Microsoft detailed feature additions to the DirectX 12 3D graphics API, and an expansion of its DirectX Ray-tracing (DXR) API to Tier 1.1. The updated APIs will be included with the Windows 10 major update that's scheduled for the first half of 2020 — the features are accessible already for developers in Windows Insider preview builds. DXR 1.1 is the first major update to the API since its Q4-2018 launch, and adds three major features. To begin with, it brings support for extra shaders to an existing ray-tracing PSO (pipeline-state object), increasing the efficiency of dynamic PSO additions. Next up, is ExecuteIndirect for Raytracing support, described by Microsoft as "enabling adaptive algorithms where the number of rays is decided on the GPU execution timeline." This could be a hint what to expect from NVIDIA's next-generation GPUs that are expected for next year. Lastly, the API introduces support for Inline Raytracing, which gives developers more control over ray traversal and scheduling.

Over in the main DirectX 12 API, Microsoft is introducing support for Mesh Shaders, which brings about systemic changes to the graphics pipeline. "Mesh shaders and amplification shaders are the next generation of GPU geometry processing capability, replacing the current input assembler, vertex shader, hull shader, tessellator, domain shader, and geometry shader stages," writes Microsoft in its blog post. DirectX Sampler Feedback contributes toward memory management by allowing games to better understand which texture assets are more frequently accessed and need to remain resident.

NVIDIA's efforts with Quake 2 RTX haven't gone unnoticed in the community, providing a distinct overhaul in image quality to the now decades-old game. Raytracing and its global illumination capabilities have already been well explored in this publication, and its effect in older games - the ones that already run remarkably well in modern hardware - has been well documented, with some third party solutions (such as ReShade) including the effect to great measure in a number of games that haven't been built from the ground-up for raytracing.

The new Lightspeed Studios from NVIDIA aims to bring Quake 2 RTX-like improvements to other games. A job posting from the company dated from the end of September seems to make it clear that the company is looking to increase the number of games with RTX support in this way. Read on after the break for the description in the job listing.

In another iD Software game supporting ray tracing (we already know Wolfenstein: Young Blood will support it), id Software's Marty Stratton confirmed that DOOM Eternal will also support the graphics technology. In what capacity, it is unclear as of yet; whether for a global illumination solution, like Metro: Exodus, or just for reflections and shadows like most games seem to be using, is unknown at this point. Looking back at how the "original" DOOM looked, and considering changes to graphics technologies under the new iD Tech 7 engine, however, DOOM Eternal really is looking to be one of the best looking games - at least on the PC platform.

As Marty Stratton put it, "RTX makes it look, you know, amazing. There are great benefits but it doesn't necessarily expand our audience or that the way that the way that something like Stadia does so, but absolutely people can look forward to DOOM Eternal and id Tech 7 supporting ray tracing. Absolutely. I mean we love that stuff, the team loves it and I think we'll do it better than anybody honestly."

Considering your reaction, you certainly remember Crytek's Neon noir raytracing scene that we shared with you back in march. At the time, the fact that raytracing was running at such mesmerizing levels on AMD hardware was arguably the biggest part of the news piece: AMD's Vega 56 graphics card with no dedicated raytracing hardware, was pushing the raytraced scene in a confident manner. Now, Crytek have shared some details on how exactly Neon noir was rendered.

The AMD Radeon Vega 56 pushed the demo at 1080p/30 FPS, with full-resolution rendering of raytraced effects. Crytek further shared that raytracing can be rendered at half resolution compared to the rest of the scene, and that if they did so on AMD's Vega 56, they could push a 1440p resolution at 40+ FPS. The raytraced path wasn't running on any modern, lower-level API, such as DX12 or Vulkan, but rather, on a custom branch of Crytek's CryEngine, version 5.5.

Intel's upcoming Xe discrete GPUs will feature hardware-acceleration for real-time raytracing, similar to NVIDIA's "Turing" RTX chips, according to a company blog detailing how the company's Rendering Framework will work with the upcoming Xe architecture. The blog only mentions that the company's data-center GPUs support the feature, and not whether its client-segment ones do. The data-center Xe GPUs are targeted at cloud-based gaming service and cloud-computing providers, as well as those building large rendering farms.

"I'm pleased to share today that the Intel Xe architecture roadmap for data center optimized rendering includes ray tracing hardware acceleration support for the Intel Rendering Framework family of API's and libraries," said Jim Jeffers, Sr. Principal Engineer and Sr. Director of Intel's Advanced Rendering and Visualization team. Intel did not go into technical details of the hardware itself. NVIDIA demonstrated that you need two major components on a modern GPU to achieve real-time raytracing: 1. a fixed-function hardware that computes intersection of rays with triangles or surfaces (which in NVIDIA's case are the RT cores), and 2. an "inexpensive" de-noiser. NVIDIA took the AI route to achieve the latter, by deploying tensor cores (matrix-multiplication units), which accelerate AI DNN building and training. Both these tasks are achievable without fixed-function hardware, using programmable unified shaders, but at great performance cost. Intel developed a CPU-based de-noiser that can leverage AVX-512.

NVIDIA today announced that it is extending DXR (DirectX Raytracing) support to several GeForce GTX graphics models beyond its GeForce RTX series. These include the GTX 1660 Ti, GTX 1660, GTX 1080 Ti, GTX 1080, GTX 1070 Ti, GTX 1070, and GTX 1060 6 GB. The GTX 1060 3 GB and lower "Pascal" models don't support DXR, nor do older generations of NVIDIA GPUs. NVIDIA has implemented real-time raytracing on GPUs without specialized components such as RT cores or tensor cores, by essentially implementing the rendering path through shaders, in this case, CUDA cores. DXR support will be added through a new GeForce graphics driver later today.

The GPU's CUDA cores now have to calculate BVR, intersection, reflection, and refraction. The GTX 16-series chips have an edge over "Pascal" despite lacking RT cores, as the "Turing" CUDA cores support concurrent INT and FP execution, allowing more work to be done per clock. NVIDIA in a detailed presentation listed out the kinds of real-time ray-tracing effects available by the DXR API, namely reflections, shadows, advanced reflections and shadows, ambient occlusion, global illumination (unbaked), and combinations of these. The company put out detailed performance numbers for a selection of GTX 10-series and GTX 16-series GPUs, and compared them to RTX 20-series SKUs that have specialized hardware for DXR.Update: Article updated with additional test data from NVIDIA.

Epic Games wants a slice of next-generation NVIDIA GameWorks titles that are bound to leverage the RTX feature-set of its hardware. The latest version of Unreal Engine 4, released as a preview-build, comes with a host of real-time ray-tracing features. In its change-log for Unreal Engine 4.22 Preview, Epic describes its real-time ray-tracing feature to be a "low level layer on top of UE DirectX 12 that provides support for DXR and allows creating and using ray tracing shaders (ray generation shaders, hit shaders, etc) to add ray tracing effects."

The hardware being reference here are the RT cores found in NVIDIA's "Turing RTX" GPUs. At the high-level, Unreal Engine 4 will support close to two dozen features that leverage DXR, including a denoiser for shadows, reflections, and ambient occlusion; rectangular area lights, soft shadows, ray-traced reflections and AO, real-time global illumination, translucency, triangular meshes, and path-tracing. We could see Unreal Engine 4.22 get "stable" towards the end of 2019, to enable DXR-ready games of 2020.

Perhaps gliding through the tech-infused CES week, UL Corporation has just announced that the much-expected Port Royal, the world's first dedicated real-time ray tracing benchmark for gamers, is now available. Port Royal uses DirectX Raytracing to enhance reflections, shadows, and other effects that are difficult to achieve with traditional rendering techniques, and enables both performance benchmarking for cutthroat competition throughout the internet (and our own TPU forums, of course), but is also an example of what to expect from ray tracing in upcoming games - ray tracing effects running in real-time at reasonable frame rates at 2560 × 1440 resolution.

UL Benchmarks released more information on pricing and availability of its upcoming addition to the 3DMark benchmark suite, named "Port Royal." The company revealed that the benchmark will officially launch on January 8, 2019. The Port Royal upgrade will cost existing 3DMark paid (Advanced and Professional) users USD $2.99. 3DMark Advanced purchased from January 8th onward at $29.99 will include Port Royal. 3DMark Port Royal is an extreme-segment 3D graphics benchmark leveraging DirectX 12 and DirectX Raytracing (DXR). UL Benchmarks stated that Port Royal was developed with inputs from industry giants including NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Microsoft.

EA-DICE and NVIDIA earned a lot of bad press last month, when performance numbers for "Battlefield V" with DirectX Raytracing (DXR) were finally out. Gamers were disappointed to see that DXR inflicts heavy performance penalties, with 4K UHD gameplay becoming out of bounds even for the $1,200 GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, and acceptable frame-rates only available on 1080p resolution. DICE has since been tirelessly working to rework its real-time raytracing implementation so performance is improved. Tomorrow (4th December), the studio will release a patch to "Battlefield V," a day ahead of its new Tides of War: Overture and new War Story slated for December 5th. This patch could be a game-changer for GeForce RTX users.

NVIDIA has been closely working with EA-DICE on this new patch, which NVIDIA claims improves the game's frame-rates with DXR enabled by "up to 50 percent." The patch enables RTX 2080 Ti users to smoothly play "Battlefield V" with DXR at 1440p resolution, with frame-rates over 60 fps, and DXR Reflections set to "Ultra." RTX 2080 (non-Ti) users should be able to play the game at 1440p with over 60 fps, if the DXR Reflections toggle is set at "Medium." RTX 2070 users can play the game at 1080p, with over 60 fps, and the toggle set to "Medium." NVIDIA states that it is continuing to work with DICE to improve DXR performance even further, which will take the shape of future game patches and driver updates.A video presentation by NVIDIA follows.

Port Royal is the name of the latest component of UL Benchmarks 3DMark. Designed to take advantage of the DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API, this benchmark features an extreme poly-count test-scene with real-time ray-traced elements. Screengrabs of the benchmark depict spacecraft entering and leaving mirrored spheres suspended within a planet's atmosphere, which appear to be docks. It's also a shout out to of a number of space-sims such as "Star Citizen," which could up their production in the future by introducing ray-tracing. The benchmark will debut at the GALAX GOC Grand Final on December 8, where the first public run will be powered by a GALAX GeForce RTX 2080 Ti HOF graphics card. It will start selling in January 2019.

Originally Microsoft shelved the Windows 10 October 2018 feature update after a data-destroying bug among other problems was detected just days after its initial rollout. Now with more than a month has passed they are finally re-releasing the update after having "thoroughly investigated and resolved" the issues, according to Microsoft's John Cable, director of Program Management for Windows Servicing and Delivery.

The decision to re-release the update was reached after the careful study of diagnostic data from millions of Windows Insiders showed no further evidence of data loss. Currently, the update is only available via media and manual updates, automatic updates will be coming later. This is because Microsoft is taking a slower more methodical approach to their updates. Taking more time for careful study of device health data in order to improve the overall user experience. This new approach will take problems like application incompatibility among other things into account in order to make sure future updates do not automatically install unless known issues have been resolved. This should help reduce the frequency of problems end users encounter.

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.

NVIDIA today announced official availability dates for what will forever be engraved in history as "the cheapest Turing" option - which contrary to what that might lead you to expect, isn't cheap at all. NVIDIA's RTX 2070 graphics card will be available starting October 17th, bringing the benefits of raytracing acceleration to a much lower price-point than the already-launched RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards.

That said, the RTX 2070 will still retail for $499 - a full $120 higher than NVIDIA's last-gen GTX 1070, and that's not counting what's being less-than-amicably called the "NVIDIA tax", which brings Founders' Editions pricing of the graphics cards up to $599, and allows AIB to increase pricing of their own designs up to that level - or higher. It's not a cheap option - especially considering how the RTX 2070 is now being built in the TU106 silicon, a smaller counterpart to the full-fledged TU104, and in contrast to the previous GTX 1070, which was built from the same chip as the GTX 1080).

MSI is looking to introduce their Trident pre-built desktop systems paired with was is going to be (at least for a while) the world's highest-performance gaming graphics cards. The Trident X revisits MSI's "console-sized" PC take, packing seriously powerful innards in what can only be thought of as insultingly small quarters (10 liters in volume, anyone?).

Of course, the Trident X features MSI's "Silent Storm Cooling" system to allow for this hardware to be cooled without a hassle. The Trident X will follow on previous Trident iterations with a front HDMI port for VR aficionados. Expect pricing to be substantially higher than previous iterations of the Trident, though - just remember the RTX 2080 Ti's retail pricing for a punch in the gut and a throwback to reality land.

After we've covered news of UL's (previously known as 3D Mark) move to include a raytracing benchmark mode on Time Spy, the company has contacted us and other members of the press to clarify their message and intentions. As it stands, the company will not be updating their Time Spy testing suite with Raytracing technologies. Part of the reason is that this would need an immense rewrite of the benchmark itself, which would be counterproductive - and this leads to the rest of the reason why it's not so: such a significant change would invalidate previous results that didn't have the Raytracing mode activated.

As such, UL has elected to develop a totally new benchmark, built from the ground up to use Microsoft's DirectX Raytracing (DXR). This new benchmark will be added to the 3D Mark app as an update. The new test will produce its own benchmarking scores, very much like Fire Strike and Time Spy did, and will provide users with yet another ladder to climb on their way to the top of the benchmarking scene. Other details are scarce - which makes sense. But the test should still be available on or around the time of NVIDIA's 20-series launch, come September 20th.

(Update: UL has come forward to clarify the way they're integrating Raytracing into their benchmarking suite. You can read the follow-up article here.)

UL (who acquired and is in the process of changing 3D Mark's image to that of its own) has revealed that the new, raytracing-supporting version of their Time Spy high performance and high quality benchmark will be arriving by the end of September.

The new version of the benchmark will be released around the launch of Microsoft's next version of its Windows 10 Operating System, codenamed Redstone 5, and thus will fall in some time after NVIDIA's RTX 20-series launch on September 20th. Here's hoping it will be available in time for comparative reviews on NVIDIA's new family of products, and that some light can be shed on the new series' framerates delivery, and not just their GigaRays/sec capabilities.

EPIC delivered their "The State of Unreal" presentation at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week (which had a great deal much time devoted to raytracing technologies). EPIC Games has been at the forefront of graphics development for some years now. Their engines (alongside a few other key players in the industry) routinely push the boundaries of graphical fidelity. And naturally, something would be amiss if they weren't jumping on the raytracing bandwagon as well with some of the most impressive proof of concept videos I've ever seen in real-time generated graphics. The company took their time, then, to unveil their artistic interpretations of real-time ray tracing, motion capture and real-time facial animation mapping. Cue many videos, after the break.

DirectX Raytracing (DXR) is a new feature in DirectX 12 that opens the door to a new class of real-time graphics techniques for games. We were thrilled to join Microsoft onstage for the announcement, which we followed with a presentation of our own work in developing practical real-time applications for this exciting new tech.

Accurate real-time reflections with DirectX Raytracing
Rendering accurate reflections in real-time is difficult. There are many challenges and limitations when using the existing methods. For the past few months, we've been exploring ways of combining DirectX Raytracing with existing methods to solve some of these challenges. While much of our presentation went deep into the math for our solution, I would like to show you some examples of our new technique in action.