AFAIK nvidia no longer needs specific game data for DLSS upscaling to work. As in they don't needs your game to train the upscaler.
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Ray tracing on Apple Silicon?
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I thought this was interesting:
devtalk.blender.org
- Metal work continues T92212 4 with a few more patches coming soon including a MetalRT patch. (Michael)
2021-11-9 Blender Rendering Meeting
Attendees Brecht Van Lommel (Blender) Kévin Dietrich (Blender) William Leeson (Blender) Thomas Dinges (Blender) Brian Savery (AMD) Patrick Mours (NVIDIA) Michael Jones (Apple) Notes Cycles Cycles 3.0 Release: Just a few bugs and the HIP changes remain. (Brecht) Work continues on getting HIP...
With appropriate on-chip hardware, ray tracing can be more efficient rendering a given scene than conventional alternatives.
Yeah the biggest loss when using RT GI tends to be the atmosphere (at least for games). A lot of folks liked how dark Metro Exodus is even though the lighting in ME:EE is actually more realistic.
There is an 30 minute video where DF talked to the 4AGames artists when they were working on ME:EE and the artists where super happy about the lighting changes, it made making areas faster because light behavior is real and didn't have to be fakes with a bunch of area lights that would have to be tweaked based on objects placed around the area.
Yeah once RT ray tracing is powerful and ubiquitous enough go mainstream it is actually much easier to make areas than the current techniques. I’m sure there would still be ways to make it atmospheric, dark , and moody with some additional work.
Expect even more borrowing of techniques and ideas from the world of cinematography and photography where ‘raytracing’ is ever present .for free (which has it’s own creative challenges. You can’t turn it ‘off’)Yeah once RT ray tracing is powerful and ubiquitous enough go mainstream it is actually much easier to make areas than the current techniques. I’m sure there would still be ways to make it atmospheric, dark , and moody with some additional work.
There's a great story from the Last of Mohicans film set where they're filming a giant night battle over multiple nights and everybody is dead tired and cranky. The director, Michael Mann, suddenly starts screaming his head off over the bull horn, "Shut that ****** light off, we're still filming!". Back over the location's PA: "uhhh ... Michael, that the sun ..."
Time to break out the blue filter...?
Whenever new graphics tech comes out it's almost always overused. When Quake II introduced coloured lighting suddenly everyone was making gaudy pink and green lights everywhere, then when normal mapping became a thing suddenly everything looked like it was wrapped in tin-foil. Next up was the era of post-processing where everything was bloomed and blurred and fake HDR'ed to the max.
It usually takes 3-4 years before artists learn to use the techniques tastefully instead of turning it up to 11 so everyone knows they're definitely using the hottest new techniques.
With Metro Exodus: EE one of the biggest differences looks to be the heavy post-processing / screen space / atmospheric haze effects. The problem with GI is that it's not that impressive as games have been doing it for 20+ years, it's just that it used to be pre-baked and now it can be done dynamically, which is kinda nice-ish I guess.
To be honest with my gaming hat on I don't really care too much about RT, but Macs definitely need RT hardware to make them competitive as 3D content creation machines.
It usually takes 3-4 years before artists learn to use the techniques tastefully instead of turning it up to 11 so everyone knows they're definitely using the hottest new techniques.
With Metro Exodus: EE one of the biggest differences looks to be the heavy post-processing / screen space / atmospheric haze effects. The problem with GI is that it's not that impressive as games have been doing it for 20+ years, it's just that it used to be pre-baked and now it can be done dynamically, which is kinda nice-ish I guess.
To be honest with my gaming hat on I don't really care too much about RT, but Macs definitely need RT hardware to make them competitive as 3D content creation machines.
This is a really nice talk from one of the architects behind imagination technologies CXT photon ray tracing hardware.
Ray Tracing Hardware Levels
and
Ray Tracing hardware benefits for developers
and
PowerVR photon benefits over other solutions
Summary :
Based on his definitions of ray tracing levels :
Level 1 : ray tracing is entire in software. Full compute on the CPU
Level 2: hardware acceleration. Takes a box and triangle ray intersection calculation and puts into dedicated hardware. Bounding logic is still managed in software. Cannot be handled efficiently in shader code because shaders tend not to like branching!
Level 3: Dedicated hardware for BVH walking and determining boundary logic. Processing is still divergent and conditional. Still heavily memory inefficient
Level 4: PowerVR photon architecture. Coherency gathering. Grouping rays and threads and rays that do the same thing together for higher efficiency processing.
Some additional links and research I’ve been taking a look at to get up to speed :
Based on PowerVR’s definition of the different ray trace levels, current RTX hardware could be considered to sit at Level 3. I’m working my way through whatever documentation that is available to see what ‘level 4’ means.
What I have read so far, (beyond the marketing hyperbole) suggests that cohernency gathering from PowerVR perspective means that parallel dispatches of rays can have similar properties when executed by the hardware in parallel.
Really nice article here:
I’m going to go out on a limb here (and wildly assume), that a PowerVR CXT licensed IP derivative will be included in Apple’s future silicon.
This would be huge!
Ray Tracing Hardware Levels
and
Ray Tracing hardware benefits for developers
and
PowerVR photon benefits over other solutions
Summary :
Based on his definitions of ray tracing levels :
Level 1 : ray tracing is entire in software. Full compute on the CPU
Level 2: hardware acceleration. Takes a box and triangle ray intersection calculation and puts into dedicated hardware. Bounding logic is still managed in software. Cannot be handled efficiently in shader code because shaders tend not to like branching!
Level 3: Dedicated hardware for BVH walking and determining boundary logic. Processing is still divergent and conditional. Still heavily memory inefficient
Level 4: PowerVR photon architecture. Coherency gathering. Grouping rays and threads and rays that do the same thing together for higher efficiency processing.
Some additional links and research I’ve been taking a look at to get up to speed :
Based on PowerVR’s definition of the different ray trace levels, current RTX hardware could be considered to sit at Level 3. I’m working my way through whatever documentation that is available to see what ‘level 4’ means.
What I have read so far, (beyond the marketing hyperbole) suggests that cohernency gathering from PowerVR perspective means that parallel dispatches of rays can have similar properties when executed by the hardware in parallel.
Really nice article here:
Coherency gathering in ray tracing: the benefits of hardware ray tracking — Imagination Technologies Technical Article | ChipEstimate.com
Despite the theoretically infinite ways to implement a modern GPU, the truly efficient ways to make one come to life in silicon tend to force the hands of those making them for real. The reality of manufacturing modern high-performance semiconductors, and the problem at hand when trying to...
www.chipestimate.tv
I’m going to go out on a limb here (and wildly assume), that a PowerVR CXT licensed IP derivative will be included in Apple’s future silicon.
This would be huge!
While nobody knows for sure, Apple and ImgTec concluded a new IP deal at the beginning of last year. It is indeed speculated that this is what it was for.
While we are here, has anyone checked to see if RT (really Lumen in UE5) works on newer MBPs? I know we have a few YT videos where the YTer says the scene has RT but they never show their project settings so we are left with taking their word on it.
EDIT: I'll be honest, I didn't think coherent rays were a problem with the hardware accelerated RT of today. It is the incoherent rays that screws stuff up, so I am not sure how the PowerVR solution helps. Am I to understand that PowerVR has a way of collecting all the rays so there are no incoherent ones?
EDIT: I'll be honest, I didn't think coherent rays were a problem with the hardware accelerated RT of today. It is the incoherent rays that screws stuff up, so I am not sure how the PowerVR solution helps. Am I to understand that PowerVR has a way of collecting all the rays so there are no incoherent ones?
nvidia has a whitepaper from 2017 (before they implemented hardware RT) talking about incoherent rays being an issue and their solution for that problem.
The problem is going to be cache misses. Processing multiple coherent rays is going to keep the same bounding boxes, objects, and materials resident in the cache giving a high cache hit rate, but a single incoherent ray could end up trashing your entire cache as it bounces down a completely different path.
Say you have 45 coherent rays and 5 incoherent ones all going in another direction. If you group them, you'll have a single cache miss, 44 cache hits, a cache miss and 4 cache hits. So only 2 misses for 50 rays.
If you process them in a random order you'll likely end up getting 10 misses and suddenly your RT units are stalling for data.
Imagination Tech sell the IP for their designs to other companies. I suspect we’ll possibly see this first implementation of this in 2022.
For Phones it looks like MediaTek is the only one left that uses Imagination Tech reference parts. I think at this point Apple most likely has the IP deal for the TBDR part of their GPU and rolls their own other bits/blocks.
Apple penned a new IP deal with them last year. Even at the time it was speculated to be about ray tracing:
Apple’s Imagination Technologies deal is all about ray tracing and AR
Apple and GPU designer Imagination Technologies forged a mysterious new multi-year agreement, almost certainly to bring ray tracing to Apple devices.