Nvidia Turing Speculation thread [2018]

Take the INT + FP thing with a large grain of salt until we have more details. NVIDIA has never done a very good job of communicating how that works on Volta; I don't expect Turing to immediately be better.

 

Since marketing folks like big numbers it's likely the number of ray triangle intersection tests that can be completed per second.

 

What info are we missing? There are 16 FP units and 16 INT units per partition and the dispatcher can issue a 32 wide warp per clock. Which means every other clock it can issue to the FP or INT units and keep both fully occupied.

 

That would be a rather low number then. Rays/second normally include full BVH traversal till the intersection with the right triangle is found.
Here a recent raytracing Nvidia paper I found: http://research.nvidia.com/publication/2017-07_Efficient-Incoherent-Ray
In table 4, using a Titan XP, they report from 1.987 Gray/s (Sibenik) to 322 Mray/s (Powerplant).
Sibenik is 80 K triangles, Powerplant is 12.8 M triangles. (Table 6)
So Gray/s without context doesn't make much sense.

 

Seems the real time ray-traced demos (Star Wars, Dancing Robots) that used Unreal on a DGX workstation (4 Volta GPU's) can now be seen using a single Turing Quadro. The recent Porche real-time ray tracing demo requires 2 RTX Quadros.

• Photorealistic, interactive car rendering — Spoiler: this demo of a Porsche prototype looks real, but is actually rendered. To prove it, you’ll be able to adjust the lighting, and move the car around. It’s all built in in Unreal Engine, with the Microsoft DXR API is used to access NVIDIA RTX dev platform. It runs two Quadro RTX GPUs.
• Real-time ray tracing on a single GPU — This Star Wars themed demo stunned when it made its debut earlier this year running on a $70,000 DGX Station powered by four Volta GPUs. Now you can see the same interactive, real-time, ray tracing using Unreal Engine running on our NVIDIA RTX developer platform on a single Turing Quadro GPU.
• Advanced rendering for games & film (dancing robots) — This one is built on Unreal, as well — and shows how real-time ray-tracing can a bring complex, action-packed scenes to life. Powered by a single Quadro RTX 6000, it shows effects such as real-time ray-traced effects such as global illumination, shadows, ambient occlusion, and reflections.

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/08/14/turing-demos-real-time-ray-tracing/

 

Apparently some companies at SIGGRAPH are already showing RTX demos:

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/08/13/turing-industry-support/

 

Pica Pica & Star Wars RT demo didn't require 4xTitan V's thought.


The use of a DGX was simply marketing from Nvidia as the product was on sale - 50% off during GDC.

 

The message is that the RTX is still equivalent to four Titan V's.

 

Just bumped into this video demo running on a RTX 6000 claiming 300 billion triangles:
As a raytracing tech demo this must be fast or impressive, as a demo for nice game visuals it would be less impressive.
(There is no level of detail in the geometry, so distant trees get heavily undersampled hitting or missing leaves all over the place)

 

It's just a theoretical maximum like FLOPs. The only way it might be achieved is colliding against a single screen space triangle with zero bounces. I doubt the traversal is even included as that will always vary based on the model.

 

Never the less, the Star War demo was running on 4 TitanVs. Now it's running on 1 Quadro RTX.

 

If the RT cores are a thing, it's not surprising if Volta is lacking the dedicated hardware.

The only strange thing for me is the 2 architectures for differents markets. Before is was a big core, and then you cut down some features.

Or, the futur is turing everywhere, and Volta was really short lived.

 

Quoting ray tracing speed for a single triangle, that would be a joke, right.
When rendering a single triangle raytracing becomes essentially equivalent to rasterizing, which GPUs can do at 100s of Gpix/s.
Raytracing is all about efficient accelerations structures, which are needed when rendering scenes with many triangles.
I'm starting to doubt now if those RT cores are actual hardware and not just some GPU code making clever use of the abundant int cores and improved L1 cache.
BTW What about raytracing participating media like smoke, fire, these are represented by volumetric textures, no BVH and triangle intersections needed, so no speedup by RT cores ?

 

It would be quite impressive to see a seaside full of small stones or even sand particles in games. My guess is that as long as these are static and instanced across the scene, it would be quite cheap for RT- no BVH updates frame to frame, just shoot N millions parallel primary rays to draw the same instanced models across the scene (should be also quite cache-friendly)

 

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dkq4XsTVsAAPJRN.jpg

hype level rising

 

50% speed up for Quadro Turing over TitanV in ATAA UE4

 

Would be nice to see the numbers for high quality rasterized AO and shadows too.

 

That's not correct. It's 3,3x Speedup in ATAA. It's 50% speed up in ??? Rasterization????

 

NVIDIA Breaks New Ground with Turing GPU Architecture

https://www.top500.org/news/nvidia-breaks-new-ground-with-turing-gpu-architecture/