Nvidia's Volta (Tensor Cores!) to feature realtime Ray tracing. Anyone excited?

[moonbogg]

I would be excited, but I know how this story plays out. Seen it before. The cards feature new tech and the cards are expensive as all hell. Maybe a few games will sort of feature the tech this generation, but it won't be an ideal implementation and the games will probably lag like crazy. In 2 or 3 generations from now, more games may feature real time ray tracing and it will run better on the even newer hardware, but it still won't be a huge deal because of the lag and lack of impact on the gaming experience.
This is like tessellation but worse IMO. Yeah its good and adds value to games, but it took a long time after the initial wave of tessellation capable hardware for this feature to actually make its way to games in any meaningful way where all gamers could enjoy it in a practical and meaningful way. For now, ray tracing will be like tessellation was; a mostly Nvidia exclusive lag factory that you will pay dearly for in these early days of tech demo-ish implementation.
This technology can be yours right now for only $3,000. Looks like those Tensor cores have a gaming purpose after all.
Combine all this with the current miner spaz attack to buy up all the GPU's on earth (certainly these new ones), and you have 2018 looking to be the crappiest year for gaming hardware we've likely ever seen .

 

[Timmah!]

Where did you take it from its the Tensor cores that are used for this? Was there any article claiming it or its your assumption? This interests me.

 

[SMU_Pony]

Where did you take it from its the Tensor cores that are used for this? Was there any article claiming it or its your assumption? This interests me.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1254...tracing-acceleration-for-volta-gpus-and-later

"Meanwhile NVIDIA also mentioned that they have the ability to leverage Volta's tensor cores in an indirect manner, accelerating ray tracing by doing AI denoising, where a neural network could be trained to reconstruct an image using fewer rays, a technology the company has shown off in the past at GTC."

So, not directly.. but they apparently can help.

 

[Timmah!]

Thank you! In that case it works the same as the new Octane Render AI Denoiser! Although i have no clue whether Octane leverages Tensor cores on Titan V - the Octane devs only said they toying with a possibility of using the CPU with AVX code to run the neural network behind their denoiser.

Anyway, i now expect the Tensor cores show up on gaming cards. The whole raytraycing will be probably useless without it, and surely they did not integrate it into Gameworks, so only the owners of 3000 USD cards can use it.

 

[Mopetar]

It's been a while since anyone has started talking about real time ray tracing. It's been so long that I can't even remember which company was hyping it either. I think they managed to do it with an older title (at the time) at 30 FPS, but they were limited to 240p. I'm curious to see what they can ultimately do with this, but I don't see it taking off.

 

[LTC8K6]

$9K for the card...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12579/big-volta-comes-to-quadro-nvidia-announces-quadro-gv100

 

[TheF34RChannel]

Thank you! In that case it works the same as the new Octane Render AI Denoiser! Although i have no clue whether Octane leverages Tensor cores on Titan V - the Octane devs only said they toying with a possibility of using the CPU with AVX code to run the neural network behind their denoiser.

Anyway, i now expect the Tensor cores show up on gaming cards. The whole raytraycing will be probably useless without it, and surely they did not integrate it into Gameworks, so only the owners of 3000 USD cards can use it.

DirectX RT doesn't need tensor cores