Monday, July 19th 2021
NVIDIA Brings RTX and DLSS to Arm Platform
NVIDIA at GDC dropped a major hint at where it wants to take PC gaming post the Arm acquisition. The company is demonstrating its RTX real-time raytracing technology, and the DLSS performance enhancement, on an Arm processor by MediaTek. To the PC, this means NVIDIA is laying the foundations of gaming in the post-x86 world where it holds Arm IP; foundations that were dug up by Apple and its mighty M1 chip, based on Arm CPU technology.
Making this unequivocal, was MediaTek. "RTX is the most groundbreaking technology to come to PC gaming in the last two decades," said PC Tseng, general manager of MediaTek's Intelligent Multimedia Business Unit."MediaTek and NVIDIA are laying the foundation for a new category of Arm-based high-performance PCs." The Taiwan-based Arm SoC major has developed a new Arm-based PC processor called Kompanio 1200, which it hopes will power PC platforms much like the Apple M1 or the Qualcomm Compute Platforms.
NVIDIA is preparing to put out two demos of RTX and DLSS on Arm. The first one is "Wolfenstein Young Blood" on Arm-based Linux, complete with raytraced reflections and DLSS. The next is an RTX-based tech-demo titled "The Bistro," depicting a raytraced urban scene in France. It's important to note that neither were rendered by a GPU integrated with the MediaTek SoC, but a discrete NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 GPU connected to the Kompanio 1200, running a special desktop Linux distro for the Arm machine architecture, which has custom NVIDIA drivers for RTX and DLSS.
What NVIDIA is trying to show here, is that future gaming PCs could do away with x86-based processors completely, as games are increasingly reliant on GPU power, with sufficiently fast Arm CPUs handling serial processing and low-bandwidth I/O stack.
NVIDIA expanded RTX SDKs for Linux to include DLSS, RTX direct illumination, RTX global illumination, AI-accelerated de-noising, and the RTX Memory Utility, a memory-management optimization for raytraced apps.
Source:
NVIDIA Blog
Making this unequivocal, was MediaTek. "RTX is the most groundbreaking technology to come to PC gaming in the last two decades," said PC Tseng, general manager of MediaTek's Intelligent Multimedia Business Unit."MediaTek and NVIDIA are laying the foundation for a new category of Arm-based high-performance PCs." The Taiwan-based Arm SoC major has developed a new Arm-based PC processor called Kompanio 1200, which it hopes will power PC platforms much like the Apple M1 or the Qualcomm Compute Platforms.
What NVIDIA is trying to show here, is that future gaming PCs could do away with x86-based processors completely, as games are increasingly reliant on GPU power, with sufficiently fast Arm CPUs handling serial processing and low-bandwidth I/O stack.
NVIDIA expanded RTX SDKs for Linux to include DLSS, RTX direct illumination, RTX global illumination, AI-accelerated de-noising, and the RTX Memory Utility, a memory-management optimization for raytraced apps.
38 Comments on NVIDIA Brings RTX and DLSS to Arm Platform
It feels almost like on drugs reading those things in one sentence.
Nvidia keeps pushing things and forces the competition to innovate too, we all win.
Fast forward to now: it is available in many more games, it is less resource-intensive thanks to upscaling tech, AMD has adopted it, and it is becoming available on platforms besides Windows/x86. :D
With AMD having locked in most of the console market and steadily penetrating the PC market, the mobile and non-x86 market is the last major stronghold they need to break into. It'd be great if they can make RDNA as easy to plug into ARM designs as Nvidia is doing. The competition would be great. Moreso since Intel is coming into play as well, and they'd likely want to keep x86 semi-relevant in an attempt to counter ARM, or at least get their own GPUs as easily integrated.
Considering how heavy it is (with how hard DLSS gets pushed) I would still not opt into it for RT, atleast wait another generation.
Maybe you folks need to try RT for yourselves. It really is stunning in some scenarios.
RT is hardly the next H+T.
Read my reply above...
RT has always been the golden ticket and we have had many companies claiming the cracked it to do it in real time (infact one such company was bought by Nvidia years back), I have never seen anyone denying that.
store.steampowered.com/app/105600/Terraria/
It's absolutely staggering how abysmal the performance hit is for visuals that are very subtly better than the non-raytraced version.
RTX may be the future for marketing goons, but in the real world RTX isn't even remotely viable without DLSS cranked up and for visuals as "clean" as that LEGO game, the noisy/grainy image caused by the raytracing really does make the tricks that realtime raytracing uses so obvious that it ruins the immersion. The instant you move the camera the denoiser is visible, all of the ambient occlusion falls apart, the refections lose all clarity in motion.
RTX gives you enough raytracing data for a full resolution at maybe 5fps. Everything else is blurring/dithering/downsampling/temporal-blending. It always looks great in still scenes but in motion the lies ruin the experience. I spent more time looking at the artifacts caused by DLSS and the denoiser than I did enjoying the improved appearance in static scenes. It's just differently wrong to the fake+bake we're used to, at half the framerate.
Consoles and portable systems are about to enter a rush period of upscaling technologies to boost framerates