Ray Tracing

[CashmereThoughts]

I don't think its a thread whether you can do without it or not. We can all do without technical advances we've yet to experience. Question is; is ray tracing performance a deal breaker when buying a card?

We're not getting hurt by RT right now, but what about when the devs have it built from ground up or leave the setting out?

I find this quote from @Humbucker on point, to which I may add; nobody bothered to give a detailed response to.

• saying that nvidia "blew their lead" is a very reductive mindset. pure rasterisation is a time honoured conservative approach to real time rendering. it does the job, but essentially you're stuck using limited techniques. there's a reason graphical leaps have stagnated so much and you can play a five year old game and it'll look almost as good as a brand new one.
  
  we're reaching the limit of pure rasterisation and all its tricks, there's a reason all high end CGI has been using Global Illumination for decades now. ray tracing, global illumination and eventually path tracing is necessary for the next step and AI reconstruction techniques like DLSS will be required to get us there.
  
  AMD have gone all out on the traditional methods and if you're only interested in pure rasterised performance per pound (and watt) then they'll have you covered., Nvidia have taken a more future-facing approach and for people who want to get in on the ground floor, the tech has matured to the point where it's possible without massive sacrifices (unlike the 2xxx series).
  
  it's a great time to be buying a card whichever mindset you subscribe to, if only we could actually buy them.

 

[Poneros]

He's right, for the future. The really far off future. For present generation, ie next 7-8 years it's still ray tracing as a garnish. Don't believe me? Watch UE5 demo and count the # of raytracing techniques. Problem is he's overhyping a much more mundane reality:

 

[CashmereThoughts]

@Poneros have we just hit a plateau, for the next 5-7 years? Devs are always pushing boundaries and it's see-saw between what can and cannot be done. I genuinely think we have hit a wall regarding rasterisation, of course, more educated minds can set me straight, but like with every technique we have to move forward and Ray Tracing is here and now.

 

[gpuerrilla]

In before Grim makes an appearance.

 

[Poneros]

@Poneros have we just hit a plateau, for the next 5-7 years? Devs are always pushing boundaries and it's see-saw between what can and cannot be done. I genuinely think we have hit a wall regarding rasterisation, of course, more educated minds can set me straight, but like with every technique we have to move forward and Ray Tracing is here and now.

Not even close. Look at that demo, that's all rasterisation innovation. That will keep getting pushed & it will be mixed in with some RT on desktop for edge cases where you really can't push rasterisation further (eg reflections) without also incurring similar performance penalty as RT, in which case it's pointless. But it will all still be a mix, we're still at least 4 GPU generations away from where RT can just take over (almost) everything... but that will still be on the highest end GPUs, and so add more years until performance trickles down for masses too. It might not even be next generation consoles in fact.

But that's okay, it will come. We kinda hit the pixel limit with 4K since 8K is too much diminishing returns for flat displays, so there's not gonna be a focus for 8K native res. So then all that's left is to drive all the GPU power to these sorts of effects, and that's pretty much what's happening.

 

[K1LaW8tt5]

I hoping this thread was made just to keep zx busy.

 

[NZXT30]

That won't happen until consoles can handle it easily and next gen consoles have RT performance which is worse than the new AMD cards.

 

[CashmereThoughts]

@pongo that is UE5 is it not? Running at 1440p. 4k rasterisation, rt, dlss? Where does an amd see a solution to that?

This thread may sound loaded but I'd not be happier if AMD did what they did to intel.

 

[CashmereThoughts]

That won't happen until consoles can handle it easily and next gen consoles have RT performance which is worse than the new AMD cards.

I don't think it works like that.

 

[Chuk_Chuk]

@Poneros have we just hit a plateau, for the next 5-7 years? Devs are always pushing boundaries and it's see-saw between what can and cannot be done. I genuinely think we have hit a wall regarding rasterisation, of course, more educated minds can set me straight, but like with every technique we have to move forward and Ray Tracing is here and now.

What do people mean when they say we've hit a wall?
Regarding the post you quoted to start the thread. Are we just going to ignore that consoles are the driving force behind game developemtn and that we have been on the same generation during the time period he has quoted?

Have you seen the Demon Souls remake?

 

[stooeh]

It's perk for sure but I don't think it's a deal breaker. I would take either based on availability right now. Once both are freely available (if ever ) then maybe can weigh up the raster vs RT differences...

 

[signal11th]

It's perk for sure but I don't think it's a deal breaker. I would take either based on availability right now. Once both are freely available (if ever ) then maybe can weigh up the raster vs RT differences...

Pretty much this I grabbed a 3070 FE only because it was the only thing available 2 months after the launch, but RT I really don;t care about so either a 3080 or a 6800xt would have been fine with me and I'm a bit of a NV fanboy.

 

[CashmereThoughts]

What do people mean when they say we've hit a wall?
Regarding the post you quoted to start the thread. Are we just going to ignore that consoles are the driving force behind game developemtn and that we have been on the same generation during the time period he has quoted?

Have you seen the Demon Souls remake?

To that I say Red Dead Redemption 2. To paraphrase Digital Foundry, a love letter to next gen.

Consoles are still way behind.

 

[Poneros]

@pongo that is UE5 is it not? Running at 1440p. 4k rasterisation, rt, dlss? Where does an amd see a solution to that?

This thread may sound loaded but I'd not be happier if AMD did what they did to intel.

A solution to what? To DLSS? It will be Super Resolution (agnostic, for all vendors and platforms, not requiring per-game implementation). For RT? They will ofc keep innovating on their hardware for better RT performance (very important here is the software - remember we haven't seen it play out yet because new consoles are just now getting out & it takes time for games to come out; everything ray traced before Nov has been done hand in hand with Nvidia, so hard to draw long term conclusions from old stuff). 4K rasterisation? They're neck & neck with Nvidia, maybe even going to trounce them with the 6900 XT (we'll see).

 

[Grim5]

Its an interesting time in the market.

prefer old games that use old graphics techniques? perhaps AMD is for you
prefer new and upcoming games that use next gen graphics techniques? perhaps Nvidia is for you

 

[pc-guy]

Agree with @Poneros analysis. The traditional rasterisation is far from dead and hit a wall there will always be innovations to improve visuals and along with RT to bring next level of experiences.

As right now RT is pure gimmick. Even with current Nvidia hardware RT performance is abysmal. RT performance to be acceptable is at least another 2/3 gen GPU away. So no point in buying current gen of GPU based on RT metrics. Who would pay £1400 for 60fps gaming...

 

[Wrinkly]

That won't happen until consoles can handle it easily and next gen consoles have RT performance which is worse than the new AMD cards.

Consoles and the new AMD cards can do it easily, they just do it at lower image quality. 30FPS, 1/2 or 1/4 resolution and/or checkerboarded.

 

[Wrinkly]

Agree with @Poneros analysis. The traditional rasterisation is far from dead and hit a wall there will always be innovations to improve visuals and along with RT to bring next level of experiences.

As right now RT is pure gimmick. Even with current Nvidia hardware RT performance is abysmal. RT performance to be acceptable is at least another 2/3 gen GPU away. So no point in buying current gen of GPU based on RT metrics. Who would pay £1400 for 60fps gaming...

The 3080(£650) running Quake 2 RTX produces more than 60FPS at 1440p. That's full scene denoised path tracing. Nvidia has a small team looking to take other older games and add RT to them in the same fashion. I'd say we now have usable / playable RT.

 

[pc-guy]

The 3080(£650) running Quake 2 RTX produces more than 60FPS at 1440p. That's full scene denoised path tracing. Nvidia has a small team looking to take other older games and add RT to them in the same fashion. I'd say we now have usable / playable RT.

What’s the 1% low on that. Probably 40fps

UR2 without RT what performance we getting on RTX 3080 to drop down this this level?

who is still playing UR2 anyway? I can appreciate the novelty in providing RT to old games but what’s the point of it?

RT in these new games are horrific. That’s the true metric of playable or not playable. To get ever 60fps you need 3090. You are talking about 50-60% performance hit on RT. That’s unacceptable as a feature.

 

[shankly1985]

Its an interesting time in the market.

prefer old games that use old graphics techniques? perhaps AMD is for you
prefer new and upcoming games that use next gen graphics techniques? perhaps Nvidia is for you

What the hell are you smoking?

AMD has release a GPU with Ray tracing support working on past games that was built and optimised for Nvidia! That is all! New games built with RDNA2 and Ray tracing will perform much better! That is a fact!

So I guess that leave DLSS? Well AMD will in time release there own version. It will just take a little longer that is all.