February 2021 - 1st DXR as minimum spec title announced

euskalzabe

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Huh. Well this happened faster than I expected. A new version of Metro Exodus with an overhauled engine will be sold (free - although a separate game - for current owners of ME) that requires DXR as the minimum spec. We knew this would happen eventually, but I was thinking more like 2030, not 2021. Granted, this is just one game, but it is telling that the developer will release a more advanced DXR version of the game that is structurally so different, it cannot just patch the existing game, it needs to exist as a different product altogether. That makes me think that more DXR focused titles will imply much heavier changes than just RTX ON as Nvidia puts it, but DXR-base from the development get-go. This reminds me a bit of how how as pixel shaders evolved, games would look completely different (though they were still rasterized and shipped as one game). Anyone recall playing Half Life 2 with different shader models in DirectX 9 vs 7? I don't think it went as low as DX6, I only remember 7... and it looked like crap compared to DX9. The DXR evolution is definitely happening faster than the decade or so it took pixel shaders to gain more traction - although DXR is nowhere near mainstream, give it another year when most consoles at least include DXR effects and it'll snowball from there.

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Metro Exodus already looks amazing. It will be interesting to see how they make it even better.
 
Are they going to include the necessary video card with the software, since it'll still probably be hard to get cards towards the end of the year. No sense in selling a game that hardly anyone has a video card that can run it.
 
Very Cool! Guess I will wait to play this game when this is out. Bought it cheap on Steam, Winter Sale. I wonder if it will support AMD Fidelity X Super Resolution ( I really hope they call it something else like MLSS or something simple)?
 
Are they going to include the necessary video card with the software, since it'll still probably be hard to get cards towards the end of the year. No sense in selling a game that hardly anyone has a video card that can run it.
A lot of people have Turing and Ampere. More will by the time this launches. Radeon people are sol, no dlss and poor RT perf on RDNA2. RT and dlss is already in many major new releases and it isn't going to slow down in the case of Ray tracing!
 
I expect raytracing is the future. 3D rendering has been done using raytracing for ages. Rasterization was just a shortcut to make rendering work in real time so you could have a 3D game. Raytracing needed a render farm back when 3D gaming was getting started.

That said, I don't see RTX being required as something that will become common for a few years. We also need an RTX 3050/4050/etc. and perhaps an RX 6500/7500/etc. first. The entry level cards are too big of a piece of the market and most game devs won't want to require RTX on until the entry level cards can do it.
 
Bought it cheap on Steam, Winter Sale.
I did aswell! Was going to wait until I had an RTX card. But I have too much time at home during the pandemic and I ran out of games... well before I'll be able to get a new GPU.
 
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Even now, the current implementation of Ray Tracing through DXR is still a shortcut. It's not perfect, and it most certainly is not 100% pixel accurate like you will see in a movie. The "only" places where you can find nearly pixel accurate Ray Tracing is through Quake II RTX and Minecraft w/ Ray Tracing, both of which are absolute power hogs on what are very graphically simplistic games.

Ray Tracing is the future, but I think Nvidia got it right by pairing it with DLSS as a way to upscale and "cheat" by approximating objects while rendering at a lower resolution. I see AI-upscaling being the much more innovative technology because as algorithms get more refined, so does the quality of DLSS, and these improvements cost virtually nothing for anyone that has a GPU with enough Tensor cores on it. Being able to render a scene at 1/4 res and upscale it close to native gives game developers a crazy amount of headroom with other emerging technologies (such as Ray Tracing). I can't wait to see DLSS implemented in Metro Exodus along with the improved Ray Tracing render path.
 
I see AI-upscaling being the much more innovative technology because as algorithms get more refined, so does the quality of DLSS, and these improvements cost virtually nothing for anyone that has a GPU with enough Tensor cores on it. Being able to render a scene at 1/4 res and upscale it close to native gives game developers a crazy amount of headroom with other emerging technologies (such as Ray Tracing).
This. %100.
 
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