That's not dependent on RT though. You could manage that less prettily than RT by dynamic lighting and SVOGI or somesuch internal lighting. RT already has to compromise how many shadow cast lights are possible so you're going to have compromises one way or another.
The only game changer I can really think of is seeing someone behind you in a reflection.
I agree. I think if I were to take the rasterization angle, we could go deep into svogi, and for ray traced shadows we have to be discussing conservative rasterization. There are tons of features in DX12_1 + SM6 that this whole generation missed out on. But in a discussion of purely features, and features only, the next gen console whether you choose to adopt RT or not, would have the same features. Added RT and Tensor cores are just more features. I don't really struggle with the concept of what rasterization is capable of. I'm struggling to see why less features would be more optimal than more features - the differential in power has got to be pretty great for that to be true.
Tensor Processing Units aren't exactly new either. Google is on their 3rd generation of TPU at the moment, Nvidia on their first 1st I think with volta. Their 2nd generation should be coming soon. AMD is likely to bring out their TPU as well, they won't be left behind in the deep based learning as that is where the money is.
And as you said, RT accelerators have been in PowerVR a long time ago and now nvidia finally has something equivalent or better in that space. It's really just a question of AMD here.
But i mean, we need to be realistic here, there are things about voxel GI that also have draw backs. There's a thread about it here on B3D and Tim Sweeny writes about it here:
https://www.dsogaming.com/news/epic-games-tim-sweeney-explains-lack-of-svogi-in-unreal-engine-4/
Epic Games’ Global Illumination technique is called Sparse Voxel Octree Global Illumination, a technique that was developed by Andrew Scheidecker. And despite what Epic Games showcased at last year’s GDC, it seems that this technique is too heavy for actual games.
As Sweeney
told GameTrailers, that technique was extremely expensive. Therefore, Epic Games decided create a series of graphical effects that achieve the same image fidelity as SVOGI with far better performance.
So far the only engine supporting SVOGI is Crytek:
And regarding Crytek’s engine, yes; CryEngine 3 is the only engine – at this point – with proper dynamic Global Illumination. However, CryEngine 3’s light propagation volume is far less advanced than SVOGI. Not only that, but Crysis 3 has only one bounce GI and the sun is the only GI source.
But that's interesting because Drive Club is very similar in that regard. The Sun is the main GI source.
SVOGI was invented in 2012 and it was showcased and dropped. If it was going to happen it should have happened this year with the middle of the pack GPUs moving well into the 6 TF range. But instead of pushing svogi for their infilitrator demo (also 2012) they ran it with RTX instead.
I mean, I believe in rasterization techniques and such, but I have to admit if it was so simple we would have seen a SVOGI solution by now (given it's lead of 6 years) vs. Ray Tracing.
edit more articles:
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-gdc-2013-unreal-engine-4
The key differentiating factor between last year's demo and this newer iteration is that the
Sparse Voxel Octree Global Illumination (SVOGI) lighting system hasn't made the cut. Instead, Epic is aiming for very high quality static global illumination with indirect GI sampling for all moving objects, including characters.
"[SVOGI] was our prototype GI system that we used for Elemental last year. And our targets, given that we've had announced hardware from Sony, that's where we're going to be using Lightmass as our global illumination solution instead of SVOGI," senior technical artist and level designer Alan Willard told Eurogamer, stressing that this new iteration of the technology has evolved significantly beyond the current-gen system used in titles like Mass Effect 3. Certainly, just the presence of so much more memory on next-gen platforms should improve lightmap quality on its own.
Let me put this another way. 1080Ti/980TI etc have been around for quite a few years now. If SVOGI could be implemented at least at world builder level (so that you could use it to prototype lighting) on very strong hardware, we should have seen it by now. But we see exactly that happening with RTX.
So I don't think 1080TI is enough for SVOGI. That means it may not be enough for next-gen either. At least it's something to consider.
Here is: SVOGI 2.0 from nvidia on UE4 just released earlier this year. It's still exclusive to nvidia hardware as well... but ignoring that, the frame rate looks fairly comparable or worse to the full RT hardware demos we saw, with less accuracy, no reflections, probably less bounce... and without the directML to approximate things in.
I'm reading reports of 110FPS dropping to 30 sub 30.