3DMark Dandia - Real-time Raytracing Video

Beautiful and thank you Hilbert.

What FPS was that running at? Source says its 2K?

I hope AMD and Intel (maybe... Raja waiting for you) can bring something to the table soon as well.

 

Looks awesome. Cant wait for 3rd gen RTX cards to be able to run it right at 4k.

 

I fail to see that beauty. I see some awfully blurred reflection.

Rendering it at 720p, then 1080p, then 1440p and 4K. Running Diff filter to highlight improvements in fidelity and you will see it mostly at edges of geometry.
I do remember Hilbert marveling over one of BF games on 4K in comparison to 1080p/1440p as textures and shaders added huge amount of details to cloth and other surfaces.
Having this on 4K will have very unpleasant problem. You'll see regular shader code on non-reflective surfaces at wonderful details. And then those out of place blurry reflections.

 

Did a double take there for a second. I thought i was watching the Normandy coming in to dock with the Citadel

 

Awesome looking Demo , thanks for sharing it Boss

 

Looks OK i guess. Dont know what the fuss is all about. This technology is still in its infancy it seems.

 

The fuss is that it's using RayTracing.

Reflections and light projection on games today are "fake". They're painted on the objects based on pre-configured maps. That's why when you look into a puddle in a game, it's doesn't show the sky that you see if you look up - it's just showing a generic picture that is mapped on the puddle as a refection. Lights that shine on things aren't actually shining on them, either - they are painted on the objects to give the illusion that it's shining on them. Shadows that cross between the "source" and the object are just maps that are painted on the object as well.

All of this works well, but it requires a LOT of extra effort to make it look right, and in even the best games it has limitations that you can see if you look for them.

Raytracing actually has a light source, and all of the above effects are "real". It's a bit backwards, but you take the viewpoint of the player (the camera) and trace a line (called a ray, hence the name) from that to a given surface, then to the light source. It calculates what the effect that the light would have on the surface based on what that ray hits on the way, takes into account the surface properties of the light and the surface, and then renders what the effects would be. If the light is bright and the surface reactive, you will get a light that not only accurately shows shadows and reflections, the surface itself can influence the other surfaces around them - a shiny red car might cast a red light of its own on the ground, or a blue tinted window would make the light that passes through it shine blue on the objects on the other side, for example. Do this several hundred thousand times a second, and that's what you are seeing in this video - accurate, real-time lights and reflections, with reflective and translucent objects influencing the objects around them as they would in the real world.

If you want to see what kind of processing this stuff needs, go grab Daz3D and mess around with the iRay engine built into it. To do a single raytraced frame with the current GPUs can take an hour or more at even a modest resolution and a single light source. This is why Pixar and the like need massive render farms to do this. A dedicated high speed raytracing hardware engine could literally change the way the world works, with the things you see in movies as special effects being able to be rendered in real time in the world around us. This is a HUGE deal.

 

^^yeah sounds interesting and revolutionary. Too bad we have to go bankrupt to experience it lol

 

I bet you were really fun when someone invented the wheel too.

 

Reflection only occurs if a material or object or entity [itself] is GLOSSY.

 

Finally, RTX owners can see something on their GPUs.

And you think about this while playing games? Never ever came to my mind. However, dowel-level AI or bugged body parts through textures bother me.

 

There are two types of light reflection. Specular and Diffuse. Just about everything reflects light and it doesn't necessarily have to be 'glossy'. Only Specular reflections require a smooth dense surface. Surfaces like your skin, the matte finish on my Logitech G903, or the highly porous surface of high quality clay ink jet paper are great examples of a Diffuse reflection of light. The former creates a reflection where you can see the object emitting the light, the latter does not.

 

Thinking about it has nothing to do with it. The fact is, raytracing looks absolutely amazing and is the future of gaming graphics. I bet when the first 3d rendered games came out, you were like "just a gimmick. ill stick with my sprites". Because thats the mentality being portrayed by the raytracing 'resist' crowd. lol.

edit/

The thing is, if AMD was the first to market this type of technology, you all would be hailing it as a monumental achievement. And you know what? I'd be in agreement with you.

 

What looks amazing is 100% subjective. I for one am not at all impressed by it... more accurate reflections, yeah wow... if raytracing came without any drawbacks, then sure, i'd use it, but it comes with considerable drawbacks. A gpu that could otherwise easily pull 4k 60 fps, has to reduce res to 1440p to get 30+ fps. That is a tradeoff i would personally never make.

 

TBH AMD has had raytracing for years already built into existing GPUs..however AMD also realizes raytracing is a non starter in the terms of general use or gaming, due to the demands on the GPU horsepower and the trade-offs with performance to achieve it. Hence why they do not market it. In a very real sense this is the true "vapor-ware" We need a new term for this...this is just something that cannot be used in any practically in general use but the functions are there so yeah Nvidia is going to hype the feature even if it is useless today. Though it could be said AMD did not have the money to waste on advertising a feature that would just disappoint due to gpu power needed, unlike Nvidia.

It is kind of like have a Ferrari body with a Hyundai engine, yeah it looks pretty, but can it actually perform?

 

This should be renamed to Nvidia benchmark.
if people use this test as a reference to compare AMD and Nvidia in the future only end up lying themselves and everyone else.

 

Why would they do that? I don't recall complaints for the Vulkan specific bench or in prior years, PhysX specific optimizations ...

Edit: I take that back, there were PhysX complaints but...I digress.....lol.

Should they ignore it?

 

Looks incredible, took me a while to understand that i was looking at a reflection inside the ship on the first shot.