RTX is a joke

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i'd rather good games than RTX

more Fallout New Vegas, more Oblivion.. to me it's about the social immersion

GTA Online also is very fun with people

My theory is it's all crap and horribly unoptimized software. I figure you can come up with clever ways to calculate Tracing more legitimately than this garbage, and faster too.

Back in the day all sorts of interesting and clever techniques had to be applied to speed up stuff... but now we get 1.25GB driver installs monthly... riddled with hidden Critical and High CVEs, etc etc

The Legendary Fast Inverse Square Root
 
I guess I need to re-frame my earlier comment so AMD fanboys don't hate.

I love playing Fortnite on my RTX(TM) card by NVIDIA. Ray tracing looks cool and adds to the immersion (165Hz, 3440x1440, OLED).

I also love playing Fortnite on my awesome 7900 XTX card by AMD with super raster performance and no RT! I use a 1080p/360Hz screen and it's great for competitive play.
 
sk3tch said:
I guess I need to re-frame my earlier comment so AMD fanboys don't hate.

I love playing Fortnite on my RTX(TM) card by NVIDIA. Ray tracing looks cool and adds to the immersion (165Hz, 3440x1440, OLED).

I also love playing Fortnite on my awesome 7900 XTX card by AMD with super raster performance and no RT! I use a 1080p/360Hz screen and it's great for competitive play.
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Case and point. RTX is optional at best.
 
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Zarathustra[H] said:
It's a little bit of a scam of you ask me.
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Literally not a scam. Snakeoil? Even that would be hyperbolic.
Zarathustra[H] said:
Developers don't need RT to make visually stunning games.
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Imagine it's early 2000s and you're saying you don't need HW T&L to make visually stunning games.

A well designed raster game can look every bit as good as the best RT title.
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That's a no. You can fake it to a point but it will never look as good. Real time ray tracing has been the holy grail of 3D Graphics since I can remember. Baked in light maps and shadows only work for static objects and scenes.
Zarathustra[H] said:
But RT has become a marketing need due to the hype. As we learned in this story, people will complain when they don't get RT, even if it isn't necessary to make a game look good.
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Being promised and not getting it is not the same as never promising it in the first place.
Zarathustra[H] said:
Sometimes (especially in the RTX 2000 days) there was also pressure and/or coercion from Nvidia.
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Did nvidia offer incentives to devs to implement it? Probably. So what? It's not like it wasn't optional in every game it was in, so why is this a problem?
Zarathustra[H] said:
There is also an argument to be made that it might be easier to develop levels etc. with RT than it is to create light maps etc. like you have to in raster. Even so, we are talking something that helps Nvidia or the dev, not something that benefits the user.
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The issue is that your whole argument is built on a false premise. You can never make fake / static lighting look as good as genuine ray tracing.
Zarathustra[H] said:
Once the developers use RT the in the game - however - GPU requirements go through the roof and Nvidia profits, as kids feel they NEED an RTX GPU to get the most out of their games.
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Almost all GPUs are RT capable now, so I Don't see this as a problem. Also it is up to the user to decide, nobody is holding a gun to my head demanding me to use RT whether my GPU is capable or not.
If anything HW T&L was worse, as that wasn't optional in the games that were built for it. Neither were shaders. So I think you are missing the mark big time here.
 
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SmokeRngs said:
How long do you think it's going to take until 4090 RT performance makes it to the low end? With the amount of hardware the 4090 throws at RT it would be close to never factoring in the costs of silicon.
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I am not sure a 4090 does throw that much hardware at RT, I think it is the yellows rectangle part on each SM on that image:

-RTX-4090-RTX-4080-Series-Graphics-Cards-_2-scaled.jpg


I am not sure how perfectly 1:1 with reality those drawing are.

I think back in Turing days, RT-Tensors core combined were about 8-10% of the die.

Would RT become more of a thing in GPU usage, with TSMC 3NM, maybe 4090 rtx performance it could be done on a rather small GPU (but at a giant raster performance cost). you could easily double the RT part of the chips, so a 240mm or so GPU on TSMC 3 ?



SmokeRngs said:
RT is outside of that pipeline and currently requires separate, dedicated hardware. It's a completely different scenario.
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Not so sure that is fully true with Unreal 5 Lumen solution ?


One issue with RT versus many other innovations, it often look different side by side and even if the RT side is more realistic (say it is), it does not necessarily look subjectively-artistically-aesthetically more pleasing, reality does not look better all the time than otherwise.

And it is a reason that have an RTX on or OFF icon, if they do not tell you which side has some could think their more pleasing to them side is the RTX one.
 
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M76 said:
Did nvidia offer incentives to devs to implement it? Probably. So what? It's not like it wasn't optional in every game it was in, so why is this a problem?
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I think it is perfectly ok to see it has a problem for people, even if every game would offer it only has an option.

Life tend to be a zero-sum game, specially for a tech that dedicate die space for it. It is ok to worry that the resource would go on what they feel a bad direction (or one that is happening 10 years too soon)
 
SmokeRngs said:
There is no future for raytracing until low and midrange cards can run it without unacceptable performance losses and that's not happening anytime soon. Two generations at the very minimum before that might happen and I'd say closer to three more generations.
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With the way pricing is going, it will be longer. And we still have to wait for AMD to catch up. Nvidia may insist DLSS should always be used (and I like the technologies) but fact is it looks better without DLSS. Making it mandatory isn't good in the slightest, and ray tracing would have to be viable on mid range cards without DLSS at the minimum for it to become standard.
 
They probably didn't include it because of cost and the end results would be a lot of computers running the game slow with RT. If Nvidia paid them money I could see them implementing it.
 
DukenukemX said:
They probably didn't include it because of cost and the end results would be a lot of computers running the game slow with RT. If Nvidia paid them money I could see them implementing it.
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They were planning to ship the game with it, and only announced it won't be included right before launch. Either the devs are the ones scamming gamers and this is a rugpull, or it is already implemented they just aren't satisfied with how it works or runs.
 
LukeTbk said:
Not so sure that is fully true with Unreal 5 Lumen solution ?
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Lumen does things a little different.
When prepping assets in Nanite it does some precalculations and saves that to the mesh and the associated textures that give ray tracing some shortcuts.
It further breaks down the concept of global ray tracing into 3 categories, Screen Traces, Mesh Distance Field Traces, and Global Distance Field Traces.

First, Lumen will trace against the depth buffer, these screen traces will trace until they hit anything and if it hits a mesh and can’t go through, Lumen will switch the trace to another virtual representation of the scene, which uses Signed Distance Fields. And then, when this Mesh Distance Field trace hits a mesh, Lumen will grab the lighting information of that hit on the surface cache. Since the mesh distance field trace works also offscreen, they’re also an expensive operation, and to balance that cost, Lumen switches to Global Distance Field trace at a certain distance, which is a much cheaper and faster trace but with lower reliability.

In a way, Lumen gives us a very optimized way of creating dynamic lighting that covers both outdoor and indoor spaces because it switches between those tracing methods more efficiently.

Most titles implementing RTX at this stage only do the equivalent of the Mesh Distance Field Traces, and turn off RTX effects after a specified draw distance.
Unreal is putting a lot of work into getting ray tracing cooked into their engine at a core level and not as some janky bolt-on accessory as it is in most cases, and their work is paying off, they are dramatically reducing the power required to actually use ray-traced lighting effects, they fact they have it working on the existing consoles to some degree with no hardware acceleration is impressive, to say the least. I would not be surprised if many upcoming AAA titles start to drop their inhouse engines, keeping pace with Epic and the work they are doing is going to be expensive and I wonder when EA and Activision may decide the effort isn't worth it and simply enter an agreement with Epic for Unreal instead.
 
M76 said:
They were planning to ship the game with it, and only announced it won't be included right before launch. Either the devs are the ones scamming gamers and this is a rugpull, or it is already implemented they just aren't satisfied with how it works or runs.
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They mentioned something about it not being on consoles at release and I believe one specific ray tracing feature. People assumed the rest of the things would be on PC at launch. They were vague with their responses. Not the end of the world, but not exactly encouraging behavior.
 
Flogger23m said:
They mentioned something about it not being on consoles at release and I believe one specific ray tracing feature. People assumed the rest of the things would be on PC at launch. They were vague with their responses. Not the end of the world, but not exactly encouraging behavior.
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I don't think they purposely set out to mislead people...I think they realized at the last minute that RT performance was not up to par and needed more time to optimize it
 
polonyc2 said:
I don't think they purposely set out to mislead people...I think they realized at the last minute that RT performance was not up to par and needed more time to optimize it
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I think that makes sense.

I also think it is ridiculous that people put so much emphasis on pre-release working copies of things.

You haven't been promised anything.

They just kind of showed what they were working on, and at the time that included RT.

If you don't like it, don't buy it. It's not like you paid for one thing, and got another. You haven't paid for anything yet.

(Not literally you as in polonyc2, but the larger "you")
 
M76 said:
That's a no. You can fake it to a point but it will never look as good. Real time ray tracing has been the holy grail of 3D Graphics since I can remember. Baked in light maps and shadows only work for static objects and scenes.
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I have a 4090, and I have played a ton of titles with RT on and off for comparison, and the differences are marginal. And I have yet to see even a single title with RT on that wowed me. In 100% of the titles I have seen, I have seen other raster only games that achieved similar lighting effects, leading me to believe that nothing zip, zilch, nada, not Cyberpunk, or Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition or Dying Light 2 or anything else, couldn't have been made to look just as good without RT at a fraction of the GPU load.

I am open to the idea that maybe some day in the future, with full scene RT we may see things that are a drastic visual improvement over raster, but it hasn't happened yet, not even in tech demos.

And if that is the case, maybe wait until you can actually build hardware that can do full scene RT before implementing it?

In its current state, I am totally sticking with it being mostly a marketing scam as there is little to no benefit, at exorbitant cost, and the little benefit there is could easily be done without it if they really wanted to.

Some day maybe it will no longer just be a gimmick. But right now that iis all it is. They gimped the raster version in order to sell the RT version, and then charged ridiculous money for the RT hardware, or you get stuck on the gimped raster version. Classic market manipulation.
 
M76 said:
They were planning to ship the game with it, and only announced it won't be included right before launch. Either the devs are the ones scamming gamers and this is a rugpull, or it is already implemented they just aren't satisfied with how it works or runs.
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If they implemented it and it needed more work then that's more money they have to spend. If Nvidia didn't give them money to implement the feature then I could see them pulling the feature. If Ray-Tracing isn't going to used on consoles then likely they expected Nvidia to pony up the money and pay them to implement it. That's usually how this works anyway.
 
It's a very niche option to turn on, that most will turn on just to see what it looks like and then quickly turn it off to restore the performance. It's still got a long ways to go to be in my mind a needed feature on my graphics card. Tried it on Hogwarts Legacy, noticed very little difference and turned it back off to restore the frame rate. You tend to only notice the small details when your staring at a static picture, when actually playing I think it's really hard to tell.
 
erek said:
i'd rather good games than RTX

more Fallout New Vegas, more Oblivion.. to me it's about the social immersion

GTA Online also is very fun with people

My theory is it's all crap and horribly unoptimized software. I figure you can come up with clever ways to calculate Tracing more legitimately than this garbage, and faster too.

Back in the day all sorts of interesting and clever techniques had to be applied to speed up stuff... but now we get 1.25GB driver installs monthly... riddled with hidden Critical and High CVEs, etc etc

The Legendary Fast Inverse Square Root
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That is pretty neat. I had not heard of that before.

I mean, I knew they used to use lots of tricks back in the day to avoid hitting the FPU, but this is interesting.
 
Armenius said:
I still think it's hilarious that people are calling ray tracing "RTX."
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I guess that is a specific RT implementation, but to be honest, I don't fully understandhow it works on the API side.

Are they handled through Direct3D calls or are their specific RT API's?
 
Armenius said:
I still think it's hilarious that people are calling ray tracing "RTX."
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RTX is much closer to RT than Kodak, Kleenex, Jeep, Aspirin, Jacuzzi are to the equivalent, it was an easy one to become misused.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Are they handled through Direct3D calls or are their specific RT API's?
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I think by now it is throught DX12 ( DirectX Raytracing (DXR) or Vulkan api, I do not think there is many RT game that do not run on non Nvidia cards (even Portal RTX does run on AMD card I think)

Maybe some nvidia only extension persist
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
It's a little bit of a scam of you ask me.

Developers don't need RT to make visually stunning games. A well designed raster game can look every bit as good as the best RT title.

But RT has become a marketing need due to the hype. As we learned in this story, people will complain when they don't get RT, even if it isn't necessary to make a game look good. Sometimes (especially in the RTX 2000 days) there was also pressure and/or coercion from Nvidia.

There is also an argument to be made that it might be easier to develop levels etc. with RT than it is to create light maps etc. like you have to in raster. Even so, we are talking something that helps Nvidia or the dev, not something that benefits the user.

(This is also more of a future state, as in today's games you can't just make them 100% RT, so you are still going to need light maps, etc.)

Once the developers use RT the in the game - however - GPU requirements go through the roof and Nvidia profits, as kids feel they NEED an RTX GPU to get the most out of their games.

So yeah, it's a bit of Nvidia RDF utilized in full swing to sell kids thousand dollar GPU 's.
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RT is just hairworks in the form of lighting. Lets follow the path of a million rays... then have a denoiser toss 950k of them so we can calculate a shadow that is just a tad more accurate then the simple edge point calculations done in raster. You can also use it for reflections !! of things not very far away from the mirror surface anyway cause calculating a full scene of bounces is of course still a huge no go. That is the the thing the few RT implementations that don't tank performance completely are only calculating shadows and reflections on things very close to player focus.... trying to do what Nvidia advertises and reflect and shadow and entire modern game map brings even their flagships to their knees. So to make RT work reasonably developers are forced to use the same tricks they have used with raster for decades. (the promise of easier developer work loads with RT is just not reality)

RT just doesn't live up to the hype. I am starting to see that its likely a tech that is going to die off at least in the short term. I think more and more games are going to drop or not even attempt to shoe horn it in... software solutions like Epics are going to become the standard for the next 5-10 years. As was the case with so many other GFX things... the hardware is going to adapt to what the software is doing. Nvidia keeps trying to do it ass end around and have their hardware dictate software. That just isn't sustainable. Its time for the hardware manufacturers to look at things like Lumen and figure out ways to accelerate that... instead of expecting developers to bend things like Tensor cores to their purposes.
 
erek said:
I’m referring to this RTX junk and not Ray Tracing purely
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Then I suppose change the thread title.

The deal with all technologies is this: when first introduced there will be compromises. I don't see the point in complaining at poor implementations of things along the way.
This is basically like complaining about the reliability of the "motorized carriage" back in 1905. Yeah, the technology sucked and needed refining. But then saying: "let's go back to horses" in light of what the "motorized carriage" has become is hyperbole and a gross overreaction.

A huge part of this mess is simply expectations and whatever you think they "should" be. Sorry that after 5 years+/- ray tracing isn't perfect. Sorry it took 40+ years for the motorized carriage to get good. Either way I see little point in complaining about it. Play games, don't play games, it's not that serious. Especially in light that it's an option and it's about implementation at this point. Poor implementation? Oh well, life goes on.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I guess that is a specific RT implementation, but to be honest, I don't fully understandhow it works on the API side.

Are they handled through Direct3D calls or are their specific RT API's?
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It's all standardized at this point.
 
UnknownSouljer said:
Pure ray tracing is the future. It’s obvious. Getting there is another matter.
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I am actually not convinced of that.
I think of raster as drawing/painting vs ray tracing being more of a camera. When the camera was invented, there where a great number of people that said it would be the end of art. Why paint something, or do a technical illustration if you could just take a picture.

Raster is much the same... it follows the same perspective rules artists have used for centuries to create convincing 3D on a 2D surface. We still enjoy paintings and comics and the like... because sometimes an artistic take on something is just better then a picture.

I see ray tracing the same way. I don't actually want to play a convincing reality, or even a hyper realistic Pixar game. I'm not saying there would be no market for that at all. It's just that traditional raster video games with the (at least sometimes) artistically skewed light, shadow and perspectives, will always be the superior and more loved art form. So in the future perhaps if the hardware can manage it we will get hyper realistic real ray traced video games... I still think the majority of the Video game art form will consist of raster type game design.
 
ChadD said:
I am actually not convinced of that.
I think of raster as drawing/painting vs ray tracing being more of a camera. When the camera was invented, there where a great number of people that said it would be the end of art. Why paint something, or do a technical illustration if you could just take a picture.

Raster is much the same... it follows the same perspective rules artists have used for centuries to create convincing 3D on a 2D surface. We still enjoy paintings and comics and the like... because sometimes an artistic take on something is just better then a picture.

I see ray tracing the same way. I don't actually want to play a convincing reality, or even a hyper realistic Pixar game. I'm not saying there would be no market for that at all. It's just that traditional raster video games with the (at least sometimes) artistically skewed light, shadow and perspectives, will always be the superior and more loved art form. So in the future perhaps if the hardware can manage it we will get hyper realistic real ray traced video games... I still think the majority of the Video game art form will consist of raster type game design.
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Raster vs Ray Tracing is just tools to meet an end goal. But ray tracing doesn't necessarily have to mean "realism" in any way shape or form either. That all has to do with artistic intent.
I once saw someone make a similar diatribe about not wanting PhysX cards because they wanted there to be games that could have "cartoon physics" not understanding that the PhysX card just handles the calculations. You could make any type of physics interactions you want real, unreal, or otherwise.

RT in that sense is the same. There isn't anything there dictating how "hyper-real" anything has to be. It's more than feasible to make a 2d "flat lit" RT game if you wanted to do so. It's just that no one has made that application yet because currently it's not easier to do and would have unnecessary overhead that making 2d vectors doesn't. (Similarly it's possible to make an anime that looks "2D" using cell shading out of 3D).

Will people still want raster games for the same reason they want pixel art? Sure. But that isn't necessarily tied to a renderer. And to go back to your analogy at the beginning, I guarantee the average American has watched thousands of hours of YouTube and probably can't name 5 Renaissance painters. Death of raster? Maybe not. But raster will eventually become the new "pixel art" that is used minimally for stylistic reasons and not for any other reason.

When you're talking about two entirely computer generated mediums that are totally based around technology, the most high end version will always be the standard that is strived for. If you want to see that track record, 2d games still exist, but we're a long ways away from Atari level graphics, things found in the 8 bit era, and even new "16-bit games" are using far more advanced tech than ever existed in the 80's-90's are are at an extreme minimum. Said another way: there are zero AAA pixel art games. Raster will eventually have the same fate as being niche.
 
I went from a Radeon VII to a 3080 back to a Radeon VII and haven't considered NVIDIA as an option since. RTX is fancy, but it shouldn't be the deciding factor nor the price increase that it ultimately is advertised to all of us as. Maybe not a gimmick, it's a legitimate lighting method, but definitely the false idol in the lack of a true video card technology advancement.
 
ChadD said:
I see ray tracing the same way. I don't actually want to play a convincing reality, or even a hyper realistic Pixar game. I'm not saying there would be no market for that at all. It's just that traditional raster video games with the (at least sometimes) artistically skewed light, shadow and perspectives, will always be the superior and more loved art form. So in the future perhaps if the hardware can manage it we will get hyper realistic real ray traced video games... I still think the majority of the Video game art form will consist of raster type game design.
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There is no reason ray tracing can't look a certain way. There's no requirement to be physically based.
 
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