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
Have a look at this : www.computerbase.de/2019-10/world-of-tanks-encore-rt/
WoT : RTX 2070 RT Ultra vs RT off : you lose about 35% of the performance with RT on ultra
Metro Exodus : RTX 2070 RT Ultra vs RT off : you lose about 40% of the performance with RT on ultra
So, come again ? How much better is the dedicated hardware ?
These comparisons don't even matter at the end of the day because these are different games with different implementations but it shows the world can survive without dedicated RT cores that eat die space and drive the price up of silicon even if you want to have RT in games. And this isn't the first time we see this either, Crytek showed the same thing earlier this year.
Losing 100% performance sends you to 0 fps and losing 120% of performance to... negative fps. Right?
I think you are confusing performance gains with losses and probably that "100% loss" should be "50% loss"
And tbh, so far I have not seen a raytracing comparison that actually impresses me apart from maybe the Quake remake ;)
But on the topic at hand, yeah it seems to just make the shadows that are already there more sharp, how is that ray tracing?Fully agree with your post here, just wanted to add, Is software PhysX as good as hardware though?
I mean I fully agree Nvidia completely killed it with its buying out Ageia and then making it propitiatory, and that still makes me angry.
But remember all those demos with PhysX? with rocks falling through cloth tearing part of it away, or those pillars all falling differently depending on where they were hit etc.
Well....we still dont have that in our games....
And just like the link Vya Domus pointed out, even with this Intel implementation, the RTX 2070 loses less performance than the RX 5700XT, so dedicated hardware for RT maybe is not as useless as some people would think.
The thing is to not fully judge this tech until it's implemented more in the future. Right now they are only scratching the surface of RT because if it were implemented too much right now it would turn a game into a slideshow. We are at least a couple more generations away from full implementation of RTRT on affordable GPUs.
For the time being if you don't like RT or see any difference or it's killing performance of your GPU then just turn it off.
Here's a demo of RTRT using the Unreal Engine:
Also you can't compare different games and different implementations without also comparing visual results, before coming to conclusions. You also can't take ONE implementation in DX11 and come to conclusions about every possible software implementation we will see in the future. Not to mention that WoT RT implementation will probably receive more optimizations in the near future.
As for the lower losses on the RTX card, that probably has nothing to do with the RTX hardware in the 2070. You think Intel payed them to use even one RT core in the Nvidia GPUs? They have more experience on optimizing with Nvidia hardware and the results are seen also in this case. WoT was never an AMD friendly title. Why be in this case?
PS. That example about PhysX that you happily chose to ignore, is there to explain to you that RTX could easily be nothing more than a new PhysX case.
PS: Just to clarify, if you ask me if the future is going to be the dedicated hardware to process Ray Tracing? I don't know, nor does anyone know.
But anyone can use it and implement Ray Tracing on their hardware/software and that's a big difference from what PhysX was.
With neither the PS5 nor XBOXn+1 having Geforce DNA, and every major game engine being designed for those platforms, does Nvidia RTX even matter to anyone? It'll just be another G-Sync/PhysX/Hairworks defeat that either doesn't get used much, or is abandoned in favour of the open standard.
Blue so show sharper or added shadows
Red to show that its a more vague shadow vs Off
its all about the shadows in this, just like Tomb Raider's RTX implementation so far.
On a more serious note tho, I've benchmarked it in the morning and with a Ryzen 5 1600 + GTX 1060 6GB in 1080p ULTRA
ULTRA + RT OFF: ~18372p
ULTRA + RT ON (Ultra): ~11595p
...so about a 40% performance cost. Framerate is capped at 141fps at my end, although probably doesn't really matter as it only hits that for a brief moment when the benchmark starts.
Mind you this game was never really Radeon friendly, treat it as an nVIDIA title in your minds. Since technically this implementation runs most on the CPU maybe WG can improve on the performance on AMD GPUs, but I wouldn't hold my breath...
PS: Got home, so updated with actually figures.
its not worth bothering with. So far, that's what we got.
Let's see if they get there someday. I'm not holding my breath... despite all the marketing around it.
This is however imo as if you are running teh game with shadows turned off vs on so I would think its worth it, that is if you play that zoomed in.
So drop with many cores please and lets see how that works :)
World of Tracing
This SIGGRAPH presentation showed some of the numbers regarding how much dedicated hardware is boosting RT performance, it's substantial.
The dedicated hardware itself, takes up a relatively tiny amount of die space, both the Tensor cores and the RT cores together only account for ~9% of the die space on current RTX cards and of that 9%, the RT cores represent only about a third of the amount. So assuming no other bottlenecks, you're getting 2x-3x times performance for a ~3% die space cost.
A lot of people think RT is too expensive even WITH the performance boost from dedicated hardware. Seems quite clear that going forward dedicated RT hardware is indeed a "must have" for real time RT, if it's ever going to be taken seriously at least.
despite that, the RX 5700XT loses 75% of it's performance just enabling some very few Ultra RT shadows on select number of tanks in the game, while the 2070 loses 55% of it's performance. We end up with a simple game running close to 70fps @1440p using software RT!
www.computerbase.de/2019-10/world-of-tanks-encore-rt/
Meanwhile, we have Metro Exodus doing hardware RT, achieving massive RT GI and Shadows implementation doing 50fps @1440p with the same 2070. The 2070 dropped 57% going from no RTX to High RTX. That's the power of hardware RT, significantly more effects for less or about the same performance impact!
All the % is nice in theory, but WoT is a PVP game that can get rather competitive, so no one will sacrifice even 10% fps, let alone 55%.
As for limited effects, all implmentations of Ray Tracing is very minimal given the horrible performance of even Hardware based RT.
To the point where it isn't hard to see noise / artifacts in the lighting. Practically the RT cores are just wasted die space for this generation of GPUs.
So here is a reality pill for you.
Funny thing is you praise how there is 70 fps with RT on, but also states that the game doesn't use RT 95% of the time.
Yes RT games performs normally when you don't use the RT, who would have thought?
Of course hardware that improves handling RTRT is too expensive. It's supposed to be. Remember when cell phones were new or SSDs?
RTRT kills the performance of my GPU. It's supposed to. It's for the future. It's not for past GPUs.
Nvidia is taking control of RTRT with RTX GPUs. They may try but they will fail. AMD already has a hardware solution for handling RTRT better with the upcoming PS5. Intel has a solution as well.
Developers are slow to embrace RTRT and some implementations are sloppy. Time takes time.
To me it looks like a good thing for gamers eventually but there are of course some rough spots right now.
ok, more seriously ... RT in WoT? that's unneeded (unwanted but that's general for RT in the end, given the usefulness for the moment) what does it give more than what we already have? visual fidelity? well WoT is a competitive tank moba (ok less fast paced than most ... if you have 60fps you are good, no need to 75+), FPS are more important than visual fidelity thus the justification is usually considered as... not being one, although given how it is easy to run maxed out at 1620p75hz, which look good enough and sustained around 75fps, would not be beneficial to activate RT for such low difference between RT off and higher values and loose some FPSah that's a little more visible on that example ... mmhhhh not worth the fps impact thowell RT for now ...(might be imho, mind you.) is unimpressive, minor and a freaking huge chunk of a RTX card is used to run it ... while it could be used for something else, that's one hell of a drawback ...
comparing that to a cell phone or a SSD is a bit ... optimistic ... at best it's comparable to a cartridge fountain pen coming from a quill pen, in term of advancement and usefulness and unfortunately .... i has more the price to pay akin to the prior than the later ...
We don't go straight to this overnight: