The-Forge 1.26 Offers Up Vulkan-Powered Ray-Tracing On Windows & Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The-Forge 1.26 Offers Up Vulkan-Powered Ray-Tracing On Windows & Linux

The-Forge, a rendering framework that has supported Vulkan on Linux for the past year, is now a lot more interesting as it's newest release now opens up Vulkan ray-tracing support for both Windows and Linux...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=The-Forge-1.26-Vulkan-RTX

[theriddick]

Hmm, how does AMD cards use this tech? is everyone just supporting RTX, what exactly does AMD use?

[finalzone]

Hmm, how does AMD cards use this tech? is everyone just supporting RTX, what exactly does AMD use?

Similar to Cryengine demo running on AMD Vega 56: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nqhkDm2_Tw
No need for RTX or Tensor core.

[starshipeleven]

Hmm, how does AMD cards use this tech? is everyone just supporting RTX, what exactly does AMD use?

Ray tracing does not require specialized hardware, any GPU can do it.

NVIDIA has ray tracing accelerators (for RTX cards) for their own proprietary raytracing implementation (how unexpected) so it will probably run it better on lower end cards.

[juno]

Hmm, how does AMD cards use this tech? is everyone just supporting RTX, what exactly does AMD use?

RTX is the Nvidia implementation and it is used via Vulkan and d3d12 extensions. AMD is free to implement those once they have hardware acceleration.
They're even free to implement it in software right now, as Nvidia is currently doing for their Pascal GPUs.

[DrYak]

NVIDIA has ray tracing accelerators (for RTX cards) for their own proprietary raytracing implementation (how unexpected) so it will probably run it better on lower end cards.

That's assuming "Ray Tracing Accelerators" isn't just marketing bullshit about finding a new application of their 8-bit precision ALUs used normally for neural nets and repurposed as a post processing filter attempting to make lower numbers of rays-per-pixel look less crappy with a couple of operations used in intersecting ray and hierarchically finding objets thrown in with better acceleration.

[starshipeleven]

That's assuming "Ray Tracing Accelerators" isn't just marketing bullshit about finding a new application of their 8-bit precision ALUs used normally for neural nets and repurposed as a post processing filter attempting to make lower numbers of rays-per-pixel look less crappy with a couple of operations used in intersecting ray and hierarchically finding objets thrown in with better acceleration.

Hm, so are you saying RTX hardware is exactly the same hardware used in compute cards but not "usable for computing" (through artificial restrictions in the driver) because it is gaming card?

No it can't be. I can't believe NVIDIA would do such a thing.


(yes I'm being sarcastic)

That said, do AMD consumer cards have similar hardware that could be used to do the same job?
Would a rendering framework based on Vulkan be able to operate this hardware so the card can do a better job than doing raytracing on shaders?

[SaucyJack]

To clarify some things before the Nvidia fanboys drown this thread in marketing bs/propaganda... There is nothing special about 'RTX cores'. Vega 56 was demoed running ray tracing just fine.

[starshipeleven]

To clarify some things before the Nvidia fanboys drown this thread in marketing bs/propaganda... There is nothing special about 'RTX cores'. Vega 56 was demoed running ray tracing just fine.

A techdemo is not a finished game though, and we haven't seen lower end cards with RTX (or raytracing through other means) yet, which is where you would clearly see if the fabled "RT Cores" are indeed some form of hardware accelerators or just rebranded computing hardware all cards have.

[theriddick]

To clarify some things before the Nvidia fanboys drown this thread in marketing bs/propaganda... There is nothing special about 'RTX cores'. Vega 56 was demoed running ray tracing just fine.

Yes well, the special thing about them is they are capable of doing 120 odd FP16 TFLOPs on top of the FP32 performance of the main core, at least how I understand it.
However I must say the tensor core thing seems like an expensive way to increase compute power of a GPU.
Also the tensor only calculates geometry or something for ray tracing, the actual ray tracing is still done on the GPU...

Shame NVIDIA didn't make a AIO ray tracing core, that would have been special!