DirectX Ray-Tracing [DXR]

We are doing a hybrid rendering pipeline in SEED with multiple raytracing components (reflections, shadows, materials, GI and AO) combined with rasterisation (gbuffer primarily) and compute.

Running on one or more TitanVs:

 

well I feel silly. I should have specified less awesome hybrid demos! Lol or something that doesn’t require tensor power

 

I guess I'm going to be buying some ray-tracing books. https://www.amazon.com/Ray-Tracing-Weekend-Minibooks-Book-ebook/dp/B01B5AODD8

 

You guys are a lot smarter than I, what you y’all make of this?

 

ProRender is getting some real-time mixed mode functionality for use in professional applications.

 

That even I could see, it was more a question of strategy and/or timing with dxr’s & Rex’s reveal.

 

Well, I don't think the information of that short video is very truthful... There are lots of photorealistic approaches that work with rasterization, so that "low photorealism" is just not true. And then there's the "comparison" picture "rasterization vs ray-tracing"... Come on! So, in rasterization we can't simulate reflections, nor even materials and colors other than grey?!

I also have wet dreams with ray-tracing and I love any progress in this field, but this video is just wrong.

 

Very nice results! The lighting and surface shading is superb. Well done all involved!

Is the lack of detailed materials in the nVidia Pica Pica (Picachew) a technical limit for achieving realtime results, or an artistic one? I'm fearing the former as complex material shaders would need to be iterated over for each ray, increasing scene complexity exponentially.

 

What exactly is AO being used for? Are you useing pre-baked probes on top of the ray traced gi? Is the real time gi leaky?

 

It's unrelated, this is the usual work in Ray Tracing plugins for professionals done by both AMD and NVIDIA every GDC.

 

It would be harder see the effects clearly if they were using more complex materials.

 

It's an artistic choice both to go for the "toy box" style look and to make the ray tracing more apparent. The material shaders themselves are actually quite complex, we're just not using high frequency texture detail in this demo. Different textures would of course not really affect the performance much.

 

I like that Remedy kept the quality at a reasonable setting and that you could really see the downsides of ray tracing with the crazy amount of noise generated. It's a good indication of what possible lighting and shadowing effects could be achieved with a hybrid approach but also what needs to be worked on for de-noise.

 

thanks for the info! It's been a long time ever since I heard of you. Nice to have you back. What kind of laptop and nVidia chip did you run it on? Would a i7-7700HQ, 1050Ti, 16 GB of RAM laptop suffice?

 

Could higher frequency normals give the denoising pass a harder time? And does ray coherence affect performance?
Great demo by the way. Exciting work right there.

 

When they state that Volta has hardware specifically suited to the task of ray tracing, does this indicate a gaming use for tensor cores?

If so, are they likely to be used for ray tracing or just for de-noising the image?

Also, looking at repi's post: damn do Nvidia know how to make a really sexy looking piece of kit!

 

From what I read somewhere; yes it is the leveraging of the tensor cores for denoising. It’s not described in detail, but appears to be leveraging that portion of hardware. And if I read it correctly, there seems to be also custom hardware for supporting the way data is stored for faster ray tracing data retrieval.

The first seems very next generation like, and I suspect there to be a lot of performance improvements in that area as the technology emerges. The second seems to have a higher possibility of being supported on older hardware if there was enough foresight into the future as I don’t believe the memory is modified on Volta. So I’m not sure where this piece of customization would lay (lie/What is the proper word to use here? ), perhaps the memory controller or some large caches?

 

finally more love for compute shaders.

EDIT: more love for memory too!

MSAA64KBAlignedTextureSupported

 

And from 2017's GDC, a mobile-sized device doing ray tracing: