News Microsoft says DirectX Raytracing 1.2 will deliver up to 2.3x performance uplift

[bit_user]

valve helped with vulkan so i wont be shocked if we see improvements come out on that next.

Valve actually does help a lot with the open source AMD GPU stack. They even contributed a new shader compiler, at one point.

 

[beyondlogic]

Valve actually does help a lot with the open source AMD GPU stack. They even contributed a new shader compiler, at one point.

yeah remember reading that at some point i suspect well see alot of direct x 12 updates and vulkan updates.

amd have good engineers but valve is the glue that makes it better better programmers i recon and coders.

im really hoping amd can make its own tech which doesnt have to be open source but something that gets rid of its copy tactics of NVidia something only amd gpus can do they literally could pull the rug out from nvidia game wise there in

ps5 and xbox for god sake except nintendo.

my bet with why they aren't in the switch is just because historically for quite a long time Nintendo loves arm processors because they can squeeze more efficient performance from them and are cheaper to produce.

 

[qwertymac93]

Huh?

Vulkan is vendor-agnostic and had ray tracing for ages. Specifically, the official (i.e. non- vendor-specific) extensions got released in Nov, 2020.

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https://www.khronos.org/blog/ray-tracing-in-vulkan​

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I'm aware, however when someone like Intel decides to enter the GPU space, they have to pick and choose what hardware features they support and target for optimization. Same goes for engine developers like Epic or Unity. A base standard such as a DXR1.2 or shader model 6.9 or whatever, makes things clear. A bunch of optional extensions tacked on to the standard have no guarantee of getting any support, both in hardware and software.

 

[bit_user]

I'm aware, however when someone like Intel decides to enter the GPU space, they have to pick and choose what hardware features they support and target for optimization. Same goes for engine developers like Epic or Unity. A base standard such as a DXR1.2 or shader model 6.9 or whatever, makes things clear.

DXR, itself, is an optional extension. Vendors know which are the key extensions, whether they want to support ray tracing on either Direct3D or Vulkan.

 

[John Kiser]

So now Microsoft decides it wants to do something. Nvidia brought out Ray tracing in 2018. Microsoft is way behind. They need to get into the gaming mood. But I guess since their partners with AMD they decided they're going to do something now that AMD finally has ok Ray tracing support after all these years. Shame.

You do realize Nvidias ray tracing taps into a product called DXR that Microsoft released during the same time that Nvidia put real time Ray tracing in cards. In fact it was because of Microsoft releasing dxr that Nvidia released RTX cards in the first place.

Go back and look at announcements. Octobe 2018 was when the official public release of dxr came out and September 2018 was the first release of rtx cards, ut no one can make use of it without dxr or the Vulkan equivalent.

Please note that Nvidia relies on the direct X app still and dxr to do ray tracing or the Vulcan equivalent. They dint have their own gaming api.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

You do realize Nvidias ray tracing taps into a product called DXR that Microsoft released during the same time that Nvidia put real time Ray tracing in cards. In fact it was because of Microsoft releasing dxr that Nvidia released RTX cards in the first place.

Go back and look at announcements. Octobe 2018 was when the official public release of dxr came out and September 2018 was the first release of rtx cards, ut no one can make use of it without dxr or the Vulkan equivalent.

Please note that Nvidia relies on the direct X app still and dxr to do ray tracing or the Vulcan equivalent. They dint have their own gaming api.

And Nvidia, as the "first mover" in the GPU ray tracing field, was clearly the primary director of what features would go into DXR and Vulkan Ray Tracing. It didn't create its own extensions for everything (though it did make its own extensions for DLSS!) because it wanted Microsoft and Khronos to help define those standards. I'm sure AMD and other companies had input as well, but I'd say it's silly to suggest Nvidia wasn't helping to define most of what would become DXR.

 

[bit_user]

In fact it was because of Microsoft releasing dxr that Nvidia released RTX cards in the first place.

It was the other way around, actually. I have it on good authority that Nvidia approached Microsoft and they cooked up DXR behind AMD's back.

That all happened way before there were any public announcements, BTW. Hardware takes years to design, which is why it took AMD until RDNA2, before they had any hardware RT, at all.

ut no one can make use of it without dxr or the Vulkan equivalent.

Well, you could use Nvidia's Optix SDK, but that's oriented towards production rendering, not gaming. For game developers to embrace it, I'd agree that it probably needed some integration with DirectX.

Please note that Nvidia relies on the direct X app still and dxr to do ray tracing or the Vulcan equivalent. They dint have their own gaming api.

Nvidia does have libraries which are supplemental to what you can use via Direct3D:

NVIDIA GameWorks Documentation

docs.nvidia.com

 

[bit_user]

I'm sure AMD and other companies had input as well, but I'd say it's silly to suggest Nvidia wasn't helping to define most of what would become DXR.

I dunno. AMD had no ray tracing hardware and Microsoft only told them about DXR about 3 months in advance of the beta SDK being released to developers. Doesn't sound like AMD was given much opportunity to influence how DXR worked.

In fact, after the release of DXR, an AMD driver dev I knew at the time, was complaining to me about a couple aspects of it. This guy had implemented pure software RT that ran in realtime on a Fury-class GPU (framerate was at least 30 fps, but probably more like 60), although the geometry was rather simple and the only rays were primary and shadows.

 

[bit_user]

BTW, it seems like Sony might be a much better partner for AMD than Microsoft is.

https://tech.yahoo.com/general/articles/ps6-development-milestone-teased-amd-113159874.html
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[JarredWaltonGPU]

I dunno. AMD had no ray tracing hardware and Microsoft only told them about DXR about 3 months in advance of the beta SDK being released to developers. Doesn't sound like AMD was given much opportunity to influence how DXR worked.

In fact, after the release of DXR, an AMD driver dev I knew at the time, was complaining to me about a couple aspects of it. This guy had implemented pure software RT that ran in realtime on a Fury-class GPU (framerate was at least 30 fps, but probably more like 60), although the geometry was rather simple and the only rays were primary and shadows.

When you look at RT for shadows (ambient occlusion at least), Nvidia was already perhaps 80% of the way to ray tracing with Pascal and the support for VXAO. I feel like once that was done, even though it was only used in a handful of games (Rise of the Tomb Raider, Final Fantasy XV, and maybe a couple of others) Nvidia was thinking, "We can do something similar and make hardware ray tracing viable..."

So yeah, you're right that AMD almost certainly had no input. But "almost no input" isn't quite the same as zero input. It's still the first mover advantage: Nvidia came up with an idea, built hardware around it, got the major API companies involved, and released it when AMD was still focused purely on rasterization. And Nvidia stuffed in AI compute for good measure.

 

[bit_user]

Nvidia was already perhaps 80% of the way to ray tracing with Pascal and the support for VXAO.

Interesting. I hadn't heard that one, but I certainly could've missed it. Seems plausible, or do you have that from a good source?

And Nvidia stuffed in AI compute for good measure.

Tensor cores first showed up in Volta (V100; Titan V).