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

It's a tiny list, and from August, where games can be dropped under new business decisions. A new $500 machine with 11 games on a list to launch not even within six months of launch would be considered DOA. RTX is definitely niche. Get past the year exploration phase and then see if it's established or not.

If UE4 enables RTX as a switch-on feature, RTX will get used in UE4 titles, but a world away from GI at the moment. RTX may become synonymous with 'nVidia's shadow tech' in the end, with real raytracing (delivering all the promise) happening in a different version of DXR entirely.

 

If AMD doesn't have RT hardware next-gen is going to be very disappointing.

 

The games don't have to be exclusive. They have to be present. You spend $500 for a GPU with raytracing and have three games to use RT with. You don't care whether RT games are exclusive to your $500 GPU or not; you just want games to use its features! Same with consoles. Same with VR. If you bought an Oculus VR headset, you didn't care whether the games on it were on PSVR or not as well. PS4 had some 32 games in the first 6 months in NA and many more promised. It had 80 in the first year. RTX offers 11 in the first year, maybe. That's niche.

It's not perspective at all. Raytracing hardware is niche! It's a tiny little portion of the gaming market and will remain as such probably until its replaced. A tiny portion of the market will have RTX enabled cards and a tiny portion of games will have RTX features.

 

If next-gen doesn't have raytracing*, it'll be disappointing. If it can be done effectively without needing specialist hardware, lack of specialist hardware won't matter.

* Actually what we want are traced quality shadows, reflections, and effective lighting. If that comes from raytracing or something else like cone tracing or hybrid solutions, makes no difference as long as visuals take a generational advance.

 

Without the performance necessary nobody will bother to implement it.

 

Yes, but the performance doesn't necessarily need raytracing hardware. What we want is next-gen visuals and hardware that achieves that, whether that's fixed-function or not.

 

It's even more disappointing people make such predictions. They'll show stuff looking much better than anything before, but you'll first check if it has RT HW or not, and then you will judge based on this.

Just sit, wait and see.

 

So far real life has shown that you need ray tracing hardware.

They'll show tech demos that will get people hyped. Then the real games will not look as good as that (PS4 reveal anyone?).

Remember UE4 reveal with voxel cone tracing? How many games ended up using such technology?

At least DXR has already been used in AAA commercial projects with very good results. Much better than a fantasy magical algorithm that looks as good and runs better without special hardware

 

I'm no PS4 palyer but the games looked as shown from what i've seen.
BFV or Metro however do not look like Starwars and Rodot Demo

They did not release their voxel GI with the argument it would be too slow for all platforms. So no games.

Your magic glass bowl is the only fantasy thing here. Wait and see.

 

We're talking about RTX hardware. RTX hardware, hardware raytracing acceleration in Turing, in niche. Heck, even the RTX GPUs are niche because they constitute a very small proportion of the market, although a reasonably sized niche perhaps.

Yes. The mid-gen consoles are a niche too.

Where are you going with this argument? Milk says RTX hardware is niche. You say it isn't. I qualify what niche is. I don't see why someone would try and argue around that. Yes, RTX is a niche, by definition. It'll be a few percent of the market that buys RTX capable hardware, and a few percent of games (perhaps a fractional percentage) that implement RTX features. That's a niche. Just accept it!

It wasn't described as a flop. It was described as a niche. It may be very successful in its niche. It may be highly valued by players who like it, and maybe devs will love working with it, and perhaps it'll lead on to bigger and better things. However, categorically, scientifically, RTX is a niche and RTX acceleration will remain a niche if there isn't a substantial proportion of the market using RT acceleration, with that sizeable proportion most realistically coming from consoles and alternatively coming from a mass-upgrade by the majority of PC users to buy new RT capable GPUs. But as said, by then RTX may have been replaced.

 

It's not that tiny when it's on a 2060. And it's not going to be tiny come 7nm NVIDIA GPUs. DXR is also part of the picture. DXR is as much as niche now, as DX11 was nice when it was first introduced.

 

UE4 never implemented voxel cone tracing...that's why no "games ended up using such technology"..you can't use something that doesn't exist. Epic was literally high on fumes when UE4 was unveiled (they saw Cyril Crassin's paper on the subject a few months prior & thought that this would be it..). The SVOGI shown when UE4 was unveiled was quickly scrapped because it was simply unusable at the time with the hardware available. UE4's development was a total mess, Epic was totally lost (this was before Tencent came to save the day & way before they decided to give it away for free in a last hail mary attempt..which worked to a certain degree..same thing they did with Fortnite which was a total flop & had a disastrous development cycle..they aped PUBG & made it F2P and this time raked in billions).

 

I don't understand why people are arguing over these obvious semantics. We have what percent of GPUs being RTX? Less than 1% going by Steam hardware survey? And that's not a niche by your reckoning?? We have what fraction of games are targeting that 1%? 11 out of how many hundreds of games being released since RTX came on the market? And that's not niche??

You cannot redefine the word 'niche' to mean something other than what it is. It means a small, specialist part of the market. RTX, people who have hardware raytracing, is a niche, and will be for a while yet, because even if RTX cards became the fastest selling ever (which they won't at $300+), it'll struggle to get to percentages that elevate it beyond a small portion of the total market. And even when you have a decent sized market for RT games and devs target it specifically, same as VR, it'll still be a niche! An install base of 10 million PCs with RTX cards all buying RT enabled games will still be a niche!!! A small percentage of the total of GPUs used for gaming and a small niche market for devs to consider.

There's no sane reason whatsoever to argue against this. It is what it is. A tree is a tree by definition, and a niche is a niche by definition, and RTX is a niche, by definition. It's English! The only reason to try and argue this is if one believes 'niche' has negative PR connotations for one's company of preference.

One day, maybe RTX hardware will not be a niche, but the argument that even now, it's not a niche, is utterly ridiculous.

 

And DX11 sure was a damn niche software when it released, it only became popular when...
...drum roll...
...consoles with DX11 level HW features launched.
You can deny this all you want. Consoles set the baseline.
Even examples like HL2, FarCry, Doom 3 or Crysis represent the very last moonhawks of these forward looking games made for PC-only technology, that had looks to justify that exclusivity. And what great examples they are, since all the studios responsible for these games surely went on to develop with consoles as a target for all later titles they released right after the ones mentioned here.
You guys are good at proving my own points. Thanks.

 

Which makes it a niche!

Unless nVidia stop selling RTX cards, of course it'll grow.

Which then won't be RTX.

It's probably important for people to move away from thinking of RTX as raytracing and focus on DXR and raytracing as a rendering method, akin to deferred rendering, say. It's something written in software, with hardware more or less capable, and that hardware capability will only improve with time. Where devs expend their efforts will be wherever the market rewards them. Ergo, if there were 50 million PC gamers all with raytracing capable cards, devs will target that market with RT-focused games. If the PC market is < 1million, the focus will be marginalised. The best hope for raytracing adoption in games is through mass consumer adoption of devices capable of implementing raytracing software solutions, and that will most likely be determined by whether the consoles are capable or not simply because they sell more and define the economics in which these game developers operate.

Which is all Milk is saying, and he ain't wrong.