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NVIDIA Releases DirectX Raytracing Driver for GTX Cards; Posts Trio of DXR Demos
Last month at GDC 2019, NVIDIA revealed that they would finally be enabling public support for DirectX Raytracing on non-RTX cards. Long baked into the DXR specification itself – which is designed [to] encourage ray tracing hardware development while also allowing it to be implemented via traditional compute shaders – the addition of DXR support in cards without hardware support for it is a small but important step in the deployment of the API and its underlying technology. At the time of their announcement, NVIDIA announced that this driver would be released in April, and now this morning, NVIDIA is releasing the new driver.
As we covered in last month's initial announcement of the driver, this has been something of a long time coming for NVIDIA. The initial development of DXR and the first DXR demos (including the Star Wars Reflections demo) were all handled on cards without hardware RT acceleration; in particular NVIDIA Volta-based video cards. Microsoft used their own fallback layer for a time, but for the public release it was going to be up to GPU manufacturers to provide support, including their own fallback layer. So we have been expecting the release of this driver in some form for quite some time.
Of course, the elephant in the room in enabling DXR on cards without RT hardware is what it will do for performance – or perhaps the lack thereof.
Also at Wccftech.
See also: NVIDIA shows how much ray-tracing sucks on older GPUs
[For] stuff that really adds realism, like advanced shadows, global illumination and ambient occlusion, the RTX 2080 Ti outperforms the 1080 Ti by up to a factor of six.
To cite some specific examples, Port Royal will run on the RTX 2080 Ti at 53.3 fps at 2,560 x 1,440 with advanced reflections and shadows, along with DLSS anti-aliasing, turned on. The GTX 1080, on the other hand, will run at just 9.2 fps with those features enabled and won't give you any DLSS at all. That effectively makes the feature useless on those cards for that game. With basic reflections on Battlefield V, on the other hand, you'll see 30 fps on the 1080 Ti compared to 68.3 on the 2080 Ti.
Previously:
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
Crytek Demos Real-Time Raytracing for AMD and Non-RTX Nvidia GPUs
(Score: 3, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Friday April 12 2019, @02:28PM (5 children)
IMHO they are doing this so potentially cool stuff will work - and if it is slow, make a demand to upgrade....
Otherwise, it is *kinda* nice for those of us that ray-trace , but not for games...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 12 2019, @03:09PM
It sounds to me that it's more like "our nvidia hairworkx and whatever slow games down enough as it is, enable this too and then join our telemetry club to potentially get valuable discounts on forced upgrades!"
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Friday April 12 2019, @03:24PM (2 children)
The good news is that AMD will probably be able to respond to Nvidia, and realtime raytracing (using machine learning to reduce complexity) will not be an Nvidia exclusive thing for long.
https://wccftech.com/amd-navi-20-radeon-rx-graphics-card-ray-tracing-gcn-architecture-rumor/ [wccftech.com]
Khronos Vulkan can also be used for raytracing, so no need to be tied to DirectX.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Vulkan-Ray-Tracing-NVIDIA [phoronix.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 12 2019, @08:48PM (1 child)
Spoilers in summary have previous SN article Crytek Demos Real-Time Raytracing for AMD and Non-RTX Nvidia GPUs [soylentnews.org], so raytracing is already viable. And that was with AMD Vega 56, not the 64 or some pro model with everything enabled.
Based in the NVidia RTX demo I saw weeks ago (something Russian looking), I wonder if the GTX are artificially crippled, because the RTX "with raytracing vs without" clearly was, non raytraced games don't have such sucky look today.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday April 12 2019, @08:58PM
AMD's upcoming Navi GPUs or a future GPU generation will add some kind of acceleration for it, probably for a denoising algorithm.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday April 13 2019, @02:00AM
Or, maybe a different algorithm is possible that would trade off memory or quality so them developing a uselessly shitty backwards compatibility layer would prevent developers from exploring their options.
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 12 2019, @06:01PM
>[For] stuff that really adds realism, like advanced shadows, global illumination and ambient occlusion, the RTX 2080 Ti outperforms the 1080 Ti by up to a factor of six.
I have a 2080ti OC coming today to replace my 1080ti, which will replace a 1070 in another machine, but my expectation is just a 30% increase at best in the software I use.
(Score: 1) by Coward, Anonymous on Friday April 12 2019, @07:17PM (1 child)
Can we use GPU ray tracing to make POV-Ray faster?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday April 12 2019, @07:54PM
I don't think so. The technique Nvidia and others will use involves doing low-quality raytracing and then fixing the result with a machine learning denoiser algorithm.
https://developer.nvidia.com/optix-denoiser [nvidia.com]
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/geforce-gtx-dxr-ray-tracing-available-now/ [nvidia.com]
http://wiki.povray.org/content/Knowledgebase:Miscellaneous#Topic_1 [povray.org]
Maybe you can do a quickie in POVray and then apply the denoising algorithm.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday April 12 2019, @10:32PM (1 child)
The point is obviously no to play games with ray-tracing. We all knew it would be slide-show speeds.
The point is to accelerate rendering of ray-traced images for the many systems who don't need real-time (stills, architecture...) and to allow developers to check the improvements and their work even if they don't have an RTX yet.
(Score: 3, Informative) by loonycyborg on Saturday April 13 2019, @08:49AM
Did you know that Wolfenstein 3D, the first ever FPS which was made in 1992, used a variant of raytracing technique? And ran at realtime speed on ancient cpus without any gpu? There is so many ways in which raytracing can be used so we can't make a blanket statement that it will result in low frame rates. It just happens that rasterization ended up easier to use and more practical. I wouldn't be surprised if this balance changes with advent of new hardware and more technical experience. But I wouldn't be surprised that this nvidia technology ends up yet another dead end either.