Microsoft is clear what DXR is:DXR is a standard by Microsoft.
This is where EVERYONE'S going.
Intel will support DXR.
AMD will support DXR.
NVIDIA supports DXR.
Raytracing is going, which put an expiration date on rasterazation.
It is already begun...it is not a question about "if"...it is a question about "when".
This should be mandatory to spoon-fed these facts to the people that cannot separate Microsoft's extension of the DX12 API wit DXR and then NVIDIA's branding of their cards with RT-cores supporting Microsoft's DXR (All though some of NVIDIA's Turing and Pascal cards supports shader-based DXR).
Raytracing IS the future.
Even Vulkan is basically doing a "copy" of DXR and will have feature parity with DX12 DXR.
The sole reason people are whining about Raytracing is because their favorite peevee company has not yet entered the party.
If you told people 15 years years ago that some people would respond to real time raytracing in a FUD/dismissive way....they would assume the future had gone "Idiocracy"...
What Does This Mean for Games?
DXR will initially be used to supplement current rendering techniques such as screen space reflections, for example, to fill in data from geometry that’s either occluded or off-screen. This will lead to a material increase in visual quality for these effects in the near future. Over the next several years, however, we expect an increase in utilization of DXR for techniques that are simply impractical for rasterization, such as true global illumination. Eventually, raytracing may completely replace rasterization as the standard algorithm for rendering 3D scenes. That said, until everyone has a light-field display on their desk, rasterization will continue to be an excellent match for the common case of rendering content to a flat grid of square pixels, supplemented by raytracing for true 3D effects.[/quote]
Bolded by me. It is at best a hybrid at this time. The current hardware is unable to give acceptable quality and performance the full gamut of raytracing in modern games but can enhance rasterized games.
Maybe the argument should be what is being used, mathwise for the pixel? Today a hell alot if compute is used, which will come to a point where you are not using fixed function units or rasterization. More and more of those compute functions will use raytracing math or methods which today is not the case.
I very much look forward to better games, rendering and AI by whomever, hopefully good by all GPU makers. Turing was the first fixed function hardware assisted intersection finding for RT with some success. I would say Nvidia need to improve significantly the performance and AMD actually having something viable and useful. Developers will then have the hard work making it work and worthwhile.
Yes I am all for more and more RT that actually enhances the game play as well as productivity on other type of applications. We are at the initial baby steps for dynamic real time raytracing.