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

[Ethatron]

Not necessarily. A camera that fits the reflecting surface viewport will only render as many pixels and whatever part of the scene as specified, exactly the same as the main camera. Think racing car rear-view mirrors for historical examples. You don't render the whole scene and then cut out a small part for the reflection.

They also don't need to be planar, you can warp the "camera" in any way you want. A monotonic warp function is the easiest, but you can can also map very strange irregular warps. It has been used since the ancient past for Dual Parabloid Shadow Maps for example (which are e.g. in Oblivion).

 

[Shifty Geezer]

True, but whatever warps you apply, they are still limited to planar renders. You can't render alternative lenses yet, so no true fish-eye for example. Either you render warped super-wide-angle, or render a typical view and apply a spherical warp which loses all the detail at the edges. It'd be an okay hack for a lot of cases, probably, but the beauty of RT is that you don't need to create hacks for specific situations, and the one size fits all.

Indeed, extreme post-effect warps would be better with a fully raytraced game as you wouldn't get interpolation artefacts, being able to sample irregular patterns.

 

[milk]

They also don't need to be planar, you can warp the "camera" in any way you want. A monotonic warp function is the easiest, but you can can also map very strange irregular warps. It has been used since the ancient past for Dual Parabloid Shadow Maps for example (which are e.g. in Oblivion).

That type of warping, while possible, is very limited. They are done at the vertex level, so a lot of geometry that was not intersecting intersects, or that was meant to intersect suddenly doesn't and other such oddities. If you want reflections of the scene on arbitrarily many non flat surfaces, Ray Tracing is the way to go. Hitman 2 is a nice example of how far you can push old tricks, but sure enough, the robust solution is RT.

 

[Tkumpathenurple]

One thing I've been wondering recently: why is it that specialised hardware is required in the GPU, and could a solution built around, say, a 1080Ti and an ARM or x86 CPU ever offer comparable results to the RTX2070/2080?

 

[iroboto]

One thing I've been wondering recently: why is it that specialised hardware is required in the GPU, and could a solution built around, say, a 1080Ti and an ARM or x86 CPU ever offer comparable results to the RTX2070/2080?

with Ray Tracing?
You can do RT on non-accelerated hardware. There are compute based software solutions for RT. Performance won't be as good though.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

One thing I've been wondering recently: why is it that specialised hardware is required in the GPU, and could a solution built around, say, a 1080Ti and an ARM or x86 CPU ever offer comparable results to the RTX2070/2080?

Do you mean a second CPU to do the work of the custom hardware?

 

[Scott_Arm]

One thing I've been wondering recently: why is it that specialised hardware is required in the GPU, and could a solution built around, say, a 1080Ti and an ARM or x86 CPU ever offer comparable results to the RTX2070/2080?

Rtx cards have special hardware to accelerate ray casting and intersection tests. That puts the bottleneck of ray tracing back on shading performance. Otherwise you'd be spending too much time casting rays and the rest of the gpu would be underutilized. Of course this hardware is mostly for intersecting polygon meshes. Other methods like ray marching with signed distance fields exist, and I think are much faster. But your game, like claybook, would have to abandon a polygon based renderer.

 

[Ethatron]

That type of warping, while possible, is very limited. They are done at the vertex level, so a lot of geometry that was not intersecting intersects, or that was meant to intersect suddenly doesn't and other such oddities. If you want reflections of the scene on arbitrarily many non flat surfaces, Ray Tracing is the way to go. Hitman 2 is a nice example of how far you can push old tricks, but sure enough, the robust solution is RT.

I think you make the approach look less useful than it really is. Quasi-hemispherical dual-paraboloids can replace cube-maps:
http://download.nvidia.com/developer/Handheld_SDK/EnvMapping.pdf
http://graphicsrunner.blogspot.com/2008/07/dual-paraboloid-reflections.html

All affine transforms behave fine. Projective transform modifications are trickier, because of hw-rasterizer fixed-function, but even there is some freedom dealing with z and w divide. Nvidia modified their rasterizer to make non-uniform w divides AFAIU to implement lens matched shading in hardware:
https://developer.nvidia.com/vrworks/graphics/lensmatchedshading
https://github.com/CRYTEK/CRYENGINE/blob/main/Engine/Shaders/HWScripts/CryFX/nv_vr.cfi

 

[iroboto]

https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/battlefi...ost-ray-tracing-performance-up-to-50-percent/
hopefully not a repost, but likely a copy from another thread I imagine.

The hope has been that things will improve over time, both with new drivers and as developers learn how best to optimize code to take advantage of the dedicated ray tracing hardware in Nvidia's newest graphics cards.

As it applies to BF5, Nvidia makes the following performance claims:

• GeForce RTX 2080 Ti gamers will now be able to achieve 60+ FPS at 1440presolution with DXR Raytraced Reflections set to Ultra quality.
• GeForce RTX 2080 gamers will now be able to achieve 60+ FPS at 1440presolution with DXR Raytraced Reflections set to Medium quality.
• GeForce RTX 2070 gamers will now be able to achieve 60+ FPS at 1080presolution with DXR Raytraced Reflections set to Medium quality.

Hoping to see more optimization, but this is a really good start.

 

[Love_In_Rio]

https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/battlefi...ost-ray-tracing-performance-up-to-50-percent/
hopefully not a repost, but likely a copy from another thread I imagine.

So still 10 gigarays short of 4k reflections. Another 20 gigarays for shadows, 20 more for GI. We need at least 5xtimes the 2080 ti raytracing performance for a 60 fps 4k full ray tracing model. 5nm wont be enough. Then what?.

 

[iroboto]

So still 10 gigarays short of 4k reflections. Another 20 gigarays for shadows, 20 more for GI. We need at least 5xtimes the 2080 ti raytracing performance for a 60 fps 4k full ray tracing model. 5nm wont be enough. Then what?.

You wait until directML is released and you rely on AI-Res upscaling to move your resolution from 1440p to 4K. Results are very good, and with the right hardware can be very fast.

 

[Tkumpathenurple]

with Ray Tracing?
You can do RT on non-accelerated hardware. There are compute based software solutions for RT. Performance won't be as good though.

Yeah, with ray tracing, but not solely with the GPU, so not only with compute.

Do you mean a second CPU to do the work of the custom hardware?

Yeah, pretty much exactly that. I'm just curious if we may see a different approach from AMD, leveraging their experience with APU's and unified memory to bring CPU's into the mix?

Or is the massive parallelism of GPU's the only way? It seems fairly likely, given that, to my knowledge, the only examples of RTRT hardware come from GPU manufacturers.

 

[DavidGraham]

The 2070 can now do 1440p60 with Medium RTX and Ultra graphics in Battlefield V, It can even do 4K30 on Medium RTX. I consider this a good baseline for a console implementation.

https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/d...-performance-patch-released-(benchmarks).html

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Yeah, that's a lot more promising. Would be good to see a 'next gen' lighting example. Something akin to The Tomorrow Children where it's all about the lighting, rather than the examples now which aren't that far removed from the existing non-RT versions of the same games.

 

[iroboto]

on the twittersphere, seems as though while devs are excited by the improvement in reflection performance, they seem to want to leverage the power for shadows, AO, i guess indirectly GI.

 

[Scott_Arm]

on the twittersphere, seems as though while devs are excited by the improvement in reflection performance, they seem to want to leverage the power for shadows, AO, i guess indirectly GI.

Remedy's Control is doing soft shadows, AO and indirect diffuse lighting using RTX. I think Control and Metro will probably be the two games that really use ray-tracing to significance and they'll be the closest to a real heavy ray-traced game that we'll see.

 

[iroboto]

Remedy's Control is doing soft shadows, AO and indirect diffuse lighting using RTX. I think Control and Metro will probably be the two games that really use ray-tracing to significance and they'll be the closest to a real heavy ray-traced game that we'll see.

I believe that SoTR is also doing something similar in terms of their usage as well. Though not likely as heavily.

 

[milk]

Remedy's Control is doing soft shadows, AO and indirect diffuse lighting using RTX. I think Control and Metro will probably be the two games that really use ray-tracing to significance and they'll be the closest to a real heavy ray-traced game that we'll see.

If their implementation in control is similar to what they've demoed in their test scene, the part about "indirect diffuse lighting" is actually using RT to improve the sampling (including better occlusion) of their precomputed irradiance volume.

 

[Scott_Arm]

If their implementation in control is similar to what they've demoed in their test scene, the part about "indirect diffuse lighting" is actually using RT to improve the sampling (including better occlusion) of their precomputed irradiance volume.

Yah, I was reading through some of that presentation yesterday. AO looked pretty expensive in terms of frame time. It'll be interesting to see how far performance improves in time for release. Soft shadows seemed like a pretty "easy" win. The demo scene looks really good with their ray-traced AO, and after using ray tracing to improve the sampling of their pre-computed GI. Solves a lot of quality issues.

 

[Scott_Arm]

I believe that SoTR is also doing something similar in terms of their usage as well. Though not likely as heavily.

Maybe it's an unfair assumption on my part, but it's already a released game so I feel like it won't receive the same care as a game that's adopting ray-tracing with significant time during development. I kind of view Battlefield and Tomb Raider as tech-demo implementations, though it seems like Battlefield is in it for the long haul and will continue making improvements.