Next gen lighting technologies - voxelised, traced, and everything else *spawn*

Shifty Geezer said:
Rather than linking me to a sprawling site of papers (and in particular the link takes me to denoising), how about you link to the specific paper or reference that shows how ray sampling can be homogenised across different requirements? I'm not saying you're wrong, but there's no way I'm going to spend however many hours searching through that site to find research that shows yes, you can reuse data and samples for relfections and lighting. ;)

Firstly, how big is that audience? How many millions of gamers will devs have to target their raytracing R&D towards? Secondly, you haven't answered the question about what do gamers actually use? It's not a monolithic group. There are lots of gamers. Do they choose higher quality settings at lower framerates on average, or lower quality settings to get higher framerates?
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The link shows path tracing running in real time with a more advanced SGVF filter than what NVIDIA presented a couple years ago (used in PICA PICA). I think it's more than enough.

PC gamers are used nowadays to high framerates/resolutions because the choice for high fidelity simply doesn't exist. All they have is console ports. Without data it's impossible to answer your question. Then again, if RT makes its way to consoles then the answer would be: many millions of gamers :p
 
Malo said:
uhhh in a desert level where there's basically zero reflections on anything. I watched most of it and apart from maybe the car's tiny mirrors a few puddles later in the video, there's nothing? I don't see how it's representative of DXR performance at all.
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London-boy said:
New Other testers also said that the more reflective surfaces are on screen, the worse the framerate gets - obviously.
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I agree, but the reflections on weapons, vehicles and metallic surfaces still apply, you can see it in the big explosion at the end of the video.

The video is interesting because it's ran on Ultra DXR.
 
Again, it runs at DXR Ultra which on most of the video and in most of the screen is NOT used and not visible. So that video could have been ran at 4K, at a higher framerate, and it would have looked the same, except a few seconds at the end, or in some parts here and there that you can hardly see when you play a game at such high framerate.

Dead.

DXR in the foreseeable future will only be good for slower, smaller games where 30fps is acceptable and higher resolution isn't needed.
 
London-boy said:
Again, it runs at DXR Ultra which on most of the video and in most of the screen is NOT used and not visible. So that video could have been ran at 4K, at a higher framerate, and it would have looked the same, except a few seconds at the end, or in some parts here and there that you can hardly see when you play a game at such high framerate.
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Again no, while I agree there are less reflections in this stage, there are still Ultra DXR reflections being applied on many objects, if the players stopped to examine the environment you would notice them.

There are other videos of stages with much more reflections achieving the same fps, albeit at low/medium DXR


London-boy said:
DXR in the foreseeable future will only be good for slower, smaller games where 30fps is acceptable and higher resolution isn't needed.
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In light of what we see in Battlefield V, this statement couldn't be more wrong.
 
DavidGraham said:
Again no, while I agree there are less reflections in this stage, there are still Ultra DXR reflections being applied on many objects, if the players stopped to examine the environment you would notice them.

There are other videos of stages with much more reflections achieving the same fps, albeit at low/medium DXR

In light of what we see in Battlefield V, this statement couldn't be more wrong.
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Majority of testers say that 2080 Ti is struggling to hit or doesn't even hit 60 FPS average in the game at 1080p Ultra DXR, but just 1 video, conveniently from the level with the least reflections in the game, is enough to prove otherwise?
 
Kaotik said:
Majority of testers say that 2080 Ti is struggling to hit or doesn't even hit 60 FPS average in the game at 1080p Ultra DXR,
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It's struggling, no doubt about that.

However the video is interesting in that there are scenes/stages where the extreme DXR reflections (of Ultra) in a controlled manner can result in good performance. BFV uses reflections so widely and on so many objects it hurts it's performance on current hardware. If the game were to reduce it's inclusion of reflections, performance would go up, while still achieving better reflections and visual flair than rasterization. It's an interesting case study.
 
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A technical theory/observation, comparing DXR Ultra to Low in the original comparison, there are diffuse reflections in Ultra not present in the low. That greatly increases the reflection surfaces to be calculated, but the end results aren't so much reflections but diffuse lighting. A better incorporation of raytracing will have illumination tracing for these aspects, which should be faster. That can be traced at a lower resolution, very noisy, and it'll still look good.

A lot of conclusions should not be jumped to. ;) Of course, cherry picking examples to support a pro/anti RX stance should be avoided too.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
This points comes up always in the framerate/resolution/graphical quality discussions and I don't recall any clear answer
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OCASM said:
PC gamers isn't a monolithic group. Some prioritize framerate, others resolution and others graphics.
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Yes there is no clear answer and yes PC gamers are divided into several categories according to their visual fidelity preferences.

IMO, there are several types of fidelity, Temporal, Spatial and graphical.

Temporal covers the fps and the tearing/stuttering free experience, this is important, and it affects the ability to enjoy the game, you maximize this by having the latest Variable Sync displays, with the highest refresh rates. eg: 166HZ GSync/FreeSync monitor.

Graphical covers how each pixel is lit/shadowed or receive detail such as textures and polygons, this is important as it affects immersion in the game, you want to create the best possible virtual world, by maxing each graphics settings available. You obtain this through better processing. eg: 5 GHz 8 core CPU and a 2080Ti.

Spatial covers the resolution of the game, and also the Anti-Aliasing portion, the higher the resolution the sharper the image, less aliasing and the more details you can see at large monitor sizes. HDR is a property of the monitor as well, and is made through spatial technologies in the monitor itself (dimming, brightness). This affects the ability to see the game without distraction, You maximize this fidelity by buying a big HDR screen with the highest resolution possible, eg: 40 inch 4K HDR enabled screen. Size to resolution ratio is important to maximize sharpness.

Competitive players prefer the temporal fidelity, the modding community and graphics enthusiasts prefer the graphical fidelity, causal gamers tend to favor the spatial fidelity. There are also elitists who prefer all types of fidelity at the same time, but they end up paying a lot of money for it. And there are many who prefer two types of fidelity at the same time.
 
ComputerBase did their write up on DXR.

For their Rotterdam map multiplayer test, a 2080Ti did well considering the effects at play.
For 1440p it was 70fps Low DXR, 50fps Ultra DXR.
for 1080p it was 90fps Low DXR, 70fps Ultra DXR.

For the campaign they confirmed the presence of the foliage bug in the Tirailleur stage.
As DICE states, there is a bug that can dramatically reduce raytracing performance on cards with lots of foliage. And at the beginning of the Tirailleur campaign and thus the test sequence, there are many leaves. With a later update the error should be eliminated.
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https://www.computerbase.de/2018-11/battlefield-v-dxr-raytracing-test/2/
 
The results coming in confirm just about everything people critical of this card were stating and highlights why Nvidia kept mum about it for so long.
In the consumerist space, it was clear pre-launch that those intending on buying this card didn't care. So it's a match made in heaven. This is what occurs when you aren't critical and toss money at overpriced products. In a number of cases, the non-DXR video looks better than Low DXR because of the pre-baked elements.

This looks more and more like an offline rendering pipeline w/ raytracing acceleration shoehorned into Geforce w/ marketing.
The denoising portion of the pipeline is serialized and occurs post render when the traditional GPU render is merged w/ the RTX result and denoised.
This is where the FPS hit is coming from along w/ bulk of the object tree being computed in traditional cuda cores. RT cores only do intersection tests and when rays have divergent characteristics, the performance tanks. This is a beta hardware acceleration pipeline for real-time purposes. It will be a boon for offline rendering in the Quadro line.

Glad I resolved on going nowhere near this release
 
With the observed 60 FPS for 1080p on a RTX2080Ti with Ultra DXR setting.
It begs the question where all those 10 GRays/s have gone ?
Assuming the best case of all pixels being reflective with a single reflection ray per pixel, this results in 120 MRays/s
This is a massive factor 83 difference between the on the box quoted 10 GRays/s and actual in game 120 MRays/s
(Or similarily paying a 500$ bonus for RTX and getting 6$ value)
 
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Voxilla said:
With the observed 60 FPS for 1080p on a RTX2080Ti with Ultra DXR setting.
It begs the question where all those 10 GRays/s have gone ?
Assuming the best case of all pixels being reflective with a single reflection ray per pixel, this results in 120 MRays/s
This is a massive factor 83 difference between the on the box quoted 10 GRays/s and actual in game 120 MRays/s
(Or similarily paying a 500$ bonus for RTX and getting 6$ value)
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You need to use more than 1 ray per pixel.
Also to my understanding it's not really set in stone 10 GRays/s but even with the RT-hardware it depends on several variables
 
Kaotik said:
You need to use more than 1 ray per pixel.
Also to my understanding it's not really set in stone 10 GRays/s but even with the RT-hardware it depends on several variables
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As primary ray hit is done with rasterizing, there is only the secondary reflected rays.
The heavy aliasing (ex in scenes with. windows reflected on the floor) doesn’t hint at more than 1 reflected ray per pixel.
It would be nice if Nvidia could come up with a technical blog post of why actual game MRays/s are nearly two orders of magnitude away from claimed theoretical 10GRays/s. (As Jen-Hsun has made such bold public statements about GRays/s I kind of doubt this will happen)
 
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Voxilla said:
As primary ray hit is done with rasterizing, there is only the secondary reflected rays.
The heavy aliasing (ex in scenes with. windows reflected on the floor) doesn’t hint at more than 1 reflected ray per pixel.
It would be nice if Nvidia could come up with a technical blog post of why actual game MRays/s are nearly two orders of magnitude away from claimed theoretical 10GRays/s. (As Jen-Hsun has made such bold public statements about GRays/s I kind of doubt this will happen)
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I'm not sure about BFV, but at least Remedy quoted that their demo, while being noisy as hell, used 2 rays per pixel. Of course they also use it more extensively than BFV does but I doubt BFV could do this clean results with just 1 reflecting ray per pixel. (I have little knowledge of raytracing, but what I do know is that in several if not all cases I've seen so far the amount of noise goes down with more rays, and BFV looks pretty noise free on the reflections)
 
Kaotik said:
I'm not sure about BFV, but at least Remedy quoted that their demo, while being noisy as hell, used 2 rays per pixel. Of course they also use it more extensively than BFV does but I doubt BFV could do this clean results with just 1 reflecting ray per pixel. (I have little knowledge of raytracing, but what I do know is that in several if not all cases I've seen so far the amount of noise goes down with more rays, and BFV looks pretty noise free on the reflections)
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With specular reflecting surfaces, there is only one direction an incoming ray can reflect, and the reflected ray direction can be computed exactly based on the incident ray and surface normal. This works for flat, curved or bumpy reflecting surfaces. Raytracing this way results in clean reflections. Raytracing GI and AO is a very different story indeed, but this kind of raytracing is not used in BFV
 
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