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NVIDIA Announces Partnerships With Multiple Studios to Bring RTX Tech to Gamers

cucker tarlson said:
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Grafi...ormance-in-Shadow-of-the-Tomb-Raider-1263244/

2080Ti running shadow of the tomb raider at max quality with rtx on, at 1080p.... 30s to 50s.
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But does it look better than 1080p non-raytracing? You can do fewer rays to get better frames but the visual quality suffers for it. Raytracing is only worth doing if the outcome is better than faking it at acceptable frame rates. If it doesn't look better, might as well keep faking it and save on your power bill.

cucker tarlson said:
RTX 2070 is too weak though, unless you lower some other settings first.Plus I think tomb raider was the only one that fetured two rtx technologies at the same time, lighting and shadows, both extremely taxing. Games running no ray traced shadows,lighting only,may see a better chance to actually do better. And I think lighting is probably the feature that we can immediately see have an impact on visual quality, unlike shadows and reflections,which get lost in fast paced gameplay.
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Shadows and reflections are the result of lighting. In a well raytraced environment, shadows nor reflections need extra processing. If they're doing post effects to shadows or reflection, that means they are excessively faking the raytracing.
 
FordGT90Concept said:
But does it look better than 1080p non-raytracing? You can do fewer rays to get better frames but the visual quality suffers for it. Raytracing is only worth doing if the outcome is better than faking it at acceptable frame rates. If it doesn't look better, might as well keep faking it and save on your power bill.


Shadows are the result of lighting. In a well raytraced environment, shadows need no extra processing. If they're doing post effects to shadows, that means the yare excessively faking the raytracing.
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The developer stated ray-tracing is in its infancy in that title (to the point the game will be released without ray-tracing which will be added later). So yeah, who know what shortcuts are they taking at the moment? They said some areas are more polished than other right now - whatever that means.
 
Translation: there's parts of our game where raytracing looks very, very broken so we need to fix models and such so the rays bounce off correctly.
 
I wonder what happened to the AMD/Radeon Technologies Group partnerships and all that hardware they gave away to developers... Now it seems like a PR stunt with no actual fruit. Or is that just me?
 
If you get 30fps on 1920x1080, then on my 3440x1440 monitor I will be getting something like 15....
Good job!
I guess I will be waiting another 1 or 2 more generations before upgrading, after this GTX 8800 price craziness flashes away.
 
bug said:
Didn't everything start "half-assed"? I'm assuming this will be the same (though we don't really know at this point). But games with movie-quality lighting? I can't understand how so many people can say that's a gimmick.
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I guess some progress is better than no progress. Crude, was the word I was looking for but it was eluding me at the time I made was making the post so I just wrote in "half-sassed," same diff. As much as I want to commend them this is Nvidia, it's obvious this another one of their attempts at a walled garden, so pardon me for not being enthusiastic about it. I predict things are going go down once like Physx, something that could've been, only difference right now it's there isn't competition from the get-go hampering adoption.

EntropyZ said:
I wonder what happened to the AMD/Radeon Technologies Group partnerships and all that hardware they gave away to developers... Now it seems like a PR stunt with no actual fruit. Or is that just me?
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PR stunt with no actual fruit
 
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Prima.Vera said:
If you get 30fps on 1920x1080, then on my 3440x1440 monitor I will be getting something like 15....
Good job!
I guess I will be waiting another 1 or 2 more generations before upgrading, after this GTX 8800 price craziness flashes away.
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Exactly! Anyone who gets a 2080 or 2080Ti is going to be frantically breaking out their 1080p monitor since their 1440p or 4K will barely play the games as long as rtx is on. It will be like a slideshow.

I guess we’ll see how W1zzard fares in his reviews to know for sure.
 
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EntropyZ said:
I wonder what happened to the AMD/Radeon Technologies Group partnerships and all that hardware they gave away to developers... Now it seems like a PR stunt with no actual fruit. Or is that just me?
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You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.

AMD has made all kinds of technologies open sourced and functional on NVIDIA/AMD/Intel hardware but developers have little to no interest in using them without AMD (same as NVIDIA) paying them to do so. Developers just want to make fun games. Hardware tech is usually of little interest to them.
 
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cucker tarlson said:
BS, good developers push for graphical improvements too.Sloppy ones don't care.
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Graphics haven't changed much in the last decade. Mostly just more polygons and more dynamic lights.
 
FordGT90Concept said:
Graphics haven't changed much in the last decade. Mostly just more polygons and more dynamic lights.
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Yet you've got 2015-16 games like witcher 3 and quantum break looking beter than most 2018 ones by a mile. Why ? Cause cdpr and remedy push for graphical improvements, most of the rest just poops out another game every year based on the same engine as previous three,that's why things are stagnant.
 
What I'd like to see with RTX is the Witcher series. And going a bit more back in time, Thief.
 
I don't think they'll be implementing backwards, but this is another feature you can add to series of gamewroks ones that you can utilize when replaying later on next gens of hardware.I loved replaying ac4bf with soft shadows,godrays and txaa, it really took the game to another level visually.
 
cucker tarlson said:
I don't think they'll be implementing backwards, but this is another feature you can add to series of gamewroks ones that you can utilize when replaying later on next gens of hardware.I loved replaying ac4bf with soft shadows,godrays and txaa, it really took the game to another level visually.
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I believe the changes to support ray tracing are far too invasive to be contained in the GameWorks part of a title. I.e. there is no generic "renderThisRay" call to be implemented as either a raster operation or ray tracing (I hope I'm not being too technical).
 
as always,good analysis from DF

 
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cucker tarlson said:
as always,good analysis from DF

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Obviously just a bunch of Nvidia shills in that video. You can tell, because they're not constantly running around like beheaded chickens screaming "highway robbery! highway robbery!"
 
Considering how much trouble Crystal Dynamics is having with it, raytracing isn't something easy to implement in new titles, never mind old titles.

I honestly don't think this tech is going anywhere for another five years at least. The cost/performance calculation isn't there. If you're not building tech demos (like Futuremark) there's literally no incentive at this time to pursue it unless NVIDIA directly creates incentive. I doubt they will beyond the few titles they announced. They would have to start handing 2080 Ti cards out like candy to developers and a vast majority of them will likely come back to them and say "it's not worth our time" for the few people that can use it.
 
nvidia spends too much money on press, they even have members in forums. so jusyt imagine how much they spend on bribing editors, youtubers or others
 
FordGT90Concept said:
Considering how much trouble Crystal Dynamics is having with it, raytracing isn't something easy to implement in new titles, never mind old titles.

I honestly don't think this tech is going anywhere for another five years at least. The cost/performance calculation isn't there. If you're not building tech demos (like Futuremark) there's literally no incentive at this time to pursue it unless NVIDIA directly creates incentive. I doubt they will beyond the few titles they announced.
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Ray tracing isn't hard, it's technology available for decades. It's probably having two code paths in there (one with ray tracing, one without) that's messy.
You're free to doubt as you will, but at this point I'm pretty sure you're more trying to convince yourself AMD hasn't missed (yet another) boat here.
 
Raytracing in theory is simple, in application, it is not. Case in point, if a ray bounces into the void that's just beyond the visible player space, how does the GPU know the terminate that ray instead of trying to find a collision that doesn't exist? Not only do you have to purge all of the artificial lighting out of the existing world, you have to update the world to work inside of the framework of containing rays. It's simple to the layman but very complex for game engine developers, modelers, and level designers.

Running through it in my head, there's zero chance of backporting this stuff. They would have to pull up the old code, delete all of the old lighting, add ray emitters in place of lights, make sure the model that represents the light lets the rays through, update all meshes to correctly reflect/absorb according to material type, then check every corner of every map to make sure it is adequately lit. Conversely they have to make sure nothing is too bright too (pure white is as unplayable as pitch black). Oh, and models have to be updated too so that they can react to the rays.
 
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Yup. I'm not holding my breath waiting to see this backported either. All I'm saying is ray tracing by itself is probably cleaner than the current approach that needs passes for shadows and reflections. It's still (very) compute heavy, but the API to net you a rendered frame is probably simpler.
 
Bigger list than I expected on that link. Then again, not surprising considering how much money NVIDIA put into it.

RTX is branding for the Turing-based cards (Volta too?). I'm not sure what NVIDIA is calling their RTRT implementation. Might not even have a name/branding yet.
 
FordGT90Concept said:
Bigger list than I expected on that link. Then again, not surprising considering how much money NVIDIA put into it.

RTX is branding for the Turing-based cards (Volta too?). I'm not sure what NVIDIA is calling their RTRT implementation. Might not even have a name/branding yet.
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RTX is the umbrella term for a bunch of technologies, actually. But I would like to know if RTX as a whole is what's standardized under DX12 (and soon coming to Vulkan) or only the ray tracing part of it. But tech sites rarely bother with such "details" anymore, when it's so much easier to start a flamewar around pricing instead.
 
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