to Unity without needing RTX card.

I'm was lot more impressed by the lightweight render GDC demo than raytracing LOL

 

What's black shifting/offset?

 

https://schedule.gdconf.com/session...ng-for-practical-game-engine-pipelines/865202

All talk here:
https://unity.com/events/gdc-2019

 

If that GDC 2019 image is RTX, then I'm just a bit disappointed.

I move the tone middle level and show the problem. The left 3D car is less dark than the right car. We know that the left car is 3d and probably the right car is real. The left was added later. So I presume that for the reflections, a cub map or 360 was used and it did not kept the correct tone info.

 

Speaking of hardware... NVIDIA is enabling raytracing on most GeForce 10 series cards with an upcoming driver update.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019...ctx-raytracing-to-geforce-10-16-series-cards/

 

Will Intel introduce new GPU's with DXR and Vulkan support?

 

Tomshardware:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-gdc-2019-gameworks-rtx-ray-tracing,38862.html

 

Intel has had Vulkan support for some time now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Graphics_Technology#Capabilities

 

I think he means Vulkan ray tracing.

 

Sweet. I didn't know there was already an alternative to DXR.

 

5x faster but in other scenes, there is 2x faster

 

Useful imply it can be used outside of a demo or experimentation.

For example, I haven't touched SRP yet because I'm working almost exclusively on VR and would have to risk working on 2019.2a to have key features like post processing in HDRP. So if I wanted just to have fun with the preview, I could, but I'm not because I need a finished product I can actually use to make a living.

I have to agree with @Murgilod , unity as the bad habit of announcing cool stuff that attract new users but takes ages to be mature enough to be used by pros. Today I opened a new thread asking for a fix on a feature left unfinished since 2015 despite complains during the related beta. So i don't have high hopes for ray-tracing either. I'd love to have it in April as you expect, but let's face it, they announced SRP more than a year ago and I still can't make money with it because it's not production ready...

 

Yes I'm not disputing anybody elses circumstances. HDRP is still useful to me in a productive, career and money making way, and has been for ages. I'm not just using this stuff to have fun. I cannot say whether this will also apply to raytracing until I can try it. And I realise I am lucky to be in this situation and there are many people it doesnt apply to. In the past I have also shared the concerns along the lines of Unity actually finishing things, I think I would have gone looking elsewhere in the early days of Unity 5 if I were not in my lucky situation (which I'm afraid I cannot talk about in detail right now). I was actually working on something in a more traditional sense when Unity 5 came along, and if the project I was on at the time hadnt happened to have been cancelled, I think I would have been left with a deep sense that Unity's half-baked attitude had left us in a very sticky situation. And despite what I just said about HDRP, I have previously commented on the fact that they hyped it up way too early. The development progress that they made with it in 2018 was what I originally expected to happen in 2017, but I have learnt my lesson on that.

 

And looking at it from a slightly different angle, its simply a question of how some people are better placed than others to take advantage of early access to features that are still in development. Even if I were not in a situation where I could start building real things with non-production-ready aspects of Unity, I still find early access invaluable for future planning, decisions about whether its likely I will need to switch to a different engine, and learning various fundamentals well ahead of the time of ripeness. I think some people are bothered by early access to unfinished things, it complicates the landscape for them, but people also moan when Unity deliver finished systems without sufficient feedback from developers, and we cant really have it both ways.

 

I have to say I've found it hard to get the balance right between pessimism and optimism when talking about this stuff since it was first announced. I was not a fan of the excessive hype at the start, or the impressions it gave some people, but obviously I'm still hoping to make use of this stuff in Unity sooner rather than later.

So I think the following blog post, which I believe is by the person who has done the HDRP-side of Unitys work on the initial raytracing implementation, is very good:

https://auzaiffe.wordpress.com/2019...altime-rendering-when-is-raytracing-worth-it/

 

Good article, with some funny examples LOL



Very objective article also.

"I’d say right now (and I hate to say this), the raytracing trend feels a lot like the machine learning trend. An old technology became popular again, and everyone states that it will solve all the problems of the world (and it will not). However, there are some configuration where there is a clear win"

 

https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Unity-Experimental-DXR

Havent tried it yet so not sure which HDRP branch is best to use, probably latest 6.x release or perhaps experimental-dxr-release (I previously tried too early today when many files were missing from the editor github project)

 

I eventually got it working using that experimental-dxr-release branch of HDRP, and a fair amount of messing around figuring out how to get it to function at all. Adding ENABLE_RAYTRACING to Scripting Define Symbols in Player Settings was key, along with creating a HD Raytracing Environment object in the scene.

 

https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-experimental-hdrp-dxr.656092/ - now it's official )