GPU Ray Tracing Performance Comparisons [2021-2022]

[davis.anthony]

Steam you mean. XBOX as a platform can push the boundaries forward to keep in line with the console's feature sets, it should be a non-issue really.

No I don't mean STEAM, Microsoft release games on Xbox and PC day and date, which means that as long as there are PC's around without RT capable GPU's they will have to release games with a Raster and RT render pipe.

And it will take years for even the most basic of gaming PC's to have an RT GPU, so Microsoft's exclusives are stuck with needing to have both a Raster and RT render pipe for quite a few years yet.

A problem Sony exclusives won't have because:

1. Their games don't release day and date on PC
2. They don't port every game to PC

 

[DegustatoR]

A publisher of a game on PC can't ignore the billions of GTX 1060s, 1070s and 1080s

Sure it can. When his primary target is a console platform which has a fixed feature set.

Saying Nvidia reported 20 million RTX GPU's sold is irrelevant

Okay.

I'll just add that thus far we see the exact opposite of you two seem to suggest will happen. PCs are getting more games with RT and those games where RT is enabled on consoles are in fact use it more extensively on PC.

 

[davis.anthony]

I'll just add that thus far we see the exact opposite of you two seem to suggest will happen. PCs are getting more games with RT and those games where RT is enabled on consoles are in fact use it more extensively on PC.

Except I'm talking about exclusives and games having an RT GPU as a minimum requirement and not 'RT support in current games' so I have no idea why you think your above comment is relevant.

And PC only started seeing a higher influx of games with RT features after the consoles released

 

[DegustatoR]

Except I'm talking about exclusives and games having an RT GPU as a minimum requirement and not 'RT support in current games' so I have no idea why you think your above comment is relevant.

I fail to see why "exclusives and games having an RT GPU as a minimum requirement" would suddenly follow an opposite direction from other RT games on PC.
To reiterate - I very much doubt that either Sony or MS will look at old h/w on PC when they'll be deciding whether or not to make RT a minimum requirement for some of their upcoming games.
If they'll do make such requirement - PCs will get that requirement from consoles, and everything will be fine. Those 1080Ti and 5700 owner who still won't update by that time will go onto newegg and buy themselves some 4060.

 

[davis.anthony]

To reiterate - I very much doubt that either Sony or MS will look at old h/w on PC when they'll be deciding whether or not to make RT a minimum requirement for some of their upcoming games.

I've already explained, multiple times now situations where PC would affect Microsoft's decision regarding RT being a minimum requirement or not.

 

[DegustatoR]

I've already explained, multiple times now situations where PC would affect Microsoft's decision regarding RT being a minimum requirement or not.

And I can only repeat that it won't.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Microsoft and multiplat devs are in a different situation as they will have none RT systems to contend with.

RT performance on console more than PC support will determine whether any game on current generation consoles will move to be fully RT WRT to lighting (again I don't care if reflections do or don't but some people might, so include that if it's important).

The problem is that RT performance isn't great on console, so it's quite likely that any game that goes full RT lighting is going to look worse than a game that only makes light use of RT due to the performance hit of RT. I mean it's certainly possible that the lighting will look much better, but it'll come at the cost of the rest of the games graphics. I'm not convinced that you'd be able to have both high density world geometry combined with fully RT only lighting without dropping down to some ridiculously low resolution (360p? 480p? ) on console. Hell, that's even problematic on PC with DLSS. Then again we don't really have any real world examples of a game featuring high density world geometry combined with fully hardware accelerated lighting yet. The closest we have is Metro: EE and that has pretty low world geometry density.

That's something that is applicable on both Sony and MS platforms.

I could potentially see some lower budget efforts go low poly with full RT lighting. So while the lighting in the game will look good, the rest will be kind of meh. Sort of like Minecraft with path tracing. Lighting is great. The rest is still Minecraft.

Regards,
SB

 

[iroboto]

I've already explained, multiple times now situations where PC would affect Microsoft's decision regarding RT being a minimum requirement or not.

Xbox is the primary gaming platform for MS. The consoles define the feature set they will be using for their games. There's no reason under any circumstances to design a game around PC when they already have a hardware baseline. Once they decide that anything below FL12_0 is useless for them, they will drop it and move on. This is the only way for MS to get traction to move people to newer OS software, and newer xboxes.

 

[PSman1700]

I can't see Sony limiting PS exclusives graphically for the sake of making games work on PC, especially as there's currently loads of PS games that still aren't on PC and the ones that do take a number of years to get ported giving PC chance to catch up with RT hardware availability.

MS release all games on PC so by default all of their games will need to have a raster and RT path.

At some point, all games will have RT hardware as a minimum requirement on PC and I can see that happening within the next 3-4 years.

There is more RT-capable hardware on the PC side than there are total PS5's. Probably equal to all current gen consoles.

PC is more restrictive as a platform in enabling games to be "pure RT no raster" (though some kind of rasterisation is required in order to determine which rays to trace). This is because the penetration of RT in PC is lower than the 100% of PS5 and PS5 Pro consoles - whenever it is that Sony chooses to loosen PS5 from the PS4 shackles...

Its the other way around, the consoles are weak in RT, around 2060S in that department, no DLSS (or intel) equalivent either. Going full-on ray tracing on the consoles or designing games totally around it isnt going to happen on your PS5. Maybe the PS6 or the PS5 Pro if that ever comes. but then the PS5 vanilla owners are left in the dust.

Microsoft are at a higher risk of having to include Raster+RT pipe in their exclusives because of PC than Sony are.

There being non RT options on PC right now is the whole point of what I wrote.

The consoles are holding back things back for the pc currently, not the other way around. Singular platform vs platform, theres actually more RT capable hw out there than consoles.
I dont see MS being at a disadvantage in any way.

It took RTX 2yrs and 3 months to hit 20 million installed, PS5 did that in 1yr and 7 months, with massive hardware shortages.

But comparing RTX GPU's sold is pointless due to mining, there was one guy on tiktok who had over 1000 RTX's GPU in his mining farm, people aren't buying 1000's of PS5's for use in mining farms.

Saying Nvidia reported 20 million RTX GPU's sold is irrelevant, what is relevant is how many of those RTX GPU's ended up in actual gaming PC's to play games on, because it isn't 20 million.

If a developer makes a PS5 exclusive they know that 100% of their potential customer base has hardware RT capable GPU, the same can not be said for PC and it'll likely take years before that to ring true for PC.

Those numbers, if i remember correctly, where counting RTX dGPUs sold, not RTX equiped laptops. The numbers are higher. Miners.... what about scalpers for your ps5 platform? there have been reports on scalpers having thousands of PS5s, whom dont get sold due to scalped prices.
True next generational games are expected 2023/2024 if were lucky, at that point in time RT capable has been around in the pc space for about 7 years. Thats a full-classic console generation.

A publisher of a game on PC can't ignore the billions of GTX 1060s, 1070s and 1080s The PC market will transition to exclusive "pure RT, no raster" more slowly...

A publisher cant ignore the billions of PS4's, PS3's and PS2's either.

A problem Sony exclusives won't have because:

1. Their games don't release day and date on PC
2. They don't port every game to PC

Why is that sole problem for MS and not Sony? MS could develop their games for an XSX and release it on pc where things can be scaled upwards for even better fidelity if they wanted to.
For your PS5 games, they are best-played on PC, worth the wait for better technical aspects.

 

[pjbliverpool]

It took RTX 2yrs and 3 months to hit 20 million installed, PS5 did that in 1yr and 7 months, with massive hardware shortages.

But comparing RTX GPU's sold is pointless due to mining, there was one guy on tiktok who had over 1000 RTX's GPU in his mining farm, people aren't buying 1000's of PS5's for use in mining farms.

Saying Nvidia reported 20 million RTX GPU's sold is irrelevant, what is relevant is how many of those RTX GPU's ended up in actual gaming PC's to play games on, because it isn't 20 million.

No, it's likely many, many more by now.

Ethereum Miners Spent $15 Billion on GPUs Alone During Latest Cryptocraze

That doesn't include mining rigs, either

www.tomshardware.com

• 73.5m discrete desktop GPU's shipped between Q4 2020 and Q1 2022 with an average selling price of over £1k
• 14.2m of those to Etherium miners
• The above excludes laptop GPU sales
• Most of the previously reported 20m RTX GPU's sold (to Jan 2021) would be in addition to those numbers

So let's be ultra conservative and say roughly ~60m sold for gaming purposes between Q4 2020 and Q1 2022 but assume only half of those were RT capable. That's 30m. Then lets add only 10m more for all RT cards sold prior to that - 40m.

Then despite discrete GPU sales being split roughly 50/50 between desktop and laptop according to that article, let's add only another 10m for laptop RT capable GPU's - 50m.

Based on the above we can extrapolate a further 5m in the last quarter - 55m.

Now consider the above estimates are highly conservative, and RT capable GPU ownership will likely soar over the next 12 months with GPU prices returning to normal, and the next gen of GPU's bringing that performance tier down to budget level GPU's. Given all that, in the timeframe that potential RT only games are likely to be released on the consoles I really don't think developers need to be worrying too much about the addressable RT only PC market size which 12 months from now is likely to be a minimum of 80-90m based on the above.

There will obviously still be the lure of an even bigger addressable market if they do provide a a non-RT render option, but by that time Pascal will be 3 generations old and massively out dated. How many PC gamers that are interested in high end gaming will still be using one? And are they enough to offset the potential advantages both in terms of marketing and development ease of going RT only?

 

[Jawed]

• 73.5m discrete desktop GPU's shipped between Q4 2020 and Q1 2022

I doubt this stated count of GPUs sold in 5 quarters. I think a reality check is required...

 

[Albuquerque]

I doubt this stated count of GPUs sold in 5 quarters. I think a reality check is required...

Keep in mind, you're talking about six quarters here, not five (Q4 2020, Q1 2021, Q2 2021, Q3 2021, Q4 2021, Q1 2022)

JPR says that addin card shipments for Q4 of 2020 was 11 million add-in cards, and then the subsequent four quarters of 2021 tallied ~50 million add-in cards. There's a nice history graph from JPR posted here on Tom's Hardware: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/jpr-q3-2021-desktop-discrete-gpu-shipments. The shipped add-in cards for first quarter of FY22 was another 13.4 million: https://www.techspot.com/news/94860-graphics-card-shipments-increased-32-yoy-q1-but.html

So, 11M in Q4 2020... 50M in all of FY2021... 13.4M in Q1 2022 -- math says that's 74.4M shipped cards if we take these numbers at face value. Guess there's rounding error in there somewhere, I'd reason the 50M in FY2021 was rounded up?

73.5 million add-in cards for those six quarters seems well researched and established to me, given the people whose job it is to know these things are in agreement.

 

[trinibwoy]

The problem is that RT performance isn't great on console.

That’s true but have we seen any games yet that truly maximize whatever console RT performance is available?

I can’t see why a developer would mandate hardware RT just for reflections or shadows unless they have very strict goals for the game’s IQ. Capcom was happy to include atrocious looking screen space reflections in their latest blockbuster titles.

RT will only be required if the developer wants to get rid of the light baking workflow and save the time and cost associated with that. It’s basically impossible to emulate those results without real time GI. There’s no evidence though that current consoles can adequately run any of the promising RTGI implementations.

I’m not expecting any RT exclusive games this generation. It’s too early for that and there’s still too much hardware in circulation without RT support. I would be happy with RT becoming a first class citizen and not a tacked on afterthought.

 

[DegustatoR]

I’m not expecting any RT exclusive games this generation.

I mean we already have one... It even runs at 60 fps. The fact that there is also a previous gen non-RT version means nothing for games which will target the new h/w exclusively.

Also people seem to confuse "requiring RT h/w" with "path traced" for some reason.

 

[Dampf]

And another one is already announced: Avatar Frontiers of Pandora.

Some here are in for a rude awakening. Games using exclusively RT for global illumination and reflections will come very soon. For other cards, these effects will simply run in software. Not fast but it will be playable for all these 1060 level cards.

Also don't underestimate the consoles, they have plenty of performance. When DX12 Ultimate finally gets used to its full extent, even smaller technologies like VRS (integrated into the engine not tacked on like currently) and Texture Space Shading can free up to 30% of performance that can be used for better RT. Bigger technologies like Mesh Shading will render geometry much faster than before. And SFS will handle the increased memory requirements.
It's a super well thought out combination of all these features that will get us great looking games with good performance. But cross gen has to end first.

 

[trinibwoy]

I mean we already have one... It even runs at 60 fps. The fact that there is also a previous gen non-RT version means nothing for games which will target the new h/w exclusively.

Also people seem to confuse "requiring RT h/w" with "path traced" for some reason.

Metro doesn’t count because it has none of the economic considerations that a true RT only game has to deal with. They didn’t have to worry about abandoning a huge chunk of the market because they didn’t.

 

[DegustatoR]

Metro doesn’t count because it has none of the economic considerations that a true RT only game has to deal with. They didn’t have to worry about abandoning a huge chunk of the market because they didn’t.

None of fully next gen games will have to worry about that. PCs are fine, no one will be targetting 2016 h/w in 2023 on PC.
The fact that consoles have weak RT h/w means little in a scheme where such h/w may very well be required if only for some minor effects like reflections.

For other cards, these effects will simply run in software. Not fast but it will be playable for all these 1060 level cards.

They won't run on 1060 level cards, at all.

 

[trinibwoy]

None of fully next gen games will have to worry about that. PCs are fine, no one will be targetting 2016 h/w in 2023 on PC.
The fact that consoles have weak RT h/w means little in a scheme where such h/w may very well be required if only for some minor effects like reflections.

The install base of Pascal is still significant. Lots of RDNA and GCN still out there too. Together Pascal, RDNA and GCN account for over 40% of the current PC install base according to May Steam numbers.

I suppose everyone will finally upgrade when they buy second hand 3060’s off miners. If not well that’s a lot of potential sales left on the table for any game dev.

 

[PSman1700]

The fact that consoles have weak RT h/w means little in a scheme where such h/w may very well be required if only for some minor effects like reflections.

They should have launched 2 years later..... but we can always say like that lol. Its not just the RT performance, AI is the new next-gen game changer and raster performance is ye, its good but its low-end.

 

[Kaotik]

I mean we already have one... It even runs at 60 fps. The fact that there is also a previous gen non-RT version means nothing for games which will target the new h/w exclusively.

Also people seem to confuse "requiring RT h/w" with "path traced" for some reason.

Which game is that? And don't say Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, it's the same game as Metro Exodus.