The big impact might be with developers, if it does indeed simplify their work by not having to fake effects.
Impact of nVidia Turing RayTracing enhanced GPUs on next-gen consoles *spawn
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The big impact might be with developers, if it does indeed simplify their work by not having to fake effects.
But they still need to develop and set materials for rays to interact with correctly? There's still huge room for improvements with geometries and mapping techniques even with RT running in parallel.
The big market is the consoles, remember the tail end of the 360/PS3 era, everything looked better on PC but there has still been scant adoption of features that come for "free" on PC even then (sniff, 16x AF, sniff).
As for simplifying devs lives I think it could make it considerably more awkward, dev folks on here if I need to RT geometry that is outside the "viewport" (I'm prob using the wrong term here) for reflections does that impose additional render costs? I presume this make geometry culling considerably more challenging as while geometry may be occluded for the viewport, the whole point of eyeball reflections is that geometry may not be for reflections. Also does this f-up current deferred rendering techniques seeing as to my understanding all the lights, etc only present in a scene by deferred renderer at the "end" of a frame (presumably forcing the renderer to wait to RT accurately)?
Very true about geometry culling. However, I'm sure nVIDIA had that in mind while developing RTX. I would be shocked if they are launching this without some sort of solution for that.
As discussed in the RT discussions, ray-tracing has replaced rasterisation in offline rendering because it's a bazillion times faster to create and render a scene iteratively with correct lighting and shading than to keep tweaking fudge settings until everything comes together, only to have to go through all that again when something is changed about the scene.
There'll be plenty of fakes possible for RT optimisation, same as rasterising. What would you use for scene reflections if you didn't have RT'd reflections? A pre-rendered reflection map? Well, then, use that in the RT'd scene, mapped to an environment sphere or in a shader. But if you have the horsepower, you can avoid the workload of having to create the prerendered reflections and just render them for real.
Beside which, you don't need to worry about geometry culling in ray tracing.
The problem is that workflows won't be ideal for devs until all games are RT's on all platforms. For as long as there's a mix of machines running these games, engines will have to straddle rendering techniques, consigning RTing to spot effects akin to PhysX particles as TresFX hair. If one console has notably raytracing powers, and the other doesn't, you'd hopefully get to see some lovely exclusives. Beyond that, it's not going to be a game changer any more than a motion-controller is or a second screen as standard or voice-and-face-recognition with every machine - features with oodles of potential that never amounted to squat because games targeted the lowest base spec that's shared across all machines.
What did MS say?
Next gen will be competing with second or even third iteration of this tech.
This is why I mentioned ray-tracing (if any) being more likely used by first-party developers. Because we have no clue how similar or different the PS5 and next Xbox are to each other. And if their hardwares are dissimilar in their methods of accomplishing the same method (RT in this case), I just can't picture third-party developers taking their sweet-time on optimizing RT for both systems unique architures. So, it wouldn't make any sense financially and time wise for third-party developers to waste resources on something they can easily substitute with a more generic approach not requiring much effort.
MS said they're working with Nvidia on hardware DXR and AMD on driver implemenation for now. AMD likely has hardware design, but not nearly as ready as Nvidia. Plus Nvidia has had Tensor Cores (needed for de-noising) for a while in pro cards.
anexanhume
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As pointed out on RA, Spencer specifically name dropped RT for what’s next on Xbox as a platform
The Tensor cores are likely going to give Nvidia a big step up in performance, even if AMD's RT specific hardware is pretty up to snuff. Anyone have an good links to how well GCN fares against Pascal or Maxwell in RT? It would give us an idea as to how much ground AMD has to make up.
Shouldnt the HW spec/design be already complete if its going to launch 2019/early 2020?
Looks impressive with the reflections especially in the eyes.
PC market is bigger if we count lower-mid tier hardware too, eventually even mid range and low range GPU's will have RTX.
If the HW specs werent allready locked and they launch 2022. RTX 2080Ti, Threadripper 2 2990WX (32c64t @4ghz) already now, something tells me consoles arent gonna match PC in hardware atleast.
It's already happening on PC with a much smaller RTX user base as shown in the on/off demos. DXR is an alternative rendering path that can be added without scraping the whole rendering engine. And since it's in DX, it will be better supported than PhysX, etc.
As i said previously i don’t think sony can afford to go half assed for ps5 without RT. It would just be a ps4 pro plus...there would be no incentive to buy that kind of product. I do not expect them to be ready with RT for 2019 and i expect the ps4 to still sell healthily until mid 2019...if MS comes with RT in 2019 , sony can still drop the price drop bomb and tease like « the world has never seen before » and talk about « real RT » for a ps5 in 2020. There is no need to rush things when you dominate so much in current gen and people have very high expectations with NVidia rtx already on the pc market.
I think the incentive to buy a ps5 would be it will play ps5 games with whatever feature advantages that box gets, or are you assuming the ps4pro will play them?
If you call by »feature », the nintendo way, i don’t expect Sony to take this direction....so yes, if the ps5 is still a bigger rasteriser, i expect game developpers to go multi platform because of the gigantic ps4 base and ps5 may fail big in this scenario.
There's not even affordable PC GPU cards with Ray Tracing you really think there will be console hardware at $399 in 2019 that includes it too?
Everyone should temper their expectations.
Hope for Ray Tracing consoles, but plan for typical rasterizer consoles.
Everyone should temper their expectations.
Hope for Ray Tracing consoles, but plan for typical rasterizer consoles.
I seriously don't understand the logic behind this reasoning at all...
anexanhume
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A hypothetical console from MS would likely launch two years after RTX launches, on a smaller node, and without retail markup, just like any other console hardware.
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