Info [Anand et al.] NVIDIA Releases DirectX Raytracing Driver for GTX Cards

[Krteq]

The only thing we have is a tech demo that is not yet available to the public from Crytek. I am sure it will end up in a game eventually. But they did demo it on a Radeon VII running at 60fps.

That Neon Noir demo has been running on Vega 56 4K@30FPS, not on RVII

 

[psolord]

...so in order to not quote you guys one by one, that's why I asked about DXR and Vega, because I remembered that Crytek claim for the Vega 56 and its 4k raytracing demo, which did indeed look great.

I really really want to see what AMD can do with these demos, as well as their own implementation, even if it's a smartly cut down one.

Now regarding RTX/DXR and what I saw, I did try all these demos and Metro Exodus on my GTX 1070.

First of all the RTX options work fine. By fine I mean they run, not crash etc, but of course at a snail's pace.

Apart from that, I have to say that sadly I was not impressed, at all. I am not talking about the performance, but the visual candy itself. Maybe, just maybe, the Justice demo was quite pretty, but then I watched it without RTX and it was still looking good. Ok the rtx reflections were missing, but boo hoo!

The worst of all was Metro Exodus. I mean this is what all this is about right? Games. Sorry but I have to dare say that it was looking borderline better without RTX. Not to mention the performance itself was ridiculous. Ok maybe the performance hit is not that bad on native hardware RTX cards, but still.

I took some screenshots with RTX on and off, with MSI Afterburner overlay, so you can see the difference.

Spoiler: RTX ON

Spoiler: RTX OFF

Sorry, not impressed at all, especially under the light of the pricing going one tier above. Nope, nope and NOPE!

 

[n0x1ous]

...so in order to not quote you guys one by one, that's why I asked about DXR and Vega, because I remembered that Crytek claim for the Vega 56 and its 4k raytracing demo, which did indeed look great.

I really really want to see what AMD can do with these demos, as well as their own implementation, even if it's a smartly cut down one.

Now regarding RTX/DXR and what I saw, I did try all these demos and Metro Exodus on my GTX 1070.

First of all the RTX options work fine. By fine I mean they run, not crash etc, but of course at a snail's pace.

Apart from that, I have to say that sadly I was not impressed, at all. I am not talking about the performance, but the visual candy itself. Maybe, just maybe, the Justice demo was quite pretty, but then I watched it without RTX and it was still looking good. Ok the rtx reflections were missing, but boo hoo!

The worst of all was Metro Exodus. I mean this is what all this is about right? Games. Sorry but I have to dare say that it was looking borderline better without RTX. Not to mention the performance itself was ridiculous. Ok maybe the performance hit is not that bad on native hardware RTX cards, but still.

I took some screenshots with RTX on and off, with MSI Afterburner overlay, so you can see the difference.

Spoiler: RTX ON

Spoiler: RTX OFF

Sorry, not impressed at all, especially under the light of the pricing going one tier above. Nope, nope and NOPE!

I think even Nvidia said in this tunnel it doesnt show much difference but once you get out into the open world its more noticeable

 

[Face2Face]

Yeah, I'm gonna disagree on Metro with GI not making a visual difference. The difference is quite drastic in a lot of areas of the game.

 

[FiendishMind]

Do any games support DXR right now? I think Nvidia's support is actually happening before most games push that feature so I think you have things backwards? Maybe I'm wrong? Or are you confusing DXR and RTX? As I believe RTX is the only implementation of ray-tracing in released games so far (well the way we're talking and not older mods like those Quake ray-tracing stuff). RTX is not DXR (meaning they can't just turn it on and you get ray-tracing in games that have RTX). I might be wrong about that, but I don't believe just because it supports RTX that now non-RTX stuff has DXR support. Not sure it'll take much, to offer it, but I don't think its that easy either.

There's not much Nvidia can do about pushing DXR as that's up to the game developers on supporting that (and its so heavily tied to DX12 that support for it is likely tied to development of new game engines, and those are probably tied to the next gen consoles since they're designed with them in mind; and since DXR is Microsoft, that means probably not much DXR support until the next Xbox which is probably holiday 2020). No amount of money is going to speed that up enough for you. Vulkan should have some similar capability and should be popular with Sony/PS5, so probably the biggest game to be able to utilize DXR type ray-tracing would probably be the next Doom game (but I'm not sure they're doing that, so it'd probably be something patched in later).

Nvidia would prefer their RTX implementation to be used instead of DXR (in fact its more in their interest to stall DXR development so they'd still have the only ray-tracing and they'd like to make it seem superior).

But Nvidia has to support DXR because its Microsoft's implementation of ray-tracing. So if they tried to refuse they'd have to pay every company to support RTX as well (since it would require extra when there often wouldn't be much benefit to them for supporting it over making sure their stuff worked on other hardware - especially the AMD based console stuff).

They're all DXR (or Vulkan ray tracing), RTX is just Nvidia's backend for DXR, Vulkan RT extensions, ect. IIRC Nate Oh covered this in the first AnandTech article on RTX/DXR last year.

 

[Auer]

For some reason the Justice demo wont run for me. I mean wont start past the settings box that allows you to choose RTX and DLSS and resolution.

Can't change resolutions and the only button not greyed out is the cancel one. RTX2070, 4K monitor.

All the other ones worked great and was neat to see and mess around with.

 

[darkswordsman17]

There's nothing vendor specific about RTX, it's just hardware acceleration which the driver in theory should handle.

AMD needs to work on DXR support of course but at the same time I'm not sure you will see anything but superficial usage unless the consoles have hardware acceleration (which seems unlikely).

Er, how are you getting that RTX is not vendor specific to Nvidia? DXR, sure, and maybe you're arguing that RTX cores are not that specialized (or rather are specialized for ray-tracing but is just Nvidia's branding of that type of hardware, and that others could do the same type of hardware)?

That (driver handling it) remains to be seen, because, unless I'm mistaken, so far the games with it have RTX black-boxed in, which to me indicates its not as simple as their driver detecting the ray-tracing and having it be accelerated, it requires extra work to properly utilize RTX (which Nvidia is doing in exchange for blackboxing it in). Developers can adjust performance by basically adjusting the general ray-tracing like number of rays cast, but they are not given much insight into what RTX stuff is actually doing.

We'll see if there might be other differences as well as more DXR support is added. For instance, I'd be really curious about the same game engine with and without RTX blackboxed in, and I'd like to see how the DXR performance of non RTX stuff compares between those situations (so a game that doesn't include RTX - allegedly where the driver would just handle putting that to the RTX cores automatically but is aimed at the general hardware in AMD and older Nvidia hardware, and then compare the RTX and Nvidia DXR in both - so see if games that have explicit RTX support, is Nvidia gimping general DXR performance to make RTX seem better, and how does RTX perform when Nvidia hasn't gotten to blackbox it in).

Shorter term we can I guess now run DXR on Pascal and compare it to the RTX versions. I'm personally really keen to see if they're equal in visuals (obviously won't be in performance, but I think there's been some other shenanigans pulled and so I'm curious if we see a generic DXR do the same things compared to non-DXR or if maybe the RTX stuff that was added was doing things that had nothing to do with ray-tracing; in BFV the higher levels of ray-tracing used different textures for instance which can account for a lot of perceived quality differences, and in Metro there seemed to be changes to stuff like Gamma or brightness/contrast and/or shadow levels between the RTX and base games - I mean huge disparities that I don't think there's any way that ray-tracing alone would account for).

I agree, although I won't be surprised if the Xbox has some ray-tracing acceleration hardware (not claiming it'll be some ray-tracing powerhouse, but I kinda think Microsoft is going to have something that will help DXR performance even if its something like the DX12 scheduler in Scorpio, just meant to offload some work and make the whole path more efficient so that developers will use it). I'm getting the impression that Microsoft is using ray-tracing (DXR) to try to get developers to use DX12 since they've been slow to adopt it and when they do it doesn't seem well done. Granted, OpenGL was often worse than the DX11 path in games as far as performance, but Vulkan showed massive gains over OpenGL in Doom, meanwhile seems most games have worse performance in DX12 over DX11 even though that's not supposed to be the case. So Microsoft offers them something that they would want to implement ties it to DX12, and because its extra performance hit, that it forces developers to improve their DX12 implementations as well.

They're all DXR (or Vulkan ray tracing), RTX is just Nvidia's backend for DXR, Vulkan RT extensions, ect. IIRC Nate Oh covered this in the first AnandTech article on RTX/DXR last year.

It seems that for games it is DXR or the Vulkan for ray-tracing as the basis, but RTX is not just Nvidia's backend for ray-tracing in general, as that's specific to Turing, or else we wouldn't be talking about DXR enabled drivers, we'd be talking about Nvidia porting RTX to older stuff. RTX is, according to Nvidia, allegedly, specialized hardware. Even still, from what I've gathered its not as simple as just running your normal DXR and RTX just working, there seems to be some aspect that Nvidia has to do to get the RTX hardware to be utilized beyond just DXR, and its not just simply the driver (which is why RTX has been blackboxed into games like old Gameworks stuff used to).

 

[FiendishMind]

It seems that for games it is DXR or the Vulkan for ray-tracing as the basis, but RTX is not just Nvidia's backend for ray-tracing in general, as that's specific to Turing, or else we wouldn't be talking about DXR enabled drivers, we'd be talking about Nvidia porting RTX to older stuff. RTX is, according to Nvidia, allegedly, specialized hardware. Even still, from what I've gathered its not as simple as just running your normal DXR and RTX just working, there seems to be some aspect that Nvidia has to do to get the RTX hardware to be utilized beyond just DXR, and its not just simply the driver (which is why RTX has been blackboxed into games like old Gameworks stuff used to).

RTX is an umbrella term that encompasses more than just ray tracing, for instance DLSS is considered "RTX technology".

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/nvidia-dlss-your-questions-answered/

Here is Nate Oh's article on RTX, some good info there.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1254...tracing-acceleration-for-volta-gpus-and-later

AFAIK the RT hardware is a blackbox in the same way other fixed function hardware i.e. the texture and raster units, are a blackbox.

Nvidia does have some (presumably) "blackboxed" GameWorks tools for ray tracing but based on DF's deep dives into BFV, Metro and Tomb Raider, none of it's actually been used so far.

 

[jpiniero]

We'll see if there might be other differences as well as more DXR support is added. For instance, I'd be really curious about the same game engine with and without RTX blackboxed in

DXR without the hardware acceleration (ie: compute only fallback) is how the driver works. As to why now, perhaps the fallback needed some more work or validation or for marketing reasons.

Like if AMD released the DXR driver now even the VII would get beaten by the 2060 in anything that decently uses RT like Port Royal. So you can see why it's problematic marketing wise.

 

[Phynaz]

Are there any rumors to when AMD users will be able to turn these graphics features on in games?

 

[maddie]

Are there any rumors to when AMD users will be able to turn these graphics features on in games?

Yep, but only for the chosen few and if I tell you I'll have to sequester you.

 

[psolord]

So since I didn't have the time to educate myself properly regarding raytracing, is it possible that AMD can follow a less demanding but less accurate RT method? I mean is there something like I dunno, 64bit and 32bit raytracing if you get my drift?

 

[Dribble]

So since I didn't have the time to educate myself properly regarding raytracing, is it possible that AMD can follow a less demanding but less accurate RT method? I mean is there something like I dunno, 64bit and 32bit raytracing if you get my drift?

That's what that Crytek demo was as I understand it basically. Adoption of something like that depends on what the next gen consoles can do - dev's aren't going to put in too much effort just for a few AMD desktop cards alone, particularly as the gen after will probably have full support anyway.

 

[Jaskalas]

So since I didn't have the time to educate myself properly regarding raytracing, is it possible that AMD can follow a less demanding but less accurate RT method? I mean is there something like I dunno, 64bit and 32bit raytracing if you get my drift?

BF5 already has multiple settings for the "quality" of ray tracing with Nvidia's RTX.
So yes, that is certainly possible and various methods can be used.

 

[railven]

Wonder if AMD can do a Ray Tracing slider option like they did back when the level of tessellation used was an issue for their hardware. The more options, the better, and everyone has subjective image quality levels.

 

[jpiniero]

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-pascal-ray_tracing-tested,6085-3.html

Toms did some benchmarking with the driver. The biggest gap was with Metro Exodus, where the 2080 was over twice as fast compared to the 1080 Ti (70.9 vs 33.7).

 

[mopardude87]

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-pascal-ray_tracing-tested,6085-3.html

Toms did some benchmarking with the driver. The biggest gap was with Metro Exodus, where the 2080 was over twice as fast compared to the 1080 Ti (70.9 vs 33.7).

Pretty much confirms that a next generation top end TI variant may be the best upgrade for me.Without raytracing BF5 runs a easy 60 on my 1070ti. Dropping down to 48fps at 1440p while not horrible on a 2080 certainly wouldn't work for me. To spoiled with my 60+ BF experience since 2007. Maybe benchmarks with a few select options turned down a notch would be interesting. If people can turn down textures to make a 2060 work without stutter at 1080p,why not play with a few settings and see if anything else can be gained fps wise?

 

[railven]

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-pascal-ray_tracing-tested,6085-3.html

Toms did some benchmarking with the driver. The biggest gap was with Metro Exodus, where the 2080 was over twice as fast compared to the 1080 Ti (70.9 vs 33.7).

And this is why I find it odd how NV handled RTX launch.

No titles at launch. All titles with expected features had horrible first impressions. Performance was terrible. And there was no real way to show if the fixed functions actually did anything outside of NV's own slides. You had some people believing GTX 1080 Ti would outperform RTX 2070 or better without issue.

These are the kind of numbers that would make suggesting a RTX 2080 over a GTX 1080 Ti if price were within reason. Just a terrible product launch in hindsight. I hope NV learns something from this.