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
Until AMD has GPUs with that kind of performance, might as well not even bother giving the GPUs the capability. Unless ofc they come up with a way to have RT @ a far far lower performance cost which, IMHO, is highly unlikely.
It's funny that AMD's interest in new technology is questioned when histrionically it was Nvidia who were the ones always reluctant to change their hardware according to the direction the industry was moving towards. Remember unified shaders ? Nvidia argued long and hard against it, how did that turned out ? They obviously knew very well that's the future, but they didn't have the hardware ready so they questioned it's use. Their behavior was always distasteful in this regard to say the least.
That one was 100% on Microsoft with nvidia taking huge advantage of it.
Not to mention upcoming 7nm Navi which will be at least 25% faster thanks to new 7nm process (official data on process' performance increase provided by AMD) not to mention architectural improvements that might come.
Vega 64 is slightly behind 2070 in this title @ 4K resolution. However, notice how much is the drop from RT fully enabled on the 2070: Vega 64 has nearly 296% more performance over a fully RT enabled 2070 because fully enabling RT tanks performance soooo much.
Quite simply: unless AMD / nVidia come up with a much less costly way to enable RT, there's little point in enabling it @ this time.
@W1zzard : how did enabling RT in any of their configurations affect power consumption? I'm guessing the increase is substantial now that the whole chip is being utilized, instead of just a significan portion of it. IMO, power consumption figures (with / without RT) should have been included in RT's review.
@ 1440p, the performance tanks from 90.9 to 33.8 FPS and @ 1080p it tanks from 112.3 to 47 FPS, and all these numbers are average numbers: minimum framerates would be more important here, IMO. RT's cost is simply far too great for "this round" of graphic cards.
If there's anything good about this, it's that Nvidia will have to invest in DX12 performance optimization now, because raytracing is in DX12.
Even "Raytraced Reflections" have a mountain of graphical glitches just like Rasterized reflections have. In otherwords, you are cutting your framerate down by 75% just so you can have incorrect and glitchy godrays show up in puddles instead of shadowy reflections that are at least consistent.
What an amazing new graphical feature /s
Actually, I think it can go in my sig.
Edit: what do you know, it works!