Nvidia Is Hiring Ray Tracing Talent to Revolutionize the Graphics Industry

[jnemesh]

I'm not entirely sure.
It would seem that it requires a Volta GPU, but that could just be because the Tech isn't in any of the older GPU's.
It does mention DXR (DirectX Raytracing) and I think it uses that as a base.
The examples on the Nvidia blog seem to use DXR.
So, It could be 'sort of' "open", as in it will run on all future GPU's, but knowing Nvidia, and its past, there is a very high possibility that it will be closed tight.

Nvidia will ALWAYS choose proprietary over open. They have a track record of doing this time and time again. They will also focus on technology that provides further lock in to Nvidia cards. Again, proven by track record. I don't think I will EVER buy another card from them. I don't care WHAT it does.

 

[euskalzabe]

Nvidia will ALWAYS choose proprietary over open. They have a track record of doing this time and time again. They will also focus on technology that provides further lock in to Nvidia cards. Again, proven by track record. I don't think I will EVER buy another card from them. I don't care WHAT it does.

Indeed. So I hope RTX fails miserably for games, and instead Microsoft's DXR implementation takes over so access will be fair to AMD/Nvidia. I like Vulkan, but it's probably not gonna happen. Look at all the DX12 games we're NOT getting, because it's not always worth the dev's time/money/effort for the performance gain.

 

[Deleted member 83233]

The idea of an affordable graphics card, being able to produce ray traced scenes comparable or better than today’s aaa titles at 4K, is a dream that is many, many years away.

And remember, we are talking about nVidia here, if they bring this to market, it certainly will not be ‘for the gamers’, unless you have very deep pockets, then where will the software be for it?

I have no doubt that high detail, high resolution, real-time 60Hz minimum, ray traced games are the holy grail, and will come to us all, but it will not be anytime soon, at least 10 years away.

And any talent that nVidia have hired over the last 12 months or so will be years away from seeing the fruits of their labour in silicon.

Some ray tracing tech has already been implemented in Unreal Engine. How much I'm not sure, but I read about it quite a while ago. Even if the next cards from NV support just what's available in UE, that at least means a potential for some of the tech to be implemented in games that could release over the next couple of years.

That said, we don't know that NV, Epic, and possibly some other UE-using dev, haven't been working on something for a while.

I'm not hugely optimistic about that, but it seems like this is the next big push. This could be like the T&L implementation in the late 90s too. The tech goes into the new card. By the time it's adopted and mature enough to use, the next iteration of card will be out that can actually do it properly. (I'm thinking GeForce 256 to GeForce 2 here for my example).

As far as the implications of benevolence of ANY GPU manufacturer, I hate to break it to you... but... None of them do it "for the gamers". They do it to one up each other. If they can get away with making it proprietary they will. If making it an "open" standard benefits them in some tangible, marketable way, then they'll push that. There is ALWAYS an agenda. When we are lucky, that agenda at least aligns a bit, and does something nice for us in the process. It's business.

So if Nvidia releases a card that can accelerate some parts of the ray tracing process, it works with existing engines that are pushing for that like UE, and there's some hope that something will support it at least a bit in the next year or three, then that's a good thing.

People love to hate Nvidia, but at least they're doing SOMETHING, and pushing things forward SOMEWHAT. AMD did that a while back when they started pushing for lower level programming, Mantle, Async Compute, etc. that now resides in DX12, and possibly Vulkan? (can't remember the exact details) which is great too. Each side will push something when they can, and if it's actually beneficial, then there's no reason to hate it. Progress is progress. No computer hardware company is doing anything for the good of humanity, gamers, game players period. AMD isn't anymore anyone's friend than NV. They just play up that "open" side of things as their angle.

Back on the subject, I can't wait to see what they're ACTUALLY up to with this. I'd be equally happy to see something similar from AMD, or even Intel. Or someone else even.

 

[Nobu]

LOL yeah, japan is an odd one. woman are highly sexualized, in more then just the media. heck.. who is leading the way in sexbots?

Have you seen photos of the penis festival?
But I digress...

 

[DukenukemX]

Not pleasing to the eye for everyone. I guess my GPU doesn't just scream SEX to me. So many spiky metals, that'd surely be painful. I'm much more interested in my GPU's rendering abilities and hardware specs, than connecting it to a sexualized man or woman. I guess raytraced naked avatars are going to be the best thing ever for some people.

You're being technical. The use of sexy women is because sex sells. You want anything to take off, sex is going to be a part of it. VHS, DVD, Internet are all mediums that did well cause of sex. Real time Ray Tracing will certainly have sexy women, whether you like it or not.

Can I ask you to post 10 more of these juicy images to trigger that dude even more? XD

Not to derail the thread, but...
https://imgur.com/t/futa/ffPRrIJ

So if Nvidia releases a card that can accelerate some parts of the ray tracing process, it works with existing engines that are pushing for that like UE, and there's some hope that something will support it at least a bit in the next year or three, then that's a good thing.

I think AMD and Nvidia have two different strategies to do Ray-Tracing. Nvidia may want to do it entirely on the GPU, where AMD might want to do it on the CPU+GPU. How much can Nvidia accelerate with just their GPU's will have to be seen, as right now there is no such thing as a Ray-Trace accelerator. If it could be done it would have been done by now.

People love to hate Nvidia, but at least they're doing SOMETHING, and pushing things forward SOMEWHAT. AMD did that a while back when they started pushing for lower level programming, Mantle, Async Compute, etc. that now resides in DX12, and possibly Vulkan? (can't remember the exact details) which is great too. Each side will push something when they can, and if it's actually beneficial, then there's no reason to hate it. Progress is progress. No computer hardware company is doing anything for the good of humanity, gamers, game players period. AMD isn't anymore anyone's friend than NV. They just play up that "open" side of things as their angle.

Nvidia is louder about Ray-Tracing than AMD, and has nothing more to show for it than some crappy demos. This one is mostly missing textures and certainly not an in game demonstration. There are older games showing Ray-Tracing which has more merit than this.

My biggest concern is if Ray-Tracing for Nvidia is not just exclusive to Nvidia hardware, but exclusive to high end Nvidia hardware. I can't imagine something like a GTX xx60 or xx50 being able to do Ray-Tracing effectively.

 

[Deleted member 83233]

Agreed. By accelerate, I just meant on GPU.

I would also expect it to need some high-end hardware. At this point though, who knows what the real solution (if you can call it that) will be. Maybe some form of mixed rendering. I'm not exactly sure how that would work, but I can imagine a few maybe-possible ways.

At the very least, it will be interesting to see how things go.

As far as the AMD / Nvidia thing goes... I really don't care if their respective tech is open or proprietary at this point, as long as games support both. That isn't always the case, but these days it seems to be the case more often than not anyway. It's not that I think proprietary is the way to go, it's just that neither of these companies is going to change the way they do things because of what I think. I will simply buy the one that performs the way I want with the software that I use. If it's proprietary, but supported, then so be it. I'm not some computer hardware freedom fighter. I don't have the time for that these days. Give me something that works, and something that performs well, and that's good enough for me.

 

[GNUse_the_force]

Not to derail the thread, but...
https://imgur.com/t/futa/ffPRrIJ

View attachment 93297

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Is the intent here to have real time games, or to use GPU's to speed up offline rendering for movie and TV use?

 

[jnemesh]

Indeed. So I hope RTX fails miserably for games, and instead Microsoft's DXR implementation takes over so access will be fair to AMD/Nvidia. I like Vulkan, but it's probably not gonna happen. Look at all the DX12 games we're NOT getting, because it's not always worth the dev's time/money/effort for the performance gain.

Seems to me the lack of DX12 support is DIRECTLY attributable to Nvidia cards not performing well with DX12. That is changing though, as developers are targeting consoles 1st, PC ports after. Lately it seems that DX12/Vulkan support is on the rise.

 

[DoubleTap]

The idea of an affordable graphics card, being able to produce ray traced scenes comparable or better than today’s aaa titles at 4K, is a dream that is many, many years away.

And remember, we are talking about nVidia here, if they bring this to market, it certainly will not be ‘for the gamers’, unless you have very deep pockets, then where will the software be for it?

I have no doubt that high detail, high resolution, real-time 60Hz minimum, ray traced games are the holy grail, and will come to us all, but it will not be anytime soon, at least 10 years away.

And any talent that nVidia have hired over the last 12 months or so will be years away from seeing the fruits of their labour in silicon.

I have not really cared about ray tracing since it was a gee-wiz thing in the Amiga days but I suspect it's more likely to be used commercially than for "just games". The scaling issues are completely different in ray tracing and we've made so much progress using current techniques that I think anything with that level of compute power is going to be able to run a rasterized game engine at 8k resolution and 240fps

I think 10 years is way too optimistic - given the 7-10nm wall we're hitting - but who knows.

 

[DNMock]

I have not really cared about ray tracing since it was a gee-wiz thing in the Amiga days but I suspect it's more likely to be used commercially than for "just games". The scaling issues are completely different in ray tracing and we've made so much progress using current techniques that I think anything with that level of compute power is going to be able to run a rasterized game engine at 8k resolution and 240fps

I think 10 years is way too optimistic - given the 7-10nm wall we're hitting - but who knows.

SLI and Crossfire gonna make a comeback!

 

[Deleted member 83233]

SLI and Crossfire gonna make a comeback!

No.

 

[DoubleTap]

Marketing addresses the ways in which you're socialized. Change those ways, the marketing will change. So, yeah, you DO make the rules, by being part of what it is. You think you don't care, even though you're actively involved in making it what it is.

Sexuality is involved in many children's games still: every time your kid saves princess Peach from her helpless situation, the message that woman = weak = inferior is transmitted. Why can't we save our friend Toad instead? With comments like the one I mentioned earlier, the connection music = sex = woman consumption object is made, reinforcing the woman = inferior stereotype previously learned as a child and taking it further to "superior men can associate women with whatever low-level imagery because they deserve it" mentality that spreads.

Offloading your responsibility in this process to others, such as "marketing", simply shows how complicit you are in the situation. How much power you have. How many rules you perpetuate, over and over, by yourself, with friends, with your kids. Not confronting the problem, is taking a position towards that situation. It always seems an easy, exaggerated notion that affects others, until you realize you're a big component of that problem.

Anyway, I didn't mean to get into a gender tangent here. I thought there was an unnecessarily sexist comment on the thread, and addressed it - if Nvidia prefers butch robot dudes dancing, that's fantastic, not really something to criticize like the comment did VS the absence of female curves. That's all.

I get that you believe this, but this is not truth. This is not fact. This is ideology and opinion and it has damn little to show for it except a bunch of angry, lost, unhappy and confused young people that have no context for human sexuality except as recreation.

It's actually a good thing for young men to see themselves as protective toward women and people in danger. That's how we get good men. Good men will risk their life for their wife, their mother, their sister or just a potential lover because women are more important to the species than men (note: this differs from the modern view where women are more important than everything)

And only a damn fool is going to risk his life for a fucking toad.

 

[[21CW]killerofall]

Nvidia wants to hire this guy?

Edit: I am sure some one out there will get this reference.

 

[Nobu]

Nvidia wants to hire this guy?

View attachment 93404

Nah, this guy:

 

[tetris42]

As other have said yes, ray tracing is probably the single biggest step between the visuals games have now to near cinematic/movie level video game visuals. The problem is ray tracing a scene still entails a MASSIVE performance penalty. Real time ray tracing is still probably a decade out, but we are inching closer. Think of it like this it is in the same vein as the jump from 2d to 3d games, it is that big of a deal. I would hazard to say it will be a bigger jump in video game visuals than probably any other tech in the last 20+ years.

Eh, from a technical perspective yes, from a end-user noticability, not really. Rasterizing has had decades to improve its techniques. Here's what the best of rasterizing gets you real-time, in Unreal 4 right now:

By the time real-time ray tracing rolls around, the difference is going to be very subtle.

 

[euskalzabe]

I get that you believe this, but this is not truth. This is not fact. This is ideology and opinion and it has damn little to show for it except a bunch of angry, lost, unhappy and confused young people that have no context for human sexuality except as recreation.

It's actually a good thing for young men to see themselves as protective toward women and people in danger. That's how we get good men. Good men will risk their life for their wife, their mother, their sister or just a potential lover because women are more important to the species than men (note: this differs from the modern view where women are more important than everything)

And only a damn fool is going to risk his life for a fucking toad.

Wow. Women don't need you to save them. FYI I hold 2 BAs, 2 MAs and a PhD on the topic, my professional research focuses on gender studies and its sociological effects on western populations. But OK, my bad for thinking the [H] userbase could be more openminded. I could send you a barrage of links to research that proves that your position is misguided. But that'd be definitely off thread, so if you want it, pm me. AFAIK, Uncharted or Mass Effect games are pretty popular with kids, and there's no damsel in distress needed in their plots.

Eh, from a technical perspective yes, from a end-user noticability, not really. Rasterizing has had decades to improve its techniques. Here's what the best of rasterizing gets you real-time, in Unreal 4 right now:

By the time real-time ray tracing rolls around, the difference is going to be very subtle.

Kind of. That first image? The shadows are clearly rasterized, raytraced ones difusse and behave much more realistically. Sure, if you only see that, it looks good, but if you have a raytraced image to compare, it's obvious that rasterization misses a lot of things. It looks convincing, but much worse than well calculated light. It is, after all, an approximation. Same goes for that second image: the only improvement that makes it look better is not the accuracy of lighting (the middle area shadow are obvious HBAO that doesn't behave the same way as physically based lighting would). That image looks better thanks to photogrammetry, getting awesome textures in the process. Both images could be vastly improved via raytracing.

 

[Dr. Righteous]

Nah, this guy:

That video made me think of one thing...................

 

[socK]

Eh, from a technical perspective yes, from a end-user noticability, not really. Rasterizing has had decades to improve its techniques. Here's what the best of rasterizing gets you real-time, in Unreal 4 right now:

View attachment 93416
View attachment 93417


By the time real-time ray tracing rolls around, the difference is going to be very subtle.

I mean, not everything there is real time. The lighting is baked and static. Someone probably spent several hours waiting for Lightmass to finish.

 

[tetris42]

Kind of. That first image? The shadows are clearly rasterized, raytraced ones difusse and behave much more realistically. Sure, if you only see that, it looks good, but if you have a raytraced image to compare, it's obvious that rasterization misses a lot of things. It looks convincing, but much worse than well calculated light. It is, after all, an approximation. Same goes for that second image: the only improvement that makes it look better is not the accuracy of lighting (the middle area shadow are obvious HBAO that doesn't behave the same way as physically based lighting would). That image looks better thanks to photogrammetry, getting awesome textures in the process. Both images could be vastly improved via raytracing.

I see the lack of fidelity on the shadows also, however you say "vastly improved", to me, we're talking a subtle change compared to present-day, let alone what games will be doing in the future. This is a subjective thing, but we're already AT "vastly improved":

Old graphics:

Unreal 4:

Actual ray tracing:

All that's left is fine tuning at this point.

I mean, not everything there is real time. The lighting is baked and static. Someone probably spent several hours waiting for Lightmass to finish.

Well here's the original where you can see the lighting / shadowing change:



Yes, it took time to compile, but the point is it's as real-time as any other game out there. I'm not arguing ray tracing won't look better, so much as it's so close now I'm kind of in a "who cares" state of mind about it compared to where graphics looked 10 years ago. Back in the 90s and 2000s, every jump forward was really substantial and it was obvious how much better things looked. Nowadays, it's not always obvious if a game now is looks better than one from 3 years ago. There's still room for improvement, but the gap is smaller than it's ever been.

 

[Deleted member 93354]

Marketing addresses the ways in which you're socialized. Change those ways, the marketing will change. So, yeah, you DO make the rules, by being part of what it is. You think you don't care, even though you're actively involved in making it what it is.

Sexuality is involved in many children's games still: every time your kid saves princess Peach from her helpless situation, the message that woman = weak = inferior is transmitted. Why can't we save our friend Toad instead? With comments like the one I mentioned earlier, the connection music = sex = woman consumption object is made, reinforcing the woman = inferior stereotype previously learned as a child and taking it further to "superior men can associate women with whatever low-level imagery because they deserve it" mentality that spreads.

Offloading your responsibility in this process to others, such as "marketing", simply shows how complicit you are in the situation. How much power you have. How many rules you perpetuate, over and over, by yourself, with friends, with your kids. Not confronting the problem, is taking a position towards that situation. It always seems an easy, exaggerated notion that affects others, until you realize you're a big component of that problem.

Anyway, I didn't mean to get into a gender tangent here. I thought there was an unnecessarily sexist comment on the thread, and addressed it - if Nvidia prefers butch robot dudes dancing, that's fantastic, not really something to criticize like the comment did VS the absence of female curves. That's all.

First off there is a distinct difference between human sexuality and gender roles You seem to be confusing the two. I said sexuality doesn't belong in games that kids play.

Second, asking mankind of turn off sexual desires and not marketing to them is like putting an opposing fan in a hurricane. There's a disconnect between the ideal world and what the real world is.

Let me explain:

I gpt into a debate with a friend of mine who is a woman. She was outraged that women would get raped just because she wore something scanty to a party. She said a woman should never get raped and she should be able to wear whatever she wants and not get harassed because of what she wears (which I more than agree with.) But here's the disconnect: That is the ideal situation. The truth is, if you are a cute looking lamb going to den full of lions, you are going to get eaten. Laws aren't going to protect you. So don't be fucking stupid. All the laws you put up, all the guidelines you make will not change the situation or rapes to this day wouldn't happen

So your mission if you don't want sexualizing of video games then you have to
1) Turn off human nature for teen boys/ young men (who are the majority of video game players) who are attracted to pretty women
2) Tell marketing they can sell just as much without using sexuality. That will make the stock owners happy...(That last statement is sarcasm btw)

 

[polonyc2]

isn't the upcoming new Metro Exodus game using ray-tracing?...will it be used throughout the entire game or only in certain spots?

 

[socK]

isn't the upcoming new Metro Exodus game using ray-tracing?...will it be used throughout the entire game or only in certain spots?

Certain effects will use it.

I see the lack of fidelity on the shadows also, however you say "vastly improved", to me, we're talking a subtle change compared to present-day, let alone what games will be doing in the future. This is a subjective thing, but we're already AT "vastly improved":

Old graphics:
View attachment 93462

Unreal 4:
View attachment 93463

Actual ray tracing:
View attachment 93465

All that's left is fine tuning at this point.

Well here's the original where you can see the lighting / shadowing change:



Yes, it took time to compile, but the point is it's as real-time as any other game out there. I'm not arguing ray tracing won't look better, so much as it's so close now I'm kind of in a "who cares" state of mind about it compared to where graphics looked 10 years ago. Back in the 90s and 2000s, every jump forward was really substantial and it was obvious how much better things looked. Nowadays, it's not always obvious if a game now is looks better than one from 3 years ago. There's still room for improvement, but the gap is smaller than it's ever been.

Really it's just a matter of us cheating less and less and it becoming easier for certain things to become real time. Like proper shadow penumbra where they'll get blurrier as they get further from the light source. Imagine if the engine took a couple minutes to bake that lighting instead of several hours. Or if there simply was no bake. We're definitely beyond enormous, blatant generational leaps and in the realm of subtleties.

A lot of games use screen space reflections now - which is technically ray tracing, except on a limited scope for performance. It's a total hack that defies physics (since it's a reflection that can only reflect what you're actively seeing) but generally works well enough.

 

[DoubleTap]

Wow. Women don't need you to save them. FYI I hold 2 BAs, 2 MAs and a PhD on the topic, my professional research focuses on gender studies and its sociological effects on western populations. But OK, my bad for thinking the [H] userbase could be more openminded. I could send you a barrage of links to research that proves that your position is misguided. But that'd be definitely off thread, so if you want it, pm me. AFAIK, Uncharted or Mass Effect games are pretty popular with kids, and there's no damsel in distress needed in their plots.

I didn't say that women need me or men to protect them. I said it's good for society if men are raised to feel protective toward women because women are important. If you have data or research that explains why that is bad for society or why my premise is flawed, then I will look at it.

I never cared for Mario but it's just about the only video game my wife will play. She thinks it's fun. My kids think it's fun, nobody thinks it's

Also, and maybe other husbands can speak up if their experience is different, but my wife never wakes me up to say:

"hey, there was a strange noise in the garage, I'm going to check it out, just stay in bed, probably nothing..."

Do I mind being the tip of the spear during a home invasion?

Not at all.

Would I let my wife take that role if she wanted to? (spoiler: she doesn't)

Absolutely - as soon as she can beat me at arm wrestling. (I will also accept a black belt in Jiu Jitsu in lieu of grotesqe lady arms)

Do I go around looking for all kinds of women who need to be saved? No, because one is plenty.

 

[DukenukemX]

Nvidia wants to hire this guy?

View attachment 93404
Edit: I am sure some one out there will get this reference.

 

[Ski]

Agreed, although we’re barely getting there with big GPUs, it’s going to be forever until we have standalone VR sets with the power to raytrace..

No, it will be less than 10 years. There's a literal arms race with mega-corporations and governments around the globe to get a working quantum computer and they're spending billions of dollars to try to be the first to win this race. Experts in this field are estimating 10 years or less before quantum computing comes to full fruition, and they're confident in this estimation simply because of the amount of potential it from a national security issue. Which explains why the US and China are the top two biggest investors in this race.

And although QC is very specialized in what they can process mainly due to their probabilistic answers caused by dechorence and only being able to solve a very specific set of problems, fortunately for computer graphics, Quantum Ray Tracing isn't one of them and that is where QC will excel at.

There was also a brilliant presentation at Siggraph 2016 demonstrating Quantum Supersampling simulation, which if you can get past the hyper complicated terminology and programming language shows how much faster QRT is than classical computers when it comes to sampling and denoising.

 

[Deleted member 93354]

Wow. Women don't need you to save them. FYI I hold 2 BAs, 2 MAs and a PhD on the topic, my professional research focuses on gender studies and its sociological effects on western populations. But OK, my bad for thinking the [H] userbase could be more openminded. I could send you a barrage of links to research that proves that your position is misguided. But that'd be definitely off thread, so if you want it, pm me. AFAIK, Uncharted or Mass Effect games are pretty popular with kids, and there's no damsel in distress needed in their plots.

There is no data to support your claims one way or another. Therefore you can't draw conclusions from it. As far as anyone knows, sales might have been more brisk if they added more titillation. Or do you think DOA beach games sold well because they were such awesome games? Or all those WOW patches (and other patches for games like Elder Scrolls) for new "special skins" aren't wanted. By the download numbers you could have fooled me.

 

[haz_mat]

Here we go again!

You might not want to hear this, but ray tracing is the holy grail of real-time computer graphics and it will always remain that way. Every few years some new "tech" pops up promising a revolution - and everyone eats it up because its what we want. If it was that easy, we would already have it. Nvidia has a long history of experimenting with this stuff (10+ years?) and we've not really seen much beyond tech demos.

The actual ray-tracing is just part of the problem. The crazy eye candy we've seen in pre-renders is the result of copious amounts of geometry and large textures in addition to the ray-tracing computations. This model has an uphill battle to produce a similar image as a rasterized render with modern shaders, materials, and optimizations (where ray tracing is already used when it makes sense). You get relatively little information about the scene for the same computation power and memory requirements compared to what we already have. The stuff we see in the movies is not the product of a completely ray-traced scene - it's not cheap to run a render farm so there are just as many optimizations as we have in our games except they spend a lot more time rendering each frame.

Part of the reason that ray tracing is so expensive is due to the fact that it is very difficult to predict what data a given ray will need during its computation - its a brute force approach. Rasterization works well because there are defined interactions between elements that dictate what needs to be done in a given area of the scene - this can be batched and cached much more easily.

Maybe I'm wrong and there is something really neat in the works, but I remain skeptical. The hardware is certainly getting to the point where it is worth investigating alternatives, but I believe whatever they come up with will be a combination of existing techniques with a few ideas that drastically depart from anything we've seen.