Epic Games Demonstrates Real-Time Ray Tracing

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rgMekanic

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Continuing the theme from the Game Developers Conference this year, Epic Games in collaboration with ILMxLAB and NVIDIA are showing off real-time ray tracing in the Unreal 4 engine. The demo is powered by NVIDIA's RTX technology for Volta GPUs, which itself is powered by Microsoft's DirectX Ray Tracing API, or DXR.

Wow, by the time the GDC is over every ray will be traced. I have to say, this is the best looking demo of the tech I have seen so far.

"Ray tracing is a rendering process typically only associated with high-end offline renderers and hours and hours of computer processing time,” said Epic Games Founder and CEO Tim Sweeney. "Film-quality ray tracing in real time is an Unreal Engine first. This is an exciting new development for the media and entertainment linear content worlds—and any markets that require photorealistic visualization."
 
Too bad it was running on a DGX-1 with four V100 connected via NVLink. Maybe in another 2 generations of graphics hardware will it be viable for us plebs.
 
Armenius said:
Too bad it was running on a DGX-1 with four V100 connected via NVLink. Maybe in another 2 generations of graphics hardware will it be viable for us plebs.
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Found the glass half empty cat.
 
Alright. I'm not impressed that easily anymore, but that blew the Northlight demo all to hell. That was 100% impressive.

Although if that took 4 Volta cards to do real time, obviously it would be better but still... real time. Damn.
 
The shimmer is gone! It's a miracle!

I think we're going to see a slew of people playing around with ray tracing in the next year, similar to when tessellation became the new girl. One of my friends that works for Id showed me his demo reel of tesselation he did at grad school and it was simply astounding what you can actually do with it. Unfortunately being the only person that knowledgable about it pretty much makes it a non starter for mass deployment in game. I think a lot of this is going to come down to the toolset available to game developers and how easily they can integrate it into their pipelines. Having UE3 on board delivering engine level tools will certainly enable widespread adoption.
 
Armenius said:
Too bad it was running on a DGX-1 with four V100 connected via NVLink. Maybe in another 2 generations of graphics hardware will it be viable for us plebs.
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If games could look like that today, totally worth it!
 
Axehandler said:
Wait.... isn't that a direct quote from Star Citizen... wait.. is SC now switching to this new engine.... wait.. 5 more years?!?
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Damn you Axehandler. I was going to post that...but not the 5 more years, because the switch will be done by a couple of developers over the weekend. ;)
 
I was taking a break from the conference. Heading back now. It was a very cool demo at NVidia’s booth. I got to see a DGX work station up close. It’s huge.
 
Not very convincing. Shiny close ups is not good enough. At least the Doom 3 demo at macworld didn't have the forced fun in it.
 
4 Volta cards. So if we get about a 35% performance increase with every new generation then we're about 5-6 generations out from the release of Volta before this being possible on a single card. That seem about right?
 
Ski said:
Found the glass half empty cat.
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half is water and other half is x% air?

whattta hell u try to say?

Armenius said:
Too bad it was running on a DGX-1 with four V100 connected via NVLink. Maybe in another 2 generations of graphics hardware will it be viable for us plebs.
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unreal engine supports MP gpus WOW!!!

i must and not go and buy V100 for science purposes...
 
When I saw all the previous XDR videos I wasn't impressed. Then I saw the Futuremark Demo and said "meh", but now I see this and I say WOW.

BTW as much as I'm impressed by raytracing, I'm even more impressed by the AA. Zero Jaggies!!!
 
I just hope when games support raytracing, developers don't oversuse shiny, hdr and reflection effects like in many demos.
 
It would look good if the required temporal filtering and temporal AA didn't make it all look so splotchy. Look at her armor as high contrast reflections move across it, the filtering can't quite keep up and this is in a fixed controlled camera scenario.
Also look at areas of the corridor as things occlude them like other storm troopers (easy one is the upper left , watch the troops passing by and occluding the light poles behind him. The temporal AA/filtering can't handle this and takes a while to catch up. Another is when it is close up on the two troopers and one passes in front. Watch the rear trailing edge as everything has to catch up in a split second because the temporal filtering essentially can only handle what is visible)
During gameplay it would look much worse. Unreal's TAA only looks decent while standing completely still or there is minimal camera movement. During gameplay it falls apart.
 
MrBonk said:
It would look good if the required temporal filtering and temporal AA didn't make it all look so splotchy. Look at her armor as high contrast reflections move across it, the filtering can't quite keep up and this is in a fixed controlled camera scenario.
Also look at areas of the corridor as things occlude them like other storm troopers (easy one is the upper left , watch the troops passing by and occluding the light poles behind him. The temporal AA/filtering can't handle this and takes a while to catch up. Another is when it is close up on the two troopers and one passes in front. Watch the rear trailing edge as everything has to catch up in a split second because the temporal filtering essentially can only handle what is visible)
During gameplay it would look much worse. Unreal's TAA only looks decent while standing completely still or there is minimal camera movement. During gameplay it falls apart.
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keep in mind this is compressed video on YouTube (unless you watched the original on another website) . It probably doesn't explain every artifact, but does have an effect.
 
Very cool... but ya 4 volta cards to pull it off... which means this in any game is still 10 years off at least. This won't be tech worth a game developers time until the power of 3-4 top of the line volta GPUs makes its way into mid range cards. 10 years min. Cool to see it I guess... but I have been more impressed with some of the Demos I have seen AMD giving the last year to high end video/3D/Gfx circles. Where real time ray tracing is useful right now in speeding pro gfx workflows. Of course the NV hardware is capable of the same things... but in the pro circles AMD has been actually doing very well with the Radeon Pro line and novel things like SSG with 2TB cache memories that allow developers to load insanely large data sets instead of having to break the work up. Still this is a nice flashy tease good marketing gotta give it to them there.
 
mdswish said:
Man....if I hadn't been told that was a rendered scene I would have swore it was from the movie. :wideyed: Exciting times ahead in GPU rendering! :D
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That is what I thought at first.
Yeah looks pretty amazing.
 
Guys take a look at this real time cgi character from the Unreal Engine. The pace at which graphics has accelerated recently has me not only giddy with excitement but also real fear and trepidation.

 
Ski said:
Guys take a look at this real time cgi character from the Unreal Engine. The pace at which graphics has accelerated recently has me not only giddy with excitement but also real fear and trepidation.

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Hello future girlfriend, this is what I sound like.
 
rgMekanic said:
Continuing the theme from the Game Developers Conference this year, Epic Games in collaboration with ILMxLAB and NVIDIA are showing off real-time ray tracing in the Unreal 4 engine. The demo is powered by NVIDIA's RTX technology for Volta GPUs, which itself is powered by Microsoft's DirectX Ray Tracing API, or DXR.

Wow, by the time the GDC is over every ray will be traced. I have to say, this is the best looking demo of the tech I have seen so far.

"Ray tracing is a rendering process typically only associated with high-end offline renderers and hours and hours of computer processing time,” said Epic Games Founder and CEO Tim Sweeney. "Film-quality ray tracing in real time is an Unreal Engine first. This is an exciting new development for the media and entertainment linear content worlds—and any markets that require photorealistic visualization."
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Love the imperial march muzak in the elevator scene.
 
I really respect Tim Sweeney but when was the last time he said something that didn't sound like it was ripped from an infomercial?
 
So... that was amazing. By the time this tech is ready for the consumer... GPU's should be what?... $10,000 with 1028gb of DDRx ram.. and budget cards will be $6,990 wiht 512gb of ram.
 
Comixbooks said:
I read a book on Ray Tracing in the 90s didn't understand any of it.
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Back in high school(2003-04) I took Cisco Networking at votech to earn my CCNA, Net+, and Server+. We created a 24p Beowulf cluster with our lab boxes and used it to run some raytracing stuff for shits and giggles. Was pretty interesting.
 
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