What lower requirements exactly? Have you tried running sw lumen and Nanite together on Pascal or GCN? It is a big old slideshow even at 1080p!
Yeah, i tried in on GCN (Vega 56). Seems i can enjoy next gen games at stable 30fps. I hope the GPU still lasts many years, becasue i won't upgrade for >1500 bucks to get similar visuals at similar performance with RT games.
There is no game good enough to justify such prices - independent of gfx features, and i won't start to mine some crypto shit to pay for my new shiny GPU.
That's not just my problem. It seems what 'hybrid era' truly means is that we get two camps. Those willing to pay ridiculous amounts of money, and those who prefer to stick at current gen. Games industry won't let the latter camp down - RT remains an optional bolt on feature, so the former camp looses too.
As a developmer i won't upgrade either, becasue i can't use RT anyway due to its LOD restrictions.
I can see good use cases for updating the "BVH" during rendering even, in which case more than an API, it needs to be available to shaders. Though rather than a BVH I think SVO (or SV-64-tree) would be more suitable to on the fly acceleration structures.
Yes, i meant the API has to be used from GPU side. Otherwise it would be useless.
I've used SV64 recently for CPU fluid simulations, and thought it's really attractive for GPU as well.
But for raytraycing octrees and the like have the big downside that we need to rebuild them on any movement, even if no LOD change or skinning etc. happens. We loose the nice option of refitting, and the desired advantage of streaming acceleration structure would become pointless.
Depending on a global grid is bad, though we could address this by supporting movable grids. Not sure, would need to think about this...
One important argument is we often want consistent parent - child relationships. LOD is such example, becasue we want (precomputed) clusters to remain at their place and not swimming over a moving mesh, which could casue visible popping.
Whatever - it seems the whole RT community settled on BVH for good reasons, so this increases the chances we get some common standard. If there are outliers using Octrees or kD-trees in hardware, chances of a standard would decrease.