General Discussions

[ajlueke]

The ray tracing built into Cryengine 5.5 is hardware and API agnostic.  Meaning, it doesn't require Microsoft DXR to work and by extension then the RTX cores on NVidia cards.  This can bring real time ray tracing to the Vulkan API as well as NVidia and AMD hardware under either Vulkan or DX12.

https://www.cryengine.com/news/crytek-releases-neon-noir-a-real-time-ray-tracing-demonstration-for-c...

[pokester]

That is awesome! Thanks for the share!

[pokester]

I see no reason why a game engine could now harness the power of unused compute cores to accomplish near the same thing that Nvidia does with it's proprietary RTX cores. 

[ajlueke]

It also allows for ray tracing on Windows platforms prior to Windows 10 as well as non Windows based operating systems.  It will be interesting to see how big a hit to performance current GPUs take using Crytek's approach, and what the minimum hardware will look like to use this approach at different resolutions.  The demo really looks amazing, far better than the current DRX implementations I've seen with RTX cards.

[ajlueke]

What's really cool, is the Crytek demo was rendered in real time on an RX Vega.

But, true to form, NVidia is trying to drive development toward DXR by suddenly bringing DXR support to Pascal.

NVIDIA To Bring DXR Ray Tracing Support to GeForce 10 & 16 Series In April 

Guess they don't want too many developers to go with cryengine for Ray tracing support, especially when one of the arguements against developing DXR support is the low RTX install base.

[pokester]

From what I have read the DX 12  implementation does't just use the proprietary solution Nvidia went with. I absolutely think that AMD could code into their drivers support for their compute units to do the same thing. I would be willing to be that behind the scenes they already are. Heck they may be working with Crytek on this and we just don't know. I do know they have partnered with them in the past.

[hardcoregames_]

that was up on youtube last week

[ajlueke]

Great.  Mark it down in the official calendar of when things appear on Youtube?

[hardcoregames_]

I have to keep my site focused on news of the day to keep the traffic coming

[ajlueke]

Okay.  But what is the purpose of posting that here, in this thread?

[hardcoregames_]

I posted that on the 15th

[cyseal]

Is there estimate when will AMD GPU support raytracing in the Unreal and Unity?

How will this work? Through RadeonRays or Vulkan ?

[hardcoregames_]

The Cryengine demo does not need any vendor gimmick to make games look good.

There are lots of shaders with the engine that are why Crytek is still widely used with team based game developers.

DX12 is the API that Crytek uses so games are at their best.

[cyseal]

Why is Raytracing not  API agnostic in Unreal in Unity? Only Nvidia RTX can be used there.

[hardcoregames_]

NVIDIA is marketing a proprietary solution while DXR is part of the DX12 API

[pokester]

I have a few games that use Ray Tracing and all of them use DXR which is as you said a standard of the DX 12 API. The most prevalent of them if Battlefield V.

I'm not aware of any of them using proprietary call for this tech. Not saying their are not games out there that do, I just don't have one. I know that colesdav‌ even figured out how to get it working on his AMD card. He could likely speak more intelligently to this.

[hardcoregames_]

pokester wrote:

I have a few games that use Ray Tracing and all of them use DXR which is as you said a standard of the DX 12 API. The most prevalent of them if Battlefield V.

I'm not aware of any of them using proprietary call for this tech. Not saying their are not games out there that do, I just don't have one. I know that colesdav even figured out how to get it working on his AMD card. He could likely speak more intelligently to this.

Battlefield uses a modified version of the in house Frostbite engine which they have been using for years. This engine can even handle a destructible environment which is not seen widely in other games.

[ajlueke]

Probably because Unity and Unreal use DXR for ray-tracing.  Thus, DX12 has to be used in order to utilize DXR.  Currently, only NVidia GPUs will process DXR ray-tracing calls.

[hardcoregames_]

The Cryengine uses DXR along with all the other features of DX12

[ajlueke]

My understanding is that the CryEngine solution does not leverage DXR or any API based ray-tracing.  It is software based solution built directly into the engine itself.  The Neon Noir demo actually ran on DX11, so that at least is certainly not leveraging DXR.

Crytek's Neon Noir demo: ray tracing without RTX analysed • Eurogamer.net 

[cyseal]

Does Nvidia use CUDA and RTX  API with DXR?

I think AMD should work RadeonRays and OpenCL to get feature parity with CUDA.

Even Cryengine demo runs better on CUDA/RTX device even though raytrcing is API agnostic.

https://youtu.be/efOR92n9mms?t=606

[pokester]

I would guess that it doesn't really matter how it runs on the hardware as long as the driver translates the standard DX call to the hardware.

[cyseal]

pokester wrote:

I would guess that it doesn't really matter how it runs on the hardware as long as the driver translates the standard DX call to the hardware.

I guess it does not. But AMD should work on RadeonRays and OpenCL as CUDA/RTX parity.

Blender, Octane, Redshift,Unity, Unreal,... all benefit from CUDA/RTX devices which are really expensive.

AMD should worked on their API because need for computational power is getting higher. Not just for raytracing. Building light in Unreal is extremely expensive even for RTX 2080.

[ajlueke]

DXR does not mandate specific hardware.  In RTX cards, a DXR call is ported to the RT/Tensor core subsystem.  On older NVidia cards, the call is handled by the general CUDA cores.  AMD has not enabled this functionality in their drivers, so DXR calls are ignored by the hardware.

The Cryengine system, is software based, and does not used DXR.  This means ray-tracing is performed like any other compute instruction and always uses the generalized shaders on both AMD and NVidia hardware.  The Cryengine demo still runs better on the RTX hardware, so it is obviously able to leverage the extra hardware to some degree, but the results were also extremely playable on AMD and older NVidia cards, which was not the case with the DXR based implementations.