Nvidia Skips Ampere at GTC 2019

AlphaAtlas

[H]ard|Gawd
Staff member
Joined
Mar 3, 2018
Messages
1,713
Several news outlets seems to think Nvidia's GTC presentation was relatively longwinded and unexciting this year. The three-hour keynote reportedly featured some software announcements and a low power Jetson board, among other things, but didn't feature the 7nm Ampere GPUs many were expecting. EE Times says that the "unspoken message" at the presentation was that "Nvidia doesn't need to pre-announce a new and faster chip because it owns that software stack and channel today," and the emphasis on CUDA seemed to really drive that point home.

However, in one of the more exciting parts of the presentation, Nvidia did highlight the Q2VKPT project we covered earlier this year. Nvidia's CEO seemed quite excited about the introduction of raytracing to Quake II. they showed off some of the project's gameplay, which you can see here.

Presaging that future, Nvidia's chief scientist, Bill Dally, told reporters about a research project in optical chip-to-chip links. It targets throughput in terabits/second while drawing 2 picojoules/bit/s. In an initial implementation, 32 wavelengths will run at 12.5 Gbits/s each, with a move to 64 wavelengths doubling bandwidth in a follow-up generation. Dally predicted that copper links will start run out of gas as data rates approach 100 Gbits/s, already on many roadmaps for network switches. Progress in more power-efficient laser sources and ring resonators will enable the long-predicted shift, he said. If the future evolves as he believes, bleeding-edge GPUs may continue to skip an appearance at some Nvidia events. Attendees will have to hope that as the interconnects speed up, the keynotes don't get even longer.
 
NVIDIA never makes GPU announcements at GTC. I don't know why we have to do this every year. That, and Turing just launched 6 months ago today. Were people really expecting a mid-cycle refresh or something?
 
Does this mean they can add ray tracing to recently released games? I'd love to see GTA5 and ALIEN: Isolation with ray tracing added!
 
Nvidia already has Ampere ready in case something good comes out of either AMD or Intel in the short run. They don't need to do anything because we already have high resolution 4K Space Invaders!
 
That's an overly simplistic version of it, but yes. It looks like what NVIDIA contributed compared to the original was more surface area properties so that the light is more accurately reflected, refracted, diffused, etc.
What's notable is that for all of our video gaming lives, our brains have been accustomed to playing in 3D worlds with pre-baked lighting and shadows, faked and pseudo raytraced environments since anything else was too costly in GPU power. But now seeing real raytraced environments it's beautiful and transfixing because our brains are like "this is how it was always supposed to be".

Lighting is everything. Without it the game world is a black screen.
 
I wonder if this will run well on a 10 series card now that Ray Tracing has been opened up? I could definitely stand to revisit Quake with ray tracing.
 
At 12.5Gbps each optical link channel (wavelength) will draw 0.01 Watt.
 
Is Quake II just a really good candidate for this treatment or something? I grew up on Doom and Quake, but why is this particular 22-year-old game being used to demonstrate this new tech?
 
Gotta admit, that looked really cool when he fired the BFG...

I've replayed Q1 once in the last 7 ish years, after a graphics texture pack upgrade was released (which I found out about because of the [H] news page :( ).
It's been awhile since I've played Quake 2, so this is on my to do list. Still running a 1080Ti, but once the 7nm GPU's come out, I will be ready to upgrade and give RTX a go. I think the 1080Ti is coming up on 3 years old, pretty good lifespan for a GPU.
 
nvidia skips cause there not ready............wheres teh amd card for comparison.................?
 
I will buy that game all over again!!!!!!!!!!! SO AWESOME!!!!!!!!!
 
Makes me want to play Quake 2 again. With their recent announcement of Ray tracing coming to the 10 series albiet slower, hopefully I can try Quake 2 on some older cards. I'm assuming Q2 is old enough that even running 10x slower (or whatever it is) it'll be plenty fast. Wonder if it's a new exe or if it requires content changes as well (will mods and user maps work or will they need to be re-done).
 
Ok, that was really cool. I spent a lot of time playing Quake 2 when it came out (LAN multiplayer).
 
They're still in the process of releasing the current gen tiers of processors, was anyone really expecting a new architecture? 6-18 month early paper launch? what world of rumor and make believe journalism are we living in?
 
I tried the RT quake 2 and got 30fps +/- in 4k with a RTX 2070. It does look pretty cool and was fun to mess around with. Obviously there is still a long way to go tho.

"It is fully raytraced and dynamically shaded with realistic global lighting models in real-time. Using path tracing for fully dynamic lighting allows for a lot more detail in the shading of game scenes, naturally producing complex interplay of hard and soft shadows, glossy material appearances and perspectively correct reflections everywhere. Moreover, light can naturally flow anywhere, tying the scene together in the ways we would expect from the real world. Traditional approaches like precomputed lighting or coarse real-time raster approximations could never interactively reach this detail at a comparable resolution, since full storage of this lighting information would exceed any memory bounds."

http://brechpunkt.de/q2vkpt/
 
They're still in the process of releasing the current gen tiers of processors, was anyone really expecting a new architecture? 6-18 month early paper launch? what world of rumor and make believe journalism are we living in?
Good solid question! Everyone needs to go to their local source of icy cold water, and drink a full glass, and pour another glass on their face, and chill the hell out. All this wild speculation only makes you all look like a bunch of immature, impatient nervous rhesus monkeys, who can look in 10 different directions in the span of 1 second by darting their head and eyes every which way. Just relax and wait, good things will come (later).
 
Quake II with RT seriously makes me want an RTX card. I'll be waiting for 7nm though.
 
am i the only one that noticed that the mirror reflected everything but THE PLAYER?
 
I wonder if this will run well on a 10 series card now that Ray Tracing has been opened up? I could definitely stand to revisit Quake with ray tracing.

Q2 uses VKPT which originally used RTX hooks

Nvidia will need to provide equivalent hooks for non-RTX ray tracing if the same code is to be used
Else develop alternate vulkan code for Quake 2 ray tracing that is optimized for non RTX cards
 
am i the only one that noticed that the mirror reflected everything but THE PLAYER?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there is no player model in Quake 2 singleplayer. you can see that the gun is being reflected though.

Also please re-release Quake 2 with full RTX

eFfmdb3.jpg
 
Last edited:
Quake 2 is one of those games I never got around to playing much back in 1997 or whatever year it was released
 
I tried the RT quake 2 and got 30fps +/- in 4k with a RTX 2070. It does look pretty cool and was fun to mess around with. Obviously there is still a long way to go tho.

Yeah I had to drop to 1080p to get 60-80fps with my 2080. I would love to play through this again. Gun fire and explosions look amazing. I just can't seem to get the music audio working. :mad:
 
They're still in the process of releasing the current gen tiers of processors, was anyone really expecting a new architecture? 6-18 month early paper launch? what world of rumor and make believe journalism are we living in?

The answer to this is: the world where people mistake the bullshit that WCCFTech spout for anything approaching reality.

As you say, given that the RTX cards have been around for all of six months, and Turing cards are still being released further down the product stack, why the fuck would Nvidia be rushing to unveil another new series of cards (even if they are just a die shrink)? It might be a different story if they were being pushed by AMD at the top of the product stack, but they aren't, so there's even less reason for them to cut their own throats by breaking the habit of a lifetime and releasing a new product range before the current one has been filled out.

Seriously, people are fucking stupid sometimes.
 
The only thing I am interested in regarding Ray tracing is when it is coming to VR. It will be a while at least but I would go for a dedicated ray tracing card if it was needed to implement in VR. The addition to immersion would be crazy!
 
I must say, they definitely should be forced to post the relevant differences when making advertising like this; the "non rtx" version is not run at even close to the same graphics settings without raytracing activated.
 
The only thing I am interested in regarding Ray tracing is when it is coming to VR. It will be a while at least but I would go for a dedicated ray tracing card if it was needed to implement in VR. The addition to immersion would be crazy!
Realistic reflections and lighting in VR would be bananas, but will be a few generations since GPUs are being outpaced by higher res HMDs. A 2080Ti sees 95% utilization in Elite Dangerous with a Samsung Odyssey+; and higher res screens are starting to trickle out. A lot of pixels to push at 90FPS *minimum* framerate until any foveated rendering breakthroughs.
 
Old idtech2 engine still holds up and is flexible enough to intake new tech. Now, do this with Q3 and I'll buy it again! :)
 
Back
Top