It is possible they do have a different solution for ray tracing and that's why they used different terminology than both AMD and MS, but as iroboto pointed out above Cerny did clarify that it was accelerated ray tracing. Either way I'm excited to see what developers can do with both consoles. Digital Foundry has a great video showing how raytracing, even when applied to a simple game like Minecraft can make a big and noticeable difference.
Next Generation Hardware Speculation with a Technical Spin [post E3 2019, pre GDC 2020] [XBSX, PS5]
- Thread starter DavidGraham
- Start date
-
- Tags
- john sell
- Status
It is possible they do have a different solution for ray tracing and that's why they used different terminology than both AMD and MS, but as iroboto pointed out above Cerny did clarify that it was accelerated ray tracing. Either way I'm excited to see what developers can do with both consoles. Digital Foundry has a great video showing how raytracing, even when applied to a simple game like Minecraft can make a big and noticeable difference.
The Wired article wasn't that long ago. The first time Sony came out with Hardware based language was Mar/April 2019.
DXR was announced and released as beta to devs at GDC 2018 running on Volta with the starwars demo. This is pre-Geforce 20xx RTX.
Hardware acceleration was the term used then and continues to be the term they use today.
I don't believe that this position makes sense from a timeline perspective.
@Dictator lol your commentary in your video here is in jeopardy!
Edit: response to Scott_Arn: 'This to me looks like a deep rabbit hole of semantic parsing. I honestly have no idea how you could distinguish between hardware accelerated and hardware based and which one implies more dedicated silicon.They could mean the same thing, they could mean different things. We have no idea what the context is. Is there some absolutist way to say whether Nvidia's RTX is "hardware based" or "hardware accelerated" and be consistent with a different product?'
Making a technical difference of those terms is surely pointless, even if we knew details.
The question is, assuming the term 'HW accelerated RT' has been established with introduction of RTX, does the use of a different term imply work on RT before RTX came up?
It just makes sense. Also that 'rushed' DXR. Seemingly MS had sudden strong interest to speed up adoption of RT, because they have cross platfrom (XP+PC) in mind.
Making a technical difference of those terms is surely pointless, even if we knew details.
The question is, assuming the term 'HW accelerated RT' has been established with introduction of RTX, does the use of a different term imply work on RT before RTX came up?
It just makes sense. Also that 'rushed' DXR. Seemingly MS had sudden strong interest to speed up adoption of RT, because they have cross platfrom (XP+PC) in mind.
There are a million reasons for this though. The simplest is the desire to test RT silicon on real code earlier than later in efforts to improve RT performance for their console.
It is a discrete advantage that they have to be able to test release code on future xbox silicon and see how RT performs.
It also means an opportunity to have developers back-patch their games to enable DXR for XBSX for titles that have it today and to be able to grow that RT library from the on-set _today_ instead of talking about the feature and not having many games for people to buy to try it.
Looking at BFV, Metro Exodus, Tomb Raider etc.
MS also supports VVR and 120fps, and there is no way the hardware today is capable of it. But if developers develop with that in mind today, it immediately rolls into action for XBSX.
A simple but effective way of growing the library well in advance and to get developers thinking more future features in their titles today to be used tomorrow.
He had to adopt to another terminology that has been established meanwhile, so he said 'accelerated' just to be clear they do no use slow software or something.
Yep, but if Cerny/Sony had RT in the works for many years, and they just sticked at 'based' without spending a thought. Then they noticed some people want to hear 'hardware acceleration', and so they said: 'yes, sure we have this'.
Just speculation, ofc.
that makes sense if no bugger is going to use the thing. Putting unused silicon in a GPU makes zero sense. If you have a closed platform where you know every game is going to use bespoke hardware, it makes more sense.
Yet if it was readily doable on GPU, why hasn't it been done? I don't know how well GPU works for audio, but what if the 3D processing can be accelerated as well as video blocks handle video? No-one's going to arguing removing the HEVC decoders and doing video decode on compute. If there is 3D audio hardware in PS5, it'll be because it brings a better economy of silicon.
Then MS wouldn't know about it and Nvidia wouldn't have released the RTX accelerated cards the following year. That's just too much happening too quickly.
Agree, but usually API comes with common hardware features, not the other way around. Vendor stuff comes with tiers, if at all, but not with a generic API just for one vendor.
It feels like: 'Wtf?!? RT is coming?! Here it is, so implement quickly, devs! Our ecosystem should not fall behind the competition!' Just, NV is no competition for MS. Sony is. There seemed no need to rush RT back then, assuming RT would be no topic for next gen consoles.
I see it's exaggeration maybe, but it makes some sense.
I like that they are focusing on it, and I'm hopeful it'll be well-supported by developers, but I'm fearful that the majority of gamers will continue to not give a shit leading to developers not bothering to dedicate resources to it.
No. It has being resolved when Cerny said that it was not a "software trick" which clearly states that they have some kind of dedicated silicon for RT. I am still waiting for a similar and unambiguous statement from Microsoft.
Well there are several players in DirectX. So it's not exactly MS just jumping on the ball saying we're goign to push DXR go figure it out. There are many vendors like Intel, etc that are also on the DirectX group who help steer it. This must have been talked for a while, and Sony is _not_ on the committee. I think it' would be much more straight forward if Nvidia has been pushing this discussion for a while, and pushed MS to release the DXR beta to support RT for Nvidia hardware so that software could be created for it ahead of time before the hardware was released.
If time is ready for RT it is just natural multiple companies work on it. ImgTec was first even. It may well be Sony working on RT was not that surprising for MS and they knew. And NV worked on RT for a decade independently of all that console business stuff.
But when they were ready MS was happy and responded more quickly than usual it seems... because of upcoming competition?
NV could have done this on their own, like they did for Vulkan with extensions.
But MS contributed to the hype. Why?
ok... leaving it at his... just speculationg and repeating myself
No.
“There is ray-tracing acceleration in the GPU hardware,” he says, “which I believe is the statement that people were looking for.”
https://www.wired.com/story/exclusive-playstation-5/
He said nothing else in the article on the topic of ray tracing. The article confirms to the reader that it is not a software-level solution.
MS doesn't need to say anything on ray tracing because they did not deviate from the normal language. Which is why he (Cerny) re-chose his words on raytracing as per the article.
@VitaminB6 look at what you started
Burden of Proof is on you for these claims, otherwise they are just completely baseless and sending everyone way off course
Because without MS, RTX would never have the support it would need. Every game that would support it is completely custom and no developer would want to build separate RT solutions for each IHV. And MS will benefit from it because they want more developers to choose DirectX over Vulkan.
Last edited:
Thing is then, can Sony best or match AMD in ray tracing solutions?
@JoeJ Maybe DXR came out because they wanted several years of work on RT in the game space before the new Xbox came out, so developers would be able to hit the ground running. If DXR came out on console launch, you'd have to wait years into the generation before devs figured it out. Maybe they'd been planning ray tracing on xbox since before DXR came out, or Nvidia announced RTX. We have no way of knowing when they started to plan it, or why.
I think that adds more plausiblity to it being 3D audio hardware, if Cerny was in charge of choosing the hardware and Cerny wanted audio to progress. Leaving it a compute thing means leaving devs the option to not bother, and audio staying at its current level. If it's to be properly supported, it needs to be readily accessible through the libraries...well, the acquisition of Audiokinect helps with that.
"Hey, Audiokinetic? Can you put in support for our 3D solution into WWise?"
"That's only going to be a small niche of users for our platform."
"Okay. We'll buy you now, and then let you carry on providing WWise to everyone but ensure and pay for you to create proper support for PlayStationAudio hardware. Now every game using WWise will automatically have 3D audio on PS5."
Not conclusive, but a reasonable argument overall.
Last edited:
upnorthsox
Veteran
I think it's the other way around, gamers want it but devs are the ones who don't seem to care.
Haha sorry... Personally I think they'll have the same solution. When I first posted on this subject I was unaware that Cerny had clarified his statement. Why would Sony spend $ on R&D to come up with their own proprietary ray tracing solution? It is possible, but seems pretty unlikely. If AMD PC cards and XBSX are both using the same tech and Sony has a different solution that would put Sony at a disadvantage when it comes to cross-platform games. Devs want things to be simple and aren't going to spend their time programming for exotic hardware that only exists in one console.
?
Nvidia describes non RTX general compute based ray tracing as “GPU accelerated software based raytracing”. Hardware based would imply the use of RT cores.
If MS rushed DXR then they must of did a better job than Nvidia because nvidia describes DXR as a low level api not replicated by OptiX until providing a low level version around sisgraph 2019.
Last edited:
- Status
Similar threads
- Locked
