Blogs Why you shouldn't dismiss Nvidia's RTX graphics cards

The thing is you're not going to eliminate the headaches of cubemap baking, sure during development when you may have constant iterations you eliminate that headache to a degree but you'll still need to do cubemapping that's what the majority of your potential customers use.

A developer may well be working on a £10k system with a GPU most people could only dream of but that not what most people use so the final product has to target those people and not the developers uber system.

Everything has ray tracing hardware, even my aging i7 920, it's not a matter of if it can do ray tracing as AMD GPUs most certainly can, it's a matter of if you can do them in what would be considered 'real time'.

 

Still not buying it... £700 tops for a 2080Ti - Else they can keep their tech and kill off the PC gaming market with their ridiculously OTT prices.

 

As an "early adopter" of an Ageia Physx card myself, I've already been burnt once, so I'm not in a hurry to get burnt a second time. I have the Asus Strix 1080Ti, the 2080Ti Strix is nearly £1500!! and barely beats the FE.

No Nvidia, NO!

 

At least with Physx there were titles with support from the off and it was a reasonable addition, there are no ray trace supported games out are there?

 

True, at least you had the plastic curtains in Mirror's Edge.

RTX is going to be dismissed for a long while yet.
Price/performance ratio in current rendering styles is just ridiculous.
Real-time ray-tracing is non existent an any current games.
We're many years away before it becomes mainstream in any way or form.

Sure, it would be great for designers to just plop a light somewhere and the ray tracing and materials do the magic, but they're going to be doing the traditional tricks as well for many years to come.
What they can do now is do the ray tracing first and see what results are expected in current rendering styles.

 

Nvidia need a good slap in the face to bring them back to reality.

 

I may be stupid but I would have thought if there was something new you wanted people to adopt and get first run on surely you would make it financially attractive in order to gain traction.

Especially if that new thing isn't currently being implemented yet.

 

I'm throwing a flag down on native advertising.

 

Gonna have to throw a meta flag on claiming any article with a positive take that goes against a general negative trend in feeling being disingenuous/paid for.

I think it's perfectly reasonable and not an uncommon position to take. Often visual innovations in GPUs beyond incremental horsepower bumps are the most interesting and long lasting. RTX might provide that for the first time in ages.

 

And I never claimed that. What I did say was that there is reward in implementing RT completely independent of any install base whatsoever. And once you have that implementation, then rolling it out for client-side use is a case of optimising an existing implementation rather than needing to implement from scratch. And that optimisation nets you fancy in-game cover shots, and an immediately noticeable quality improvement that current 'ultra nightmare WTF extreme' preset modes fail to deliver, even if a similarly small portion of the install base could ever use them.

 

Yea, you did.

That may not be how you intended it to come across but it certainly seems like you're saying developers will implement RT as soon as possible to eliminate the headaches of cubemap baking, something they can't (afaik) eliminate entirely because %90+ of their market are not going to have access to DXR capable hardware.

 

I don't think RTX will get rid of cube maps - where as non-rtx has to go straight to the cube map, RTX will bounce 2 or 3 times and then use the cube map. What you get then is something very very close to the full ray traced effect without the many bounces required to get it. It does mean you need less of them however and they don't need to be as accurate.

 

It appears I need to explain what "cubemaps" and "dynamic lighting" are.
Dynamic lighting: any game engine where lighting calculations are performed in real-time, rather than being baked into the textures. Today, this basically means any engine: completely baked lighting is relegated to games tat want to achieve a specific visual effect (e.g. using a 3D engine for sprite ordering in a psuedo-isometric perspective).
Cubemaps: also called 'light probes', are used to simulate both global reflections (of the static environment only) and global illumination (of non-moving light sources and objects only) onto objects in a scene. At multiple points per level, at least once per 'room' if not more often for optimum quality, a fully raytraced 360° sphere is rendered from those points, and projected onyo a cube texture (hence cubemap). When an object in that room is to be rendered, instead of casting rays through the scene (as with raytracing), it casts rays to the insdie surface of this cube and uses that result instead. This means all the time-consuming ray bouncing is done once and stored ('baked') rather than in realtime, but also means the reflections and GI are not strictly correct for objects in any position other than exactly where the cubemap rendering point was located. Having a single fixed cubemap for an areas causes all sorts of artefacts, like FFXIV's infamous 'googly eyes' in one area.

My point was that cubemaps aren't going to suddenly vanish, they are going to be needed for quite some time (i.e. anytime you need to target a platform that does not have real-time raytracing available, and as a fallback mode for RT), and furthermore that even if you have almost no userbase with real-time-RT capability, it still makes sense to implement RT in your engine in order to turn cubemap baking from a multi-minute process to a sub-second process.

 

Not really but whatever floats your boat.

Ah, apologies. When you said developers would implement RT as soon as possible to eliminate the headaches of cubemap baking i thought you meant developers would dispense with the storing of cubemaps, silly me.

 

EA brown grey military shooter #5 has released the patch enabling RT now:

https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/battlefield-v-raytracing-features-are-now-enabled.html

 

So basically for playable frame rates at 1080p you require a 2080Ti...

Erm, yeah, f*ck right off Nvidia.

Commercial grade hardware not yet fit for consumer usage all at a premium price.

 

Does this go along with "Ant thinks everyone should be happy with a 2 core processor by clocking the living **** out of it just to make par - bit-tech recommended".

No and err, no.

 

Maybe it's my deteriorating eye sight but I'm struggling to notice the ray tracing in the few videos posted to YouTube today that have it enabled, they show it enabled in the options and i notice puddles reflecting things but it seems very subtle.