Anyone else given this a shufti? Steam, direct. It's the first thing I've tried that uses the RT Cores, and confirms that I can actually use them in Linux. Which I wasn't sure would be the case. Hooray!
From what i've seen... Quake 2 in 1997 - playable at 800*600 Quake 2 RTX in 2019 - only playable at 800*600
On the 2080 currently resting in my rig, I'm getting a good 50-60fps at 1920x1200, all settings cranked, 120% rendering resolution. Naturally, if you ain't got RT Cores, those figures are going way down.
Stolen from here: https://wccftech.com/quake-2-rtx-is-out-and-what-kind-of-performance-you-can-expect/ In short, if you don't have an RTX card then don't even try it.
I'm not sure what to make of it... On the plus side it does highlight the potential of raytracing as a solution to remaster all those early 3D games that look like an explosion of vomit into something tolerable. On the other hand it confirms the suspicion many will have had: Even the 2080TI is orders of magnitude too slow for a "proper" raytraced modern game.
You don't need to buy it; it's free. I think the confusion stems from the fact that your FTFY said "if you don't have an RTX card or anything from AMD either, then don't even try it" - which reads that "anything from AMD" would be able to run it, though from your follow-up I think you meant the opposite. Interestingly, you can disable the RTX renderer: in video options you can drop to OpenGL, which gives you High Resolution Quake II instead of Ray Traced Quake II. It'd make sense for it to drop to OpenGL automatically if it can't find an RTX-compatible GPU in the system (i.e. if you're running an older Nvidia or any AMD GPU) - but I guess that wasn't a priority for Nvidia.
I think their goal was to show off full path-traced graphics. If they silently failed back to raster (or even failed back with a giant red THIS IS NOT RAY TRACED warning on startup) you'd get a slew of comments that "Raytracing totally just looks like normal Quake RT sucks LOL!".
Yeah, this is surely designed to show that if you want ray tracing that doesn't run like a slideshow then you need an RTX card. What better way to demonstrate that than to allow non-RTX to experience the full glory of 15fps?
I'd like to dismiss hardware accelerated ray-tracing as a gimmick with little real-world value... however I'm reminded of the days when hardware accelerated transform & lighting (T&L) was a brand new thing, way back in late 1999/early 2000... Hardware T&L was in a similar situation when it first launched: at first it was only supported under OpenGL and only a handful of titles actually made use of it. From what I can see, the first graphics card to support hardware T&L was the GeForce 256, and one of those cards with DDR memory would set you back $280 at the time (see this old Tom's Hardware review). If you adjust for inflation that comes to about $430 in today's USD - for comparison the cheapest RTX 2060 card I see on Scan is £300, $380 in funnymoney. DirectX 7 eventually came along with hardware T&L support and within a couple of years hardware T&L units were standard in all discrete 3D graphics cards. (Side note: the addition of a hardware transform and lighting engine into the GeForce 256 is what prompted Nvidia to stop calling their graphics chipsets "accelerators" and start calling them "graphics processing units": the entire 3D rendering pipeline was contained in one architecture and didn't rely on any outside components.) Hardware assisted ray-tracing is only supported on one GPU range right now, but others are round the corner. Much like hardware T&L wasn't necessary if you had a very fast CPU to compensate, hardware-assisted ray-tracing isn't necessary now if your current graphics card can push sufficiently high resolutions and framerates that you don't miss the extra ray-tracing effects. Give it a couple of years or so and hardware accelerated ray-tracing may well be just another part of modern GPU design, much like hardware accelerated T&L was back in the day. When I think back about how far this stuff has come in my lifetime - and I'm not even really that old - I realise that, actually, in a lot of ways PC gaming has never been this good. That's exactly how I read it at first
You can take the reviews of the first T&L cards (or later, the first cards with unified shaders) and do a find & replace with "raytracing", and get basically the same reviews as for RTX cards: "all this new stuff is neat, but there's not many games that support it, and the cards are more expensive and not as much faster in current games as if they had not implemented new hardware in place of more of the current hardware".
That's exactly my point . Give it time and RTX/AMD-equivalent enabled cards will come down in price, more mainstream titles will support it, and in a few years it'll be normal.
RTRT will be like AA... it'll be a while before performance improves to the point it offsets how much having it enabled hobbles performance, and it'll be one of the first things you turn off to get your frame rates up.
Kind of, except if also shows it'll probably be 2030 before they can achieve halfway acceptable performance when trying the same trick with something like this: or this:
Don;t be so sure, we're used to raster performance scaling with scene complexity, but RT scaling is more closely tied to output buffer size than the scene (barring tricks like assuming all surfaces are orthogonal like you can do with Minecraft). And to be extra-facetious, here's Crysis with limited raytraced GI shading (retrofitted, so screen-space only because it is performed after culling):