Monday, November 12th 2018
David Wang From AMD Confirms That There Will Eventually Be an Answer to DirectX Raytracing
We don't know when, but it seems AMD will someday have support for DirectX Raytracing , a feature introduced by Microsoft on March 2018. David Wang, Senior Vice President of Engineering at AMD's Radeon Technologies Group, told so in an interview on the Japanese gaming website 4Gamer. Overclock3D confirmed the comments with the assistance of a Japanese speaker who helped to translate the interview without misunderstandings. It's important to clarify that what Wang said was "a personal view", not an official statement from AMD.
Nevertheless, this executive seems to be that "AMD will definitely respond to DXR", although right now the company is focused on improving its current CG production environment based on Radeon ProRenderer. Wang went further on his comments and told also that "the spread of Ray-Tracing's game will not go unless the GPU will be able to use Ray-Tracing in all ranges from low end to high end". Therefore he thinks that ray tracing technology will not become mainstream until there is support for all types of products, from low-end to high-end, but that doesn't mean that AMD won't offer that support gradually when it sees fit. And he seems to think it will be entirely appropriate at some point, and that's what's important.
Source:
4Gamer
Nevertheless, this executive seems to be that "AMD will definitely respond to DXR", although right now the company is focused on improving its current CG production environment based on Radeon ProRenderer. Wang went further on his comments and told also that "the spread of Ray-Tracing's game will not go unless the GPU will be able to use Ray-Tracing in all ranges from low end to high end". Therefore he thinks that ray tracing technology will not become mainstream until there is support for all types of products, from low-end to high-end, but that doesn't mean that AMD won't offer that support gradually when it sees fit. And he seems to think it will be entirely appropriate at some point, and that's what's important.
69 Comments on David Wang From AMD Confirms That There Will Eventually Be an Answer to DirectX Raytracing
When it comes to these kinds of crystal ball things, I tend to look at the economy of things to get a handle on it. And economically, Turing as an architecture really doesn't seem viable. How are they ever going to scale this up? Through node shrinks? That is going to be short lived. A whoppin' 18-20% of the die is now reserved for RT capability and the performance is going nowhere. Another economical factor is the state of the marketplace, and this very article underlines how sad it is. AMD is not even in a position to make a meaningful entrance with RT enabled GPUs anytime soon. So in terms of market share and adoption we have literally three (!) GPU models capable and even the strongest one has nothing to show for it.
The rest of what he said was a bit disappointing though..
AMD shouldn't prioritize it. It would be a terrible business decision. They already have Radeon Rays for professional situations which can be pre-rendered.
What I wouldn't want to see is another TruForm that took 8 years to catch on as Tessellation. And to this day, the hardware still chokes on it.
You've said it yourself. There was more 'talk' about how DX12 and Vulkan were going to revolutionize gaming and look where we are today. Marginal, if even that, performance wins, and not a single game is out that truly leverages the feature levels DX12 has to offer. When Mantle was a thing, we got served with special demos showing what increased draw calls could mean for gaming. Where are the games using that? We have Ashes... and that's it.
The vast majority of games still gets limited by DX11 because the vast majority of the marketplace is still optimized for that API. RTX is in far worse place right now in every possible way. Like bug said, this could well take a decade and if there is one certainty, it is that the current RTX implementation is dead on arrival.
I couldn't tell you honestly. But let's put them side by side anyway. Put those highlighted bits next to Turing and you can see my point :)
The problem I think is clear. RTX is directly eating into the remaining headroom and die space we so desperately need to scale performance. TruForm was just bonus as there were tons of options to scale further.
RTRT is a platform agnostic feature set.. Not really and for reasons stated above. Can't agree with that perspective. It's not going to take 10 years. The reason DX12 wasn't jumped to by devs is because a large portion of the Windows gaming market refused to jump on the Win 10 bandwagon. According to Steam a majority still haven't. But RTX/RTRT is, as stated above, platform agnostic. It can be done on any OS with any API.
RTRT is the future of lighting in games. It's not a fad and it's not going away. It's here to stay. Get on board, or join the DoDo bird..
RT is the future, VR is the future, low level APIs are the future. Its all the future, and I can't disagree on that. But 'future' is a very broad term. All you need to do is look at history and you can see that these changes are very gradual and some of them are so gradual, you can easily ignore them. I think RT is one of those. We're already looking at 2020 or later at the *very least* to see, *maybe*, the upper half of the GPU product stack as RT capable - with only the top parts actually playable. That is two years essentially lost in terms of adoption rates.
As for those millions of GPUs being sold, where do you get these numbers? Answer: you don't, its a figment of your imagination. The amount of benches ran on RTX GPUs is incredibly low at this point, and its market share is lower than the adoption of 4K monitors right now.
We are now looking at a whoppin'...
Wooops. 9K samples across all RTX enabled cards. Of course, it will rise. But this doesn't look like something that is flying off the shelves, to me. This includes all those pre orders.
Take note also of the ratings: 56 ~ 65. Another showcase of 'hype' to you? Of millions of sales? Of Nvidia that can't make enough RTX to feed this ray-tracing starved world? This echoes the feedback RTX has gathered since it launched. Even in the back of a buyer's head there is that nagging question: "Nvidia, wtf are you doing?"
Some perspective, as well. Take note of market share per GPU tier (of course, high end is more heavily represented here, people are more likely to bench it), but especially take note of the user ratings.
Are we not allowed to?
Enthusiasm is abused to sell you overpriced, mostly worthless junk, that is the whole business model of the RTX family. There isn't a single example in GPU history that shows otherwise. If you want to early adopt this crap, be my guest, but wise it surely is not, and in some ways even damaging towards the end goal: nice games. RT introduces expenses that do little to elevate gameplay and money can only be spent once - both for publishers and devs as for consumers.
There is some value to be had in figuring out what is going to work well and what is not. What bandwagon is worth jumping on and which one is not. Blindly early adopting everything because some company put a nice sticker on repurposed datacenter technology is... well. You know. And I hate to sound arrogant, but my hit rate is well above 50% when it comes to these predictions. Maybe I should make a video, so people can link it here and it becomes credible... :roll::roll:
On the point of optimism, I can't wait to see AMD's efforts in the area of RTRT. Hopefully they get the lead out sometime soon.
You want to paint RTRT as a fad, it's your right to do so.
And if we're talking hit rates, I also didn't buy into VR (or 3D before it) and told people here expecting everything to go DX12/Vulkan is like expecting all programmers to give up higher-level languages and start writing everything in C.
:lovetpu:
We heard that even Nvidia's flagship cards buckle hard under their advertised ability of ray tracing (30fps 1080p...).
So that is just going to be nothing more then a silly gimmick (like PhysX) until there is proper support for it.
I don't know what the total number is, but 25 titles were looking to add DLSS alone when it was unveiled. Granted, one of those titles was FF XV, which has kicked the bucket since.