NVIDIA Shows Off Quake II Path-Traced Using Vulkan RTX/Ray-Tracing

[DrYak]

As far as I understand, it is an open source contribution to an open source project,

My main gripe isn't the heavily modded Quake2 engine itself. This thing got open-sourced by id some aeons ago, and I presume nowadays such mod do still release their source as per GPL.

using Vulcan RT. To run on AMD, it would require AMD to support Vulkan RT, but no blobs.

According to the article, this demo uses NV-specific extensions to Vulkan for real-time ray-tracing.
Meaning that, even on Linux, is only exclusively works with Nvidia's own proprietary drivers, which are blobs.

The open-source Nouveau probably won't support these extensions for quite some time, because they can only rely on reverse engineering, they don't get much help from Nvidia, even less for non-tegra / for desktop hardware.

AMD and Intel *have* official opensource drivers as their main official offering (meaning even the latest driver from the latest rolling distro has them up to date) *BUT* as this real time quake 2 demo relies on Nvidia-specific extensions, RADV and ANV probably haven't implemented workarounds yet.

But as @dwagber has pointed out, Crytek has proven that Nvidia's in-house proprietary stuff isn't a hard requirement to achieve real-time ray-tracing.

[DrYak]

In the end it has to do with the companies restective target markets.

Nvidia is in the "big hardware" scheme. They'll release the biggest possible thing, even if it is outrageously expensive and horrendously wasteful of power.

They have some market in the ultra-high range computing market (cluster nodes for GPGPU clusters to be used by scientific computing).

But they have problem pushing larger numbers of units of uber-cards to the gamer demographic.

(Though the existence of uber cards helps a bit: due to these cards being well received in benchmarks, Nvidia gets its name associate with powerful cards, so when the gamer go shopping for hardware, even if they go for more reasonable compromise in term of price-point and watts, they are more likely to stick with the Nvidia brand, even if they are much better offering in that specific mid-range from competitors).

Again, Nvidia has to invent ways to push their over expensive hardware to the masses.

Realtime raytracing, where they re-purpose some of the custom hardware that they have designed for the cluster users, in order to filter/post-process the image, thus making the technology kind of big-card exclusive was their attempt at marketing their uber-cards outside of the data-center setting.

Turns out, these bells and whistle aren't a hard requirement to produce useful raytracing - as CryTek has proven (and as probably the next generation of console is going to prove again, very likely sticking to AMD GPUs/APUs. Comment also applies to remote streaming as Google's Stradia and their choice of GPU).

Nvidia has basically painted themselves in a not-so-profitable corner. In the short term it still works (they still have their scientific higher-margin market), but in the longterm ...

[arokh]

What rolling release are you using that this is an issue on? As long as the distribution packages the driver I have never had an issue updating my kernel.

I think you misunderstood me. I never have an issue like that, if my distribution package it or not. I'd just update the package myself.