AMD: RDNA 3 Speculation, Rumours and Discussion

[PSman1700]

To be pedantic^2, we mean games using DXR hardware acceleration. There are games/engines using software ray tracing:

Lol. DXR RT aint worth it due to performance costs, so lets roll on with doing it all in software. Engines like UE5 can/will take advantage of hardware ray tracing too....

Oh common guys, please don't derail another thread with this "RT is holly grail vs. RT is useless" nonsense. Thx

I wonder why that happens anyway, the playstation does have ray tracing capabilities in some form (aswell as its games), so does the xbox and pc. I doubt nintendo users feel so upset here since there arent any

I think ray tracing as-is on all platforms isn't all that bad, its mostly used for just reflections, shadows, GI etc or a combination of any or all of those depending on the title. Even low end hardware that can be had for 500 (PS5 etc) can handle ray tracing for reflections and when considering AAA they can compromise RT fidelity without much of a visual decrease. Optimizations can and will be done on all levels of hardware i assume, and finally atleast so far now, you have the ability to disable ray tracing (even on console) and get that extra normal rendering fidelity or framerates/resolution etc.

 

[OlegSH]

oh man.
Bold.

The bold stuff is already here in UE5's Lumen, 4A's game engine, Frostbite's surfels, etc.

which is why adoption is slowing down on AAA studios

I see the opposite, so can you share statistics over years?

Maybe on the handful of titles where Nvidia subsidizes the implementation with their own man-months

So Nvidia subsidizes UE5 and Frostbite apparently too?
Ditching lightmaps is a trend that suddenly appeared just now with RT.

 

[DavidGraham]

After UE5 with Lumen was shown we started to see the big AAA games actually moving away from RTRT or making light use of it.

Lumen is RTRT as well, but just in software, which is why it is way slower than hardware RTRT. A 3090 can barely do 1080p60 using Lumen, while it can do much better (1440p90 or 2160p45) in hardware RT games, which makes your statement invalid. Studios are doing RTRT whether software/hardware in an accelerating manner, UE5 will use hardware RT soon, after which it will become ubiquitous.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

I see the opposite, so can you share statistics over years?

https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/2223497/

So Nvidia subsidizes UE5 and Frostbite apparently too?

With engineering man-months? It would be weird if they don't, but you tell me.

Frostbite is one of the examples of RT being dropped, with 2018 BF:V supporting ray traced reflections and 2021's BF 2042 dropping ray tracing altogether.
What future Frostbite game is bringing back RT?
Regardless, I ran the UE5's tech demo myself and hardware RT is pretty much broken or at the very least useless at the moment.

 

[Deleted member 2197]

What future Frostbite game is bringing back RT?

??
Game Developer Conference Sessions | GTC Nov 2021 | NVIDIA

Frostbite is a large and complex engine that’s ever-evolving to meet the needs of a large number of games across many genres. It uses a stateless renderer for rasterization, but this is inefficient for ray tracing, as rebuilding ray-tracing data structures every frame is not feasible for performance. We'll discuss how we integrated GPU-accelerated ray tracing as a first-class citizen, including dealing with tens of thousands of objects, state caching, memory allocation patterns, acceleration structure updates, and multi-platform support. Finally, we'll look at an example feature--ray-traced ambient occlusion--that uses the ray-tracing infrastructure in Frostbite.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

??
Game Developer Conference Sessions | GTC Nov 2021 | NVIDIA

What games releasing in 2022 or 2023 are mentioned in that presentation?

 

[Deleted member 2197]

What games releasing in 2022 or 2023 are mentioned in that presentation?

Wait and see ...

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Wait and see ...

If there's actually no new information relevant to the discussion from the link you posted, what's the point in linking to a nvidia conference in the RDNA3 speculation thread?

 

[DegustatoR]

Wait, so let me get this straight - BF2042 (an MP only online shooter targeting the widest possible audience) is (presumably) omitting h/w RT usage and this somehow means that "RTRT adoption is slowing down"? Am I getting it right?

 

[OlegSH]

https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/2223497/

That's not statistics and this post doesn't even contain reliable or confirmed information.

Frostbite is one of the examples of RT being dropped

Have there been anything from devs on this?

with 2018 BF:V supporting ray traced reflections and 2021's BF 2042 dropping ray tracing altogether

While, I can imagine, RT setting uptake in a multiplayer game would be just as low as Ultra High settings uptake in general, the fact alone that they're working on a surfel GI in Frostbyte speaks itself against the nonsense about RT being dropped in Frostbite.
Even if there is no reflections in BF 2042, that says nothing about RT support in Frostbite and in games built on it.

What future Frostbite game is bringing back RT?

Lets wait for games, there are no words from devs, so you can be completely wrong even regarding that short list of games.

I ran the UE5's tech demo myself and hardware RT is pretty much broken or at the very least useless at the moment.

I did a few maps in UE5, HW RT is not broken at all (but it could have been much better), it just that you should know what you're doing.
Kitbashing 100s of models in 1 spot like in the "valley of the ancient" would certainly kill any tracing performance because a ray has to check all 100s of models in that spot one by one, hence the linear slowdown and disastrous performance, because the number of traversal steps increases linearly with the number of models that ray has to check.
For SW tracing, EPIC simply merged local SDF's into coarser global SDF, local per object SDFs are not used in the "valley of the ancient" (even with the short 2 meter tracing range for local SDFs).
The same merging and clustering for HW RT proxies have to be implemented if they want to workaround the HW RT pitfalls on maps with tons of kitbashing.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

I guess I missed that BF:V with RT is actually a single player slow paced farming simulator targeting a niche, so the fact that its successor BF2042 cut RT out means absolutely nothing.

Have there been anything from devs on this?

"Battlefield 2042: Enhanced With NVIDIA DLSS and NVIDIA Reflex. And Now, Bundled With GeForce RTX Desktops and Laptops
Battlefield 2042 launches October 22nd, taking players to near-future conflict zones where extreme weather is just as deadly as the enemy. For the PC edition, NVIDIA GeForce RTX is the official graphics platform partner, ensuring a brilliant Battlefield 2042 experience."

Look, a "RTX Game" with real time ray tra... oh wait no it's just DLSS and latency optimization.

 

[DavidGraham]

Far Cry 6 apparently uses ray tracing as an afterthought,

Typical of any AMD sponsored title really.

Halo Infinite AFAIK doesn't have any,

The developer said they will implement it post launch.
https://www.windowscentral.com/halo-infinite-will-get-free-ray-tracing-update-after-launch

nor does Age of Empires 4.

It's an RTS title, those typically don't implement state of the art graphics.

 

[tsa1]

simply enable games with more interactivity than ever.

I wonder how, games steadily become more and more graphics heavy and gameplay-lite (especially AAA titles on consoles)

Because it doesn't require 100-1000x more processing power, because there are no 1000s of ways to render realistic graphics, and because Dennard scaling is dead, so industry will support RT anyway.

Yeah, that's why you have to use denoiser and other tricks to hide the fact that there's a paltry amount of rays in each image.

increased development time and costs.

Which should not bother the people who buy GPUs and games, you basically say that we have to pay extra so that poor devs will have to do less routine work. A noble endeavour, but I'll pass, thanks.

 

[Krteq]

...aaand, thread completely derailed :/

 

[Bondrewd]

...aaand, thread completely derailed :/

It won't ever be sane until the big boye launches.

 

[Malo]

My favorite company has bigger raytraced gonads than yours!

 

[DegustatoR]

My favorite company has bigger raytraced gonads than yours!

Watch all of us say the exact same when that company you're thinking about will change.

Really, some of people here are weird.

 

[PSman1700]

Watch all of us say the exact same when that company you're thinking about will change.

Really, some of people here are weird.

Maybe when the mid-gen refreshes (Pro) are around things will settle somewhat. Its still somewhat early days for ray tracing and other technologies like reconstruction and even fast storage solutions etc.

 

[Bondrewd]

and even fast storage solutions

We haven't even really touched those yes.
Crossgen will only die in like two more years so that's a long ass wait incoming.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Ooof, RT still seems hit or miss. Just the other day I was watching CrReam, Burke Black, Gassy Mexican, and one other person playing Mechwarriors 5 (the new DLC). And Burke went, hey there's RT in this game, I'm going to turn it on. At which both both CrReam and Gassy Mexican both yelled out to disable RT or he'll regret it once a mission starts. Ouch. And these are people that all have 3080's or above and are proponents of RT in games.

I really can't envisage a scenario where RT will be relevant for me for at least another 2+ generations. Basically, this generation isn't good enough for RT that isn't at time really good but at times really distracting. Kind of like shadows that I always immediately turned off if I could, in games up until a year or two ago.

Basically the cost/benefit for RT in games just isn't quite there yet for me. Well, RT AO is relevant to me, but that's about the only RT feature I would voluntarily turn on in games at the moment.

That said, I appreciate that some really do enjoy what RT brings even if there are compromises associated it.

What I'd like to see is RT proponents not dismissing people that like RT but don't think it's quite there yet. Likewise I'd love to see people that aren't convinced by the current generation of RT hardware to stop being dismissive of people that really do enjoy RT on current gen. RT hardware.

RT isn't going to get anywhere if there isn't any hardware to help with accelerating it. But just because that is true doesn't mean that everyone enjoys the current state of RT accelerated hardware and what it currently brings to games.

Regards,
SB