Hey, wondering if anyone has any news on whether this helps rendering or not? The latest nVidia driver enables ray tracing in cards like the gtx 1060, 1070, 1080 etc. Obviously not nearly to the levels of an RTX card, but I'm wondering if the enabled ray tracing and new driver speed up renders for those who don't have RTX cards.
Ray Tracing on GTX
- Thread starter MovieMike
- Start date
- May 3, 2018
- 1,403
- 992
Uh... No, that's not how it works.
I understand why you ask, It's a fair question so let me explain some of the details as to why.
The update allows 10 series card to say that they are DirectX Raytracing (DXR) compatible, and will try to do raytracing to the best of their ability. Basically, the DXR is just a list of commands that let renderers ask the GPU to do real-time ray tracing, but it doesn't tell them how, it leaves it up to the graphics card since different cards will have different methods that best uses their hardware. Any card can say it is compatible with these commands, as to how they actually compute is different.
RTX cards use the same cuda core technology as the GTX series, they do have a section of more specialized ray tracing cores, but those are just the same Turning based cores the GTX used, but streamlined so that they only are useful for raytracing and without constant memory citing. RTX also has the AI tensor core system, which is basically a smart blurring system, which none of these get used for rendering without using the DXR system.
the GTX series, since they don't have the ray tracing cores nor the tensor cores, which for the RTX work together to do the ray tracing quickly, pretty much have to do ray tracing the old way, calculating it like normal. It is like doing pen and paper math vs the kid with the calculator. the RTX system is 8 to 10 times faster than the GTX system.
However, the RTX only uses it's ray tracing technology when DXR commands are issued. DXR is only used in some engines (which they were never designed for DXR to begin with) in only a few games and only for window's 10 systems. Outside of that, if you run something like daz or blender for ray tracing, their ray tracing engines are not Nvidia's own engine, which would have the best chance to use the DXR commands, so neither program is (real time) ray tracing compatible. And if you had an operating system different from Win10, you couldn't utilize DXR anyways since it wouldn't be part of your system.
So, if you are making art, such as with Daz, it is not DXR compatible (at least no proof I could find to say otherwise), not only does that mean you couldn't take advantage of the new update, but even RTX cards wouldn't perform much better than the GTX series because without DXR commands, RTX cards would just have to do the same brute force calculation using the same turning based cuda cores that the GTX 10 series uses, but with slightly more cuda cores.
Not only that, but most likely, no ray tracing software other than video game engines are going to use DXR because the point of having different competing raytracing engines is the fact that each uses their own algorithm to try and improve quality and or speed. Using DXR means that the program is at the mercy of using whatever algorithm the GPU may implement, which may not be the best (for example how RTX actually just uses smart blurring for ray tracing and only ray traces shadows, it doesn't do real ray tracing). So any engine would end up locking them self to a particular (and possibly changing or system dependent) algorithm. For example, I believe Daz was moving to a new engine some time ago, but that the quality/speed still didn't beat blender's cycles system, so I haven't switched to using Daz yet as a result.
So in summary, the update will not speed up renders, and most likely, in the future, getting RTX cards are not likely to help either, since real-time ray tracing is all about using whatever real-time method the GPU implements, meanwhile, dedicated ray tracing engines depend on particular custom algorithms that must be calculated fully and cannot be emulated using ray tracing cores (at least not until they are generalized, but that just turns them back into normal Cuda cores, so it is like taking a step forward and then back again), so the ray tracing technology is never taken advantage of in more complex engines.
But it's nice to hope, and also nice to write a wall of text to crush that hope :3
I understand why you ask, It's a fair question so let me explain some of the details as to why.
The update allows 10 series card to say that they are DirectX Raytracing (DXR) compatible, and will try to do raytracing to the best of their ability. Basically, the DXR is just a list of commands that let renderers ask the GPU to do real-time ray tracing, but it doesn't tell them how, it leaves it up to the graphics card since different cards will have different methods that best uses their hardware. Any card can say it is compatible with these commands, as to how they actually compute is different.
RTX cards use the same cuda core technology as the GTX series, they do have a section of more specialized ray tracing cores, but those are just the same Turning based cores the GTX used, but streamlined so that they only are useful for raytracing and without constant memory citing. RTX also has the AI tensor core system, which is basically a smart blurring system, which none of these get used for rendering without using the DXR system.
the GTX series, since they don't have the ray tracing cores nor the tensor cores, which for the RTX work together to do the ray tracing quickly, pretty much have to do ray tracing the old way, calculating it like normal. It is like doing pen and paper math vs the kid with the calculator. the RTX system is 8 to 10 times faster than the GTX system.
However, the RTX only uses it's ray tracing technology when DXR commands are issued. DXR is only used in some engines (which they were never designed for DXR to begin with) in only a few games and only for window's 10 systems. Outside of that, if you run something like daz or blender for ray tracing, their ray tracing engines are not Nvidia's own engine, which would have the best chance to use the DXR commands, so neither program is (real time) ray tracing compatible. And if you had an operating system different from Win10, you couldn't utilize DXR anyways since it wouldn't be part of your system.
So, if you are making art, such as with Daz, it is not DXR compatible (at least no proof I could find to say otherwise), not only does that mean you couldn't take advantage of the new update, but even RTX cards wouldn't perform much better than the GTX series because without DXR commands, RTX cards would just have to do the same brute force calculation using the same turning based cuda cores that the GTX 10 series uses, but with slightly more cuda cores.
Not only that, but most likely, no ray tracing software other than video game engines are going to use DXR because the point of having different competing raytracing engines is the fact that each uses their own algorithm to try and improve quality and or speed. Using DXR means that the program is at the mercy of using whatever algorithm the GPU may implement, which may not be the best (for example how RTX actually just uses smart blurring for ray tracing and only ray traces shadows, it doesn't do real ray tracing). So any engine would end up locking them self to a particular (and possibly changing or system dependent) algorithm. For example, I believe Daz was moving to a new engine some time ago, but that the quality/speed still didn't beat blender's cycles system, so I haven't switched to using Daz yet as a result.
So in summary, the update will not speed up renders, and most likely, in the future, getting RTX cards are not likely to help either, since real-time ray tracing is all about using whatever real-time method the GPU implements, meanwhile, dedicated ray tracing engines depend on particular custom algorithms that must be calculated fully and cannot be emulated using ray tracing cores (at least not until they are generalized, but that just turns them back into normal Cuda cores, so it is like taking a step forward and then back again), so the ray tracing technology is never taken advantage of in more complex engines.
But it's nice to hope, and also nice to write a wall of text to crush that hope :3
Thanks guys, really informative. Didn't think there'd be any difference but you're right, doesn't hurt to hope.