131–140 of 235 posts
I can't help but feel this is aimed at making future Augmented Reality (ie. Hololens) applications integrate into their host environments better.. or perhaps I'm just giddily over-extrapolating possibilities!
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Maybe GPU vendors will offer specialized spatial look up trees or something .
To clarify: that's more of a problem in programming the GPU in a portable manner, and that may or may not turn into a problem depending on the implementation. GPUs can do loops that run a different number of times per thread just fine, at the cost of having to wait for the slowest to finish. Things start to turn sideways if you want diverging branches though (at least AMD kind of has support for this, but it's limite…
The PowerVR guys added special purpose hardware for doing spatial lookups for raytracing.
That's great.. if you are on Windows. I get that Microsoft works on Microsoft-technology, but it really doesn't help adoption or global development as a whole. DirectX doesn't work anywhere except Windows PC's and the Xbox. That's no biggie for Microsoft, but it's bad for everyone else.
> DirectX doesn't work anywhere except Windows PC's and the Xbox. And most new phone chipsets. And a lot of old phone chipsets. And a lot of ARM-based single board computers. And a lot of non-Xbox consoles like the Switch have hardware support for DirectX... DirectX is in a lot of places you would not expect.
I'm not sure what's the big deal here; the demoscene has been doing realtime raytracing for many many years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11848097
Also, ray tracing, marching, and casting has been real-time for a while, for some definition and degree. Graphics has always been about tradeoffs, though, and this seems markedly more general purpose than anything I’ve seen before.
I’m excited, even though I don’t have any Microsoft products outside my Xbox.
The only issue is that a lot of this is already possible in the current renderers at a reduced cost. - Soft shadows work in WebGL fairly well using PCSS: https://clara.io/player/v2/8f49e7c3-7c5e-43f0-a09c-33a55bb1b... - Translucency can be faked effectively using a few different methods. https://clara.io/view/5c7d28c0-91d7-4432-a131-3e6fd657a042 - Screen space ambient occlusion, if using SAO, is amazing. SAO test: ht…
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> a lot of this is already possible in the current renderers at a reduced cost. Maybe this misses the point of standardizing an API? Isn't there considerable value in having a simple framework that can achieve all those effects, and be shared and communicated easily with others? I'm sure a lot of studios would welcome faster dev times, fewer authoring tools, and fewer geometric limits for their rendering effects. Als…
> Isn't there considerable value in having a simple framework that can achieve all those effects, and be shared and communicated easily with others? historically, gfx apis went the opposite direction. fixed function pipeline was replaced by shaders. now we rely on the api basically to do rasterization and little else. i think in ray tracing you would want a similar distillation. so like yes, the ray cast operator mig…
By "simple framework" I mean the ability to trace rays, rather than the API specifics. What I had in mind is that by being able to trace rays at all, you can very easily get all the effects on the GGP's feature list, with less effort, wider generality, and higher quality than having to code up the buffering tricks required for things like screen space reflections or percentage closer shadows.
Sadly, I doubt the copy-pasta problem is going away any time soon... I think the trend is that it's getting worse.
So why DX12 and not Vulkan? It's time for MS to start helping the industry instead of proliferating lock-in and complicating things for engine developers.
I don't know why you're getting downvotes. DirectX is harmful for consumers and only serves to lock in games and users to Microsoft Windows.
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To clarify: that's more of a problem in programming the GPU in a portable manner, and that may or may not turn into a problem depending on the implementation. GPUs can do loops that run a different number of times per thread just fine, at the cost of having to wait for the slowest to finish. Things start to turn sideways if you want diverging branches though (at least AMD kind of has support for this, but it's limite…
> Also, I doubt GPU vendors would add special-purpose hardware like that. They'd much rather just add some new shader instructions to help doing it. The PowerVR guys added special purpose hardware for doing spatial lookups for raytracing.
[1]: https://www.imgtec.com/blog/ray-traced-shadows-vs-cascaded-s...
Friendly reminder DirectX is a proprietary windows-specific API, with its associated lock-in. Don't fall for such simple trap.