Mesa's CPU-Based Vulkan Driver Now Supports Ray-Tracing

[sophisticles]

Another top notch, well thought out idea from the open source community.

I think instead of criticizing we should be supporting them with a few bugs.

Remember, the only ones that we are allowed to criticize are Microsoft, Apple and NVIDIA, but the open source community?

They can do no wrong.

[dlq84]

Another top notch, well thought out idea from the open source community.

I think instead of criticizing we should be supporting them with a few bugs.

Remember, the only ones that we are allowed to criticize are Microsoft, Apple and NVIDIA, but the open source community?

They can do no wrong.

Oh look another dumb comment from you. This is done for testing purposes, not for gaming use.

[Phoronos]

Don't be such a spoil sport. Additionally they still make gpus that don't support OpenGL and Vulkan and compositors are moving towards require it. CPU based options allow for it to run. Not necessarily fast, but run.

Just remember that the GPUs were ESPECIALLY invented to REPLACE the CPUS for the graphics calculations. Any cpu based graphics is a bad design from the start and should be avoided.

[ReaperX7]

Guys, remember that the graphics should be done by the GPU and not the CPU.
I am personaly against those drivers which use the CPU instead of the GPU, they shouldnt even exist...and should never be used, except for testing purposes.
That's my opinion.

The purpose is mainly for rendering not gaming, but like anything, if it can work with gaming then it will.

If testing can bring new things in to make things better, then by all means. Remember the purpose of being free open source software is to allow freedom of development and do things without restrictions. If those new things can bring compatibility to more hardware, then by all means please add it. CPU or GPU, support is support. Llvmpipe/lavapipe is primarily used by Virtual Machines and older GPUs that don't have modern Gallium based drivers anyway. But it is useful for testing systems also.

Most GPUs are more effective at 1440p anyway, by allowing more CPU utilization, it would actually work better and the extra cores not used by the game or rendering application would serve well.

It might not be exactly playable, but it proves the concept of RTRT doesn't have to be strictly a GPU thing.

[Phoronos]

The purpose is mainly for rendering not gaming, but like anything, if it can work with gaming then it will.

Most GPUs are more effective at 1440p anyway, by allowing more CPU utilization, it would actually work better and the extra cores not used by the game or rendering application would serve well.

It might not be exactly playable, but it proves the concept of RTRT doesn't have to be strictly a GPU thing.

Sorry to disagree but that's the GPU's job and not the CPU's job to do the rendering.

[TemplarGR]

"On June 12, 2008, Intel demonstrated a special version of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, titled Quake Wars: Ray Traced, using ray tracing for rendering, running in basic HD (720p) resolution. ETQW operated at 14–29 frames per second on a 16-core (4 socket, 4 core) Xeon Tigerton system running at 2.93 GHz."

https://web.archive.org/web/20081002030022/http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-37925-113.html

In 2008 CPU based real time ray tracing worked, now 16 years later it's suddenly unfeasible despite CPUs having become up to 40x faster (in MT workloads)? Are Linux users experts in everything? You are not. Could be a little bit more humble.

Path Tracing (as opposed to Ray Tracing) could be still ways away though but it's not what this news piece is about.

One of the few times in this forum when Avis pwned the n00bs with superior arguments and logic. I agree with him. People vastly underestimate multi-core cpus these days and overhype the dgpus which are essentially glorified SIMDs. I agree though that bandwidth starvation could be a factor but in the future perhaps we could enjoy SoCs with much better cache and more RAM channels.

[TemplarGR]

Cache, bandwidth and cores on a CPU will not help you to achieve comparable ray tracing acceleration like modern GPUs which got dedicated ray tracing hardware.

The "dedicated ray tracing hardware" are really just programmable shaders mostly.... There is no "fixed function" ray tracing hardware. It is not some kind of "special instructions only RT uses". I really don't understand why people think that gpus are really that much better than cpus. gpus mostly exploit parallelization and dedicated large RAM bandwidth to facilitate faster graphics and very wide calculations. It is not like cpus are useless for calculations all of a sudden, and the way cpu floating point units keep getting wider and wider and their caches larger, they are going to become quite adequate for at least 1080p low detail RT. Eventually when all games become RT-only and drop the rasterization, i suppose the plan would be for APUs to completely replace budget gpus for gaming, and software RT could definitely help in that regard.

[Anux]

One of the few times in this forum when Avis pwned the n00bs with superior arguments and logic.

your funny or did you mean this serious? Following that "logic" we wouldn't even need a multi core CPU for ray tracing because ID Software already did it on the 286 in 1992. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfenstein_3D
Look how I pwnd you all!!11!!1!

No one would even compare this to what we know as ray tracing today. It had no physically based rendering, no soft shadows, no global ilumination, super low polygon count, mostly rays casted directly to textures and some mirrors. No doubt this runs on any current desktop CPU like a charm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtHDSG2wNho

But any modern rasterized hobby project looks 1000 times better than this. Of course it was a great achievement at its time.

[M.Bahr]

The "dedicated ray tracing hardware" are really just programmable shaders mostly.... There is no "fixed function" ray tracing hardware. It is not some kind of "special instructions only RT uses". I really don't understand why people think that gpus are really that much better than cpus. gpus mostly exploit parallelization and dedicated large RAM bandwidth to facilitate faster graphics and very wide calculations. It is not like cpus are useless for calculations all of a sudden, and the way cpu floating point units keep getting wider and wider and their caches larger, they are going to become quite adequate for at least 1080p low detail RT. Eventually when all games become RT-only and drop the rasterization, i suppose the plan would be for APUs to completely replace budget gpus for gaming, and software RT could definitely help in that regard.

I didn't claim by "dedicated ray tracing hardware" those to be fixed function RT hardware. Dedicated just hints to the fact that the vendor determined those so called die blocks for Ray Tracing. It depends on the vendor's implementation. While AMD's approach is more flexible, Nvidia's Ray Traversal and Intersection functions are in fact fixed. You can not do much with those besides BVH and RT calculations.

But when talking about fixed-function ray tracing hardware, this is exactly what can be achieved by programming FPGAs for this purpose. And if the gate arrays are programmed directly as RT algorithms, without an abstraction layer in between, as with shaders, then this FPGA implementation is even closer to bare metal than any abstract shader on an asic.

As for favoring GPUs over CPUs, you yourself have unwittingly implied the essential point. Besides their speciality for matrix multiplications GPUs got thousands of cores for parallelized tasks. And Ray Tracing is one of the best use cases for parallelization, because it scales very good with more RT cores.

[kneekoo]

Cool, soon I'll be able to have ray-tracing in my Quake II slideshows.