GPU Ray Tracing Performance Comparisons [2021] *spawn*

Some researchers have estimated that the RTX performing ray sorting/grouping in the hardware.
http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2485/paper3.pdf

It's only an assumption based on the result, though.

 

Interesting. They’re tripling down on dedicated hardware. No mention of custom traversal or LOD. Hardware accelerated BVH construction would impose even more limits on api flexibility.

I guess the theory is if you can build and cast really, really fast you can just brute force your RT through high resolution geometry without software optimization tricks.

 

Stop attributing your words to me, I made it cristal clear that by my criteria they should not be jumping on conclusions in areas where they don't have any expertise, this has nothing to do with benchmarking GPUs.
Though the quality of tests leaves much to be desired as was noted on a previous page (not by me).

Again you're trying to attribute your wild guesses to me.
But yes, It would have been nice indeed if all reviewers were able to interpret the math behind FPS, and the low FPS metrics, which they seem to struggle with because otherwise that weird low "instantaneous" FPS metric would have never appeared in the first place.

The problem is that they succeed at highlighting basic FPS numbers (because it's so easy), but fail hard at highlighting where RT has an impact (super easy too) because they don't know how it works or where to look at, hence wrong conclusions and misinformation. All that typical "RT works only on puddles" moaning in YT comments comes from watching videos like that.
What's the problem to show shortcomings of screen space solutions by simply moving camera up and down in a game, or why they can't show more diffuse reflections on metall walls and other surfaces in games (which there are plenty), why don't they highlight light leaking without RT, specular occlusion is just as important as mirror reflections in puddles, etc.

If that's a fully subjective opinion of the reviewer then they need a disclaimer: "Hey, we are not experts in RT, so we can't highlight it for you in this video because we don't know where to look at", but they prefer jumping to conclusions on how RT doesn't matter.

 

It’s probably true that some people don’t notice or don’t care about those details or that good looking reflections don’t matter to them when gaming. On the other hand I’m currently playing FC4 and there is a lot of water in that game. The reflections are hot steaming garbage. The people who aren’t bothered by it should consider themselves lucky.

 

These tiers seem to be artificial at best without PPA and absolute performance metrics in games traces.
They could have invented the same tiers for their deferred raster architecture and would likely win for the number of levels, lol, but that means nothing in practice.

People do SW coherency sorting since the very first game with RT - Battlefield V, probably that's a mandatory requirement for RT on consoles.
Unlike with SW tree traversal, modern SMs/CUs are efficient at sorting thanks to all sorts of inter lane operations, so dedicated sorting HW might be useless or bad for perfomance (if there is not enough of dedicated silicon).

 

For me, specular occlusion is just as important as mirror like reflections on water, etc. Without specular occlusion, light leaking makes objects look out of place (due to how unnatural it looks). Without explaining that stuff, many would prefer the shiny glowing look just because people love the shiny things even when they look out of place.

 

Is building BVH through GPU compute considered "h/w accelerated" here?

 

No GPU compute is still software.

 

Hitman 3 will soon be another point of comparison

 

Is that screenshot reprensative of the actual RT in action in hitman 3? its a still-image though so ye.... doesnt say much then seeing the Intel logo at the top-right.

 

It's just a screenshot i took from their announcement trailer

 

The first game to support Intel's ray tracing features?

 

Reflections and transparency reflections are in it seems.
Not sure that it's a good choice for Hitman specifically since I don't really recall a lot of reflective materials in the first two games.
But maybe that is the reason for that choice?

 

What I am telling you is that you are looking in the wrong place if you think that GPU reviews targeting the public is where you will find experts of the field. Because that is what you have been complaining about, game benchmarks and GPU reviews lacking actual technical expertise and why no one should care about the results they present.
And that is why you should stick to actual GPU conferences or other material directly written by and targeted towards actual experts of the field.

This thread has alot of posts with RT benchmarks from different sites whose validity are questionable according to your criteria. The only ones I assume get an actual pass are the ones from actual tech papers or live presentations.

What I asked is exactly the way you come across with your statements. And I asked the question to be sure that I interpreted you correctly, which seems to indeed be the case, so you really ought to stop calling them wild guesses now.
It is baffling though that you indeed are prepared to turn tail the moment the reviewer shows proof he has the technical expertise.

Things like poor frame latency had even been missed by AMD's actual driver team and alot of benchmarking tools started including it first after the issue had been discovered, so even the actual experts are not error free. It is even one of the disadvantages that you would have thought the experts working for the competition would have discovered at once and tried make a big deal of to the public.

So now you say that you prefer cherrypicking scenes in order to show off the tech. Whereas many reviews, I assume, try to find an average but repeatable scene to show the average performance you can expect in the game.

Basically, what you ought to be looking for are specific reviews like "Where will you see the key advantages in raytracing?", not general gaming and GPU benchmarks. Read around and you will see alot of people focusing on the gaming benchmarks and not the 3DMark ones.


That is the problem every new feature has had in the past, the industry says this shiny new feature is better, but the provided showcases has failed to convince the public why.

A review by itself is prone to be subjective, be it for books or films or GPUs. And that is what most reviews targeting PC gamers boil down to, both the reviewer and readers asking, is what you see here worth the performance loss?

 

Considering that you can get 100 frames within 1-2seconds, the 99% percentile frame time isn't exactly an outlier. If they're being measured correctly, then you'd be getting a hitch every two seconds or the fps drops big time in an area.

Revisited this save game on my 5800X and 6800XT. The biggest difference I see is that there is next to no CPU load, not sure if it's a change or there was something else going in the background.

Spoiler

 

Wrong thread

 

Their latest ray tracing architecture called Photon seems to have dropped the fixed function BVH builder.

 

Yeah I played the demo with the Dubai level - or whatever the skyscraper level was - and all I could think was "this should have RT", so many reflective surfaces and so many artifacts. Even though their use of planar reflections is pretty nice in some places. I wonder if RT will make its way to consoles at some point?

 

After some digging into Nvidia's TTU(RT Core) patents published in 2018, I've found that they actually do ray grouping in the hardware.

https://patents.justia.com/patent/11157414
https://www.freepatentsonline.com/11157414.pdf

Sorry for the long text!