Impact of nVidia Turing RayTracing enhanced GPUs on next-gen consoles *spawn

It doesn't matter if the whole chip is under load, the fans and heatsink are there to regulate thermal limits, not the load limits. You want those fans to spin up so heat doesn't cause damage to your console.

 

Exactly. If one sensor on your chip is showing worrisome temperatures, your cooling solution may spool up in response to that one small section of your chip and generate antisocial levels of noise even if the vast majority of the chip is running within acceptable parameters.

Designing chips and cooling solutions so a single hotspot doesn't cripple overall chip performance is a critical part of chip layout and chip design.

 

People should be measuring power use by...um...actually measuring power use rather than fan noise.

 

Exactly, since @orangpelupa fan noise is more a measurement of cat hair and dander than power use.

 

Next gen console are releasing in 2 or 3 years and targeting 4K resolution.
Having full ray tracing will be impossible, having limited raytracing such as reflections only as showed in some demos wouldn't be worth the price.

I guess we will have some sort of low resolution ray tracing for secundary rendering aspects and the use VXGI or something like that for indirect lighting.

Maybe we will have full raytracing with new mid-gen refresh consoles in 2024 or so.

Considering that we have reached 4K and the big improvement in rendering with full raytracing, the next gen or the next next gen could be a milestone in gaming.
After that we will have diminishing returns on the graphical side and most of the effort is going to go somewhere else.

 

@8:55, contact hardening shadows in RDR2, those are running on console mid-range GPUs.

 

If people are satisfied with the quality of VXGI then might as well just use low res raytracing. For the mid gen refresh just increase the resolution and you're done instead of having to implememt a completely different technique.

That feature is long overdue. I think even STALKER in DX10 mode had it.

 

Most CryEngine games had soft shadows since Crysis 2 in 2011. Without some sort of contact hardening shadows just look terrible and therefore I don't understand why most games without Nvidia support (PCSS) still doesn't make much use of it. With the exception of CryEngine titles and Far Cry 5, soft shadows usually have a very big influence on the performance (~30 %). Such a solution as in the CryEngine/Amazon Lumberyard/ Dunia Engine or RDR2 would already be very good as a base.

 

IMO Red Dead Redemption 2 makes the position of RT in the next generation consoles more interesting, because if 6TF, a relatively shitty CPU (whatever customisations MS applied to it, you can't polish a turd,) and 12GB of GDDR5 get you this game at native 4K, then maybe vastly more of those resources would leave a lot squandered?

12TF and a 3.xGHz Zen would be more than enough for RDR2 at 4K60. That degree of rasterising with additional RT hardware is a pretty awesome prospect. 8-10TF with additional RT hardware would still be pretty good for the typical 30fps console experience.

Btw, does ray tracing and physics simulation occupy overlapping magisteria?

 

of course. Most physics and collision detection resolvers cast rays all the time since 3D is a thing.

 

Tracing rays is very common for physics and AI. AI uses it to look-ahead - "If I keep heading in this direction, am I going to hit a wall?" That said, these can use more advanced and useful tests like circle casts and box overlaps. I don't know if ray tracing hardware can accelerate these. If designed specifically for tracing rays, I doubt it, but a spatial test system could accelerate aspects.

That's really what I want to see in next-gen consoles - flexible acceleration units that aren't tied to a specific paradigm, which would inspire more exploration of novel approaches. The right setup may allow some really unique experiences in addition to just adding reflections to AAA shooters.

 

Who needs Ray Tracing anyway?

 

I was in Valentine at night while it was raining, standing maybe 20 yards from the hotel at an angle down the street and the effect of the bright lantern on the counter, through the window, across the street in the rain was impressive. Similarly when you're riding along at dawn some distance from a building obscuring a rising sun and some light is blooming around the building while other light is casting through. So good.

 

Apparently, it's already the case in some games : "Another important part is reflections, and although we do have real-time raytraced reflections since Killzone Shadow Fall, cubemaps remain a very important part of the pipeline."

https://80.lv/articles/horizon-zero-dawn-interview-with-the-team/

But i agree with this point.

I see developers using this tech only if it's a real differentiator. As long as they could put ressources elsewhere to get a better overall result, they won't use it.

Also : "The reason we chose to once again use a prebaked solution instead of a fully real-time solution is simple: the quality is higher, and the memory cost and runtime performance cost is really low compared to a fully real-time solution. We have the opportunity to stack multiple irradiance volumes as well, giving us higher fidelity and resolution.

Another reason for us not to use a fully real-time solution is so we can add a lot of non-runtime lights into the equation in order to really paint with light, and create a more balanced, stage-lit experience. These ‘bake-only’ lights get baked down completely (primary and secondary rays) and provide a more rich-looking lighting scheme with a lot of gradients in both color and intensity. This enables us to create a slightly more unique version of reality and makes our games stand out a little bit. We can also flag lights to be sun bounce lights, which means we can render them into the sun bounce passes and thus have them affected by time of day scaling and recoloring."

 

Devs use Screen space reflection in many games but it is a rare in Horizon Zero Dawn too costly...

Raytracing reflexion are probably an order of magnitude more expensive in rendering time.

 

I'm saying it won't.

 

I have a 580 in my iMac (running macOS, linux and Windows 10) and I'm inclined to agree with you on this. Based on my experience of games (incl. Rockstar games) on PC, I don't see that GPU turning out RDR2 at 4K even at 30fps.

 

It will, DigitalFounry has already found the RX580/1060 equal to the X1X in most titles. There are some titles that perform better on the 1X like Forza 7 or Far Cry 5, but most titles perform the same.

 

So the extra memory bandwidth won't have an effect? I highly doubt a Rx 580 (a Rx 570 even Rx 480 was mentioned in his first post) will give you the same performance at 4k.

 

Here's an example of their tech apparently :



But then again, i don't care about buzz words. Only the final result matters.

Many developers just throw fancy words in front of you while the final result just look bad.