Ray-Tracing Is All The Rage At This Year's Game Developers Conference

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ray-Tracing Is All The Rage At This Year's Game Developers Conference

The annual Game Developers Conference (GDC 18) kicked off yesterday in San Francisco and one of the most popular topics this year is ray-tracing...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GDC-18-All-About-Ray-Tracing

[Naquatis]

Uhh ahhh DirectX 12 did not get adopted as well as Vulkan -> we need to put in some more realistic realtime stuff! Yesterday I saw Mono got replaced by Visual Studio for Linux. They pushing really hard didn't they?

[GruenSein]

On the plus side: AMD's ray tracing SDK is built on Vulkan and should therefore be independent of the underlying platform and hardware manufacturer.
As always, NVIDIA has simply come up with an SDK to showcase their upcoming tensor cores which basically locks out anyone without their latest GPU series.

[humbug]

Uhh ahhh DirectX 12 did not get adopted as well as Vulkan -> we need to put in some more realistic realtime stuff! Yesterday I saw Mono got replaced by Visual Studio for Linux. They pushing really hard didn't they?

Yes dx12 did not get adopted well.

however better vulkan adoption is needed on windows.

A lot of the Vulkan adoption is on Linux for porting direct x games to Linux, and due to the way they are ported they end up being slower than the original direct x games.

We need more native Vulkan implementations. We need Vulkan to become more often thr default choice even if you are developing only for windows.

[Leopard]

Yes dx12 did not get adopted well.

however better vulkan adoption is needed on windows.

A lot of the Vulkan adoption is on Linux for porting direct x games to Linux, and due to the way they are ported they end up being slower than the original direct x games.

We need more native Vulkan implementations. We need Vulkan to become more often thr default choice even if you are developing only for windows.

Problem is ; both Dx12 and Vulkan is hard to excel at it. Only capable devs like id Software team can do it properly for now. That is why we can't see so many native Vulkan and Dx12 games. BTW , Unreal Engine and Unity is not offering mature implementations for both api's. OpenGL and Dx11 will be with us for a long time.

Also , emulators seems like mostly adopted Vulkan rather than Dx12.

[Naquatis]

On the plus side: AMD's ray tracing SDK is built on Vulkan and should therefore be independent of the underlying platform and hardware manufacturer.

I hope some day we will have a usable OpenCL version (>=1.2) in Mesa for AMDGPU because till now I only hear fancy stuff like yeah with Kernel 4.17 we have Vanilla Kernel support for ROCm.

[TemplarGR]

Typical Nvidia, always attempts to vendor lock-in and is hurting all sides. Even their own customers who must upgrade to get support.

[L_A_G]

I hope that I'm not the only one who wasn't all that impressed with the demo video in the article...

All the shadows and reflections in that scene were pretty damn grainy with the general grain typical of ray-tracing, thus indicating that we're taking about a low ray count with a lot of interpolation to make up the difference. Not even Remedy's demo of this tech avoids the problem with an overall grainy image and particularly grainy shadows.

When I read about this the day before yesterday when they just talked about it I was reminded of how people have been doing real time ray tracer demos for years in places like the demoscene and they've all suffered from being limited to a low number of rays and thus suffered from pretty grainy images, particularly in parts of the image with shadows and reflections. I personally hoped that this would be a drastic improvement over those previous efforts with better interpolation that actually gets rid of the grainy look to practically everything in the scene and maybe even using less expensive rendering techniques to achieve that grain-free interpolation.

However it seems like they haven't really succeeded in getting rid of the fundamental problem with all the real-time ray tracer implementations seen so far. Don't get me wrong, I do still believe John Carmack is right when he says that ray-tracing will eventually win and become the dominant rendering technique. However when it still provides visibly worse end results than considerably cheaper rendering techniques I don't see it being used outside of games and demos doing experimental things.

[OneTimeShot]

It seems like every time the hardware people build something faster, software people come up with additional crazy!

You’ve got a really fast GPU. Real time ray tracing!!!

[log0]

I hope that I'm not the only one who wasn't all that impressed with the demo video in the article....

I expect future GPUs to include dedicated ray tracing hardware, like the PowerVR RTU. So the demos should become more impressive over time.