While this whole thing remains a curiosity, it is interesting to watch. Will broader fallback mode enabling (I assume AMD will introduce a fallback layer for their higher end cards at some point) mean that low cost uses of raytracing will become a broadly utilized? I assume that's what the evolution looks like.
ray tracing have hard parts called secondary rays. Secondary rays usually lack of coherence, which cause random memory access. This is worst case for performance, and it drop to lowest level and almost all execution units sits idle. Can you test how well RTX handle scenes with many secondary rays ? I think it will be barely faster than regular GTX. You can quickly create such scenes by placing lot of polished glass balls and few lights.
Global illumination is full of incoherent light beams and this is actually the part, where RTX shines compared to non-rtx parts (assuming you believe presentation slides).
I am under the impression that SIMD (and SIMT) architectures handle ray tracing very well as long as there is coherency. If so, if there is any justification for NVIDIA spending so much R&D and die space on specialized ray tracing hardware I would think it would be to deal with situations where there isn't such coherency.
Somehow a single person managed to make absolutely gorgeous realtime multi bounce, path traced GI work on even 970's in Minecraft, yet Nvidia can't do it.
I used to spend hours everyday playing Call of Duty: Zombies online on iPhone 4. Since then I had tried more than 50 of other most popular games on powerful gaming PCs but none had me keep. Eye candy craps won’t interest me. I’m all for good gameplays but I guess game developers nowadays have different perspective.
I am eager to see an in depth comparison in what Crytek is doing on both AMD and nVidia that is apparently different from nVidia's version using the RT cores.
Anyone get this to work with Shadow of the Tomb Raider? I have a 1080TI but the option to turn on RTX is not showing up for me. My driver, game, and windows is up to date.
NVIDIA's decision to enable ray tracing for non-Turing cards was a strategically planned effort all along b/c users w/ Pascal cards w/o a doubt would install the new drivers, and as a result would not only just be tempted, but would also be motivated to turn on ray tracing only to realize that due to the specs of their outdated hardware, their Pascal card wouldn't be sufficient enough to support the feature, prompting that user to upgrade to a Turing ray trace enabled card instead.
Did the GTX 970 get updated? Any coincidence that after the update is pushed through my trusty Asus GTX 970 FTW then catches fire as a result of a capacitor blowing out! Just wondering as it had never missed a beat until then.
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A5 - Thursday, April 11, 2019 - link
I'm actually kind of excited to see the demos on my 1060 6GB, but I'll probably never turn this on in an actual game.Colin1497 - Thursday, April 11, 2019 - link
While this whole thing remains a curiosity, it is interesting to watch. Will broader fallback mode enabling (I assume AMD will introduce a fallback layer for their higher end cards at some point) mean that low cost uses of raytracing will become a broadly utilized? I assume that's what the evolution looks like.TristanSDX - Thursday, April 11, 2019 - link
ray tracing have hard parts called secondary rays. Secondary rays usually lack of coherence, which cause random memory access. This is worst case for performance, and it drop to lowest level and almost all execution units sits idle. Can you test how well RTX handle scenes with many secondary rays ? I think it will be barely faster than regular GTX. You can quickly create such scenes by placing lot of polished glass balls and few lights.qap - Thursday, April 11, 2019 - link
Global illumination is full of incoherent light beams and this is actually the part, where RTX shines compared to non-rtx parts (assuming you believe presentation slides).Yojimbo - Thursday, April 11, 2019 - link
I am under the impression that SIMD (and SIMT) architectures handle ray tracing very well as long as there is coherency. If so, if there is any justification for NVIDIA spending so much R&D and die space on specialized ray tracing hardware I would think it would be to deal with situations where there isn't such coherency.djayjp - Thursday, April 11, 2019 - link
Somehow a single person managed to make absolutely gorgeous realtime multi bounce, path traced GI work on even 970's in Minecraft, yet Nvidia can't do it.Yojimbo - Thursday, April 11, 2019 - link
Not just NVIDIA - AMD, the game engine programmers, and all the AAA developers as well.imaheadcase - Thursday, April 11, 2019 - link
Um because its a one specialized game to be done on. Not go do it on thousands of games and get them all working.Jon Tseng - Thursday, April 11, 2019 - link
Bear in the geometry in Minecraft is a little more simplistic than your average title.Would like to see a single person try to make absolutely gorgeous realtime multi bounce path traced GI work on say GTV for example...
Achaios - Thursday, April 11, 2019 - link
Not at all excited with this, won't even bother checking it out on my Gtx 1080. It follows I won't even bother with the 1st gen RTX cards.sonny73n - Thursday, April 11, 2019 - link
I used to spend hours everyday playing Call of Duty: Zombies online on iPhone 4. Since then I had tried more than 50 of other most popular games on powerful gaming PCs but none had me keep. Eye candy craps won’t interest me. I’m all for good gameplays but I guess game developers nowadays have different perspective.pixelstuff - Thursday, April 11, 2019 - link
I am eager to see an in depth comparison in what Crytek is doing on both AMD and nVidia that is apparently different from nVidia's version using the RT cores.Yojimbo - Thursday, April 11, 2019 - link
Crytek made a demo, right? That's a lot different from making a playable game.Threska - Friday, April 12, 2019 - link
It's the underlying principles that's important. Not if executed as a game (which is as much a controlled environment as any demo, or benchmark).wr3zzz - Thursday, April 11, 2019 - link
Nvidia demo hair physics for GTX470, just saying...delightfulwalrus - Thursday, April 11, 2019 - link
Anyone get this to work with Shadow of the Tomb Raider? I have a 1080TI but the option to turn on RTX is not showing up for me. My driver, game, and windows is up to date.urbanman2004 - Friday, April 12, 2019 - link
NVIDIA's decision to enable ray tracing for non-Turing cards was a strategically planned effort all along b/c users w/ Pascal cards w/o a doubt would install the new drivers, and as a result would not only just be tempted, but would also be motivated to turn on ray tracing only to realize that due to the specs of their outdated hardware, their Pascal card wouldn't be sufficient enough to support the feature, prompting that user to upgrade to a Turing ray trace enabled card instead.AWeakling - Thursday, April 18, 2019 - link
Did the GTX 970 get updated? Any coincidence that after the update is pushed through my trusty Asus GTX 970 FTW then catches fire as a result of a capacitor blowing out! Just wondering as it had never missed a beat until then.