A1xLLcqAgt0qc2RyMz0y
Veteran
Since Nvidia's Ray Tracing hardware acceleration was a complete surprise and Navi development is either done or in the final development I don't see RT hardware acceleration being in Navi.
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Since Nvidia's Ray Tracing hardware acceleration was a complete surprise and Navi development is either done or in the final development I don't see RT hardware acceleration being in Navi.
Since AMD has already implemeted RT acceleration in ProRender, and will have something similar in Vulkan and DirectX, I can only expect Navi will be even better for such tasks
https://gpuopen.com/announcing-real-time-ray-tracing/
And in my opinion, RT is much more important in CAD, than in games. Maybe because I spend much more time in CAD software than playing games :d
https://gpuopen.com/announcing-real-time-ray-tracing/
It was a surprise to consumers, I don’t believe it was a surprise in the hardware industry. While AMD may not have know NVIDIA’s plans directly, I’m sure they were aware of Microsoft’s plans to introduce DXR months if not years before they announced it.
I think RT is something MS will want for their next console and DXR is an early step to get developers to start thinking about it and developing prototypes around it.
Questions remain though: Was this in the making when AMD finalized the base architecture for Navi? Did AMD see this as a long term primer for future consoles and developers or did they actually integrate circuits into their hardware apart from larger caches that significantly speed up RT? I don't see anything conclusive in either direction, yay or nay.
It hasn't been a surprise since Microsoft announced DXR and Microsoft announcing DXR definitely wasn't a surprise for any big graphics company - I don't think anything ever has been added to DX without all the big players input
Magnum_Force
Newcomer
Just thinking out loud, but could any of the patents which were mentioned in B3D in the Vega speculation thread regard variable length simd or a beefed up scalar core help with ray tracing?
Ike Turner
Veteran
The narrative that AMD was caught by surprise is ridiculous. Will they implement something similar to Nvidia's RT cores (which technically aren't even "cores"..) ? Maybe or maybe not. But just like Nvidia & Intel they have being working on GPU accelerate Ray-Tracing for Real-Time and Offline rendering for a while now (fully open-source and cross OS/HW compatible..). Radeon FireRays (now called Radeon Rays) was announced/released 3 years ago. Microsoft didn't create DXR without AMD's input.
Edit: But the two things that AMD doesn't have are the R&D money that Nvidia has and more importantly the shit-ton of researchers specialized in ray tracing that Nvidia has hired in the past 10 years..
Edit: But the two things that AMD doesn't have are the R&D money that Nvidia has and more importantly the shit-ton of researchers specialized in ray tracing that Nvidia has hired in the past 10 years..
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One would indeed expect at least Microsoft to lean towards AMD for the next Xbox, and to be interested in accelerating DXR. And Sony probably wouldn't want to be left out of that, though they might not want to jointly fund something with MS.
Lisa Su practically confirmed already that they're in both next gen consoles
Rootax
Veteran
" caught by surprise" is not about RT, it's about dedicated HW (RT + tensor cores) helping that. But right now, my question is, can AMD execute what they're planning, or will they be late / a generation behind again. On paper Vega was nice. In real life, it's a big polaris... (where a you primitive shaders / NGG). Which is not bad in a vacuum, but can't beat "old" Pascal.
But it's a bad start with Navi IMO, in a sense it's not even there yet, and won't be for months. nVidia is alone, again...
But it's a bad start with Navi IMO, in a sense it's not even there yet, and won't be for months. nVidia is alone, again...
Without their input of course not, but it still might be too late for them to add hardware stuff in navi. There're a few indications which tend me to believe that DXR was mostly pushed by nvidia or they might have even used a mantle approach and finished the api first and later gave it to MS for changes. This way it might be that AMD just got involved too late for architecture changes for navi (early 2017).
Why i'm thinking that?
1. I heard DXR has very big similarities with Nvidia Optix
2. Nvs Vulkan extension which they proposed for inserting into the api is also very similar to optix and DXR.
Of course it might be, that this is just the "optimal" approach for an api, but i can't really believe that.
Ike Turner
Veteran
https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd-microsoft-cloud-consoleDo you have a link to that? Thanks!
D
Deleted member 13524
Guest
I've been using ProRender on Solidworks for over a year, and I must say it was a life saver to get stuff done on time.
Imagination had fully functional chip with dedicated logic for ray-tracing 3 years ago. Even Intel's Larrabee had its own RT design 10 years ago. So MS could have asked them to put it in next gen console even before current one was released.
Wheter we see it in Navi or not, I'm sure AMD has something similar at least on paper if not in the lab. The question is - is this the time to put it on expensive silicon, when you know it won't be utilized for most of the time?
Regarding DXR, from what I read, it will be available for all current DX12 hardware. Though RTX will probably have way better performance than anything else. But it is important that even with older cards, developers are able to implement RT in games, knowing that when the game is released, gamers will have cards that can actually run it in real time.
Wheter we see it in Navi or not, I'm sure AMD has something similar at least on paper if not in the lab. The question is - is this the time to put it on expensive silicon, when you know it won't be utilized for most of the time?
Regarding DXR, from what I read, it will be available for all current DX12 hardware. Though RTX will probably have way better performance than anything else. But it is important that even with older cards, developers are able to implement RT in games, knowing that when the game is released, gamers will have cards that can actually run it in real time.
A1xLLcqAgt0qc2RyMz0y
Veteran
Real Time RT was a surprise to the industry as they did not expect to see that in hardware for at least 3-5 years from now.
So again with that reality AMD would have to have been positioning themselves to that same time frame.
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A1xLLcqAgt0qc2RyMz0y
Veteran
GPU architectural designs take 3+ years to develop.
Microsoft announced DXR only 6 months ago.
So that starts the clock for AMD.
Nvidia is the biggest player by far and you should be aware that there is a fallback position in DXR to run on all GPUs even if they lack hardware accelerated RT.
And because of that fallback position in DXR AMD probably became aware that Nvidia was going to have some kind of RT hardware acceleration soon. Again that takes 3+ years to implement thus the 2.5 year gap for AMD.
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Why do you assumie AMD wasn't privileged to informations on upcoming DXR extension from Microsoft prior to its official unveiling?
This is not how industry standards are born, companies are involved way earlier than any official announcment is made. Obviously knowing and acting on that knowledge are two different things, so I fully expect Navi to support DXR via universal INT/FP units with added functionality but I would like to be proven wrong.
No, that starts the clock for public. 3rd party devs had already working demos ready so they knew and had the spec quite a bit earlier than that. AMD is developing DirectX with Microsoft, just like NVIDIA, Intel, Qualcomm, you name it - if anything AMD is even closer to MS than the rest due to console connections.
AMD most likely knew about DXR before there was a single line of code written at MS regarding it.
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