DXR Raytracing is coming to Minecraft - RTX On

[WYP]

I guess this is why the game's Super Duper Graphics pack is dead.



Read more about DXR/RTX coming to Minecraft.

 

[demonking]

OUCH!
Sonic ether must be pretty ed right now. And to out it behind a rtx garden wall, shame on you Microsoft and Nvidia.
Had high hopes for this, shame Nvidia had to get involved and price me out of free content....

 

[WYP]

OUCH!
Sonic ether must be pretty ed right now. And to out it behind a rtx garden wall, shame on you Microsoft and Nvidia.
Had high hopes for this, shame Nvidia had to get involved and price me out of free content....

You realise that the Sonic mod isn't hardware accelerated. With DXR hardware this should run much faster.

Beyond that, Microsoft us using Nvidia here. DXR is their API. They made it, and they have already said that their next-generation Scarlett console features raytracing acceleration. They are prepping for next-gen, and using Nvidia to prepare Minecraft.

DXR support is available on Nvidia GTX 1060 or higher Pascal cards, so if you are on Pascal you should be able to try this out.

 

[demonking]

You realise that the Sonic mod isn't hardware accelerated. With DXR hardware this should run much faster.

Beyond that, Microsoft us using Nvidia here. DXR is their API. They made it, and they have already said that their next-generation Scarlett console features raytracing acceleration. They are prepping for next-gen, and using Nvidia to prepare Minecraft.

DXR support is available on Nvidia GTX 1060 or higher Pascal cards, so if you are on Pascal you should be able to try this out.

Yeah I know, that was the point. The other point is that he has been working on this tirelessly to bring it to all. He could be asked to cease and desist with his development should Microsoft decide it. And again forget the rtx part, if you don't own nvidia you don't get it. Which I suppose it's no different than any other rt atm but when something is going to be given away to all and then a company steps in and limits it to their customers only....

 

[grec]

Nvidia's RTX series of graphics cards are the only GPUs that offer support for hardware-accelerated raytracing

I have to disagree with this statement, every current DXR implementation and everyone that's likely to be in the next 5 years at least is a hybrid hardware/software solution, GTX Turing still uses hardware acceleration for a good portion of the ray probing, casting, shading, ect, the difference between RTX and GTX DXR implementations atm are mostly whether or not the BVH search and memory management parts of the algorithm are accelerated in fixed-function hardware in parallel.

Yeah I know, that was the point. The other point is that he has been working on this tirelessly to bring it to all. He could be asked to cease and desist with his development should Microsoft decide it. And again forget the rtx part, if you don't own nvidia you don't get it. Which I suppose it's no different than any other rt atm but when something is going to be given away to all and then a company steps in and limits it to their customers only....

Given the launch period they've planned(Which they're prone to missing mind you), NVidia won't be the only company compatible when this launches in any meaningful form.

 

[WYP]

I have to disagree with this statement, every current DXR implementation and everyone that's likely to be in the next 5 years at least is a hybrid hardware/software solution, GTX Turing still uses hardware acceleration for a good portion of the ray probing, casting, shading, ect, the difference between RTX and GTX DXR implementations atm are mostly whether or not the BVH search and memory management parts of the algorithm are accelerated in fixed-function hardware in parallel.

I would define "accelerated in fixed-function hardware" as hardware acceleration. What else would you call it when explaining something so complex in laymans terms?

Maybe the entire pipeline isn't accelerated, but it still runs a lot faster thanks to fixed function hardware.

Yeah I know, that was the point. The other point is that he has been working on this tirelessly to bring it to all. He could be asked to cease and desist with his development should Microsoft decide it. And again forget the rtx part, if you don't own nvidia you don't get it. Which I suppose it's no different than any other rt atm but when something is going to be given away to all and then a company steps in and limits it to their customers only....

The mod is for the old version of Minecraft, not the DX12 one. Taking down the mod would just be a PC disaster for Microsoft and Mojang.

Also, the mod is DXR. By the time DXR Minecraft releases in 2020 AMD should soon have DXR complaint GPUs ready to go out the door. Mojang has promised to support DXR Minecraft on other DXR compliant graphics cards.

 

[grec]

My point of contention is regarding defining RTX as accelerated but not GTX Turing, it's a bit of a messy term, but you'd say that your GPU was a hardware accelerator for graphics pipelines, even though since DirectX10 10 years ago almost all the pipeline has been programmable, with fixed function becoming hardware quite rare kept to small specific steps like compression algorithms or whatever. The same is true here for both GTX/RTX implementations of DXR, some of the pipeline is fixed function hardware, most of it is general purpose in both cases, it's just the RTX version has a bit more fixed function hardware than the GTX one.

Going from AMD's patent, they too have essentially no fixed function hardware in their proposed raytracing pipeline, but the BVH search for instance is still hardware accelerated, just with re-purposed(Texture) units, so they could technically have "RT hardware acceleration" just as "complete" as RTX Turing with less fixed function hardware.

Personally I'd only say units like Imagination technologies RTU use a full hardware raytracing pipeline, and I'd say everything else is just hardware accelerated(unless done on the CPU or done with legacy GPGPU instructions, though most GPU archs since 2010 onwards have been designed with consideration for raytracing, ofc not usable for realtime though), including RTX & GTX Turing and AMDs upcoming implementation, just to different degrees.

 

[Dicehunter]

I hope this isn't made exclusive to Turing as I'd quite like to test this on my 1080 ti.

 

[demonking]

I hope this isn't made exclusive to Turing as I'd quite like to test this on my 1080 ti.

This is kind of what I'm getting at. If you own a rtx card then it's all good, if you own pascal, you might be able to. If you own an amd card then no. The purpose of the mod was to give it to everyone for free, now it's a goddam rtx advert.

 

[grec]

No RTX software is exclusive to Turing, whether or not it runs on Pascal is a question of performance rather than functionality.

But until it launches you can't run it on anything, and by the time it launches "Sometime next year" you'll probably be able to run it on two different consoles and GPUs from 3 different hardware vendors. (And given Minecraft was made on the back of mod support I can't see them attacking the long lasting, many many years old and widely distributed SUSE shaders line if you want that version, I don't think they've ever done that before unless someone was charging for mods)

 

[WYP]

My point of contention is regarding defining RTX as accelerated but not GTX Turing, it's a bit of a messy term, but you'd say that your GPU was a hardware accelerator for graphics pipelines, even though since DirectX10 10 years ago almost all the pipeline has been programmable, with fixed function becoming hardware quite rare kept to small specific steps like compression algorithms or whatever. The same is true here for both GTX/RTX implementations of DXR, some of the pipeline is fixed function hardware, most of it is general purpose in both cases, it's just the RTX version has a bit more fixed function hardware than the GTX one.

Going from AMD's patent, they too have essentially no fixed function hardware in their proposed raytracing pipeline, but the BVH search for instance is still hardware accelerated, just with re-purposed(Texture) units, so they could technically have "RT hardware acceleration" just as "complete" as RTX Turing with less fixed function hardware.

Personally I'd only say units like Imagination technologies RTU use a full hardware raytracing pipeline, and I'd say everything else is just hardware accelerated(unless done on the CPU or done with legacy GPGPU instructions, though most GPU archs since 2010 onwards have been designed with consideration for raytracing, ofc not usable for realtime though), including RTX & GTX Turing and AMDs upcoming implementation, just to different degrees.

I said that I would define "accelerated in fixed-function hardware" (your words) as hardware acceleration. In my mind, hardware-level changes that are specifically designed to accelerate raytracing can be considered as hardware acceleration for the purposes of an article which is designed to be read by gamers. Not hardware enthusiasts, gamers.

I don't care about fixed function hardware. Just so long as it accelerates the process using specific hardware changes that do beyond the usual add more processing units and increasing clocks.

When I say RTX is hardware accelerated, what I'm saying is that the hardware includes specific design changes that accelerate the process of producing raytraced graphics. While GTX Turing supports DXR, its lack of RT cores kicks it outside of this definition. While some of Turing's other design changes help with raytracing performance, such as the concurrent Floating Point/integer compute stuff, that specific raytracing hardware changes were stipped away for those GPUs.

I would be very misleading if I said that all Turing GPUs offered hardware-accelerated raytracing. I don't see why we need to argue semantics.

I hope this isn't made exclusive to Turing as I'd quite like to test this on my 1080 ti.

As it says in the article, this is DXR Raytracing. It won't be RTX only. Non-RTX GPUs will need to be powerful enough to run this with just compute though.

 

[grec]

While some of Turing's other design changes help with raytracing performance, such as the concurrent Floating Point/integer compute stuff, that specific raytracing hardware changes were stipped away for those GPUs.

I would be very misleading if I said that all Turing GPUs offered hardware-accelerated raytracing.

I think this is the point I disagree on, if you compare performance on the DXR Fallback layer on say a RadeonVII to DXR performance on a GTX1660, the latter performs orders of magnitudes better than the pure software implementation even with the software version held up by a beefy compute GPU. There's a lot of design decisions in Turing's shader unit and memory management that seems to indicate running parts of the RT pipeline were always its primary purpose, and NVidia claims this was the original design goal for the shader, the BVH hardware exclusive to "full-fat Turing" seemed to come as an extension when they realised that wasn't enough on its own.

Personally I'd say the inclusion of specific hardware instructions in PTX on NVidia GPUs for raytracing since around 2010 have meant they've been RT accelerators for quite a long time, just not RTRT ones, but I can understand passing that one up as a whole in reference to gaming.

(If anyone wants to test the relative "weakness" of different degrees of acceleration vs full software you can compile the samples here for most hardware, though the fallback layer only works on AMD cards with v1.2 and earlier https://github.com/microsoft/DirectX-Graphics-Samples/tree/master/Samples/Desktop/D3D12Raytracing, all examples will display FPS at the top of the screen)

 

[WYP]

I think this is the point I disagree on, if you compare performance on the DXR Fallback layer on say a RadeonVII to DXR performance on a GTX1660, the latter performs orders of magnitudes better than the pure software implementation even with the software version held up by a beefy compute GPU. There's a lot of design decisions in Turing's shader unit and memory management that seems to indicate running parts of the RT pipeline were always its primary purpose, and NVidia claims this was the original design goal for the shader, the BVH hardware exclusive to "full-fat Turing" seemed to come as an extension when they realised that wasn't enough on its own.

Personally I'd say the inclusion of specific hardware instructions in PTX on NVidia GPUs for raytracing since around 2010 have meant they've been RT accelerators for quite a long time, just not RTRT ones, but I can understand passing that one up as a whole in reference to gaming.

Ofcourse low-end Turing features a lot of the Turing secret sauce. Nvidia didn't just make two different architectures. As you said, it's a pipeline and several parts of that pipeline can be leveraged to deliver better performance. There is a reason why Volta can run games with RTX enabled.

Ultimately, it depends on the workload how well GTX Turing can raytrace. In things like 3DMARK Port Royal, RTX is miles ahead. An RTX 2060 can be 2x better than a GTX 1660 Ti.

In other workloads this can drop dramatically. It depends on how much each part of the GPU is used.

Here is a slide that Nvidia used to describe the difference between Pascal and Turing and the impact of the RT core.

In both cases, Nvidia showcases that Turing itself has an impact, which they explained away by talking about their concurrent INT32 and FP32 pipelines in Turing. Regardless, Nvidia stressed the importance of the RT core, which is what the slides above demonstrate.

 

[grec]

Yeah ultimately doing the BVH search to slim down what you actually need to render dominates the time taken to complete the task in modern implementations for realtime gaming and so accelerating that delivers the biggest single change gains atm, but that's mostly because of all the work done on accelerating the shading part with GPU hardware over the last few generations, accelerating raytracing workloads with GPU hardware is a challenge both companies have been working on since DX10 and full-fat Turing's BVH accommodations and acceleration one was of many steps in GPU hardware design to better accommodate rayrtracing acceleration that got us to this point, my point is just that that in itself is not the be all and end all of wider raytracing hardware acceleration(Or the only meaningful acceleration occurring in the GPUs pipeline) even in current implementations, more of a juicy technique for gaming or animation, further useful too for optimising the kind of hybrid rendering you'd do there.

 

[demonking]

The mod is for the old version of Minecraft, not the DX12 one. Taking down the mod would just be a PC disaster for Microsoft and Mojang

A modder is potentially going to give away something for free on one of their games that directly competes with their own product, history suggests that it won't end well for SE. Don't buy the new version of Minecraft, download the snapshot that works with seus instead...
I'm just going to sit here and wait for the announcement that the SE mod has been cancelled. What the public reason is will be the interesting part

 

[WYP]

A modder is potentially going to give away something for free on one of their games that directly competes with their own product, history suggests that it won't end well for SE. Don't buy the new version of Minecraft, download the snapshot that works with seus instead...
I'm just going to sit here and wait for the announcement that the SE mod has been cancelled. What the public reason is will be the interesting part

There's more to that mod than path tracing. If it gets cancelled it will be the developer's decision. The old Java version of Minecraft still has a huge playerbase that's independent of the DX12 version.

I'd guess that the modder will lose a lot of Patreon money over this, but that's it. MS need to look like the "good guys" moving into next-gen, a cease and desist will ruin that.

 

[demonking]

There's more to that mod than path tracing. If it gets cancelled it will be the developer's decision. The old Java version of Minecraft still has a huge playerbase that's independent of the DX12 version.

I'd guess that the modder will lose a lot of Patreon money over this, but that's it. MS need to look like the "good guys" moving into next-gen, a cease and desist will ruin that.

I give up.
You can drink as much free water as you like once you've paid to get in a club. Oh and it's the only one club, and there's no water anywhere else. All other options are still being developed and may or may not ever exist. But the water is free still..... Oh and the guy that was giving away free water to all, he "decided" that he would suddenly stop after doing it after all these years after we spoke to him about how it might affect our business.
Wouldn't be the first injunction Microsoft have dished out, won't be the last.

 

[NeverBackDown]

Lots of kool-aid going round this thread tbh.

MS owns Minecraft and has been working on the graphics for at least a couple years now behind the scenes. This isn't anything new. It's a smart move for MS. Minecraft is incredibly popular. If they can get this all working for launch day of next-gen, it will be an incredible selling point for the new console and it won't exactly be the most difficult RT implementation, it would be cheaper as Minecraft itself isn't overly complex so you don't need state of the art RT implementations. Cheaper but still far better than vanilla? Easy money for MS..

The mod using Path Tracing isn't the same as Ray Tracing. I don't think the mod will be forced to be shut down by MS. MS won't care. It won't affect them in any way on PC. Console players are really the winners here.

 

[WYP]

I give up.
You can drink as much free water as you like once you've paid to get in a club. Oh and it's the only one club, and there's no water anywhere else. All other options are still being developed and may or may not ever exist. But the water is free still..... Oh and the guy that was giving away free water to all, he "decided" that he would suddenly stop after doing it after all these years after we spoke to him about how it might affect our business.
Wouldn't be the first injunction Microsoft have dished out, won't be the last.

Mate, all I'm saying is that if Microsoft did this they would be making an extremely stupid decision. Minecraft's PC community is built on modding.

If they wanted to stop him, they would have done it before now. The mod is about more than raytracing and if they wanted to stop him, they would have done it when they announced the "Super Duper Graphics pack" in 2017. His mod pack competed with that too didn't it?

Microsoft would get all the complaints in the world if that mod was suddenly taken down. I'd be amongst those complaining. What I'm saying is that you shouldn't be taking things as a given.

Also, the modder behind SE is free to quit developing the mod, that's his right. That said, his Patreon is giving out insane amounts of money, so why would he stop? If it all gets taken down, it will be because Microsoft are a bunch of complete idiots.

Hell, even Nvidia is supporting the mod. It has presets in Geforce Experience. Even Nvidia don't want this mod killed because it makes ray tracing look good.

This forum is getting filled with far too much negativity. Please wait for something bad to happen before complaining about it...