how much of this is due to crypto? do they have a raytracing chip that's much less general purpose and specific to raytracing (and incompatible with mining)?
Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing
171–180 of 235 posts
Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. You can use PBR concepts in an old school renderman style pipeline, but that's not why it's been a big deal in VFX. With a PBRT style renderer, everything is handled in a single monte carlo framework. And once you get an unbiased renderer that meets your standards, you can implement schemes like irradiance caching or photon mapping that introduce bias, but greatly accelerate rendering (and reduce noise). That o…
With 4K around for corner for regular gamer screens, and top of the line GPUs that cannot handle that at an acceptable speed yet, I think it's a long time before we see that. Maybe when a 200$ GPU can do 4K 60 fps, but until then 5-10% gain is seen as worth chasing.
Every pass doesn't have to be rendered at native resolution, and most aren't. When you're running a game at 4K on your PS4 pro or modern PC, very often the 4K image is being produced using a mix of temporal anti-aliasing (accumulating a full image over time across multiple frames), heuristic upsampling, etc. Many post-processing passes run well below screen resolution even if you're running at 1080p - things like SSAO and even particle effects are typically rendered at a lower resolution.
Also, many modern games have been hitting 60fps at 4k on mid-high tier cards for years - you can hit 60 at 4k with reasonable quality settings in a game like MGS5 or GTA5 on a single 970. If you get a 1080 way more stuff runs great, even at higher settings.
Many modern games have an internal resolution slider as well, so you can set the internal resolution to 80 or 90% and still get your UI rendered at full 4K resolution. If the game has temporal anti-aliasing the difference tends to be hard to spot.
Finally, if you've got a freesync or gsync monitor, a few dips down to 50fps at 4k aren't going to be super noticeable, and the games look great. :)
Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing
#173Is this open source?
No, DirectX is proprietary closed-source technology from Microsoft.
Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft is the dominant platform for games. What financial gain would they derive from pursuing a non lock in strategy?
Sometimes I just wish Valve* would pop up and announce: 'oh so HL3 is coming out soon, and it will be a Steam Linux exclusive for the first 6 months.' While not likely, something like that would be a really interesting gauge of how likely genuine Linux adoption could be... * I use Valve due to their apparent Linux push with SteamOS (what's the go with that btw!?)
Most people are not Linux fanatics like you. 99.9% of people do not care to use Windows as long as it works.
Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't seen evidence one way or the other, but it's specifically labeled "real-time GPU raytracing." Do you have evidence it doesn't run at 60 fps?
Well, the video is clearly dropping frames so obviously not maintaining 60fps...
"Real-time" has never meant 60fps. It typically just means interactive framerates - fast enough to drag a camera around or move an actor. You can get away with calling 20fps realtime, and lots of stuff runs at 24 or 30fps. (Obviously nobody wants a game like Doom or Battlefield to run at 20 fps, though.)
Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing
#176And here's a nice demo from Remedy https://youtu.be/70W2aFr5-Xk
This has a lot of artifacts and does not look better to me than full fledged games that have already been released.
It's a tech demo. It's not supposed to look better than retail games, it just shows off some new experimental technology. If you check out the slide deck for the demo they compare each technique with existing solutions (i.e. SSAO vs traced AO, SS reflections vs traced reflections) and the advantages are very obvious.
If you want to see how much existing techniques suffer compared to tracing, just check out the absolutely miserable, incredibly ugly, just disgusting screen space reflections in the brand-new Crytek game Hunt: Showdown. The water is a nightmare.
Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing
#177Friendly reminder DirectX is a proprietary windows-specific API, with its associated lock-in. Don't fall for such simple trap.
Use OpenGL or Vulkan if you want. Modern (AZDO) GL and Vulkan wouldn't exist if Direct3D 9 & 10 hadn't dragged the state of the art forward by actually having reasonable APIs and well-specified behaviors.
Direct3D has had world-class debugging tools and a reference renderer for years, meanwhile when I'm trying to ship OpenGL games the shader compiler doesn't even work the same across multiple PCs. (Vulkan fixes this stuff, yay!)
It sucks that DX is proprietary but the proprietary nature of it means that it can achieve things that are only possible with full integration - just like Metal on iOS and OS X.
Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing
#178The article says that MS (like everyone else) expects there to be fewer and fewer "fixed-function" features in a GPU with more shifting over to software-defined shader code. But isn't this just an introduction of more fixed-functionality to the pipeline? So what's the advantage of doing it this way versus writing a ray tracer in the current compute shaders?
APIs like a ray tracing API can be implemented in driver software (on-CPU) or in device firmware (on-GPU, but programmatic, not in silicon). Technically this also applies for the old fixed-function pipeline, of course, but it's worth considering the difference.
A raytracing API also isn't forced into the pipeline for every rasterized polygon like old features - hardware T&L, geometry shaders, etc - were. It's something you use on-demand in a compute or fragment shader.
Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing
#179Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing
#180Friendly reminder DirectX is a proprietary windows-specific API, with its associated lock-in. Don't fall for such simple trap.
Use OpenGL or Vulkan if you want. Modern (AZDO) GL and Vulkan wouldn't exist if Direct3D 9 & 10 hadn't dragged the state of the art forward by actually having reasonable APIs and well-specified behaviors. Direct3D has had world-class debugging tools and a reference renderer for years, meanwhile when I'm trying to ship OpenGL games the shader compiler doesn't even work the same across multiple PCs. (Vulkan fixes this…
And PS2 SPUs, PS3 libGNM, libGCNM and Nintendo GX, GX2, NVN.
Apple saved OpenGL from being irrelevant thanks to NeXTSTEP and their OpenGL ES push on iOS, because they needed to attract devs, now with the commoditizationof middleware among AAA studios that is no longer a relevant.
And it remains to be seen if Vulkan will ever get any adoption beyond Linux and flagship Android phones.