Unreal Engine 4.21 Preview

[kurylo3d]

@Raziel

1. They ARE using DXR (mentioned on: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/b…and-nvidia-rtx)
   “Today, Microsoft has announced DirectX Raytracing (DXR), which brings real-time ray tracing to the DirectX 12 API … Epic Games has partnered with NVIDIA to support their newly revealed RTX technology via the DXR API” <– in other words, it’s all generic and should just work. Sort of anyway… which brings me onto the next 2 points.
2. “Vega has more compute than 1080 Ti” <– Except a 1080 Ti is completely useless for ray-tracing in real-time, you seriously shouldn’t expect Vega to be able to do anything near playable frame-rates either. Keep in mind that the RTX cards have actual dedicated ray tracing hardware in addition to the existing rasterisation hardware. Prior to RTX, it took 4 high-end Volta GPUs to run that Star Wars tech demo at 24fps in 1080p using GPU compute. That’s the equivalent of something like 6 1080 ti’s. DigitalFoundry has shown it running @ 2160p 25-38fps using DLSS on a 2080 ti (https://youtu.be/pgEI4tzh0dc?t=656). So, point is, you really need that dedicated ray tracing hardware for this feature to be useful.
3. On top of the basic compute limitations, you also need a way to take a partially rendered image and turn it into a clean, full image. AI is really good at that sort of thing, but you need some kind of inference hardware for that, hence the need for something like the Tensor cores, which again, the 1080 ti and Vega cards do not have. You could solve this problem with some sort of temporal algorithm, but it probably wouldn’t look as good and would add an additional load on the GPU which is already overloaded trying to do ray-tracing on top of rasterisation.

In short, it should just work but I’m not expecting the feature to be useful for real-time ray-tracing. Maybe you could use it for high-quality screenshots of your games, but realistically, if you’re interested in ray tracing, you’re going to have to wait for AMD to implement their equivalent to RTX… I mean, it would be awesome if by some miracle, AMD manages to get ray tracing via DXR running at playable frame rates without needing to add additional hardware and this could just come for free to existing Vega card owners, but I just can’t see it happening.

Im honestly just interested in teh lightmap baking… Super fast lightmap baking would be incredable…