Thursday, October 17th 2019
Intel and Wargaming Join Forces to Deliver Ray Tracing to World of Tanks
Intel has been very serious about its efforts in computer graphics lately, mainly because of its plans to launch a dedicated GPU lineup and bring new features to the graphics card market. Today, Intel and Wargaming, a maker of MMO titles like World of Tanks, World of Warships, and World of Warplanes, partnered to bring ray tracing feature to the Wargaming's "Core" graphics engine, used in perhaps one of the best-known MMO title - World of Tanks.
Joint forces of Intel and Wargaming developers have lead to the implementation of ray tracing, using only regular software techniques without a need for special hardware. Being hardware agnostic, this implementation works on any graphics card that can run DirectX 11, as the "Core" engine is written in DirectX 11 API. To achieve this, developers had to make a solution that uses CPU's resources for fast, multi-threaded bounding volume hierarchy which then feeds the GPU's compute shaders for ray tracing processing, thus making the ray tracing feature entirely GPU shader/core dependent. Many features are reworked with emphasis put on shadow quality. In the images below you can see exactly what difference the new ray-tracing implementation makes, and you can use almost any graphics card to get it. Wargaming notes that "some FPS" will be sacrificed if ray tracing is turned on, so your GPU shouldn't struggle too much.
Joint forces of Intel and Wargaming developers have lead to the implementation of ray tracing, using only regular software techniques without a need for special hardware. Being hardware agnostic, this implementation works on any graphics card that can run DirectX 11, as the "Core" engine is written in DirectX 11 API. To achieve this, developers had to make a solution that uses CPU's resources for fast, multi-threaded bounding volume hierarchy which then feeds the GPU's compute shaders for ray tracing processing, thus making the ray tracing feature entirely GPU shader/core dependent. Many features are reworked with emphasis put on shadow quality. In the images below you can see exactly what difference the new ray-tracing implementation makes, and you can use almost any graphics card to get it. Wargaming notes that "some FPS" will be sacrificed if ray tracing is turned on, so your GPU shouldn't struggle too much.
72 Comments on Intel and Wargaming Join Forces to Deliver Ray Tracing to World of Tanks
The result was significantly better graphics on my PC however now I have to clean the CPU cooler every 6 months otherwise the CPU will overheat.
WoT is the only game or program what overheats my CPU (if cooler is not cleaned properly)...
Look at the first set of pictures. Notice the shadows from the grill are blurry with RT off and sharp with RT on.
Look at the back of the tank in the 2nd set of pictures. The shadows on the 2 metal plates that are sticking out are blurry and with the RT on the shadows are sharp and distinct.
What RT helps with here is to make shadows optically/physically correct and that definitely includes soft shadows that are still not very good(/easy/fast) with traditional methods.
At least Intel is not playing it like Nvidia here and goes with a solution that can(?) run in any hardware.
In medium settings, things are more interestings, almost third performance for me with rt off-on.
Edit:
Developer's video about RT for vehicle shadows in World of Tanks:
RTX performance hit can be justified by increased visual fidelity.
Maybe now the conspiracy theorists can stop the nonsense that RTX cards are a scam and we don't need dedicated RT hardware for anything.
Without dedicated Ray Tracing hardware, the performance loss is even more depressing.
I am willing to bet Wargaming takes is very easy with the amount of rays as they do need to get this running on as wide install base as possible. And without hardware support at this point.
Two of the latest RT games:
Intel's ray tracing looks much better than those fake reflection used by nvidia.
So in absolute terms they are both just as good, or just as horrible, whichever way you want. Nice try though.
So, what is the status of PhysX 10 years latter? Everyone seems to be using software PhysX and no one is using hardware PhysX. Also I was surprised to see last week, probably with a few years delay, that Nvidia has unlocked PhysX. Epic store was giving older Batman titles that support hardware PhysX for free, so I had the chance to revisit those games. And guess what. With primary card an HD 7870 and secondary card a GT 620, I have hardware PhysX unlocked and fully functioning. 10 years ago Nvidia was locking it. They would have been selling much more low end GPUs today and all those years, if they haven't been so arrogant. Or maybe not if software PhysX is as good as hardware PhysX, or at least good enough.
Nvidia is trying to find uses for it's tensor and RT cores, while locking it's customer base to it's products and ray tracing is a good excuse. That doesn't mean that Nvidia's hardware implementation is a necessity. Maybe ray tracing will end up being the best selling point for HEDT and hi end mainstream processors. Because why buy an ultra expensive 2080 Ti, if you can have the same performance at RT with a simple RTX 2070 and a 12-16 core CPU that uses Intel's solution?