Ray Tracing Is No New Thing
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Ray Tracing Is No New Thing
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Re: Ray Tracing Is No New Thing
#2The article concludes with a succinct TL;DR, but it's worth a read if you're at all interested.
So, ray tracing. It’s a rendering technique that has been around for over 45 years. It’s nothing new. Finally seeing the benefits of this technology enhance the environments in our games and VR worlds — in real time — thanks to a new API and dedicated consumer hardware, that’s the New Thing.
Re: Ray Tracing Is No New Thing
#3Can someone from AMD/NVidia please jump in and explain the difference between Radeon Rays (2016?) and RTX (2018)? Thanks!
Re: Ray Tracing Is No New Thing
#4The article concludes with a succinct TL;DR, but it's worth a read if you're at all interested. So, ray tracing. It’s a rendering technique that has been around for over 45 years. It’s nothing new. Finally seeing the benefits of this technology enhance the environments in our games and VR worlds — in real time — thanks to a new API and dedicated consumer hardware, that’s the New Thing.
We did learn POV-Ray in high school computer class. We rendered on our faithful Sun Microsystems workstations. Good times.
Re: Ray Tracing Is No New Thing
#5Gamers have long been clammering about how they can't wait until in-game graphics match those of pre-rendered cinematics (that said, a lot of cinematics these days are no longer pre-rendered). Ray tracing is such an expensive operation. According to this quora, it took 29 hours to render a single frame of "Monsters University": https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-to-render-a-Pixa...
We're probably nowhere close to getting real-time Pixar-quality rendering in our games right now, but we've definitely made leaps and bounds over the last few decades.
Re: Ray Tracing Is No New Thing
#6Gamers have long been clammering about how they can't wait until in-game graphics match those of pre-rendered cinematics (that said, a lot of cinematics these days are no longer pre-rendered). Ray tracing is such an expensive operation. According to this quora, it took 29 hours to render a single frame of "Monsters University": https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-to-render-a-Pixa... We're probably nowhere clo…
That's because it's a moving goalpost. Pixar keeps increasing the quality to take advantage of faster hardware and better algorithms.
We'll never be close to getting today's real-time Pixar-quality until Pixar rendering is good enough that they stop meaningfully improving it. What we can have is yesterday's Pixar quality rendering in-game.
Re: Ray Tracing Is No New Thing
#7I'd say that it is rather obvious that ray tracing is not a new thing, since it is simulates how light physically behaves.
I consider this 3d rendering as a spectrum: rasterization requires little computation but has little to do with physics. Ray tracing is what requires a lot of computation and has everything to do with physics. Somewhere in between are hybrid methods: rasterization with ray tracing components added to it, or ray tracing with approximations.
For instance, pure rasterization cannot do shadows. It is approximated by rendering the scene from the viewpoint of a light and test the rasterized scene for occlusions casting shadows. And the other way around: real time ray tracing cannot compute all indirect lighting paths, a subset is only considered at the cost of e.g. variance.
Re: Ray Tracing Is No New Thing
#8Can someone from AMD/NVidia please jump in and explain the difference between Radeon Rays (2016?) and RTX (2018)? Thanks!
Dedicated hardware to accelerate BVH traversal and ray triangle intersections. Previous GPU accelerated ray tracing implementations have just used existing hardware for programmable shaders for these but that hardware isn't ideally suited to the task.
Re: Ray Tracing Is No New Thing
#9Gamers have long been clammering about how they can't wait until in-game graphics match those of pre-rendered cinematics (that said, a lot of cinematics these days are no longer pre-rendered). Ray tracing is such an expensive operation. According to this quora, it took 29 hours to render a single frame of "Monsters University": https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-to-render-a-Pixa... We're probably nowhere clo…
That's because it's a moving goalpost. Pixar keeps increasing the quality to take advantage of faster hardware and better algorithms. We'll never be close to getting today's real-time Pixar-quality until Pixar rendering is good enough that they stop meaningfully improving it. What we can have is yesterday's Pixar quality rendering in-game.
Exactly, look at the first Toy Story and compare that to something like The Witcher 3.
Re: Ray Tracing Is No New Thing
#10Can someone from AMD/NVidia please jump in and explain the difference between Radeon Rays (2016?) and RTX (2018)? Thanks!
Dedicated hardware to accelerate BVH traversal and ray triangle intersections. Previous GPU accelerated ray tracing implementations have just used existing hardware for programmable shaders for these but that hardware isn't ideally suited to the task.
So in that case is this going to be a "G-Sync"/"Freesync" or "Gameworks"/"No, I like my framerates" thing? If developers begin supporting the RTX hardware is there a way AMD can get on board, or is this another one of NVidia's patented industry hurting moves?