Baseless Next Generation Rumors with no Technical Merits [post E3 2019, pre GDC 2020] [XBSX, PS5]

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Unfortunately, many people out there (on the inter webs) do not understand the basic purpose of an API; and I notice that people will often confuse what can be accomplished within shader programs with what the API calls do. On one hand of an extreme, the API serves no purpose; on the other hand of the spectrum way over serving its purpose.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
What are you talking about? DXR is a software API - it has nothing to do with Hardware RT acceleration. GPUs (APUs/Systems) that don't have RT hardware acceleration will use a software fallback, same as many DX features.

Again, for the third time, 'hardware acceleration' is hardware designs/features incorporated for the purposes of accelerating a task. It's silly to try to imagine otherwise - that'd mean hardware acceleration doesn't exist as a concept. You can do floating-point maths on CPUs without a floating point unit. The FPU was added to accelerate this maths. Clearly a CPU without an FPU isn't accelerating floating-point maths in hardware.
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Quite clear it is hardware in some form, even confirmed by the console companies and AMD themselfs, just like the 7nm process. How people think sometimes is interesting atleast :p

What kind of RT solution we get remains to be seen though.
 
PSman1700 said:
Quite clear it is hardware in some form, even confirmed by the console companies and AMD themselfs, just like the 7nm process. How people think sometimes is interesting atleast :p
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Initially there was doubt due tot he ambiguity of 'ray-tracing' being listed as a feature. 'Ray-tracing' could have meant RT on compute. However, saying 'RT hardware' means there's dedicated hardware so there shouldn't be any confusion from here-on in.
 
I really hope that both next consoles will have (true) RT accelerated hardware as defined by @Shifty Geezer otherwise there is going to be discussion raging for years about semantics here and elsewhere.

Because obviously if one or both manufacturers don't actually have any kind of RT hardware their marketing will inevitably say they have it. Well they already both said it anyways, Spencer and Cerny, so it's on record, they'd have to continue lying :yep2: and it would be funny messy.
 
Well if the results are as fast as say RTX it doesn’t really matter how/what hw rt it is? If they claim it is hardware based it probably is, how subtle or where that might be, there’s something dedicated to it.

More interesting question would be if the rt is worth it over extra power in a console, did they have to offer anything in favor of it or is it a ’free’ addition?
 
At the end all is HW based but specialized HW may allow a wider use of some techniques at the moment marginally used or even uknown....
 
It's not all hardware based. :rolleyes: A CPU can do absolutely anything - that does not make any solution running on a CPU hardware based. Software is using programmable hardware to do a variety of tasks. Hardware is using specialist hardware to do a limited set of tasks faster than software running on a more general purpose processor. The development of hardware acceleration is essential to efficient designs. Things like video decoding are a gazillion times more efficient thanks to hardware specialised to the job. Audio processing hardware is included in the consoles to do those workloads more efficiently (faster per watt of energy/$ of silicon) than using a CPU.

Running raytracing on GPU is not hardware acceleration. It's software acceleration, using a fast general purpose highly-parallel processor. Interestingly, rasterising graphics on the GPU can be considered hardware acceleration as current GPUs are designed for rasterising triangles efficiently and include specialist hardware (texture samplers, ROPS) for that purpose.

This conversation is getting silly and tiresome. Next we'll be calling the CPU a 'hardware game-logic accelerator'.

Caveat: We do have things like hardware IO controllers where the hardware isn't designed to accelerate a task but to shunt the workload off the CPU. I don't think that's ever been referred to as hardware acceleration, and if it ever has, it shouldn't have been. In conversation, the idea of hardware may be somewhat muddled by people using the term without clarification, so talking about doing audio 'in hardware' without saying 'hardware accelerator'. Obviously you have to have some hardware somewhere to do anything - you can't run games on thin air.
 
People seem to be confused in general because of not understanding. But even then, if hardware RT is confirmed... then it is there. Like the 7nm process and the use of rdna.

Btw, where does that put the PS2's vector unit(s)? Both hardware and software?
 
All processors (and functional units) are hardware! They vary in flexibility versus performance, with those weighted more towards versatility being general purpose processors, and those weighted towards a specific task being accelerators. The VUs are general purpose maths accelerators.
 
Didnt wanted to say something different... the real point is: will RT HW be enough specialized to make RT a tangible, viable, usable option on next gen consoles ? That's because we need the engines to support it, we need also to keep some compatibility with older consoles & pcs....
 
HBRU said:
Didnt wanted to say something different... the real point is: will RT HW be enough specialized to make RT a tangible, viable, usable option on next gen consoles ? That's because we need the engines to support it, we need also to keep some compatibility with older consoles & pcs....
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Probably it will, otherwise they wouldn't implement it. Older consoles and pc users will have to upgrade... sometime. That's what happens when a new gen arrives.
 
I'm sure talks where going on with engine developers and that will introduce a RT that first adds up just on quality of existing rendering and no more than that... Then, with time, -maybe- it will add something usefull on other areas of game development.... this second way of utilizing RT-HW is more plausible on PS5 because of exclusive IMHO....
 
They will definitely find a way to use any block of logic. Even if not as the designers intended. Whether that makes it a good use of thermal/cost limits will be debated for quite a while.
 
We've already seen hybrid approaches from developers making use of RTX cards. That's the approach we're likely to see for quite a few years, certainly in the realm of multiplatform games, because RTRT cards/consoles will be in the minority.

As for making use of ray tracing hardware outside of graphics, that was actually Sony's first official mention of ray tracing: for audio.

I'm not sure if there are other uses besides audiovisual though e.g. physics.
 
I rather have "software" RT i.e programmable than "hardware" RT i.e fixed function as long as the underlying hardware is performant. We shouldn't conflate "general compute" with "software RT" and "hardware accelerated" with "fixed function".

A programmable RT core could be technically described as "software RT" while offering hardware acceleration.
 
Ray-casts are relentless for AI. It's basically how agents 'see' the world. Don't know how that'd fit into the current RT processing flows though. You also want things like sphere-casts.

dobwal said:
I rather have "software" RT i.e programmable than "hardware" RT i.e fixed function as long as the underlying hardware is performant. We shouldn't conflate "general compute" with "software RT" and "hardware accelerated" with "fixed function".

A programmable RT core could be technically described as "software RT".
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It'd still be hardware acceleration if designed for the job, same way a programmable audio DSP is. What would such a processor do though? What features would it need and how would it accelerate RT?
 
HBRU said:
So suspects inside One X is present RT-HW are founded ?!?
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no because you'd need drivers for that. all 3 cases are using compute shaders.
DXR emulation is using compute shaders as well; but we can see how poorly optimized the drivers are for that.
 
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