AMD Radeon RDNA2 Navi (RX 6500, 6600, 6700, 6800, 6900 XT)

There's content to use restrictions for raytracing that simply might not be overcome, especially on a fixed bvh like Nvidia has. You can hack reflections somewhat, as they're not as noticeable if they don't match up 1 to 1. EG see the t-pose npcs in Miles Morale's reflections. Amusing but not terrible.



Shadows on the other hand need to be at least close to one to one, otherwise leaking and false shadowing occur, and that does look pretty terrible. There's been concern about how on earthy you can even manage to refit an entire moving forest of leaves in realtime even with a programmable bvh, let alone fixed function. You can see the effects already in CoD Black Ops:



You can see how the "wind" doesn't seem to effect the foliage almost at all, from the mostly static grass right at the beginning to the basically entirely static jungle a bit later. Meanwhile for rasterization vertex shader tricks have gotten so ridiculously cheap that you can move individual blades of grass separately all the way back on the Wii-U (see Breath of the Wild) without a problem.

 

Level of Detail for BVH has been demonstrated on NV hardware - so it is not a limitation. What is happening in that miles morales screen shot is not level of detail causing t-posing Rather the game code for animation and characters not caring about how they look when the camera is not looking at them. A different "issue" altogether.

Basically, your gameplay systems are more lenient in fidelity and simulation but ray tracing now exposes the cheating.

If you read the modern warfare 2019 ray tracing presentation - they mention how vertex animation grass and foliage is a limitation that they will go around in future products by actually using real mesh representation for grass and leaves and animating them that way.

https://www.activision.com/cdn/research/Raytraced_Shadows_in_Call_of_Duty_Modern_Warfare.pdf

Slide 61: "Alpha testing will most likely have to be replaced with high poly opaque BLASes, but actual performance/mesh complexity balance is yet to be measured."

That would be a positive thing for ray tracing against them as well as the fidelity of such assets. It will be nice to see how these games look once the last gen is dropped and the asset production can catch up to the new techniques.

 

It seems everything is supply constrained atm.
I added up the Proshop numbers for both AMD and NVIDIA (orders shipped to customers to date 25/11 2020):

RTX 3070 - 1.361
RTX 3080 - 1.135
RTX 3090 - 482
RX 6800 - 100
RX 6800 XT - 25

Will be interesting to observe the next few months and I hope Proshop keeps posting numbers like this for the future releases.

 

Within a week they've received 125 RX 6000 series cards. After 1 month they'd received 344 RTX 3080s:

https://videocardz.com/newz/danish-retailer-fulfiled-only-10-of-geforce-rtx-3080-preorders

and 78 RTX 3090s.

Do we have counts for shipped consoles?

The point of my comparison: "work smarter nor harder".

AMD appears to be using primitive shaders, "to work smarter" in RDNA2. So we already have a proof. And that's before developers write mesh shaders.

I agree. It would be like being able to work directly with the data in a render target, without the API getting in the way. Sort of how devs were flipping bits in XB360's render target... Alright if you have a single platform to target and you're a bit mad...

Perhaps "BVH Feedback" could be the concept we're looking for? Similar to Sampler Feedback?

Yes, it appears NVidia is spending way more die area on ray acceleration... and all the comparisons so far are based on code optimised for that hardware.

There's no doubt that you don't do a dumb port of a MIMD algorithm to SIMD hardware, we've got over 10 years' proof of that

At the same time it seems AMD is warning developers not to do fancy workgroup style coding in their custom traversal shader (LDS space is too tightly constrained, sigh), so maybe it's a dead end.

Maybe there's mileage in a hybrid of texture-space shading and ray tracing? Texture-space shading can be accelerated with sampler feedback, e.g. to identify parts of the frame where no rays should be cast or to identify dead rays that when cast produced no useful result (e.g. ray exceeded path length).

A custom BVH traversal algorithm that can sample from a texture might be useful

 

This might be a fun thing to compare:
1 month:

Fulfilled:
RTX 3080 - 344
RTX 3090 - 99

Incomming:
RTX 3080 - 123
RTX 3090 - 55


1 week:

Fulfilled:
RX 6800 - 100
RX 6800XT - 25

Incomming:
RX 6800 - 13
RX 6800XT - 9

In Denmark there are also a lot of whine over the availability of new Xbox/PS consoles...and AMD CPU's
Seems everything is in tight supply atm.
Crossing my finger for that it doesn't affect servers.
Just ordered 34 x Dell P570 VXRails...less that a week of delivery-time...so for me it seem consumer space is hit way harder than Enterprise.

 

Gives credence to the idea of AMD DXR drivers not being really ready.

 

Gives credence to the idea of AMD DXR drivers not being really ready.

 

Maybe it's a bit too early to draw conclusions. The question is, can AMD re-stock the distributors/shops more quickly than Nvidia could.

 

And/or that RT on AMD is not as simple as turn it on.

 

This will be so good no more strange looking vegetation.

 

That is likely accurate and aligns with some recent info from @Dictator.

https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/2178552/

 

So the AIB pricing is ...



The MSRP is $120-150 USD above AMD's announced 6800XT price. Pretty crazy.

Edit: Not distributors or retailers that are increasing the price. Powercolor and Sapphire pricing is "low margin" for those companies.

 

Something doesn't add up, they mention "10% profit margin" at current prices. If that was correct, they sold references at about 0% profit margin (or even negative, didn't actually do the math, just estimation) and AMD is selling them at loss from their own shop.

 

It would be fantastic.

You can specify unique transformations per instance in the BLAS but presumably deformations would still be done at a relatively high level (shrub, branch etc) and not for individual blades of grass or leaves.

 

Since when have custom premium AIBs been MSRP? Not in my lifetime.

 

AMD has a profit margin from the chips. Board partners have to buy the chips.

 

Is $800 for a card with a reference model at $650 normal? That seems insane for an air cooled card.

 

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/evga-geforce-rtx-3070-ftw3-ultra/

110$ above the MRSP

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/evga-geforce-rtx-3080-ftw3-ultra/

same

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/colorful-igame-geforce-rtx-3080-vulcan-oc/

180$ above MSRP

 

So we have to get a last gem card until prices become sane again. I heard 2080S are in good prices now

 

In case of reference models, all the cards are supplied by AMD as whole rather than as chips. AMD is selling them at MSRP. AIBs reference models were marked up clearly everywhere from those (regardless of who's behind the markup, be it AMD pricing, AIB pricing, importer, retailer, whoever).
AIB customs seem to be even more expensive and if they quote 10 % profit margins for those, there's just no way they made any money from reference models and AMD can't have normal margin on their reference either.
AMD needs to take into account that profit margin per chip when they price their card, no matter if they're selling it themselves or via AIB, or lower their own profit margins which I can't see happening really.