Nvidia is Publishing a Book on Raytracing

AlphaAtlas

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Nvidia is excited about raytracing, to say the least, but they still face some hurdles in getting the industry to adopt it. In that vein, Nvidia is writing a entire book on raytracing. In addition to (presumably) selling a print copy in stores, Nvidia is uploading PDFs of the book for free in the Nvidia Developer Zone. At first glance, it may look like the downloads are behind a paywall, but signing up for a Nvidia developer account is relatively painless and doesn't cost anything. For reference, Part 1 is already 81 pages long, and while the a large portion of the first entry is taken up by contributing writers (which, interestingly, includes a Mass Effect/Dragon Age developer and some other high profile names,) the rest of the article is densely packed with developer info and example code. Thanks to cageymaru for the tip.

These chapter are "preprints," in that they will look a bit different than the publisher's layout, but the information is the same, barring any last-minute fixes. By the end of February, the professionally laid-out electronic version of the final book from Apress will be available for free (formats to be determined), along with the code repository. Ray Tracing Gems is not meant as a survey of the field of ray tracing. There are already fine books that provide a general education, many of them free; see this resource list, for example. Rather, this volume is more in the spirit of other gems books, such as GPU Gems, containing articles covering techniques that are often not discussed in general texts but that are important for high-quality results. The book also includes tutorials on newer technologies, along with guides that pull together best practices for solving specific problems. The second half of the book includes studies of larger systems focused on a variety of effects.
 
Unless Nvidia realizes that their current pricing is out of touch with reality and the mass market they can start adopting the idea of becoming "book publishers" in order to increase their income...

Get off your high horse nVidia - you never were and never will be a Lifestyle Luxury goods producer - your clients are "geeks"....period!
 
Yay get the book out now so by the time it’s mastered and implemented by Unreal and a few others there will be < $400 cards that can use it at 60+ at 1080p. Of course by that time Microsoft and Kronos should have open versions built into the DX12 and Vulkan API’s.
 
Forget the book on ray-tracing, what I want to read is a book about how nvidia invented the "GPU". Bet that would be good for some laughs.
 
here is the first part, pretty sure by "freely copy and redistribute" means I can paste it here?

 
Yay get the book out now so by the time it’s mastered and implemented by Unreal and a few others there will be < $400 cards that can use it at 60+ at 1080p. Of course by that time Microsoft and Kronos should have open versions built into the DX12 and Vulkan API’s.

There's already MS DXR and Kronos has its own RT implementation via extensions.
 
maybe I'm alone in the forums here on this, but I can understand the excitement from a developer standpoint... this is kinda like back in the 90s when new techniques were being born left and right, like with id software and directX, then shaders... we haven't seen this big of a jump since those times... the printed book is probably more symbolic and for the old school guys to read once and then put under their monitors never to be opened again
 
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imagine being such a fanboy you cant even make fun of nvidia coming out with a 81+ page book on raytracing. my 1060 and i laugh, we laugh at you.

And my xfx 580 laughs right back at you. Muhaha!

By the way 81 pages is nothing when it comes to using ray tracing rendering.
 
maybe I'm alone in the forums here on this, but I can understand the excitement from a developer standpoint... this is kinda like back in the 90s when new techniques were being born left and right, like with id software and directX, then shaders... we haven't seen this big of a jump since those times... the printed book is probably more symbolic and for the old school guys to read once and then put under their monitors never to be opened again

I remember when anti aliasing started being implemented and the graphics horsepower it required. Hardocp viewers are a different breed as Nvidia has been demonized as the scourge of the earth while AMD is the white knight who will come to save the day. The young kids who have invested themselves into graphics tribalism have no idea how the business or tech world works other than through the eyes of a few articles that paint very unflattering pictures.
 
Guess I'll be the only one buying it unless it costs an arm and a leg. I'm sure it would be an interesting read.
 
Nvidia is Publishing a Book on Raytracing? Will I be able to find it the fiction section at Borders?

Heck, for that matter, will I be able to find a Borders?
 
There's already MS DXR and Kronos has its own RT implementation via extensions.
Yes they do https://developer.nvidia.com/rtx/raytracing/dxr/DX12-Raytracing-tutorial-Part-1
But it doesn't have much implemented quite yet and I think it needs more work but it is a great start.

As for the Vulkan ray tracing, its great that a 3'rd party has taken it on themselves to get the stuff there but having all those external libraries by everybody and their dog is what made OpenGL such a clusterfudge. it needs to be done officially and supported officially.

Looking at the GitHub page for the Vulkan Ray Tracing project is met with this note from the developers....

"
We no longer want to do this bullshit and support this project. It’s easier for us to maintain separate components like radix sorting. For us, the greater pleasure comes more from the way it works, whether it works stably and works in principle. And such a project is difficult to maintain, as it delivers a lot of pain, including when debugging. We realized how important microcontrol is, but we realized that we no longer have time ... It became clear that Hercules’s efforts were achieved by a low code quality, a huge amount of water, and for quick hands with fortunes.

  • Too many old or dirty code, needs have so much need hack's and so much time.
  • Critical performance drops despite of efforts.
  • Enthusiasm drops sharply with awareness and relaxation.
  • Error's in different operation systems (such as Linux).
"
 
Does this strike anyone else as being a wee bit self-indulgent?

Perhaps even, dare I say, masturbatory?
 
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Wasn't such a book released a few decades ago?


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In all seriousness, I do hope this help light a fire in the game dev realm, because ray tracing implementation needs to happen sooner rather than later, which in turn should light a fire under the GPU designers to rapidly advance hardware and release GPUs that have actual usable ray raacing horsepower.
 
Does this strike anyone else as being a wee bit self-indulgent?

Perhaps even, dare I say, masturbatory?
No. It's just a technical reference to the work a lot of people have contributed to and they are offering it for free for anyone to look at.

should light a fire under the GPU designers to rapidly advance
if you mean "rapidly" like what you saw in previous years... no... just no... maybe in 10 years you'll be able to look back and see a big jump in visual quality, but we are gone from the days of big leaps here, this last 10% of photorealism will be the hardest and most time-consuming to get and then consider the amount of resolution needed for 20:20 VR vision...
 
Honestly, not really surprising. They had previously released the Gem series prior to Raytracing. I remember picking up the GPU Gems 3 during my university's book sale for like...$30. It had lots of neat concepts, ideas, and techniques on how to go about rendering graphics and utilizing the CUDA cores. Most of the info at the time was way over my head but I gave it to a club mate that was highly knowledgeable in the area and appreciated the contents more than I did. Helps that he had also created their own working 3D game engine previously. This just brings back some nostalgic memories... :)
gpugems3.jpg
 
Perfect, I was looking for something to read while waiting for the release of the RTX patch for Tomb Raider :rolleyes:
 
Wasn't such a book released a few decades ago?


View attachment 140434

In all seriousness, I do hope this help light a fire in the game dev realm, because ray tracing implementation needs to happen sooner rather than later, which in turn should light a fire under the GPU designers to rapidly advance hardware and release GPUs that have actual usable ray raacing horsepower.

The high end cards definitely have the horsepower. We just need it implemented in the proper game. Ever since seeing ray tracing... then seeing the shit lighting in other games I need them to hurry up and roll it out.

I haven’t read this but maybe it’ll help AMD as well since it’s all based on Microsoft’s directx.
 
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It's like a normal book, except the pages turn much slower. But the page quality is second to none!
 
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The high end cards definitely have the horsepower. We just need it implemented in the proper game. Ever since seeing ray tracing... then seeing the shit lighting in other games I need them to hurry up and roll it out.

I haven’t read this but maybe it’ll help AMD as well since it’s all based on Microsoft’s directx.

I disagree...a $1300+ GPU can only manage to maintain minimum acceptable performance with high DXR settings at 1080p resolution. That's quite pathetic, IMO.
 
Now I understand why there is only one game having limited ray Tracing, there was no instruction manual. Maybe Nvidia should of had the books much ealier.
 
Does this strike anyone else as being a wee bit self-indulgent?

Perhaps even, dare I say, masturbatory?

It's a free book on ray-tracing by the people who wrote all the editions of Real-Time Rendering (1st ed. 1999.) I don't see how this is anything other than awesome. The 2018 edition of RTR is $80 and this book is $0.
 
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I disagree...a $1300+ GPU can only manage to maintain minimum acceptable performance with high DXR settings at 1080p resolution. That's quite pathetic, IMO.

DLSS needs to be implemented along with RT in order to get any kind of acceptable frame rate. I just tried the stupid Port Royal benchmark at 4K on my RTX 2080 8GB and I got an astonishing 0.9 FPS average. Then I ran the benchmark with DLSS turned on and at 4K I got 24FPS.

As much as I like to poke fun at NVIDIA and ridicule their decision to price these GPUs out of this realm, it's a matter of proper implementation. Sadly though, it will take a generation or two of cards before we see this tech implemented in games. So it's a terrible investment to buy any RTX card right now. If you have a GTX 1080 Ti SLI setup then you're pretty close max performance and you should be in good shape for the next 2 to 3 years.

As it stands now NVLINK, DLSS and RT are useless technologies for gamers. If you are on a budget and need a pair of GPUs for machine learning in Linux then a pair of 2080s or 2080 Ti GPUs linked with NVLINK make sense. Again , that's under Linux. NVIDIA won't let anyone get too much meaningful use out of NVLINK beyond gaming on GeForce GPUs because they won't cannibalise their enterprise GPUs.

I think that the most ridiculous aspect of their pricing is the cost of that stupid NVLINK bridge. It's $100, no matter how you look at it. And then the board partners made their own versions with RGB, and they all look terrible. It's not any harder to manufacture then the old bridges, so they shouldn't cost more than $20, and most of that is to cover all the shipping. But $80 to $100, on top of two GPUs?! I'd rather give up on the second GPU than pay that!

If NVIDIA doesn't implement virtual GPUs for GeForce RTX cards with NVLINK, then once SLI is done for, dead and burried, and it will happen once a new generation of games are released, then having two of these expensive GPUs with an expensive NVLINK bridge in your system is a waste of money. So as it stands now it's just a gimmick. Old school SLI still rocks for current games.
 
I disagree...a $1300+ GPU can only manage to maintain minimum acceptable performance with high DXR settings at 1080p resolution. That's quite pathetic, IMO.

I get about 75 fps at 3440x1440 ultra/dxr low and even that looks vastly better than without it. That’s 2.5x the pixels of 1080p.

I will agree we need more powerful mid range.... adoption will be slow for sure.
 
I get about 75 fps at 3440x1440 ultra/dxr low and even that looks vastly better than without it. That’s 2.5x the pixels of 1080p.

I will agree we need more powerful mid range.... adoption will be slow for sure.

What GPU do you have? I got an RTX 2080 8GB.
 
I get about 75 fps at 3440x1440 ultra/dxr low and even that looks vastly better than without it. That’s 2.5x the pixels of 1080p.

I will agree we need more powerful mid range.... adoption will be slow for sure.

I would hardly say it looks "vastly" better at all. If you're laying prone looking for puddles to see reflections in or wandering around looking in windows then maybe. Besides that it's not really noticeable.
 
I get about 75 fps at 3440x1440 ultra/dxr low and even that looks vastly better than without it. That’s 2.5x the pixels of 1080p.

I will agree we need more powerful mid range.... adoption will be slow for sure.

In my mind, anyone that pays for a $1300+ GPU shouldn't have to settle for any "low" setting.

Again, just my personal opinion.
 
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