Almost one year has passed since raytracing was introduced by Nvidia/Microsoft. Are we still expecting this to be the next big thing? (I hope so)

[TSM]

It seems like lowered production costs will be a primary motivator to move to ray tracing even if there were no other big compelling reasons. I think once the user base with adequate hardware is built up things will move very quickly.

 

[ToddBonzalez]

It's cool, but really expensive from a performance standpoint...probably will be rare or nonexistent on next gen consoles and an option on PC for those with machines that can handle it.

 

[Overflow]

im working towards adding raytracing to my Era account

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How's that going for ya

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RTX OFF: good
RTX ON: g o o d

 

[dgrdsv]

And I suppose a decade or so from now many game engines will just drop their rasterization renderer completely

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I really doubt that this will ever happen. Rasterization is very good on some stuff which you still need to render a scene even with RT being fast and everywhere. Why throw out free performance if the IQ end result is the same or very similar? I expect that some FF rasterization h/w will remain in GPUs for a very very long time, even if only for b/w compatibility, and this means that you'd be wise to use this h/w in your renderer where it will fit your requirements.

Would be nice if there was a separate ray tracing add-in card to expand on your GPUs current ability. That way you wouldn't need to upgrade GPUs as often to keep current on the growing requirements for ray trading.

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There is no "RT add-in", your GPU is working 100% when doing RT, you can't have "separate RT card" because you still need to upgrade the rest of your GPU (generic compute, caches and LDS sizes, memory bus speeds, compute capabilities, etc) for RT to be fast. I don't know why people don't understand this.

 

[ILikeFeet]

I can't speak on AMD, but the move to 7nm should help improve RT performance since they can cram more cores on the die. I think we'll see a lot of step down while increasing RT cores (in addition to decent improvements to rasterization).