NVIDIA RTX Real-Time Ray Tracing Tech Demo From Remedy Entertainment - General

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkhBlmKtEAk

Minus points for proprietary technology

But they still haven't announced any consumer cards that can actually run this.

Reminded me of Real-time Global Illumination by Precomputed Local Reconstruction from Sparse Radiance Probes, a research paper that was released around half a year ago by Aalto University, Remedy and NVIDIA. The global illumination work they detailed in the paper is probably in use here, though I can't say for sure.

There's something so very, very uncanny about all the footage. It looks great, but so close to real that it looks so far away from reality.

its mainly because the raytracing is still noisy so your seeing weird gradients everywhere nvidia said in yt comments they are getting a denoiser onto it later

I think there's an artistic choice to it here, Remedy's games have always been fairly washed out/overly reflective so I feel like the contractor was probably trying to emulate that look.

I'm still waiting on their fluid physics and grass https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2j_HNzXUUc

I was listening to the Anarchy Reigns OST as I started watching the video, I didn't expect it to fit it like a glove (camera moving around a strange bar)

The grass is used in the PC version of the newest Final Fantasy game. The fluid physics are used sparingly throughout titles, Borderlands 2 probably being the one to include the most prominent integration.

Fucking Nvidia goddamnit I hate how they keep doing this shit, but they'll never change eyup. They say there should be partial back-porting, though, and a fallback layer for hardware that doesn't support this. Tbh there's no reason this has to only perform well on Nvidia cards, since most graphics cards nowadays have obnoxious quantities of compute power that go vastly underused in most applications. There was a paper on volumetric forward lighting that was able to hit several million lights in a scene before dropping below 60fps - while it was on a Titan card, that still potentially means tens of thousands of lights are easily achievable on most consumer cards. The big trick is just putting everything you can onto the GPU through compute shaders: generating a BVH, generating AABBs, sorting the AABBs/BVH, updating the light positions, doing culling, etc. Nvidia GPUs in particular do seem to expose a lot more concurrency in the compute stuff than AMD though: while multiple hardware graphics queues are rare (usually done by firmware multiplexing, incurring overhead), multiple queues for command submission and then potential parallel execution are pretty common. The 1060 + 1070 both have 8 potential queues for executing compute jobs (akin to threads in a CPU). Idk, this is really neat but it's still thoroughly tainted by being Nvidia's tech tbh. And it's only DX12, ofc. Khronos and the various organizations supporting Vulkan don't have the resources for a tech like this, I think

There are a few titles that support Turf afaik, Ghost Recon Wildlands being one of them, was made in a pretty meh way, though

Don't really care until either AMD makes a solution or Nvidia stop being giant dickheads about it.

There's something...wrong about this demo, like it's only partially ray-traced (maybe just the reflections? Things aren't adding up if you look closely.

The future is here

the entire point of this video is that this tech runs on a consumer graphics card coming out soon

So as an idiot what exactly am I looking at and why is this groundbreaking? Looks beautiful tho

Psh, ray tracing is so late 90s. Let me know when we get real-time path tracing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_tracing Although at least we have this: Amietia • Quake 2 Realtime GPU Pathtracing For realsies tho this is cool as heck but why does it have to be proprietary

Disney made a video that explains Path Tracing, which is similar to ray tracing but is more efficient. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frLwRLS_ZR0

Raytracing is usually a process that takes a very long time depending on how detailed the scene is, even on the most powerful computers. Most attempts at running raytracing in realtime often results in a massive amount of noise or just generally poor quality. Raytracing provides much much more realistic results because it's currently the closest we have to simulating how real light works.

Neat, I didn't know he actually released this. Doesn't run too badly on my 770 if I lower the resolution

EA's demo is pretty neat as well. [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkhBlmKtEAk ]

Pretty impressive. Can't wait for their announcements tomorrow.

There's honestly nothing groundbreaking about the tech, realtime raytracing has been a thing for a while. Its really just an easier interface for DirectX developers to enable and exploit raytracing for various rendering techniques, afaik (bolded after reading more articles on it). Might be some driver-level optimizations, or could use really optimized shaders for the various abstracted tasks that the programmer chooses to enable. That would be most of it, imo, as building an interface and writing the optimized intemediary bytecode for the shaders could absorb a lot of time and development. Also: https://twitter.com/thekhronosgroup/status/976071695374213121 !!!!! this is pretty heckin' exciting. Vulkan 1.1 gave us subgroup operations, which open up lots and lots of chances for highly optimized compute operations and I can already think of applications for them in Ray tracing. For me, they're allowing to write much more optimized almost synchronization-free merge sorts and reductions. They also map to Shader Model 6.0 commands in DX12 (i think), and since SPIR-V compilers can already take HLSL shaders this makes it even easier for applications to port to or use Vulkan. So it's really not crazy for Vulkan (and by relation, AMD) to have similar capabilities soon-ish. There haven't been any major features update for Vulkan yet, but Khronos has vaguely hinted about a 2.0 spec being around somewhere. It should feature expanded compute abilities (potentially merging in much of OpenCL, as they plan to do so eventually), and I wouldn't be surprised if they add this too. Vulkan is missing a lot of the convenience features of DirectX, so I'm curious how the working group plans to implement ray tracing into the spec. Onus still falls on the implementers though: so Nvidia could potentially just either choose to shim Vulkan calls through their RTX tech, or they could be dicks and have a sub-par implementation of ray tracing stuff just for Vulkan maybe. Also, AMD has a real-time ray-tracing talk scheduled for GDC tomorrow. I'll have to take a look at the slides, if I can. Also, this was released yesterday too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2Jq4EcV3xk

Damn, why couldn't it be in games I play? It would have been great in The Witcher 3 for the parts where you're walking through fields and tracking something

see, now THIS is real. notice how much more sense things make when you pause and look than the OP video.