PC Gaming

Ooh thankyou for the link.

“We can leverage it [ray tracing] for things we haven’t been able to do in the past, which is giving accurate hit detection”

“So when you fire your weapon, the [hit] detection would be able to tell if you’re hitting a pixel that is leather sitting next to a pixel that is metal”

“Before ray tracing, we couldn’t distinguish between two pixels very easily, and we would pick one or the other because the materials were too complex. Ray tracing can do this on a per-pixel basis and showcase if you’re hitting metal or even something that’s fur. It makes the game more immersive, and you get that direct feedback as the player.”

It sounds like they're assigning materials based off the pixels of a texture map, rather than each mesh in a model being a different material. ie you paint materials onto a character rather than selecting chunks of the character and assigning them.

I suspect this either won't be noticeable at all to players or it will be a very minor improvement (at best). It's not something worth going for in exchange for losing compatibility with other GPUs. It will require a different work pipeline for the 3D modellers (they have to paint materials on now rather than assign them per-mesh), but that's neither here nor there, it might be easier for them or it might be hell-awful depending on the tooling.

This particular sentence upsets me:

Before ray tracing, we couldn’t distinguish between two pixels very easily

Uhuh. You're not selling me on your game company.

"Before" ray tracing, the technology that has been around for decades. That you could do on a CPU or GPU for this very material-sensing task without the players noticing for around 20 years. Interpolate UVs across the colliding triangle and sample a texture.

I suspect the "more immersion" and "direct feedback" are veils over the real reasoning:

During NVIDIA's big GeForce RTX 50 Series reveal, we learned that id has been working closely with the GeForce team on the game for several years (source)

With such a strong emphasis on RT and DLSS, it remains to be seen how these games will perform for AMD Radeon users

No-one sane implements Nvidia or AMD (or anyone else) exclusive libraries into their games unless they're paid to do it. A game dev that cares about its players will make their game run well on all brands and flavours of graphics card.

At the end of the day this hurts consumers. If your games work on all GPU brands competitively then you have more choice and card companies are better motivated to compete. Whatever amount of money Nvidia is paying the gamedevs to do this must be smaller than what they earn back from consumers buying more of their product instead of competitors.

It sounds like they're tying the effect of attacks to the actual fine detail game textures/materials, which I guess are only available on the GPU? It's a weird thing to do and a bad description of it IMO, but that's what I got from that summary. It wouldn't be anywhere near as fast as normal hitscan would be on the CPU, and it also takes GPU time which generally is more limited with the thread count on modern processors being what it is.

Since there is probably only 1 bullet shot most of the time on any given frame, the minimum size of a dispatch on the GPU is usually 32-64 cores (out of maybe 1k-20k), just to calculate this one singular bullet with a single core. GPU cores are also much slower than CPU cores, so clearly the only possible reason to do this is if the data needed literally only exists on the GPU, which it sounds like it does in this case. You would also first have to transfer that there was a shot taken to the GPU, which then would have to transfer that data back to the CPU, coming with a small amount of latency both ways.

This also only makes sense if you already use raytracing elsewhere, because you generally need a BVH for raytracing and these are expensive to build.

Although this is using raytracing, the only reason not to support cards without hardware raytracing is that it would take more effort to do so (as you would have to maintain both a normal raytracer and a DXR version)

Ooh, that makes sense. Sounds like it could be much cheaper to process than heavy collision models. Thanks for the clarification!

Yeah, but in this case I'm referring to vram. RT is what it is, and most "recent" cards support some kind of RT, even if not well. The concern is more that, for instance, the 3070 only has 8GB. I wouldn't ever say that the 3070 is nearing it's EoL either. The 3060 is the top card in steam, sure, but the next two dozen or so places are almost universally 8GB cards (with varying degrees of RT support) , including several 40xx series. I'm just saying that I don't see a hard RT and >8GB VRAM requirement playing out as well as a lot of people think.

I’m still hearing from people that they’re using an Nvidia 1000 card. I was expecting to hear 2000 instead of 1000, and then it would happen.

How many 8 year old computers still function halfway decently? Most of those people are probably due for an upgrade whether they know it or not.

Even if we go with this popular narrative, no one is actually going to immediately run to throw out their working Win10 PC when Microsoft cuts off updates. They’ll just continue to use it insecurely. Just like millions of people did and still do with Win7.

This is the issue with using a proprietary operating system in general. Eventually they’ll cut you off arbitrarily because there’s a profit motive to do so. Relying on them to keep your system updated and secured indefinitely is a naive prospect to begin with.