GPU Ray Tracing Performance Comparisons [2021-2022]

[DavidGraham]

The numbers for RT performance loss look pretty decent for AMD right now, 55% loss on 6900XT vs. 42% on 3090. It's even better if you consider that the Navi21 is actually similar to GA104 which also takes a 50% hit with RT.

You can't compare the rasterization scores vs RT scores because they are not tested using the same scenes. That's a false premise that made you reach a false conclusion. The RT impact of RDNA2 was always measured to be greater than Ampere or Turing (almost double the cost), even when using light RT.

Even 3dcenter note that AMD can make up for it if they've higher rasterization performance than nvidia:

And NVIDIA can leap up once more if they've higher rasterization performance. This is a silly game. In fact, if NVIDIA used 7nm like AMD, then their rasterization performance would be higher owing to the higher frequencies they could reach. This is a definite fact by the way.

The MCM design might probably pull off 30% over 4090

Now these numbers are pulled out of thin air.

 

[Dictator]

Percentages lost based on frames per second is not a good metric to say what the cost is IMO. Milliseconds makes much more sense, as you distort the percentage based upon the base FPS number you start with.

 

[DavidGraham]

It helps to read the whole sentence instead of picking just the words that you can fit into your narrative.

The only one making narratives here is you, basing your "real world stories" on a false premise, RT is found in 50 games right now, and the number is rising, virtually every AAA title is launched with RT, as well as a slew of major AA titles, basing your 500$+ purchase on a GPU that can't handle these games is like choosing your own exile and living under a rock.

I am not going to even touch on DLSS and the other features, but may be you should direct your criticism of upscaling techs towards AMD who is definitely using an inferior solution and is trying to sell it as a superior one. Or better yet, direct it at TAA, because there is no such thing as native when TAA introduces a ton of shimmering, blurring and ghosting on its own.

 

[neckthrough]

In fact, if NVIDIA used 7nm like AMD, then their rasterization performance would be higher owing to the higher frequencies they could reach.

I think this is just as speculative as trying to guess where the next generations are going to land at. We really don't know. Frequency depends as much on the uarch and physical design as it does on the tech node. AMD did a stellar job with the physical design on RDNA2.

 

[iroboto]

Nice. Didn't realize Halo Infinite was going to have RT. It's probably going to be a light-touch implementation, but hopefully it makes a positive impact (however small).

Hopefully they change their entire lighting system over to some temporal RTGI method. My fingers are crossed here that we're not just seeing simple bolt-ons.

 

[PSman1700]

LAN support for the PC version. Thats actually very nice to see.

 

[DegustatoR]

Hopefully they change their entire lighting system over to some temporal RTGI method. My fingers are crossed here that we're not just seeing simple bolt-ons.

I mean, it's coming post launch, likely not coming to consoles and is a... how should I put it... "AMD friendly" implementation.
Thus I wouldn't get my hopes up much for RT in Halo Infinite really. We'll likely get some sparse low res reflections or some low res AO/GI (RE8 style) if we're lucky.
Still this just shows that the whole narration on how RT penetration is "slowing down" is just false.

 

[w0lfram]

You can't compare the rasterization scores vs RT scores because they are not tested using the same scenes. That's a false premise that made you reach a false conclusion. The RT impact of RDNA2 was always measured to be greater than Ampere or Turing (almost double the cost), even when using light RT.

And NVIDIA can leap up once more if they've higher rasterization performance. This is a silly game. In fact, if NVIDIA used 7nm like AMD, then their rasterization performance would be higher owing to the higher frequencies they could reach. This is a definite fact by the way.


Now these numbers are pulled out of thin air.

This thread is for talking about the RT technology, not trying to market the technology to others. Once the consoles have multiple AAA releases & feature a fully traced lighting & soundfield, is when ray tracing will move mainstream. Until then, these titles are forced and niche. Nobody who plays Battlefield, has ever cared how realistic reflection in puddles are. Gamers instinctively turned that stuff off, because performance.

If you are a content creator then RTX is your only choice. Even those with $4k quadro cards, were snapping up 3090's for $3k because it had greater Enterprise performance. But if we are strictly speaking about gaming performance, then all RT games will perform horribly, unless you have a $1,499* dGPU.



No need to overstate RT's importance in buying, when we are all discussing the poor performance and comparing usage between the different game engines & hardware. Not even the best dGPU is enough to turn RT on in any e-sport.



Gamer Fact: Raster is king. No need for those RT guys to feel inferior... RT's time will come. My $900 RTX 2080 will never have the power to run RT in games. Ever..

 

[gamervivek]

You can't compare the rasterization scores vs RT scores because they are not tested using the same scenes. That's a false premise that made you reach a false conclusion. The RT impact of RDNA2 was always measured to be greater than Ampere or Turing (almost double the cost), even when using light RT.

And NVIDIA can leap up once more if they've higher rasterization performance. This is a silly game. In fact, if NVIDIA used 7nm like AMD, then their rasterization performance would be higher owing to the higher frequencies they could reach. This is a definite fact by the way.

Now these numbers are pulled out of thin air.

What false premise and false conclusion? The numbers are from the article linked by one of you and even the article notes that higher rasterization performance can enable AMD to reach parity in RT if they lead in rasterization.

The silly game is your defensiveness here. The article is pessimistic about AMD having a 30-40% lead in rasterization over nvidia, but AMD doing MCM, which has been the topic of RDNA3 thread for quite some time now, can get them that lead even if it's just for one generation.

Percentages lost based on frames per second is not a good metric to say what the cost is IMO. Milliseconds makes much more sense, as you distort the percentage based upon the base FPS number you start with.

Faster 6900XT losing same percentage as 3070 would mean that its RT cost is lower. Or whatever the cost of switching on RT entails.

Frametime is better of course if you're dealing with the numbers and how exactly the RT pipeline is behaving is also important. I remember the quake II RTX profiler posts here and there was a post recently with an RT benchmark showing bvh setup being slower on RDNA2 even when compared to Pascal( GTX 1060 ).

 

[Subtlesnake]

Gamer Fact: Raster is king. No need for those RT guys to feel inferior... RT's time will come. My $900 RTX 2080 will never have the power to run RT in games. Ever..

If consoles can run ray tracing, then so can a 2080. Console ray tracing performance seems to be at about 2060S level, at best.

 

[CarstenS]

Gamer Fact: Raster is king. No need for those RT guys to feel inferior... RT's time will come. My $900 RTX 2080 will never have the power to run RT in games. Ever..

Certainly you're referring to 1080p 99th percentiles, right? e-sports' players favourite.

 

[trinibwoy]

This french site does an extensive RT analysis using Turing, Ampere and RDNA2 GPUs, using an average of 11 RT games (which include Godfall and RE8), the 2080Ti roughly matches the 6900XT, and the 3090 is 56% faster than the 6900XT.

https://www.comptoir-hardware.com/a...-test-nvidia-geforce-rtx-3070-ti.html?start=5

What's interesting however, is how much faster Ampere appears to be against Turing in path traced games, @4K the 3070 is ~30% faster than 2080Ti in Minecraft, and 25% faster in Quake 2 RTX.

https://www.comptoir-hardware.com/a...-test-nvidia-geforce-rtx-3070-ti.html?start=5

Really good layout on that website. Graphs are clear, lots of useful data and only took a few pages.

 

[trinibwoy]

Faster 6900XT losing same percentage as 3070 would mean that its RT cost is lower. Or whatever the cost of switching on RT entails.

Are you looking at 4K numbers? The 8GB Ampere and Turing cards are losing a step in some games (e.g. WD: Legion) due to not enough VRAM at 4K. Otherwise the RT cost for GA104 is ~40% similar to GA102.

 

[iroboto]

I mean, it's coming post launch, likely not coming to consoles and is a... how should I put it... "AMD friendly" implementation.
Thus I wouldn't get my hopes up much for RT in Halo Infinite really. We'll likely get some sparse low res reflections or some low res AO/GI (RE8 style) if we're lucky.
Still this just shows that the whole narration on how RT penetration is "slowing down" is just false.

It’s definitely coming to consoles if Metro Exodus can pull it off. They’ve had significant time to think about their RT implementation I think. I don’t expect they would allow their flagpole game implement none of what they marketed. While I agree the focus is indeed the cross gen version; with MP and SP separated by binary I see no reason they couldn’t pull a Metro Exodus and just redo lighting for Series console versions and PC.

 

[PSman1700]

It’s definitely coming to consoles if Metro Exodus can pull it off. They’ve had significant time to think about their RT implementation I think. I don’t expect they would allow their flagpole game implement none of what they marketed. While I agree the focus is indeed the cross gen version; with MP and SP separated by binary I see no reason they couldn’t pull a Metro Exodus and just redo lighting for Series console versions and PC.

Due to the way they presented it as 'halo infinite gets extra features and optimizations on pc' and then going on about ray tracing, it could be its exclusive to the pc version perhaps. However the Series X should/could get ray tracing (lower setting) aswell.
Btw, there isnt going to be any ray tracing for the MP? That would be killer. I know MP games usually dont but still.

 

[Malo]

It’s definitely coming to consoles if Metro Exodus can pull it off. They’ve had significant time to think about their RT implementation I think. I don’t expect they would allow their flagpole game implement none of what they marketed. While I agree the focus is indeed the cross gen version; with MP and SP separated by binary I see no reason they couldn’t pull a Metro Exodus and just redo lighting for Series console versions and PC.

I'm not sure they'll be able to do both lighting and reflections in RT on the consoles. Given the standard lighting is already really nice in Cyberpunk, they should probably focus on RT reflections instead.

 

[iroboto]

I'm not sure they'll be able to do both lighting and reflections in RT on the consoles. Given the standard lighting is already really nice in Cyberpunk, they should probably focus on RT reflections instead.

Agreed. So drop reflections on console . The Dynamic GI needs a lot of work to bring their lighting together. MP is static baked lighting so everyone was happy with that. But if the implementation hasn’t improved on campaign; it could largely be what we saw in the reveal. Probe lighting GI is hurting.

I know this video has some controversy for odd reasons. But the meat of the video of Halo Infinite's issues are here:
4:08

I think with the way Halo Infinite is lit with it's strong sun sets and likely sun rises, proper directional dynamic lighting is really the key here to bringing the campaign together graphically to move that bar forward. I largely suspect that 343i knows this, so I would be surprised to see if they don't address this one. Reflections are likely a bigger deal inside forerunner spaces, but I still think that this GI portion is more important.

 

[DavidGraham]

The numbers are from the article linked by one of you and even the article notes that higher rasterization performance can enable AMD to reach parity in RT if they lead in rasterization.

You are using the graphs wrong, the collective rasterization numbers are from different set of games than the collective ray tracing numbers, I don't know how you can even use the graphs like that, even the original site didn't use them like this.

Essentially you use the data as is, rasterization numbers are their own bubble and RT numbers are their own different bubble, don't mix the two or compare them.

Once more, the data we have is that RDNA2 takes double the RT hit of Ampere or Turing, period.

 

[DegustatoR]

It’s definitely coming to consoles if Metro Exodus can pull it off. They’ve had significant time to think about their RT implementation I think. I don’t expect they would allow their flagpole game implement none of what they marketed. While I agree the focus is indeed the cross gen version; with MP and SP separated by binary I see no reason they couldn’t pull a Metro Exodus and just redo lighting for Series console versions and PC.

I think that it would be a launch feature in that case, not a post launch patched one. The latter has "PC exclusive afterthought" written all over it.
Also consider that MS is all in on maintaining 60 fps minimums in their 1st party releases. FH5 won't have RT in gameplay mostly for that reason. I don't expect HI to be any different.

 

[iroboto]

I think that it would be a launch feature in that case, not a post launch patched one. The latter has "PC exclusive afterthought" written all over it.
Also consider that MS is all in on maintaining 60 fps minimums in their 1st party releases. FH5 won't have RT in gameplay mostly for that reason. I don't expect HI to be any different.

We know some underlying reasons for FH5 not having ray tracing, since FM8 is building it for them so we're going to see that in the title following FM8. Double effort doesn't make a lot of sense with that respect.

For Halo, yea I'm not sure; possibly or it's just a content issue when it comes to remaking the game for RT since both of these titles are massive open world scope, the amount of QA is significant effort to climb. It doesn't read like a PC exclusive to me. It just sounds like that they are working in tandem with AMD to extract the most performance they can out of RT which can be applied to both console and PC, at least with respect to the marketing of it.

I largely suspect that a temporal RTGI could directly replace their existing lighting system, but optimization and lighting directors still need to go through the whole game to ensure that the game is properly lit.