RTX is clearly a compute-hog: its barely usable even if you pay for the best-of-the-best GPUs. I mean, not to knock Nvidia down or anything, raytracing is one of the most computationally difficult problems in existence right now.
But from a practical and pragmatic perspective, you suffer a major loss in frame-rates and force the GPU to drop in resolution to make the jump to raytracing. Even if you spent $1200 on the card...
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I'm personally excited to see offline renderers use the RTX features to accelerate offline raytracing. That's probably the more important use of the technology. As it is, RTX isn't quite fast enough for "real time" yet. Just grossly accelerated offline raytracing (which is still impressive)
Also last I read, RTX really isn't designed for offline raytracing and doesn't really bring much to the table. Its use is in realtime.
Battlefield V Ultra 1080p RTX on is ~63 FPS average (not minimum FPS, but average), which means it will regularly dip below 60 in practice.
> Also last I read, RTX really isn't designed for offline raytracing and doesn't really bring much to the table. Its use is in realtime.
On the contrary! RTX Cores are a hardware-accelerated BVH-traversal. That has HUGE implications for the offline rendering scene.
See NVidia Optix for details: https://devblogs.nvidia.com/nvidia-optix-ray-tracing-powered...
IMO, this is the killer-feature of RTX. Accelerating those Hollywood Renders from hours-per-frame to minutes-per-frame. NVidia Optix takes industry-standard scene trees and can use the RTX Cores to traverse them for hardware-accelerated raytracing.
Or more specifically: coarse AABB Bounds checking, which is a very compute & memory heavy portion of the Raytracing algorithm.
Even if RTX is too slow for video games, any improvement to offline rendering is a huge advantage.
What NVIDIA is trying to sell people is a denoiser.
And are you sure RT Cores even exist or are they just tensorcores by a different name?
Here is a comparison of the regular global illumination vs RTX real-time raytracing, particularly take look at noise levels generated by RTX in the background. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuoER1DwYLY
NVidia has that temporal denoising algorithm though. So noise is smoothed between space and time. When you have 60-frames per second, you can "recycle" old frame's raytracing data for the current frame.
As long as the raytracing lights rarely change, it'd work out pretty well. The fast-moving lights would probably have to still use rasterization techniques, but the demos of the temporal-denoising algorithm from NVidia are very impressive.
FYI: Blender Cycle's denoising is still kinda bad even at 1000 or even 5000 samples (at least, when you look at low-light areas close to walls). You gotta zoom in and look, but artistic CGI requires many, many samples before raytracing looks smooth. Its a major advancement for NVidia to come up with a raytracing denoising algorithm that works well for video games on only 1-ish samples per pixel.
Can you explain this more? All the tests of RTX in actual games have been very positive and showed significant improvements in visual quality.