Monday, August 20th 2018
NVIDIA Announces Partnerships With Multiple Studios to Bring RTX Tech to Gamers
(Update 1: Added the full 21 games list for RTX support.)
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at the company's Koln event announced partnerships with multiple games studios. This is part of NVIDIA's push to bring real time ray tracing and NVIDIA's RTX platforms' achievements to actual games that gamers can play. These encompass heavy hitters such as Battlefield V (DICE), Hitman 2 (IO Interactive), Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Crystal Dynamics), Metro Exodus (4A Games) and Control (Remedy Entertainment).
However, not all games are made equal, and NVIDIA knows there are significant gaming experiences coming from other, smaller studios. That's why partnerships have been established with the studios developing games such as We Happy Few (Compulsion Games), Atomic Heart (Mundfish), Assetto Corsa Competizione (Kunos Simulazioni), just to name a few. Of course, RTX's nature as a technology depends on NVIDIA's push for the initial implementation wave, and the company will be looking to bring developers up to speed with all needed programming skills, needs and difficulties inherent to the adoption of any new development framework. However, that DICE have already implemented an Alpha Version of NVIDIA's RTX technology into Battlefield V is surely a good sign.
The full 21 games to feature RTX support as announced by NVIDIA follow:
Source:
Jensen Hunag Presentation, Koln
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at the company's Koln event announced partnerships with multiple games studios. This is part of NVIDIA's push to bring real time ray tracing and NVIDIA's RTX platforms' achievements to actual games that gamers can play. These encompass heavy hitters such as Battlefield V (DICE), Hitman 2 (IO Interactive), Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Crystal Dynamics), Metro Exodus (4A Games) and Control (Remedy Entertainment).
However, not all games are made equal, and NVIDIA knows there are significant gaming experiences coming from other, smaller studios. That's why partnerships have been established with the studios developing games such as We Happy Few (Compulsion Games), Atomic Heart (Mundfish), Assetto Corsa Competizione (Kunos Simulazioni), just to name a few. Of course, RTX's nature as a technology depends on NVIDIA's push for the initial implementation wave, and the company will be looking to bring developers up to speed with all needed programming skills, needs and difficulties inherent to the adoption of any new development framework. However, that DICE have already implemented an Alpha Version of NVIDIA's RTX technology into Battlefield V is surely a good sign.
- Ark: Survival Evolved
- Assetto Corsa Competizione
- Atomic Heart (2019)
- Battlefield V
- Control
- Dauntless
- In Death
- Enlisted
- Final Fantasy XV
- The Forge Arena
- Fractured Lands
- Hitman 2
- Justice
- JX3
- Mechwarrior V: Mercenaries
- Metro Exodus
- PlayerUnknown's BattleGrounds
- Remnant from the Ashes (2019)
- Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider
- We Happy Few
99 Comments on NVIDIA Announces Partnerships With Multiple Studios to Bring RTX Tech to Gamers
blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/directx/2018/03/19/announcing-microsoft-directx-raytracing/
Not that it matters me (Vega user).
Just look at the RTX 20xx line up. 2080 Ti can do 10 Grays where 2070 can only do 6 Grays. Here's an article that shows the difference based on samples per pixel:
raytracey.blogspot.com/2010/04/comparing-path-tracing-image-quality.html
4K = 8,294,400 pixels
if targeting minimum 30 frames per second: 248,832,000 pixels per second to illuminate
RTX 2070 = 6 Gray = 24 samples/pixel
10 Gray = 40 samples/pixel
They both look like shit to me (first is grainy, second is blurry). And that's not even figuring in the latency this tech adds to generating frames.
Until we have benchmarks with side by side comparisons of image quality and frame rate, we're not going to know if NVIDIA's venture into ray tracing made any sense whatsoever. It's smoke and mirrors right now. Raytracing is not new. The methods we use for lighting today were developed because they do the job at significantly lower hardware costs. I'm not convinced NVIDIA changed that paradigm. Any of these cards cost twice as much as your average gaming card.
You see ray tracing every single time you watch a movie with CGI in it. Ever wondered why that is?
The machine in this video has 4xTesla V100
www.pcworld.com/article/3281332/components-graphics/nvidia-rtx-real-time-ray-tracing-demo-e3.html
NVIDIA provides this graph (presumably RTX 2080 Ti):
They don't say what resolution the demo is running at. It's also panning very slowly which reduces workload per frame. Author noticed frame rate dip with raytracing enabled. Remedy (developer of demo) likely didn't put the effort in to make traditional methods look almost as good as ray traced (e.g. they didn't even try to do reflections in water which I just saw that in Dishonored: Death of the Outsider...it was pretty...without ray tracing).Pre-rendered on Linux server farms.
“CGI for films is usually rendered at about 1.4–6 megapixels. Toy Story, for example, was rendered at 1536 × 922. The time to render one frame is typically around 2–3 hours, with ten times that for the most complex scenes. This time hasn't changed much in the last decade, as image quality progressed at the same rate as improvements in hardware.”
Seems like we may still be a long way from games using it at high levels of detail, though maybe a cartoon-style game could pull it off?
Read as: Forcing game developers to implement NVIDIA proprietary code paths for all video cards. Performance penalty may apply.
I see what NVIDIA is trying to do: end the use of traditional lighting methods. But this is a problem because of backwards compatibility. They need a crapload of shaders to keep older games running while they also soak a crapload of transistors into RT and Tensor cores to raytrace and denoise it. Turing could be a lot better at either one. NVIDIA isn't wrong that we're at a branching point in computer graphics. Either we keep faking it until we make it or we start raytracing.