"I've seen the announcement from Imagination technologies earlier in the week, but I wanted to take a look at their Ray-Tracing demos and presentations to get a better idea. I finally got an opportunity to do so, and I really liked what I saw. The latest PowerVR GPU architecture has a new Ray Tracing Unit (or RTU) that can trace the path of light rays from one surface to another in order to accelerate a number of graphics techniques going from shadowing, reflections to visibility algorithm and more." ( Hubert Nguyen, http://www.ubergizmo.com/2014/03/powervr-series-6- wizard-gpu-ray-tracing/ )
"Now that the dust has settled over GDC 2014, we have started collecting and analyzing the coverage from the launch of our ray tracing PowerVR Wizard GPU..."
( Alexandru Voica, http://blog.imgtec.com/news/launching-ray-tracing- powervr-wizard-gpus-gdc-2014 )
Related Stories
NVIDIA Announces the GeForce RTX 20 Series: RTX 2080 Ti & 2080 on Sept. 20th, RTX 2070 in October
NVIDIA's Gamescom 2018 keynote just wrapped up, and as many have been expecting since it was announced last month, NVIDIA is getting ready to launch their next generation of GeForce hardware. Announced at the event and going on sale starting September 20th is NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 20 series, which is succeeding the current Pascal-powered GeForce GTX 10 series. Based on NVIDIA's new Turing GPU architecture and built on TSMC's 12nm "FFN" process, NVIDIA has lofty goals, looking to drive an entire paradigm shift in how games are rendered and how PC video cards are evaluated. CEO Jensen Huang has called Turing NVIDIA's most important GPU architecture since 2006's Tesla GPU architecture (G80 GPU), and from a features standpoint it's clear that he's not overstating matters.
[...] So what does Turing bring to the table? The marquee feature across the board is hybrid rendering, which combines ray tracing with traditional rasterization to exploit the strengths of both technologies. This announcement is essentially a continuation of NVIDIA's RTX announcement from earlier this year, so if you thought that announcement was a little sparse, well then here is the rest of the story.
The big change here is that NVIDIA is going to be including even more ray tracing hardware with Turing in order to offer faster and more efficient hardware ray tracing acceleration. New to the Turing architecture is what NVIDIA is calling an RT core, the underpinnings of which we aren't fully informed on at this time, but serve as dedicated ray tracing processors. These processor blocks accelerate both ray-triangle intersection checks and bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) manipulation, the latter being a very popular data structure for storing objects for ray tracing.
NVIDIA is stating that the fastest GeForce RTX part can cast 10 Billion (Giga) rays per second, which compared to the unaccelerated Pascal is a 25x improvement in ray tracing performance.
Nvidia has confirmed that the machine learning capabilities (tensor cores) of the GPU will used to smooth out problems with ray-tracing. Real-time AI denoising (4m17s) will be used to reduce the amount of samples per pixel needed to achieve photorealism.
Previously: Microsoft Announces Directx 12 Raytracing API
Nvidia Announces Turing Architecture With Focus on Ray-Tracing and Lower-Precision Operations
Related: Real-time Ray-tracing at GDC 2014
Crytek has showcased a new real-time raytracing demo which is said to run on most mainstream, contemporary GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD. The minds behind one of the most visually impressive FPS franchise, Crysis, have their new "Noir" demo out which was run on an AMD Radeon RX Vega graphics card which shows that raytracing is possible even without an NVIDIA RTX graphics card.
[...] Crytek states that the experimental ray tracing feature based on CRYENGINE's Total Illumination used to create the demo is both API and hardware agnostic, enabling ray tracing to run on most mainstream, contemporary AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. However, the future integration of this new CRYENGINE technology will be optimized to benefit from performance enhancements delivered by the latest generation of graphics cards and supported APIs like Vulkan and DX12.
Related: Real-time Ray-tracing at GDC 2014
Microsoft Announces Directx 12 Raytracing API
Nvidia Announces Turing Architecture With Focus on Ray-Tracing and Lower-Precision Operations
Nvidia Announces RTX 2080 Ti, 2080, and 2070 GPUs, Claims 25x Increase in Ray-Tracing Performance
Q2VKPT: An Open Source Game Demo with Real-Time Path Tracing
AMD and Nvidia's Latest GPUs Are Expensive and Unappealing
Nvidia Ditches the Ray-Tracing Cores with Lower-Priced GTX 1660 Ti
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Saturday April 12 2014, @03:01PM
Is our first Soytisement?
The Musk/Trump interview appears to have been hacked, but not a DDOS hack...more like A Distributed Denial of Reality.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RamiK on Saturday April 12 2014, @08:57PM
Nope. I'm just an old MIPS hacker that's felling nostalgic. ;)
Graphics wise, I think the last time I rendered a model that wasn't with SolidWorks/Catia was with 3D Studio Max in dos... But I remember all the "ray-tracing is the future" talks from back then. So, when I stumbled on a real-time ray-tracing hardware in the making while looking up MIPS news I figured it's time for my first SoylentNews submission
compiling...
(Score: 2) by mrbluze on Sunday April 13 2014, @03:34AM
An interesting bit of news it is too. Cheers to you and thanks
Do it yourself, 'cause no one else will do it yourself.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Saturday April 12 2014, @04:41PM
No thanks. Intel crippled an entire line of Atom CPU's with PowerVR making them useless for running Linux or even 64 bit Windows.
Unless PowerVR is going to open drivers or provide proprietary drivers like Nvidia, I'll pass on their tech.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Marand on Saturday April 12 2014, @11:53PM
Completely agreed. When I saw this last month at the Register [theregister.co.uk] I thought the same thing. It looks interesting, but even if it's an incredible breakthrough that can revolutionise 3d rendering, it's useless until they provide better driver support than they currently do.