| Bofferbrauer2 said:
The question is, what will it get filled up with? RTX 2080 performance seems certainly in the realm of possible, but let's not forget that the raytracing bloats the RTX chips a whole lot bigger than a GTX with same performance would be. I think ~2 billion tensor cores like in the RTX 2080 won't cut it if they want to make raytracing really worthwhile on consoles. I hope AMD comes up with a solution that doesn't need specific circuitry just for raytracing. |
I don't think AMD are all that interested in tensor cores and that's not going to help with ray tracing. Those things are mostly used for machine learning frameworks like PyTorch or Tensorflow so Nvidia tried to get a use out of them in gaming by making a library for AA ...
As for not needing to implement some fixed function circuitry, I don't think that's quite possible considering how optimized Nvidia's hardware implementation is. You would definitely at the very least need some sort of hardware accelerated BVH generation because building acceleration structures for global scene representations is very slow since not even Nvidia can afford to keep rebuilding the BVH every frame so game developers just do BVH refitting on dynamic objects which can degrade the performance of ray intersection tests. Already, game developers need to do hacks even with fixed function BVH generation!
Even DXR takes advantage of fixed function ray intersection tests so Microsoft/Nvidia obviously sees this as a performance win right there. There'd have to be a compelling case to make the hardware more flexible than just for the current implementation ... (only thing I can think up of are ray traversal shaders and that's pretty much it as far as the immediate future is concerned so AMD are pretty much thinking of heading into a similar route as Nvidia did here)
Ray tracing isn't THAT bad of a performance hit as long as developers remain reasonable their ray budget. Tricks like using a simplified BVH for many dynamic objects or updating the GI/AO at quarter frame rate/quarter resolution and reflections/shadows at half frame rate/half resolution can make things very manageable. Even taking in those compromises will make for a vastly superior visual quality than what state of the art rasterization can do ... (obviously ultra settings are going to be an issue so maybe developers should consider putting a ceiling on their ray budget)
I hope AMD doubles down on ray tracing since it'll be well supported in the future. I wish consoles will reach 20B rays/s which is double that of the RTX 2080 Ti and enhance it even further implementing "ray reordering" too for even more performance advantages ...
