NVidia Ada Speculation, Rumours and Discussion

[TopSpoiler]

Btw, Lumen has amount of limitations in the software ray tracing mode.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/lumen-technical-details-in-unreal-engine/

Limitations of Software Ray Tracing
Software Ray Tracing has some limitations relating to how you should work with it in your projects and what types of geometry and materials it currently supports.

Geometry Limitations:

• Only Static Meshes, Instanced Static Meshes, Hierarchical Instanced Static Meshes, and Landscape terrain are represented in the Lumen Scene.
• Foliage must be enabled with the setting Affect Distance Field Lighting found in the Foliage Tool settings.

Material Limitations:

• World Position Offset (WPO) is not supported.
• Transparent materials are ignored by distance fields and Masked materials are treated as Opaque.
  • Masked materials can cause significant over-shadowing on foliage where large areas of leaves are masked out.
• Distance fields are built off of properties of the material assigned to the Static Mesh Asset rather than the override component.
  • Overriding with a material that has a different Blend Mode or that has Two-Sided property enabled will cause a mismatch between the triangle representation and the mesh's distance field representation.

Workflow Limitations:

• Software Ray Tracing requires that levels be composed of modular geometry. Things like walls, floors, and ceilings should be separate meshes. Large single meshes, such as a Mountain or multi-story building, will have a poor distance field representation that can cause self-occlusion artifacts to appear.
• Walls should be no thinner than 10 centimeters (cm) to avoid light leaking.
• Distance Fields cannot represent extremely thin features, or one-sided meshes seen from behind. Avoid these types of artifacts by ensuring the viewer doesn't see the triangle back faces of one-sided meshes or only use closed geometry.
• Mesh Distance Field resolution is assigned based on the imported scale of the Static Mesh.
  • A mesh that is imported very small and then scaled up on the component will not have sufficient distance field resolution. Instead, set the distance field resolution from the Static Mesh Editor's Build Settings if you use scaling on placed instances in a Level.

Also quality problems:

https://imgur.com/a/kkfIJ1e

Therefore, Lumen should not be used as an example to claim that hardware ray tracing is useless.

 

[techuse]

If you think dynamic lighting is useless in games then this whole conversation is a bit pointless isn't it? Have you never played Splinter Cell or any game with lights that turn on and off e.g. a flashlight. I'm not sure if you're joking...



Yeah that's a good point. 32 ROPs per GPC may be overkill for AD102 but fine for other products. One thing I did notice is that ROPs get completely slammed at 8K. Maybe Nvidia is still going to push that nonsense

I was talking about global environment lighting. You’re naming rare exceptions while I'm speaking to the majority. You can have a flash light with baked environment lighting.

It is a gorgeous game sure, but it's also a 6-year development cycle and $100+ million budget. RT doesn't mean that any indie studio could produce something like that of course, a lot of that budget is motion capture and voice acting too, but what it can certainly help is at least reducing the art dept cost required to craft that lighting, and especially constantly update it during development as art direction can change for a particular scene over the course of the project.

Sure, I just don't agree with the narrative that without RT good lighting isn't possible. Games with dynamic world lighting aren’t doing anything gameplay wise that cant be done with baked lighting. I also was under the impression it was the creation and polishing of art that was the major time consumer, not light baking but happy to concede if I’m wrong there.

 

[trinibwoy]

I was talking about global environment lighting. You’re naming rare exceptions while I'm speaking to the majority. You can have a flash light with baked environment lighting.

Dynamic lighting in games isn’t rare at all. There’s dynamic lighting everywhere. Lights, torches, muzzle flashes, fire, doors opening and closing, spells being cast etc. The global environment lighting for these things cannot be baked.

How exactly do you pre-render the GI for a flashlight?

Sure, I just don't agree with the narrative that without RT good lighting isn't possible.

No one said you can’t have good lighting without RT. However static baked lighting is firmly last generation tech. There’s no need to play the gameplay card. There’s very little about graphics that directly impacts gameplay. If you go down that route you might as well disable textures, shadows, lights and all the random objects strewn about in games that don’t impact “gameplay”.

 

[Seanspeed]

That's true when compared to last generation consoles. Without RT though the current generation consoles wouldn't bring much new to the table for PC folks. The shader/texture/memory performance required to render the latest console games have been available on PC for a long time. The main benefit of RT adoption on consoles is to free developers from being stuck supporting old rendering methods which will hopefully unlock the potential of RT on cross platform PC titles going forward.

Having said that there's obvious benefit to having faster consoles. UE5 probably wouldn't be what it is today without console hardware that can run it.

Everything is about consoles. GPU's on PC could be like 10x as fast as the ones on console and it wouldn't matter when games are still built around the consoles as a baseline.

I know a lot of PC gamers, especially ones who like to spend $600-700+ on their GPU, really hate acknowledging this reality, but it's true.

Without RT, the new consoles would still provide an immense lifting of visuals and ambition for developers, and thus of PC versions of these games that follow. You're still spouting this weird notion that RT is like the only new avenue for pushing graphics, when something like Nanite is proving that's not the case at all. In fact, UE5's impact on games likely wouldn't be any different at all if consoles didn't have hardware accelerated ray tracing given how unlikely it is that UE5 games on console will actually use hardware-based Lumen. We're undoubtedly gonna see loads of proper next gen-looking UE5 titles on console that aren't using h/w ray tracing at all cuz it's simply too expensive.

 

[Seanspeed]

It is a big deal if it would go un-used largely in the consoles. Its being advertised as a game changing future in electronic stores and other adds. Its something console makers have been boasting about.
It is a departure into new technologies on what we see on-screen. Being stuck to just rasterization would be very 'meh'. Its weaksauce on consoles but it certainly still has use-cases.
And you have to start somewhere, next generation consoles will be more capable in the RT department. its like the pixel/vertex shaders 20 years ago.

HZFW looks quite good on the PS4, its not a generational leap going to the PS5 version. Not any game has shown that 'true generational leap' as per DF has noted. Ue5 tech demos do, but thats using hw ray tracing....

Again, y'all are trying to push this weird notion that I'm saying ray tracing wont be used on consoles. Why? It's getting frustrating have to constantly repeat that this isn't actually anything I'm saying.

Anyways, Xbox360/PS3->XB1/PS4 didn't see any drastic new hardware revolution and yet the graphics improvement was still very significant. Ray tracing is a nice addition for these new consoles, but this weird sentiment that it's the end all, be all of the new capabilities is whack. And no, I'm not misinterpreting any comments here - the claim I'm pushing against is literally the idea that hardware-based ray tracing is *the* defining aspect of this generation's graphics. This is gonna prove wrong. It doesn't take any expert or Nostradamus to posit this.

Y'all just vastly underestimate how much room for improvement there still was even without ray tracing. We weren't close to hitting a wall on the rendering technology at all. Only a limit on the baseline hardware of the XB1/PS4 consoles.

 

[trinibwoy]

I know a lot of PC gamers, especially ones who like to spend $600-700+ on their GPU, really hate acknowledging this reality, but it's true.

And you shouldn’t be surprised when those same PC gamers aren’t excited by new consoles that are playing catching up.

You're still spouting this weird notion that RT is like the only new avenue for pushing graphics, when something like Nanite is proving that's not the case at all.

That’s nice except for the fact one has claimed RT is the “only” improvement needed in game graphics. What RT brings are improvements that cannot be accomplished by a simple bump in flops and bandwidth. Nanite can run on multiple generations of PC GPUs just fine.

We're undoubtedly gonna see loads of proper next gen-looking UE5 titles on console that aren't using h/w ray tracing at all cuz it's simply too expensive.

Verdict is still out on whether software Lumen is faster than HW on the consoles.

 

[pjbliverpool]

I thought the Matrix demo was using hardware Lumen on consoles?

 

[DavidGraham]

So, Ada is launching first, in mid July, and clearly before RDNA3, with the RTX 4090 being first out the door.
https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-...aunch-first-followed-by-rtx-4080-and-rtx-4070

 

[Jawed]

Article seems to imply that AD103 might be coming after AD104, implying that 4080 will start off as a cut-down 4090. That could mean that 4090 and 4080 actually launch "simultaneously".

I'm assuming there'll be a 4090Ti and 4080Ti, presumably lined up for RDNA 3's appearance.

 

[DegustatoR]

I'm assuming there'll be a 4090Ti and 4080Ti, presumably lined up for RDNA 3's appearance.

Not any time soon and definitely not at RDNA3's launch.

 

[Kaotik]

We do have 4090 Ti cooler photos already, though

 

[DegustatoR]

We do have 4090 Ti cooler photos already, though

4090, not "Ti".

 

[Krteq]

It clearly says RTX 4090 Ti

Spoiler

https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-cooling-heatsink-has-allegedly-been-pictured

 

[trinibwoy]

So, Ada is launching first, in mid July, and clearly before RDNA3, with the RTX 4090 being first out the door.
https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-...aunch-first-followed-by-rtx-4080-and-rtx-4070

Makes sense to milk the big spenders first.

 

[techuse]

3k a good over/under line for the MSRP? 4k for street pricing?

 

[Seanspeed]

3k a good over/under line for the MSRP? 4k for street pricing?

Entirely depends what it is. Nvidia doesn't usually copy/paste their lineups from one series to the next in terms of segmentation.

I'd only expect a $3000 pricetag if it was a full fat AD102 ultra premium SKU ala Titan Black or something. And I kinda doubt they'll lead with such a product.

 

[DegustatoR]

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 is now expected to debut in August. The current launch schedule lists RTX 4080 with a September launch date and RTX 4070 should launch in October. However, our sources expect some dates to change because AIBs still have lots of RTX 30 inventory left, and the last thing they want is to NVIDIA announce a new generation.

https://videocardz.com/newz/rumor-n...rtx-4080-in-september-and-rtx-4070-in-october

Lots of inventory left? That's interesting to hear to those who weren't able to get a 30 series card over the last two years.
AIBs should really stop supporting miners as much as they did over these years.
Nvidia should really not give an F about such AIBs.

 

[trinibwoy]

That doesn’t make sense. AIBs have been making a killing on inflated prices for months/years. What’s stopping them from discounting the cards now at the end of their production run? And why should Nvidia tolerate their continued greed?

It’s a different story if Nvidia had also jacked up the price they charged AIBs but I haven’t seen any evidence of that.

 

[Malo]

Ampere hasn't moved in price for weeks now since the initial drop. Still stocks and same inflated prices.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Ampere hasn't moved in price for weeks now since the initial drop. Still stocks and same inflated prices.

Tons of stock now unlike about a month or two ago. When I was looking back then they were highly priced but there was limited stock (less than 1 page of results for any given Ampere model on Amazon). Now if I check, say Amazon, there is more than 1 page of results for any given model of Ampere card.

Regards,
SB