Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/directx/2018/03/19/announcing-microsoft-directx-raytracing/

by mxfh • 8 years ago

400 223 8 years ago

blogs.msdn.microsoft.com

psyc2• 8 years ago

Graphics programmers have been predicting this revolution for almost as long as I can remember. It's quite exciting that so many of the big players seem to believe it is almost time.

agumonkey2• 8 years ago

In the days of ML based AI, seeing raytracing + revolution is both refreshing and funny :)

make3• 8 years ago

Actually, raytracing is a domain with strong potential for AI, as there is a lot of work using ML models to de-noise ray-traced scenes in real time.

Edit: Yeah, NVidia actually just announced a big project on that exact subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkhBlmKtEAk

vardump• 8 years ago

Graphics programmers have been predicting this revolution...

Mostly it has seemed like it's been everyone except the actual graphics programmers.

Tobba_4• 8 years ago

Yep. There's a billion and a half reasons you wouldn't use full-blown path tracing for games. It'll always perform worse regardless of what you do, the frame budgeting is likely going to be a total nightmare, the tree search you need to trace rays requires too much branching to map well to GPUs (it's perfectly possible, just another absolute nightmare as your complexity goes up), console GPUs are (and have always been) extremely underpowered in terms of compute (but good with textures), etc.

Limited uses? Sure. Otherwise hell no. It's never been more than a gimmick GPU vendors use to show off (in real-time, offline rendering is something else entirely).

VikingCoder2• 8 years ago

Cute video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXo0WdlELJk

corysama2• 8 years ago

A separate tech demo from Remedy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70W2aFr5-Xk

CyberDildonics2• 8 years ago

This doesn't even look like it runs at a full 60 frames per second unless they are speeding it up in the editing.

VikingCoder2• 8 years ago

I haven't seen evidence one way or the other, but it's specifically labeled "real-time GPU raytracing."

Do you have evidence it doesn't run at 60 fps?

electricslpnsld5• 8 years ago

The article's title says raytracing, but the actual text describes path tracing, no?

mnw21cam• 8 years ago

From each light source within a scene, rays of light are projected, bouncing around until they strike the camera.

Which is definitely not how raytracing is done if you want to get an image before the end of the world occurs. Rays are traced from the camera, and then back to the light sources. Some amount of pre-lighting can be done by tracing photons forwards from lights, but not the main image generation.

bhouston12• 8 years ago

In path tracing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_tracing), which is what the VFX industry uses primarily, both directions happen.

oh_sigh• 8 years ago

Does anyone use path tracing for live renderings? I think that is the question.

smcl• 8 years ago

Looks like it was updated to the following which is closer:

Depending on the exact algorithm used, rays of light are projected either from each light source, or from each raster pixel; they bounce around the objects in the scnee[sic] until they strike (depending on direction) either the camera or a light source

bhouston12• 8 years ago

The only issue is that a lot of this is already possible in the current renderers at a reduced cost.

- Soft shadows work in WebGL fairly well using PCSS: https://clara.io/player/v2/8f49e7c3-7c5e-43f0-a09c-33a55bb1b...

- Translucency can be faked effectively using a few different methods. https://clara.io/view/5c7d28c0-91d7-4432-a131-3e6fd657a042

- Screen space ambient occlusion, if using SAO, is amazing. SAO test: https://clara.io/view/2e1637a7-a41d-4832-923a-e6227d1ebaaa

- Screen space reflections also work. Our reflections are this: https://clara.io/player/v2/b55f695a-8f4a-4ab0-b575-88e3df8cd...

- Fast high quality depth of field: https://clara.io/player/v2/ce7d91ed-1163-4cbc-b842-929adc4ef...

- Real-time global illumination: https://www.siliconstudio.co.jp/middleware/enlighten/en/

So while I think that Raytracing is awesome, it generally will not increase existing real-time render quality that much. My experience with the game industry, even if you have a better way of doing things, if it takes more CPU/GPU cycles that a hack that achieves basically the same quality, it will not be adopted. It is that simple.

binarycrusader• 8 years ago

Maybe, but it may make it substantially more accessible and easier for the average developer that isn't a domain expert in a dozen areas of graphics rendering technology and doesn't want to use a pre-built engine.

bhouston12• 8 years ago

This will make it easier to port existing shaders from high end VFX to real-time, like RenderMan and OSL shaders for sure. Trivial even.

zdfjkhiuj2• 8 years ago

I'm not sure it's fair to describe those as hacks. Those techniques are also used for animated movies, which take many CPU-years to render. Those "hacks" are used even when artist have huge amounts of hardware, no real-time constraints, and need extremely high quality.

Techniques other than raytracing have an artistic place, not merely a pragmatic one.

ClassyJacket2• 8 years ago

Aren't animated movies pretty much universally ray traced?

jasonwatkinspdx2• 8 years ago

While the above is accurrate I think it's a bit one sided.

Physically Based Rendering has become the dominant approach in VFX because it's a huge simplification and productivity boost. Integrating tons of special purpose hacks into one renderer isn't just hard for the renderer devs, the control parameters exposed to artists become an absolute nightmare. Combing the PBR perspective with raytracing greatly simplifies both sides of this.

Not every game is trying to be the next Far Cry. Ray tracing will be adopted by teams that value that unification and simplification over getting the very last bit of performance possible by a pile of hacks. As the hardware improves, which still seems likely, we'll see the balance point of who makes that call shift in favor of tracing IMO.

bhouston12• 8 years ago

I agree that PBR is awesome, but PBR doesn't slow things down, it is just a replacement by less accurate equations (BlinnPhong ambient,diffuse,specular) with better equations (GGX albeido, roughness, metallic, clearcoat, sheen) that are generally the same complexity.

It is sort of neutral on render time for the most part.

In time, I am sure we will be in a raytraced future if GPU trends continue.

gt_2• 8 years ago

Non-3D artists should note that “Physically Based Rendering” or PBR is merely a standard for defining materials. It is becoming something of an industry standard in real-time and offline rendering workflows. From a real-time(games) perspective, PBR represents a leap up in realism but from an offline(VFX) perspective, it offers no improvement in realism, and often a downgrade from past norms if implemented with no additional efforts. For someone using offline rendering, [EDIT: As per pxl_fckr’s comment, I must be short on some history of PBR. I stand corrected.]

AboutTheWhisles3• 8 years ago

I don't think pure raytracing and ray traced global illumination are going to be adopted by many games if there is still such a giant problem with noise. That is far from a solved problem, even in multi-hour per from visual effects renders.

digi_owl• 8 years ago

I really wish i kept a bookmark for an article over at filfre.net, because in it a game dev, from back around the C64 era i believe, lamented how whenever there was a big step up in hardware performance, game developers had a bad habit of getting stuck trying to show how far they could push the hardware while ignoring game mechanics and similar.

Effectively whenever some new piece of hardware hit the market, the quality of games would be rolled back by a number of years as companies released what may well be glorified tech demos.

And as of late i wonder if the pace of GPU development have lead to perhaps the most prolonged period of such tech demos.

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 8 years ago

Perhaps that is what has allowed the indie scene to thrive as well as it has? I'm ok with that.

Honestly I'm not sure why gamedevs seem to care so much about this kind of thing (marketers on the other hand...). Minecraft was worth $2B and intentionally looked like it was rendered in mode 13h.

mstade• 8 years ago

On the one hand I agree with you, but in the other there’s Horizon Zero Dawn, Battlefield 1, Tomb Raider, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, NHL 17 and 18, Journey, the Little Big Planet series, Cities: Skylines, GTA V...

I dunno, I think gaming is starting to come out of that prolonged oooh-look-shiny-effects kind of era and into a pretty creative space.

orbital-decay2• 8 years ago

My experience with the game industry, even if you have a better way of doing things, if it takes more CPU/GPU cycles that a hack that achieves basically the same quality, it will not be adopted. It is that simple.

That's not always the case. Physically based materials, tonemapping and many more were widely adopted in game engines because they're easier to get proper and predictable results with. It's the same with most rendering techniques based on real physics, they are usually easier to work with, which is a very real advantage which allows devs to make more realistic environments in less time.

It's the same process that led the non-realtime world to physically based renderers, although it is slower in GPUs because of obvious hardware constraints.

hyperpallium2• 8 years ago

In the realtime performance vs developer time tradeoff, the magnitudes are important... and also, their value.

For a long time, games pushed the graphics envelope, but that doesn't seem the case any more. So perhaps that's less important today, and GPUs have overshot gamer needs.

OTOH, development costs of AAA games are incredibly high. with larger worlds at higher res. Even worse at 4K.

So the question of the magnitudes remains.

2018: the year of raytracing in games, finally?

A data-point is that Imagination has had hardware raytracing for several years now: https://www.imgtec.com/legacy-gpu-cores/ray-tracing/ But without publicised success.

adrianN• 8 years ago

Maybe all these techniques exist because ray tracing wasn't really possible, so a lot of workarounds were found. If ray tracing becomes mainstream and researchers focus their attention more on that, perhaps some awesome new things will be developed that aren't possible in the existing paradigm.

ahartmetz• 8 years ago

- Screen space ambient occlusion, if using SAO, is amazing.

Yeah, no. It still looks like "draw a blurry black halo around edges and call it a day" ambient occlusion.

TheCoreh2• 8 years ago

You can combine SSAO with (very coarse) global illumination probes to achieve a very convincing effect.

DOOM (2016) is a good example of this: http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2016/09/09/doom-2016-gra...

SSAO has been overused/applied poorly (just like the brown 'bloom'/color grading effect in mid-2000s games), which is why people often dislike it.

tinus_hn• 8 years ago

If raytracing is practical you don’t need to deal with the limitations imposed by the tricks used by current renderers. All this faking has a price too.

TheCoreh2• 8 years ago

Screen space reflections also work

Screen space reflections are an amazing trick and work really well for _some_ things, like reflective floors, water bodies, or objects the player might be holding near the camera (e.g. a weapon)

Since they can't reflect the back sides of objects, or anything outside the camera frustum (which includes the player model) they can't be used for things like mirrors.

The appearance of the reflections being 'clipped' with objects leaving the frustum as you move your head is also quite jarring on VR.

mhermher• 8 years ago

Well, maybe providing an API with fallback (which let's say incorporates those hacks.) is the path towards incremental adoption. Maybe that is the big news here.

drb912• 8 years ago

What makes you think people are rushing out to replace all these effects? At first blush this doesn't seemed directly aimed at video games.

dahart2• 8 years ago

a lot of this is already possible in the current renderers at a reduced cost.

Maybe this misses the point of standardizing an API? Isn't there considerable value in having a simple framework that can achieve all those effects, and be shared and communicated easily with others? I'm sure a lot of studios would welcome faster dev times, fewer authoring tools, and fewer geometric limits for their rendering effects.

Also worth considering is that all those specific tricks are very limited, either in applicability or in quality or both. Screen space reflections only work on flat surfaces. PCSS still needs a hand-tuned shadow map. DOF has problems at image space contact points. Etc. Let's not oversell today's workarounds as so good they should be preserved forever.

even if you have a better way of doing things, if it takes more CPU/GPU cycles that a hack that achieves basically the same quality, it will not be adopted. It is that simple.

That's true for any one specific game on any one specific platform. OTOH, that framing misses the trend: there has been consistent and very strong pressure towards higher fidelity, more realism, better physics, faster processors, higher resolution, and overall larger numbers of everything, ever since the first video game ever made. Ray tracing might not be adopted today, but one thing I will guarantee is that next year the CPU & GPU cycles used for rendering will exceed today, and it'll be even more the year after that. When I think about that, I feel like seeing ray tracing take over in games is inevitable.

blt• 8 years ago

Isn't there considerable value in having a simple framework that can achieve all those effects, and be shared and communicated easily with others?

historically, gfx apis went the opposite direction. fixed function pipeline was replaced by shaders. now we rely on the api basically to do rasterization and little else. i think in ray tracing you would want a similar distillation. so like yes, the ray cast operator might be wanted in the api, but i think computations like importance sampling from the conditional brdf are better left in shaders.

and beginners who just want to get triangles on the screen copy/paste a bunch of code they dont fully understand, like now :)

pjackson5• 8 years ago

I spend a lot of time doing lighting TD work using non-realtime renderers. Every one of those examples is pretty good for realtime, but also looks soooo wrong! its not anywhere near the same quality as a proper raytracer!

-Thats not what an ao pass should look like. But you shouldnt even need ao if your GI/shadows look good

- Gi should have detail to it, every realtime example is sooooo blurry

-The screen space reflections sometimeslook ok but really depends on your scene, you get all sorts of reflections in the wrong place.

-Yucky DOF without the nice bokeh on highlights and all those edge problems you get with a z-space blur.

The beauty of raytracing with a unified sampler is it makes the algorithm for each of these features you listed incredibly simple and it mixes distributes CPU/GPU time to whats important depending on that part of the image.

scene with lots of motion blur- more primary samples, less samples to gi/shadows/reflections - automatically based on how much gi/shadows you see

scene with lots of gi - more samples in gi, less for reflections etc - automatically

You can have a complex scene with reflections/gi everywhere, and then turn a heavy DOF on and get faster frame times.

Iv• 8 years ago

PBR proved that we reached the point where the industry had enough of hacks in some domains.

Everybody in CG knows that raytracing is the graal in that it allows a unique, universal rendering model and that triangle-based techniques are always hacks aimed at approximating a raytracing result (or even better, a radiosity-based algorithm)

We have always surfed on the edge between cramming more millions of triangles in our graphic cards and being able to make a complex calculation per pixel. It is arguable that if hardware manufacturers had taken a different path, GPUs would be more comfortable with raytracing now as it requires a very different architecture (make lookups in a big scene cheap vs matrix operations)

From time to time, big player test the water with raytracing and often are not followed by the crowd of developers afraid to change their ways.

I wish that one day we cross that bridge.

rubber_duck• 8 years ago

I think you meant to compare rasterization with raytracing ? You can raytrace triangle meshes and you can rasterize non-triangular geometry.

jayd16• 8 years ago

I was at the GDC talks today. The gist is that this is for filling in the gaps that screen space tricks simply cannot do because the reflected surface is off screen.

bhouston12• 8 years ago

I can imagine that raytracing for a few effects will be possible when you switch on "Ultra" settings on desktop games, for the guys who have V100s in their machines.

tgb• 8 years ago

The article says that MS (like everyone else) expects there to be fewer and fewer "fixed-function" features in a GPU with more shifting over to software-defined shader code. But isn't this just an introduction of more fixed-functionality to the pipeline? So what's the advantage of doing it this way versus writing a ray tracer in the current compute shaders?

bhouston12• 8 years ago

The main issue with current compute shaders is intersecting with arbitrary geometry in a fast way. I expect that the main thing they will add is raycast() function that propagates the ray to the next surface, similar to how RenderMan shaders or OSL works.

kevingadd5• 8 years ago

APIs like a ray tracing API can be implemented in driver software (on-CPU) or in device firmware (on-GPU, but programmatic, not in silicon). Technically this also applies for the old fixed-function pipeline, of course, but it's worth considering the difference.

A raytracing API also isn't forced into the pipeline for every rasterized polygon like old features - hardware T&L, geometry shaders, etc - were. It's something you use on-demand in a compute or fragment shader.

pkilgore• 8 years ago

Raytracing is sort of like nuclear fusion: a few years away for my entire life. Not clear what changed yet.

MBCook• 8 years ago

Well I imagine today’s GPU would be more than capable of doing an amazing looking game at 320x240 or maybe 640x480 at a reasonable frame rate.

The problem is at this point people want it at 1080, 4k or 8k.

gnode• 8 years ago

The goalposts have also moved in terms of quality. Raytracing these days no longer just means point light sources and mirrors, but full global illumination with bidirectional path tracing.

Rasterization has improved a lot over the years, so the meaning of "raytracing" has to improve to be competitive.

polskibus• 8 years ago

can this somehow work with autocad, etc so that construction fragments could be previewed in real time with Raytracing and global illumination turned on?

electricslpnsld5• 8 years ago

"CAD"-like programs from the animation and VFX worlds (Houdini, Modo, etc) already do this, so if Autodesk really wanted to they could almost certainly add real-time path tracing to AutoCAD.

detritus• 8 years ago

I can't help but feel this is aimed at making future Augmented Reality (ie. Hololens) applications integrate into their host environments better.. or perhaps I'm just giddily over-extrapolating possibilities!

phkahler2• 8 years ago

Good point. Ray tracing makes compensating for lens distortion trivial.

dharma1• 8 years ago

And here's a nice demo from Remedy https://youtu.be/70W2aFr5-Xk

CyberDildonics2• 8 years ago

This has a lot of artifacts and does not look better to me than full fledged games that have already been released.

kevingadd5• 8 years ago

It's a tech demo. It's not supposed to look better than retail games, it just shows off some new experimental technology. If you check out the slide deck for the demo they compare each technique with existing solutions (i.e. SSAO vs traced AO, SS reflections vs traced reflections) and the advantages are very obvious.

If you want to see how much existing techniques suffer compared to tracing, just check out the absolutely miserable, incredibly ugly, just disgusting screen space reflections in the brand-new Crytek game Hunt: Showdown. The water is a nightmare.

wongarsu• 8 years ago

It looks great, but it also clearly suffers from the noise issues inherent in most raytracing. In this particluar demo I didn't find it distracting, but when using a lower-performance computer I would expect much worse noice (instead of the usual compromise of removing effects)

braderhart• 8 years ago

Is this open source?

romanovcode3• 8 years ago

No, DirectX is proprietary closed-source technology from Microsoft.

joosters• 8 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXo0WdlELJk

I'm pleased to see that the tech video includes spherical mirrors. As I understand it, all raytracing demos are obliged by universal law to include at least three reflective balls in any promotion of the technology.

One day, someone will figure out a game where these super-shiny ball bearings are a critical part of the gameplay, and at that point, raytracing will finally take off...

ttoinou• 8 years ago

Portal :p ?

Aardwolf2• 8 years ago

Even in AAA games of today with amazing graphics, I still see polygons in cylindrical, conical and round objects (I'm not talking about raytracing but regular rendering). Everything looks so realistic, but a well or bucket [1] or some other cylindrical object you encounter looks not round but faceted, breaking the suspension of disbelief.

Raytracing may bring more roundness, but why not quadratic surfaces or some other fast enough to render method of real roundness in rasterizers? It may be expensive (although one surface would replace many polygons...), but it'd solve one of the last remaining uglinesses :)

[1] https://imgur.com/gallery/AdDyT8B

blaenk• 8 years ago

I think that's just a matter of how many subdivisions/polygons they decide to devote for those assets. For example, that bucket is pretty inconsequential in the overall scene so they can save some polygons on it, to give more toward something like a character or weapon model that is more prominent, more of the time, since more polygons means higher storage and computational requirements.

Something like tessellation [1] can be used to dynamically tune how many subdivisions to give a model based on certain parameters, such as camera distance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessellation_(computer_graphic...

haldean2• 8 years ago

(I do geometry but I'm not in the gaming field)

I'd guess that this is because the fastest way to compute a precise silhouette of an arbitrary shape (like quadratic surfaces) is to do a ray test for every pixel that might hit the surface. You could project the surface onto the image plane to get boundary curves, but (a) determining the curves that make up that silhouette is a complicated geometric process that's prone to numerical error in weird edge cases (of which there are lots) and (b) once you have the projected curves, you still have to actually shade the interior, which require you to project back onto the original surface to figure out the normal, texture, etc. At that point, you're essentially doing little ray tests for each pixel anyway, so why not just raytrace the whole thing? The global illumination approximation is much much better with raytracing, and modern GPUs can do it real-time.

By the way, modelling everything as an analytic surface rather than as a discretized polygon mesh is called "Boundary Representation" or b-rep, and it's what's used in solid CAD programs that engineers use, like Solidworks or Inventor. Engineers and designers like analytic surfaces because they have "infinite" resolution, but even those CAD programs almost invariably polygonalize b-rep to a mesh and then render the mesh, because it's expensive to hit-test all the surfaces involved; computers only recently became able to do that fast enough for real time interaction, and most CAD programs are old old old.

nitwit005• 8 years ago

Fallout 4 probably set a limit for how many polygons an object could be because the scenes had to support hundreds.

Tobba_4• 8 years ago

That's just because the industry is stuck using triangles in the art pipeline (and don't put in as much effort into the low-polys as they used to). If they were willing to use some variation of patch-based pipeline so that they could utilize the tessellation hardware that has existed for years, it wouldn't be a problem. I've heard artists are scared of it due to how amazingly awful some editors managed to make the NURBS editing experience, but with a decent editor it really wouldn't be a problem.

Sadly tessellation largely just gets used to screw over AMD performance (for those sweet Nvidia kickbacks; if you're wondering why some games like Crysis 2 tessellate flat surfaces into an insane number of polygons, this is why).

rasz• 8 years ago

would you prefer world's greatest virtual concrete slab? https://techreport.com/review/21404/crysis-2-tessellation-to...

PaulHoule• 8 years ago

How about a game that happens outside a pawn shop?

corysama2• 8 years ago

A separate tech demo from Remedy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70W2aFr5-Xk

milesvp• 8 years ago

My understanding is that rasterization really made portal hard to make. They had to jump through a bunch of hoops to make it all work. Meanwhile I understand that adding portals to raytrace quake was like an afternoon's exercise. I'm also annoyed that there's a map in overwatch where the corner mirrors don't actually reflect anything :P

I think generally with many of the tricks that have come out of SIGGRAPH for the last decade, we've really reached a point where, computationally, raytracing really is starting to have the advantage over rasterization in terms of both pixel count and object count. The struggle for the next 30 years however is going to be overcoming the tooling built around rasterization, and to a lesser extent the headstart rasterization has had in terms of hardware.

Not to sound too crazy but I also have a strong suspicion that if you tied a physics engine to a raytracer, you might get your physics 'for free' which could be a big deal for pushing forward more realistic physics too.

electricslpnsld5• 8 years ago

Not to sound too crazy but I also have a strong suspicion that if you tied a physics engine to a raytracer, you might get your physics 'for free' which could be a big deal for pushing forward more realistic physics too.

Why is that?

beamatronic• 8 years ago

Marble Madness?

jlebrech3• 8 years ago

one tricky thing to code is where you as the player look into a mirror, the trick usually is to create another exact replica of the room you're in and your player and use that like a skybox.

but with this you could have all the particle effects work properly in the reflection.

bhouston12• 8 years ago

one tricky thing to code is where you as the player look into a mirror, the trick usually is to create another exact replica of the room you're in and your player and use that like a skybox.

Actually mirrors can be easily implemented as a pre-render step, you just re-render the system from the right perspective, a virtual camera, and then paste that on the polygons that are acting as the mirror.

audunw• 8 years ago

Spheres are just a super simple and dead obvious way of showing that your rendering engine is able to do realistic reflections.

In the demo, there are actually lots of much more subtle reflective surfaces that contribute to the realism of the scene.

.. critical part of the gameplay ..

Strictly speaking, graphics hasn't been a critical part of gameplay for a long time. I think we've mostly gone beyond the point where increasing graphics capabilities actually enable new gameplay.

mikevin• 8 years ago

The exception being VR/AR

newnewpdro• 8 years ago

I can't help but imagine the massively power-hungry machines hosting the GPUs necessary for real-time rendering of Pixar-level movie graphics.

Won't this resemble power demands of crytpocurrency mining rigs except actually used for gaming? As if it weren't already bad enough the amount of energy we use per capita...

kyleperik• 8 years ago

In my experience with blender, though you can create very detailed photo realistic images without raytracing, but using raytracing makes it much easier to make the same photos. It takes longer, but it's probably the direction we're going generally with 3d rendering given Moore's law.

Anyway this seems a little overhyped

piracykills• 8 years ago

So where are we realistically with ray tracing? What kind of performance can be expected with modern GPUs?

snvzz• 8 years ago

Friendly reminder DirectX is a proprietary windows-specific API, with its associated lock-in. Don't fall for such simple trap.

gaius• 8 years ago

Have fun shipping a real product on OpenGL without a proprietary binary driver blob.

dfox• 8 years ago

Both nouveau and amdgpu are good enough for every linux game in my steam library.

jenscow• 8 years ago

Reasonable compromise, compared to being aggressively locked into a proprietary platform.

trilinearnz• 8 years ago

While true, it's worth noting that these developments will likely impact the next XBox model too.

dingo_bat2• 8 years ago

Considering Windows still has ~90% of the market, this is not a trap. It's a matter of practicality.

beavis2• 8 years ago

That attitude just adds to the problem.

out_of_protocol• 8 years ago

1) Still a trap

2) DX12 works on win10 only, which deployed to waay less than 90% PCs

OCASM6• 8 years ago

AMD's Vulkan version:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12552/amd-announces-real-time...

kevingadd5• 8 years ago

Use OpenGL or Vulkan if you want. Modern (AZDO) GL and Vulkan wouldn't exist if Direct3D 9 & 10 hadn't dragged the state of the art forward by actually having reasonable APIs and well-specified behaviors.

Direct3D has had world-class debugging tools and a reference renderer for years, meanwhile when I'm trying to ship OpenGL games the shader compiler doesn't even work the same across multiple PCs. (Vulkan fixes this stuff, yay!)

It sucks that DX is proprietary but the proprietary nature of it means that it can achieve things that are only possible with full integration - just like Metal on iOS and OS X.

pjmlp11• 8 years ago

And PS2 SPUs, PS3 libGNM, libGCNM and Nintendo GX, GX2, NVN.

Apple saved OpenGL from being irrelevant thanks to NeXTSTEP and their OpenGL ES push on iOS, because they needed to attract devs, now with the commoditizationof middleware among AAA studios that is no longer a relevant.

And it remains to be seen if Vulkan will ever get any adoption beyond Linux and flagship Android phones.

laythea• 8 years ago

Can this be applied to Path tracing? If so, would this be able to accelerate something like OctaneRender?

I stumbled across this a year or so ago and was amazed at how the realistic image is built up after rotating. https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/

tomovo• 8 years ago

Anyone remembers Intel's Larrabee project? It featured HW accelerated raytracing. They had Quake Wars running on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_Wars:_Ray_Traced or video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtHDSG2wNho

orbital-decay2• 8 years ago

Imagination and OTOY also experimented with hardware raytracing on mobile: https://www.imgtec.com/legacy-gpu-cores/ray-tracing/

pjmlp11• 8 years ago

Yes, I was seated at GDCE 2009 Intel session where they told us that Larrabee would be the future of graphics programming, yeah right.

AareyBaba• 8 years ago

AMD has a free ray tracing renderer called Radeon ProRender https://pro.radeon.com/en/software/prorender. Supported by Maya and Blender among others ...

KaoruAoiShiho• 8 years ago

It's too slow to be relevant.

AMDGfxManager• 8 years ago

Can you elaborate: what are you testing and comparing to ? are you looking at a real-time application (gaming) or is your comment about offline rendering (visualeffects/animation) ? I don't work on this project but I can forward the feedback to the developers.

OCASM6• 8 years ago

Not anymore:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12552/amd-announces-real-time...

IvanK_net• 8 years ago

It reminds me the ray-traced game I made a few years ago :) http://powerstones.ivank.net/

If you don't move, the image "improves" over time. You can change the resolution in the top left corner. Play it in fullscreen. It works on phones, too.

ingen0s3• 8 years ago

Awesome. Cant wait to test this out.

enzanki_ars• 8 years ago

More discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16620515

dang• 8 years ago

We merged that discussion here.

ingen0s3• 8 years ago

Also dont forget to link the SDK: http://forums.directxtech.com/index.php?topic=5860.0

ingen0s3• 8 years ago

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AmttvHQpGvyVbOmqJ4vut9zN3Ss

shmerl13• 8 years ago

So why DX12 and not Vulkan? It's time for MS to start helping the industry instead of proliferating lock-in and complicating things for engine developers.

swebs3• 8 years ago

I don't know why you're getting downvotes. DirectX is harmful for consumers and only serves to lock in games and users to Microsoft Windows.

thelittleone• 8 years ago

Microsoft is the dominant platform for games. What financial gain would they derive from pursuing a non lock in strategy?

partiallypro• 8 years ago

In Satya's Microsoft, it's pretty much guaranteed that DirectX is going to go the route of .NET and be largely open and multi-platform. I almost bet within a year, we'll get a Hacker News article with just that announcement...

OCASM6• 8 years ago

AMD saves the day:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12552/amd-announces-real-time...

shmerl13• 8 years ago

Great, but how can other engines benefit from it?

Tloewald• 8 years ago

Ray Tracing is also a lie! Are they giving us an unbiased renderer?

Looks interesting anyway.

oneplane2• 8 years ago

That's great.. if you are on Windows. I get that Microsoft works on Microsoft-technology, but it really doesn't help adoption or global development as a whole. DirectX doesn't work anywhere except Windows PC's and the Xbox. That's no biggie for Microsoft, but it's bad for everyone else.

naikrovek• 8 years ago

DirectX doesn't work anywhere except Windows PC's and the Xbox.

And most new phone chipsets. And a lot of old phone chipsets. And a lot of ARM-based single board computers. And a lot of non-Xbox consoles like the Switch have hardware support for DirectX...

DirectX is in a lot of places you would not expect.

lpghatguy• 8 years ago

What? All of those places have hardware support for DirectX, but none of them (barring Windows phones) actually have DirectX running on them.

ClassyJacket2• 8 years ago

iOS and Android both don't support DirectX, so the hardware technically being compatible is irrelevant, especially with Windows Phone now discontinued.

OCASM6• 8 years ago

AMD just announced their owm real-time ray-tracer based on Vulkan:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12552/amd-announces-real-time...

DoveBrown6• 8 years ago

There is a value to having competition. My guess that if it works out and Nvidia and AMD have it implemented on silicon, then they will push to have those features accessible through a Vulkan interface.

I love open standards as much as the next guy but for something like this where the utility is still an open question, I'd rather than some just makes an implementation for just their technology. The alternative is that your open standard is full of half baked experiments and trimming a standard is a huge pain.

oneplane2• 8 years ago

Yes to competition, but this isn't really that, this is plain vendor lock-in, and it is not really competing anywhere except within the Windows ecosystem itself, where it practically has a monopoly.

If DirectX were to be used on Linux and macOS, you'd have some real competition, but that is not the case.

keyle• 8 years ago

Unreal Engine 4's post on this https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/unreal-engine-4-supp...

userbinator• 8 years ago

I'm not sure what's the big deal here; the demoscene has been doing realtime raytracing for many many years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11848097

drb912• 8 years ago

Well, if we can get a standardized raytracing api built into any os, that’s a pretty big deal.

Also, ray tracing, marching, and casting has been real-time for a while, for some definition and degree. Graphics has always been about tradeoffs, though, and this seems markedly more general purpose than anything I’ve seen before.

I’m excited, even though I don’t have any Microsoft products outside my Xbox.

egypturnash• 8 years ago

Large scene graphs full of dynamically allocated objects with arbitrary motion and animation are a very different problem than a flyover of a static landscape or a Mandelbulb that you’re tweaking parameters on.

kev009• 8 years ago

So I guess this is to mesh with the new HW support from nvidia and AMD? Because ray tracing wasn't usually the providence of GPUs.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12546/nvidia-unveils-rtx-tech...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12552/amd-announces-real-time...

I haven't touched a PC game in ages, would be fun to come back and see some epic like HL3 done up in this.

synaesthesisx• 8 years ago

This is quite exciting for augmented reality applications - I think it's a reasonable assumption that the next iteration of Hololens will have some sort of hardware acceleration for this (like Nvidia's RTX w/ Volta announced today).

Relevant:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/shedding-some-realis...

"I am 90% sure that the eventual path to integration of ray tracing hardware into consumer devices will be as minor tweaks to the existing GPU microarchitectures." - John Carmack

blauditore• 8 years ago

The Seed tech demo advertises depth of field - so does this renderer simulate a lens? Is this common in raytracing?

pavlov• 8 years ago

Yes, simulating lenses is standard for physically-based rendering.

jlebrech3• 8 years ago

how much of this is due to crypto? do they have a raytracing chip that's much less general purpose and specific to raytracing (and incompatible with mining)?

mtgx• 8 years ago

Why not path tracing?

Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

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