Vulkan Ray-Tracing Arrives With New Khronos Extension

[pinguinpc]

In my case d9vk still working



And native still works (dirt 4)

[Stefem]

I suppose there's some value in that if devs target the older GPUs by making more simplistic games or reducing the value of RT.

I wouldn't expect most people to play with sub 30 fps though (on 1080 max) so I'm not really sure if the value is there especially considering that those older GPUs will only be getting older and the performance gap will only lengthen considerably each time a newer GPU gen is released.

The CryEngine RT demo is interesting as it doesn't use RT hardware but if all hardware becomes RT hardware then running games using RT on pre-RT hardware gets kind of silly.

Mesa should just support RT on RT enabled hardware and work on more important things.

The CryEngine RT demo had a really limited use of ray tracing, that's why it have acceptable performance on GPUs lacking dedicated ray tracing hardware, however, honestly I didn't get impressed by it as you can run Battlefield V with much more ray tracing on the same Pascal based GTX 1080 with faster performance

[theriddick]

Will be interesting to see how this fairs against stuff like DXR and RTX.

[Stefem]

However I'm probably worried for nothing here as from the limited look I've into Nvidia's tensor cores (i.e their ray-tracing hardware) and what I've read about AMD's new yet-to-be-named ray-tracing hardware first shown in the new Xbox they do sound pretty similar, at least in principle. Hence it's probably not that much work to get AMD's RT cores to run this code and run it at similar levels of performance.

That's absolutely not true, NVIDIA isn't using tensor cores to accelerate ray tracing, they have special dedicated hardware for it

[Imroy]

That's absolutely not true, NVIDIA isn't using tensor cores to accelerate ray tracing, they have special dedicated hardware for it

True, but they use the tensor cores to perform de-noising. From what I've seen, they typically only shoot a single shadow ray (per light), so the raw result is really noisy.

[pal666]

The biggest issue going forward is that neither AMD, nor NVIDIA will be able to infinitely make their GPU dies bigger which means we'll have to eventually migrate to multi-die solutions and I've no idea how AMD/NVIDIA will tackle this issue.

ryzens are multi-die already, did sky fall? the issue with multigpu setup is separate memory, not multiple dies

[smitty3268]

ryzens are multi-die already, did sky fall? the issue with multigpu setup is separate memory, not multiple dies

Yeah, it's more complicated for GPUs but AMD has big plans for their infinity fabric. Intel is working on the same thing for their Xe GPUs, but supposedly right now it's far too power-hungry to work well. I'm sure NVidia has something similar going on behind closed doors, we just don't get much news out of them until they are ready to announce it.

[Jabberwocky]

I'm always somewhat worried whenever Vulkan and OpenGL adapt extensions created by specific vendors into the common language specification. It reminds me of the mess of different vendor-specific versions and incomplete implementations that OpenGL was in the early 2000s and how that helped Direct3D gain a dominant market position at a staggering pace. This market domination is also the reason why we don't see more Linux ports as it's much harder to get Direct3D-using games running on non-Windows platforms than ones that use OpenGL or Vulkan.

However I'm probably worried for nothing here as from the limited look I've into Nvidia's tensor cores (i.e their ray-tracing hardware) and what I've read about AMD's new yet-to-be-named ray-tracing hardware first shown in the new Xbox they do sound pretty similar, at least in principle. Hence it's probably not that much work to get AMD's RT cores to run this code and run it at similar levels of performance.

Come to think of it... Maybe I should borrow one of the Quadro RTX graphics cards from my work machine for a quick "corona sabbatical" and really look into what this hardware can be used for? Haven't really had a proper vacation at my current job since I started in April 2018 so I've definitely got enough vacation days stored up for a week or two.

I feel the same about everything you said. Looking at the docs it appears that the pipelines are using shaders but the devil is in the details.

There are some amazing open source projects that you can read through. Many people have studied ray tracking and so it's relatively easy to absorb their findings. Obviously not many using the Vulkan ray-tracing extensions, but it will come.

PS: I'm also behind in holidays. Only 1 week leave since June 2016, but I'm to blame not my company.

[Stefem]

True, but they use the tensor cores to perform de-noising. From what I've seen, they typically only shoot a single shadow ray (per light), so the raw result is really noisy.

They actually don't, their explanation was that approach to real time denoiser are evolving rapidly and by the time AI learning end better approach come out. Tensor cores are only used to denoise on pro rendering software and DLSS image reconstruction tech is games