Ray-Traced Games Coming This Year

Megalith

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According to NVIDIA’s senior vice president of content and technology, the first ray-traced games will be released as early as this year. Of course, these titles will only feature ray tracing sparingly, as it is computationally intensive: rendering will remain largely raster based.

Ray tracing has been the holy grail of graphics and was always a better-quality alternative to rasterization. Ray tracing simulates the physical properties of light, including reflection and refraction, scattering, and dispersion and propagation. It is computationally very intensive, and this was the main reason why it was dominating realistic, offline rendering.
 
Does this mean the new 1170 and 1180 cards will be able to do it, or will this be an exclusive feature for the 3000 $ Titan V only?
 
Maybe the hook on the 11 series is Ray Tracing and the only major difference between the 10 series? Performance wise that is. GDDR 6 too but incremental steps. So Nvidia, pushes hard to out the games with the new tech in there to get some people to side grade to the new cards.

Maybe not. Reviews will tell the tail.
 
It doesn't matter what the cards can do, I'm not spending more on a video card than I would on an entire new PC build. Period. Until this GPU fiasco is resolved, I'm not building a new computer. If I have to go without, so be it. It's called restraint, heh.
 
It doesn't matter what the cards can do, I'm not spending more on a video card than I would on an entire new PC build. Period. Until this GPU fiasco is resolved, I'm not building a new computer. If I have to go without, so be it. It's called restraint, heh.

Ya same with me, I have a core i5 7400 with 16gb of RAM and a gtx 970, I got the whole combo for like 400usd. I was about to upgrade the video card when prices went through the roof. I still think this pc has enough legs for a while longer...though I did end up buying a 4k monitor just because it was only $50 more than a 1440p one and I'd like to be able to play more games at 1440p than I do know.... But I can hold out until these sky high prices settle.
 
It doesn't matter what the cards can do, I'm not spending more on a video card than I would on an entire new PC build. Period. Until this GPU fiasco is resolved, I'm not building a new computer. If I have to go without, so be it. It's called restraint, heh.

Ditto. I was lucky to get 2 Red Devil RX470's for only $420 at the time. My cards aren't being upgraded anytime soon either.
 
I will actually put my hand up and admit I sold my year-old 1080 for 200 Euros more than I bought it for (just noticed I still have it in my sig - whoops). Was an auction and didn't think it would go as high as it did.

When I saw what they were going for, and factored in that I was not using it very much, I decided to sell, play games on the PS4 Pro for now, and get another card later when things aren't so stupid price-wise.

Of course it's a bit stupid my rig now running on on-board gfx but it drives my two 1440p monitors via daisychain displayport just fine... will bide my time.
 
Does this mean the new 1170 and 1180 cards will be able to do it, or will this be an exclusive feature for the 3000 $ Titan V only?

Nvidia's new cards will have the technology. Word on the streets is production of GDDR6 from Hynix is starting in July, which gives the new Nvidia cards a launch of August-September. And thats usually around their traditional launch date.
 
Nvidia's new cards will have the technology. Word on the streets is production of GDDR6 from Hynix is starting in July, which gives the new Nvidia cards a launch of August-September. And thats usually around their traditional launch date.

I'm going to laugh if they launch with a really high MSRP, citing "demand." The miners will pay for it. The gamers will get screwed.
 
I'm going to laugh if they launch with a really high MSRP, citing "demand." The miners will pay for it. The gamers will get screwed.

I'll be happy if they launch them at a stupid-high MSRP...


...and then drop prices a month later.


Let the miners pay, make their cash, and then drop ship to the gamers.
 
Note from my friend Ray...he prefers to not be traced...likes his anonymity.

As to Nvidia, great, so how much is this RT stuff going to set us back? I'd love me a version of Kerbal Space Program with photo realistic ray traced graphics. I'm not holding my breath though.
 
I'm going to laugh if they launch with a really high MSRP, citing "demand." The miners will pay for it. The gamers will get screwed.

Oh you can bet the farm they're going to be priced to the stratosphere when they launch. But Nvidia will blame it on the 20% higher costs of producing GDDR6 memory. And we'll likely not see them on shelves until Christmas.
 
Does this mean the new 1170 and 1180 cards will be able to do it, or will this be an exclusive feature for the 3000 $ Titan V only?

Well they used 4 cards to power it, TBH I can't see a huge compute jump from a 1080ti to an 1180 of that magnitude, then again NVidia did talk about major price jumps and that could be a reasonable cause as theoretically you could be cannabilizing the low end of the compute market for these newer chips, then again I can see a similar situation to the PPU market, they discontinued SLI support, thinking about this we may get another Physx situation where you can buy a RTU that will do Ray tracing and require the HBSLI bridge to feed data back and forth, either way this could be expensive for consumers, I can't imagine a GPU powerful enough like a Titan V to be reasonably priced the compute would errode their compute card business. Just my 2 cents
 
I for one can't wait to see this tech in games! I know the GPU market is terrible right now and I wouldn't be surprised to see some cryptocurrency with a POW algorithm built to leverage the machine learning chops of these upcoming GPUs making them unobtainable ... but lets ignore that for the moment and focus on the graphics!

SSAO is such a big boost in image quality but it isn't terribly accurate. The ray-traced equivalent will look even better, plus even more amazing shadows and other lighting effects.

Screen-space reflections look great but again aren't terribly accurate and tend to only be applied to the ground. I'm just imagining games set in a city, like The Division or Watch Dogs, with shiny buildings and cars all around that have real reflections on them instead of a single low-res cube map that is used for every building and vehicle on the block. It will be glorious!
 
Does this mean the new 1170 and 1180 cards will be able to do it, or will this be an exclusive feature for the 3000 $ Titan V only?

Virtually all DX12 cards will be able to raytrace RTX stuff via shaders, but only next generation cards will have actual hardware included to greatly speed it up.
 
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