NVIDIA's real time ray tracing demo from yesterday, May 15, 2012

blastingcap

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Sep 16, 2010
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RussianSensation

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Sep 5, 2003
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Looks so much more realistic than today's graphics.

I have to give it to JHH - he is a charismatic CEO (almost like Steve Jobs of the graphics industry). You can see he is really passionate about this stuff. Rory Read has been at the helm of AMD and what do we know about that guy? JHH is always on, reaching out to gamers, scientists, etc.

Looking forward to ray-traced gaming.
 

Jaydip

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Mar 29, 2010
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This is still too expensive for the gaming gpus.Hope to see it in the future though.
 

Vesku

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Aug 25, 2005
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Ray tracing was the future when Amiga was a contender, problem is it's still the future. Will be fantastic when $100-300 graphics hardware can finally power something like that demo.
 

blastingcap

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Sep 16, 2010
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Hmm. I withdraw this post. PCPER has some interviews with John Carmack that help settle my mind on certain topics. He does say that he believes ray tracing will win in the end. This is in keeping with my understanding that once you hit a certain threshold of GPU power, it's actually less computationally expensive to do things via ray tracing instead of via rasterization (the computational cost curves are different). It's just that for the longest time we haven't been anywhere near that point. But we're getting there. :)

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Editor...ce-Intel-Graphics-Ray-Tracing-Voxels-and-more
 
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X98

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Mar 1, 2012
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the way the nVIDIA logo bends and distort under the sloshing simulated fluid (in real time) is jaw dropping awesomeness.

JHH knows his stuff and seems to place a lot of values in his engineers. nVIDIA engineers are credit to team!
 

Mr. Pedantic

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Feb 14, 2010
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the way the nVIDIA logo bends and distort under the sloshing simulated fluid (in real time) is jaw dropping awesomeness.

JHH knows his stuff and seems to place a lot of values in his engineers. nVIDIA engineers are credit to team!

lol.
 

sefsefsefsef

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Jun 21, 2007
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Current and (as far as I know) near future GPUs all go for being massively SIMD, but that is not the correct approach for ray-tracing. Ray tracing requires more control parallelism (think many independent threads instead of all threads in a warp executing the same instruction at the same time). Of course, you can just brute-force it and have tons of execute units on your raster GPU and get reasonable performance with low SIMD-utilization, which is what they're going for in this demo. But that's kind of stupid and you might as well just use your hardware what it was designed for (raster graphics). Designing a ray-tracing focused GPU represents a fundamental shift away from everything nVidia has been doing for the last 5+ years.
 

tulx

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Jul 12, 2011
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Why do all physics simulations always work in slow motion? 0_o Both in games and demos.
The water was moving a lot slower than in reality. I understand this could be due to demonstration purpouses in this case, but it's the same thing in games (TES IV and V etc.)
 

borisvodofsky

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Feb 12, 2010
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Why do all physics simulations always work in slow motion? 0_o Both in games and demos.
The water was moving a lot slower than in reality. I understand this could be due to demonstration purpouses in this case, but it's the same thing in games (TES IV and V etc.)

You want reality? go pour urself a glass of water then.:'(
 

Keysplayr

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Jan 16, 2003
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Why do all physics simulations always work in slow motion? 0_o Both in games and demos.
The water was moving a lot slower than in reality. I understand this could be due to demonstration purpouses in this case, but it's the same thing in games (TES IV and V etc.)

Depends on what you perceive the size of the glass container is. If you perceive it as the size of a coffee mug, then yes, it is slower than reality the way the water moves. If you perceive the size of the glass container to be as large as a white dwarf star, then it is much faster than reality.

All in the perception.

This is the first time I've seen this level of real time ray-tracing. We are almost there, the end of the tunnel is in sight it seems.
 

ShintaiDK

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Apr 22, 2012
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Just wow :D

Intel and nVidia is on the raytracing race. And the finish line is getting very near.
 

Cerb

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Aug 26, 2000
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Current and (as far as I know) near future GPUs all go for being massively SIMD, but that is not the correct approach for ray-tracing. Ray tracing requires more control parallelism (think many independent threads instead of all threads in a warp executing the same instruction at the same time). Of course, you can just brute-force it and have tons of execute units on your raster GPU and get reasonable performance with low SIMD-utilization, which is what they're going for in this demo. But that's kind of stupid and you might as well just use your hardware what it was designed for (raster graphics). Designing a ray-tracing focused GPU represents a fundamental shift away from everything nVidia has been doing for the last 5+ years.
OTOH, both NV and AMD have been going for more unique cores to run more unique threads, instead of wider and wider SIMD arrays. There may be an ideal convergence point. Low width utilization with shaders has been an ongoing problem for years, as it is, and moderate-width SIMD with lots of cores and SMT has been the way they've been dealing with it. With DX10-11 shaders, and focusing on computing, the differences aren't nearly as stark as back in the day when only a little bit of the chips were programmable.

Their demo is far from a full game environment, but it is cool to see that it's getting there. Even if hacked into an engine that isn't pure ray tracing, ray tracing is the way to solve light, shadow, and texture problems (texture as in the real-world definition, not bitmaps).
 
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flexy

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Sep 28, 2001
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Ray tracing was the future when Amiga was a contender, problem is it's still the future. Will be fantastic when $100-300 graphics hardware can finally power something like that demo.

Remember..how it took hours sometimes to render one single image? :)
The term "real time ray-tracing" is almost frightening realizing how far we have come since Amiga times in terms of computer power...
 

tweakboy

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Jan 3, 2010
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This Ray Tracing would need a DX12 or DX13 or whatever to understand the ray tracing implementation. When this becomes reality, so all cards 690 and under cant play the new ray traced game. When will this be who knows ? Maybe when Howard I mean Haswell is out well know a lot. 2020 ? Soo all of us have to upgrade to play MASS EFECT 4 which is ray traced and requires DX14 or whatever its gonna be at that time..
 

tweakboy

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I don't see it happening any time soon. Since xbox720 wont be ray traced console ,, then PC games will never port over to ray tracing until xbox 1000 in 6 or 7 years, still no ray tracing games.. I think real time ray can be good for studio max,,,,but not us gamers.
 

SickBeast

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Jul 21, 2000
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It used to take my Mobile Barton 2500+ about an hour to generate a 12 megapixel ray traced image of a moderately complex photorealistic scene. I doubt that any hardware any time soon can render 60 frames like that per second even at 1080p resolution.

It's definitely cool and photo realistic but I think we're still 10 years away from it.
 

nismotigerwvu

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May 13, 2004
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Didn't Intel show a raytraced version of Wolfienstein running on Larabee a few years ago? If memory serves me correctly, it was much closer to gameplay than this (granted it might have been running on $10,000 worth of hardware)