The RTX elephant in the room

Development Rendering
1

Will we have it in the engine when the RTX cards comes out on 20th September?
If not then when?
4.21 ?
Finally dynamic Gi and raytraced reflections?
Please make it possible, to be honest I don’t care what AMD is doing. I want RTX in my beloved Unreal engine.

2

I have a question too… do we want to buy teh quadro rtx cards or will the 2080/2080 ti be enough for some fast fast lightmap baking :slight_smile: realtime?

3

RTX is the GPU model, the tech is DXR (a DirectX feature)

And no, it won’t be available in the engine when the cards are released, Epic said it would be supported around version 4.22 which would be closer to the end of this year or early next year since we’re on 4.20

4

Regarding how underwhelming DX12 runs in Unreal, will Epic revamp DX12 in Unreal in order to properly support/accompany DXR?

5

Short range very specular reflections, only for people with Direct X tracing cards, yes. Maybe on 4.21 or later.

Short range global illumination effects, only for people with Direct X tracing cards, yes. Maybe on 4.21 or later.

Honestly don’t buy into Nvidia’s hype machine that much. It’s going to be many years of hard software work, and another GPU redesign or more, before raytracing starts to be both really good and mainstream instead of just some neat added effects for high end stuff. I mean, they’ll be neat for that category, just like FFT bloom is and etc. but it’s limited for games is the point (I imagine Archviz/budget pre-render types will love it though!)

Frankly I’m hoping Epic ditches the polygon intersections stuff and goes for using the new API extension to speed up SDF tracing. That’s already got a non API fallback, and will be faster and more useful for things raytracing is good at today like shadows and ambient occlusion/shadowing GI, etc. EG I’m pretty sure DFGI is already as fast (or faster) than DICE’s polygon RTX raytracing demo for long range ambient occlusion, and that’s without using the new API/hardware to speed things up.

6

Indeedy. Its another of those beautiful nvidia technologies which most people dont have the hardware to run.