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At GDC, Microsoft announced a new feature for DirectX 12: DirectX Raytracing (DXR). The new API offers hardware-accelerated raytracing to DirectX applications, ushering in a new era of games with more realistic lighting, shadows, and materials. One day, this technology could enable the kinds of photorealistic imagery that we've become accustomed to in Hollywood blockbusters.
[...] Because of the performance demands, Microsoft expects that DXR will be used, at least for the time being, to fill in some of the things that raytracing does very well and that rasterization doesn't: things like reflections and shadows. DXR should make these things look more realistic. We might also see simple, stylized games using raytracing exclusively.
The company says that it has been working on DXR for close to a year, and Nvidia in particular has plenty to say about the matter. Nvidia has its own raytracing engine designed for its Volta architecture (though currently, the only video card shipping with Volta is the Titan V, so the application of this is likely limited). When run on a Volta system, DXR applications will automatically use that engine.
In conjunction with Microsoft’s new DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API announcement, today NVIDIA is unveiling their RTX technology, providing ray tracing acceleration for Volta and later GPUs. Intended to enable real-time ray tracing for games and other applications, RTX is essentially NVIDIA's DXR backend implementation. For this NVIDIA is utilizing a mix of software and hardware – including new microarchitectural features – though the company is not disclosing further details.
(Score: 4, Informative) by canopic jug on Tuesday March 20 2018, @11:32AM (2 children)
That is just M$ spam, put out by an M$ booster/representative inside Ars Technica. M$ goes to any lengths to avoid using OpenGL or Vulkan since they are platform independent. They also put in a lot of effort to overshadow either in the media. So the press release is most likely a belated response to the recent announcements about Vulkan improvements, which were even covered here:
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Khronos Group Releases Vulkan 1.0 Graphics Specification [soylentnews.org]
AMD Finally Pushing Out Open-Source Vulkan Driver [soylentnews.org]
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mth on Tuesday March 20 2018, @03:45PM
Both DX12 and Vulkan were inspired by AMD's Mantle API. I much prefer Vulkan because it is cross-platform, but I don't think it's fair to say that DirectX is behind the times.
As far as I know, there is no specific support for ray tracing in any of those APIs. People have done ray tracing with existing graphics APIs, so I don't know how much of a difference a dedicated API makes: does it actually make things easier or faster, or is it just marketing?
(Score: 4, Informative) by TheRaven on Tuesday March 20 2018, @04:54PM
DXR and Vulkan are very different. Vulkan is a low-level API that basically lets you manage data and run programs on the GPU. You use it to build very high-performance rendering pipelines tailored to a particular use. DXR is a high-level ray-tracing API. You can implement DXR on top of Vulkan, but you don't want to make everyone who wants to write games implement it on top of Vulkan. A bunch of the big-name game engines (e.g. Unity) are providing DXR back ends, so you can describe your scene graph using their APIs and have it ray traced with DXR.
I expect Khronos will define a standard similar to DXR (OpenRT never went anywhere, in spite of some promising demos), but it will be layered on top of Vulkan, not a direct competitor.
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