NVIDIA talk up bringing DirectX Ray Tracing to Vulkan

It's just a matter of time.

That said, I avoided buying a GTX 2000, because at the moment, it feels more like an expensive gimmick.

It is a gimmick. More of a marketing tool than a really useful feature. To achieve good quality real time ray tracing, you need really powerful hardware. And one that can be fit in a single GPU gives at best some minor enhancement to the lighting, and as I said above, it naturally comes at the cost of everything else.

wtf?
Ray tracing is the holygrail of computer graphics.
maybe Rtx, their dedicated cores, may be gimick, but Ray tracing?
that is simply the reason why the computer graphics industry had to use countless other gimmicks, because they didnt had real time ray trace, what nvidia did was an miracle that was later followed by others, sure, its not as good as rendering the entire frame, the same way that eevee (on blender) is not as good as cycles, but its close enough.

rendering in 16ms what usually take hours in a much better machine is not an small deal, sure its not as good as, but its impressive nonetheless.

one thing that i hate in gamers in general is how clueless they are, i dont give a fuck about 4k, raytracing is an serious technology, 4k is just a gimmick, but when they realizes that they would have to give up on 4k to play with raytracing, what they did? trash talked the technology, and that is the reason why it didnt sell as it should.
sure, there are other factors too, like games that arent really optimized for it, but seem the reception that this technology had, just disgusts me.

wtf?
Ray tracing is the holygrail of computer graphics.
maybe Rtx, their dedicated cores, may be gimick, but Ray tracing?

We aren't talking about ray tracing, we are talking about Nvidia's implementation. See my post above. What they did it not a miracle, it's a gimmick. Once someone will make serious real time ray tracing on commodity hardware, you can call it a miracle. Nvidia did nothing of the sort.


Last edited by Shmerl on 24 February 2020 at 5:13 am UTC

RTX on GTX1000 series cards doesn't run anywhere as fast as on RTX2000 cards. I have ran QuakeII on my GTX1600 and it had 3FPS.

RTX on GTX1000 series cards doesn't run anywhere as fast as on RTX2000 cards. I have ran QuakeII on my GTX1600 and it had 3FPS.

That's because GTX1xxx cards don't have RT cores.

It is a gimmick.

No, it's a solution the the rendering problems that rasterisers can't solve. It's just the first generation of hardware that attempts to use it in real time graphics. It's as much a gimmick as 3D rendering was with the first 3Dfx card.

I remember a friend bringing over his Diamond Monster 3D at a LAN party not too long after
when it was released. To many of us the concept of a 3D accelerator was completely fresh.

We played Quake a lot and you know it was quite demanding at that time.
And you typically played it at VGA 320x240 using the software rasterizer.
Switching to 640x400 or higher looked awesome but was extremely slow to
the point where the FPS would better be given in SPF.

So this guy had the card since a day before and only played a demo and a
rather crappy game (Terminal Velocity?) that came with the card.

Another friend had a computer magazine with a CD.
Quite common at the time because internet access was still not
that common, rather expensive and terribly slow.
So these CDs not only provided demos but patches and drivers.
He pointed out that it features a GLQuake patch for that 3Dfx card.
So we gave it a try.

I'm not exaggerating when I claim this was the biggest WOW effect I,
and probably the others too, ever faced so far with computer gaming.

Even VR and other stuff didn't came close to what you experience seeing
this for the very first time.

Not only Quake ran smooth as butter on 640x480, it was bi-linear filtered
and provided some extra lightning effects.

It felt like such a clear unsteady jump in technology that I've never
experienced again in the same way since then.

Comparing this to the crappy attempt of RT is just not right. :)

The first 3Dfx card delivered. And how it did!


Last edited by sub on 24 February 2020 at 9:58 am UTC

a rather crappy game (Terminal Velocity?) that came with the card.

I had a lot of fun with that game and a flight stick. :(

a rather crappy game (Terminal Velocity?) that came with the card.

I had a lot of fun with that game and a flight stick. :(

Sorry, I take it back. ;)

This has been a really interesting conversation to read, although I have to admit I don't know enough to have a good handle on who might be right about what.

It's just a matter of time.

That said, I avoided buying a GTX 2000, because at the moment, it feels more like an expensive gimmick.

It is a gimmick. More of a marketing tool than a really useful feature. To achieve good quality real time ray tracing, you need really powerful hardware. And one that can be fit in a single GPU gives at best some minor enhancement to the lighting, and as I said above, it naturally comes at the cost of everything else.

wtf?
Ray tracing is the holygrail of computer graphics.
maybe Rtx, their dedicated cores, may be gimick, but Ray tracing?
that is simply the reason why the computer graphics industry had to use countless other gimmicks, because they didnt had real time ray trace, what nvidia did was an miracle that was later followed by others, sure, its not as good as rendering the entire frame, the same way that eevee (on blender) is not as good as cycles, but its close enough.

rendering in 16ms what usually take hours in a much better machine is not an small deal, sure its not as good as, but its impressive nonetheless.

one thing that i hate in gamers in general is how clueless they are, i dont give a fuck about 4k, raytracing is an serious technology, 4k is just a gimmick, but when they realizes that they would have to give up on 4k to play with raytracing, what they did? trash talked the technology, and that is the reason why it didnt sell as it should.
sure, there are other factors too, like games that arent really optimized for it, but seem the reception that this technology had, just disgusts me.

I always love it when clueless people call others clueless.... It is funny.

No, Nvidia performed no such "miracle". Nvidia just caught up with AMD's hardware architecture after many years. Nvidia's gpus for the better part of this decade were lagging behind in technology. They lacked async compute (VERY important and if games actually utilized it we would be seeing superior games), they lacked enough shading power and relied on geometry and brute force, they overtesselated everything just to win in benchmarks etc.

RTX is just some CUDA shaders that perform raytracing effects. That is why Nvidia after some months enabled the 1000 series to have RTX too.... It was just software. And guess what, architecturally VEGA and NAVI from AMD could run RTX just as efficiently, if Nvidia allowed their shaders to be translated to AMD hardware legally.... Oops, i guess now they did.

4K is not a "gimmick". Alongside HDR, they can enhance graphical fidelity considerably. They do cost a lot of resources. But if i had the choice between 4K/HDR and RTX on 1080p, i would pick 4K, every single time. Why? Because most effects RTX performs can be done with traditional techniques and be quite good looking, while 4K and HDR color literally upgrade the detail level of the whole screen. so yeah, RTX is a gimmick.

first off, i dont know about the hardware details, nvidia may lag behind in this front, but from an software point of view, ray tracing in real time is impressive (even more if they did in on their hardware that is as bad as you described)
it dont matter if it was an hardware inovation, or software inovation, its impressive in any case!

saying "It was just software" ,"Its just a shader", donot explain how they could make such a shader, if it was so easy, people would have figured it out before.

"if Nvidia allowed their shaders to be translated to AMD hardware legally.... Oops, i guess now they did."
the fact that nvidia hold the patent for that proves that they did it first.
why didnt amd did it before? or any game developer? because it isnt easy to do.


and second, 4k is not an guarantee of quality.
if i want to make an 4k game, i can just make an game with atari graphics and it will run on an ps3, an ps2, maybe even an n64 (if you ignore that those platforms dont have the proper output capabilities)

the issue with 4k is that you are giving up on something else to increase the resolution.
nowadays, you can run old games in high resolution on some emulators, pick an n64 game in 4k vs an movie in full HD, what have better graphics?
until games looks as good as movies (with fur and etc) i dont see the reason to increase the resolution, fullHD is good enough, 4k is bullshit, i rather have the double the poly count than double the resolution. (quadruple if you count x and y)


"Because most effects RTX performs can be done with traditional techniques and be quite good looking,"
that is why ray tracing is such a revolution, because now developers dont have to use those techiniques (those gimicks), they can just focus on making the game.
instead of baking the lights then making the objects inmovable so you cant break the illusion that the shadows are real, you just simulate light.
baking shadows is a gimmick.

in the current gen games, its hard to show the true advantage, because games were designed with that limitation into account, but now developers can get rid of then.

this video explain the issue better than i can:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyfTPG-dwOE

this video explain the issue better than i can:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyfTPG-dwOE

Good ol' Shamus. I like him. I stopped following his stuff because he's a bit outside my core interests and the conversations on his blog could seriously suck time. But he's a good guy and has some sound ideas.

wtf?
Ray tracing is the holygrail of computer graphics.
maybe Rtx, their dedicated cores, may be gimick, but Ray tracing?

We aren't talking about ray tracing, we are talking about Nvidia's implementation. See my post above. What they did it not a miracle, it's a gimmick. Once someone will make serious real time ray tracing on commodity hardware, you can call it a miracle. Nvidia did nothing of the sort.

if its more affordable than an super computer, or can do it under 16ms, it is an miracle, dont matter if it need an asyc to do it or not.

It's just a matter of time.

That said, I avoided buying a GTX 2000, because at the moment, it feels more like an expensive gimmick.

It is a gimmick. More of a marketing tool than a really useful feature. To achieve good quality real time ray tracing, you need really powerful hardware. And one that can be fit in a single GPU gives at best some minor enhancement to the lighting, and as I said above, it naturally comes at the cost of everything else.

wtf?
Ray tracing is the holygrail of computer graphics.
maybe Rtx, their dedicated cores, may be gimick, but Ray tracing?
that is simply the reason why the computer graphics industry had to use countless other gimmicks, because they didnt had real time ray trace, what nvidia did was an miracle that was later followed by others, sure, its not as good as rendering the entire frame, the same way that eevee (on blender) is not as good as cycles, but its close enough.

rendering in 16ms what usually take hours in a much better machine is not an small deal, sure its not as good as, but its impressive nonetheless.

one thing that i hate in gamers in general is how clueless they are, i dont give a fuck about 4k, raytracing is an serious technology, 4k is just a gimmick, but when they realizes that they would have to give up on 4k to play with raytracing, what they did? trash talked the technology, and that is the reason why it didnt sell as it should.
sure, there are other factors too, like games that arent really optimized for it, but seem the reception that this technology had, just disgusts me.

I always love it when clueless people call others clueless.... It is funny.

No, Nvidia performed no such "miracle". Nvidia just caught up with AMD's hardware architecture after many years. Nvidia's gpus for the better part of this decade were lagging behind in technology. They lacked async compute (VERY important and if games actually utilized it we would be seeing superior games), they lacked enough shading power and relied on geometry and brute force, they overtesselated everything just to win in benchmarks etc.

RTX is just some CUDA shaders that perform raytracing effects. That is why Nvidia after some months enabled the 1000 series to have RTX too.... It was just software. And guess what, architecturally VEGA and NAVI from AMD could run RTX just as efficiently, if Nvidia allowed their shaders to be translated to AMD hardware legally.... Oops, i guess now they did.

4K is not a "gimmick". Alongside HDR, they can enhance graphical fidelity considerably. They do cost a lot of resources. But if i had the choice between 4K/HDR and RTX on 1080p, i would pick 4K, every single time. Why? Because most effects RTX performs can be done with traditional techniques and be quite good looking, while 4K and HDR color literally upgrade the detail level of the whole screen. so yeah, RTX is a gimmick.

first off, i dont know about the hardware details, nvidia may lag behind in this front, but from an software point of view, ray tracing in real time is impressive (even more if they did in on their hardware that is as bad as you described)
it dont matter if it was an hardware inovation, or software inovation, its impressive in any case!

saying "It was just software" ,"Its just a shader", donot explain how they could make such a shader, if it was so easy, people would have figured it out before.

"if Nvidia allowed their shaders to be translated to AMD hardware legally.... Oops, i guess now they did."
the fact that nvidia hold the patent for that proves that they did it first.
why didnt amd did it before? or any game developer? because it isnt easy to do.


and second, 4k is not an guarantee of quality.
if i want to make an 4k game, i can just make an game with atari graphics and it will run on an ps3, an ps2, maybe even an n64 (if you ignore that those platforms dont have the proper output capabilities)

the issue with 4k is that you are giving up on something else to increase the resolution.
nowadays, you can run old games in high resolution on some emulators, pick an n64 game in 4k vs an movie in full HD, what have better graphics?
until games looks as good as movies (with fur and etc) i dont see the reason to increase the resolution, fullHD is good enough, 4k is bullshit, i rather have the double the poly count than double the resolution. (quadruple if you count x and y)


"Because most effects RTX performs can be done with traditional techniques and be quite good looking,"
that is why ray tracing is such a revolution, because now developers dont have to use those techiniques (those gimicks), they can just focus on making the game.
instead of baking the lights then making the objects inmovable so you cant break the illusion that the shadows are real, you just simulate light.
baking shadows is a gimmick.

in the current gen games, its hard to show the true advantage, because games were designed with that limitation into account, but now developers can get rid of then.

this video explain the issue better than i can:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyfTPG-dwOE

First of all, it would be nice if you don't comment on things you have no knowledge about. Sorry to be harsh, but i am tired of wasting time responding to people who clearly haven't done their homework.... Mostly kids and teenaged gamers...

"saying "It was just software" ,"Its just a shader", donot explain how they could make such a shader, if it was so easy, people would have figured it out before."

You realize raytracing is a very old technique, right? Raytracing is not new, it is decades old, and you can google about it and educate yourself. People had already figured it out, the issue has always been an issue of not enough transistors present on personal hardware to make it feasible in real time video games.... The reason modern gpus began implementing it is because we are at 7nm these days, there is no rush to reach higher resolutions (4K is more than enough for the next decade) and there are no new raster techniques that need extra juice. So they can use any extra transistors to begin transitioning to raytracing this decade.

Nvidia didn't invent anything, really. They just use gpu shaders to perform some effects. Even the dedicated hardware they use on some models is really just specialized shaders. It is not some newfound "magic" Nvidia invented, despite their marketing claiming it is. That is what i am combating, this ridiculous Nvidia propaganda. I hate Nvidia with a passion because they are a detriment to the hardware industry, they enjoy a dominant position in the gpu market while selling pure air and marketing hype.

As for 4K, sorry to burst your bubble, but any 1080p game will have significantly worse visuals than 4K on a proper screen. You clearly haven't gamed on 4K.... It is a great improvement all around. On the other hand, right now video games are not going to be fully ray-traced, raytracing is used mostly on some effects, they REPLACE some effects. The difference is there, raytracing is definitely more realistic, but for the most part the difference is barely noticeable during gameplay. So if someone has to choose between tiny more realism at 1080p that he won't really notice while gaming, and a little less realism at 4K, i think the vast majority of people are going to pick 4K. It just adds more visual quality.

Obviously, N64 games at 4K won't look significantly better than 1080p, because their textures are tiny, even for 1995 standards N64 games had crappy textures due to ram restrictions. You can't notice the difference in detail on flat 1995 textures.... But we are going to play at 4K games like Cyberpunk 2077, with 8gb+ vram.... If you think you can display all that detail of games made in 2020 and beyond on 1080p, you are delusional. We are not talking Super Mario 64 here....

I am sorry, but you are clearly an Nvidia fanboy here. I can smell it from a mile away, you just want to support Nvidia propaganda. When next gen AAA games arrive, people will be disabling raytracing in droves to gain FPS and ability to play at higher resolutions, unless developers begin not implementing the same effects using traditional techniques on purpose to push for more raytracing adoption....

You realize raytracing is a very old technique, right? Raytracing is not new, it is decades old, and you can google about it and educate yourself. People had already figured it out, the issue has always been an issue of not enough transistors present on personal hardware to make it feasible in real time video games..

W.R.O.N.G.
they didnt brute force it, they made a few samples and extrapolated from it.
we still dont have enough power to do it in real time without some tricks.
and the fact that it can work in older hardware proves that its not brute force in hardware, but code, an clever algorith.
even if it was pure hardware based, they deserve some credits for making an 7nm hardware, this isnt easy either.


" N64 games had crappy textures due to ram restrictions. "
wrong again, the issue was to make the textures fit into the catridge.

"you are delusional. We are not talking Super Mario 64 here...."
that was just an example on how resolution means nothing in pratice.
people are criticizing doom eternal for not being 4k (on xbox or stadia) but they would have to sacrifice something else more important to render it in 4k.
like disable some shaders, or something else, they did the right choice, the 1800 resolution wont kill anyone, but consumers are stupid.

"I am sorry, but you are clearly an Nvidia fanboy here."
i'm not an nvidia fanboy, they did a lot of shit in the past
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcF36_qMd8M
but that dont means everything they do is shit, i recognize when they do something impressive, and to say its just bruteforce is quite dumb.
raytracing in real time is impressive, if that was not an thing, cryengine, microsoft and amd would not be running to implement it on their technology (especialy after nvidia coming with it proving it was possible)

RTX may be bullshit since it was proven that the specific/dedicated hardware was not nescessary, but raytracing is not.