Raytracing on Intel's Arc B580

> both AMD and Nvidia manage their long-latency dependency tracking in hardware

This is incorrect for AMD, which has "s_waitcnt" instructions in its ISA, which is publicly documented. I believe it is also incorrect for Nvidia, but don't have the receipts to prove it.

They won't make a B770 or C770 because they lose money on every card they sell. The prices are low because otherwise they would sell 0 and they already paid for the silicon. The intel graphics division is run by fools who won't give their cards a USP in the SR-IOV feature home labers have been asking for for years. Doing what AMD and Nvidia do but worse is not a profitable strategy. There's a 50% the whole division gets fired in the next year though.

I have a couple of these too, and I strongly believe Intel is effectively subsidizing these to try to get a foothold in the market.

You get me equivalent of a $500 Nvidia card for around $300 or less. And it makes sense because Intel knows if they can get a foothold in this market they're that much more valuable to shareholders.

Great for gaming, no real downsides imo.

Just a heads up - it looks like the "Path Tracing Off" shots have ray tracing disabled as well. In the shots starting at 1:22 (the car and then the plaza), it looks like they just have the base screenspace reflections enabled. Path tracing makes a difference (sometimes big, sometimes small) for diffuse lighting in the game. The kind of reflection seen in those scenes can be had by enabling "normal" ray tracing in the game, which is playable on more systems.

I've kind of wondered about this a bit too. The respective visual quality side of it that is. Especially in a context where you're actually playing a game. You're not just sitting there staring at side by side still frames looking for minor differences.

What I have assumed given then trend, but could be completely wrong about, is that the raytracing version of the world might be easier on the software & game dev side to get great visual results without the overhead of meticulous engineering, use, and composition of different lighting systems, shader effects, etc.

I think there's two ways of looking at it. Firstly that raster has more or less plateaued, there haven't been any great advances in a long time and it's not like AMD or any other company have offered an alternative path or vision for where they see 3d graphics going. The last thing a company like nvidia wants is to be a generic good which is easy to compete with or simple to compare against. Nvidia was also making use of their strength/long term investment in ML to drive DLSS

Secondly, nvidia are a company that want to sell stuff for a high asking price, and once a certain tech gets good enough that becomes more difficult. If the 20 series was just a incremental improvement from the 10, and so on then I expect sales would have plateaued especially if game requirements don't move much.

Not if you want better fidelity: the VFX industry for film moved from rasterisation to raytracing / pathtracing (on CPU initially, and a lot of final frame rendering is still done on CPU due to memory requirements even today, although lookdev is often done on GPU if the shaders / light transport algorithms can be matched between GPU/CPU codepaths) due to the higher fidelity possible starting back in around 2012/2013.

It required discarding a lot of "tricks" that had been learnt with rasterisation to speed things up over the years, and made things slower in some cases, but meant everything could use raytracing to compute visibility / occlusion, rather than having shadow maps, irradiance caches, pointcloud SSS caches, which simplified workflows greatly and allowed high-fidelity light transport simulations of things like volume scattering in difficult mediums like water/glass and hair (i.e. TRRT lobes), where rasterisation is very difficult to get the medium transitions and LT correct.

I don't think it's just about looks. The advantage of ray tracing is the real time lighting done rather than the static baked maps. One of the features I feel that was lost with modern game lighting is dynamic environments. But as long as the game isn't only ray tracing, these types of interactions will stay disabled for the game. Teardown and The Finals are examples of a dynamic environment game with raytraced lighting.

Another example is when was the last time you've seen a game with a mirror that wasn't broken?

If you think of either crypto or gaming and not accelerated compute for advanced modeling and simulation when you hear Nvidia, you won't have sufficient perspective to answer this question.

What does RTX do, what does it replace, and what does it enable, for whom? Repeat for Physx, etc. Give yourself a bonus point if you've ever heard of Nvidia Omniverse before right now.

lol, go play Cyberpunk 2077 with pathtracing and compare it to raster before you call it a gimmick.

It's a transition happening.

Research and progress is necessary, Ray tracing is a clear advancement.

AMD could just easily skip it if they want to reduce costs, we could just not by the gpus. Non of it is happening.

It does look better and it would be a lot easier if we would only do ray tracing

If suggested usage means upscaling, it's a dubious trade off. That's why I'm not using it in Cyberpunk 2077, at least with RDNA 3 on Linux, since I don't want to use upscaling.

Not sure how much RDNA 4 and on will improve it.

Intel is close. Good history with software.

If they started shipping GPUs with more RAM, I think they'd be in a strong position. The traditional disruption is to eat the low-end and move up.

Silly as it may sound, but a Battlemage where one can just plug in DIMMs, with some high total limit for RAM, would be the ultimate for developers who just want to test / debug LLMs locally.