NVIDIA RTX

[WAS]

Arguably then you have a very specific/individual definition of "RTX":
https://developer.nvidia.com/rtx

- Oshyan

You seem to be completely ignoring the whole "real-time" and rendering aspects where they are rendering on the Turing GPU, in real-time, or performing real-time AI. Nothing you posted previous is RTX... It's using the OptiX API to make some very specific calls, as needed. There is no actual RTX employed beyond a brand name GPU name. No real Real-Time Raytracing or AI computation, etc, outputted via Hardware.

Effectively Cycles and Vray are just using it as a calculator, none of it real-time RTX.

[Oshyan]

Did you look at the page I linked? Nvidia themselves define"RTX" as a whole platform which even includes AI. The specific component you're talking about is of course ray tracing, but even Nvidia don't differentiate between realtime and non-realtime uses: 

Ray Tracing (OptiX, Microsoft DXR, Vulkan)
From: https://developer.nvidia.com/rtx

- Oshyan

[WAS]

Did you look at the page I linked? Nvidia themselves define"RTX" as a whole platform which even includes AI. The specific component you're talking about is of course ray tracing, but even Nvidia don't differentiate between realtime and non-realtime uses:

Ray Tracing (OptiX, Microsoft DXR, Vulkan)
From: https://developer.nvidia.com/rtx

- Oshyan

I don't think you're understanding the pages technicalities. "The platform" specifies use of "real time" denotation to those features, on Turing GPUs (output). "real time ray tracing"

There is NO rendering happening with the RTX platform. The OptiX API is used for calculations. The whole inherent application of the technology is real time steaming on turing GPUs. AI for example, like deep neural networks, are suppose to be real time.

Again The RT in RTX stands for "Real Time". The X for Ray Tracing (it's main rendering goal). Actually I guess it's "Ray Tracing" (The RT), X isn't specified. I guess Technology similar to GTX.

Additionally, RTX Platform, refers to the GPU. RTX itself is OptiX, Microsoft DXR, Vulkan. NGX already existed, same for PhyX, etc. Those were already part of GPUs (like GTX cards [the GTX platform]) and not "RTX"

[Tangled-Universe]

I'm not sure if I should chime into this discussion after being called "ignorant of TG" by you before little time ago in another topic, but I feel I need to back Oshyan in saying that VRay utilizes RTX now and what he means by saying that.
It simply means that VRay utilized GPU capabilities before, but was not utilizing the new tensor cores which made it into the mainstream market and is what actually defines the RTX product line.
No tensor cores is GTX and with tensor cores is RTX.
So VRay utilizes the RTX Tensor cores now and they actual have all sorts of benefits in relation to the type of calculations useful in raytracing scenarios, but also AI.
It's interesting cherrypicking and contradicting that you refer to RTX as also being an AI platform *because* of these tensor cores, but dismiss its usefulness for ray tracing and such and call it a "feature" when in ray tracing context.

From there the discussion became a language and blaming the ignorant one type of discussion I just referred to... AGAIN.

I don't know what happened in your offline life recently, but I think not many here enjoy the way you treat (other) people here when they oppose or even mildly question the tiniest bit of your assumptions/opinion/logic.

[WAS]

I'm not sure if I should chime into this discussion after being called "ignorant of TG" by you before little time ago in another topic, but I feel I need to back Oshyan in saying that VRay utilizes RTX now and what he means by saying that.
It simply means that VRay utilized GPU capabilities before, but was not utilizing the new tensor cores which made it into the mainstream market and is what actually defines the RTX product line.
No tensor cores is GTX and with tensor cores is RTX.
So VRay utilizes the RTX Tensor cores now and they actual have all sorts of benefits in relation to the type of calculations useful in raytracing scenarios, but also AI.
It's interesting cherrypicking and contradicting that you refer to RTX as also being an AI platform *because* of these tensor cores, but dismiss its usefulness for ray tracing and such and call it a "feature" when in ray tracing context.

From there the discussion became a language and blaming the ignorant one type of discussion I just referred to... AGAIN.

I don't know what happened in your offline life recently, but I think not many here enjoy the way you treat (other) people here when they oppose or even mildly question the tiniest bit of your assumptions/opinion/logic.

Well, you're wrong, though. Because they are using the OpitX API to run calculations on RT Cores. They aren't using Tensor Cores. As they specifically state, this is for "RTX Class" GPUs. Not Volta GPUs...  Tesla Volta GPUs have Tensor Cores... Not sure where you're getting your information from. Both Vray and Cycles are using the OptiX API for RT core calculation, two little functions to run structure and intersection calculations that RTX can use in real-time, just much higher fidelity settings in non-real time. However, again, as even NVIDIA specifies, RTX is real-time. The "RTX Platform" are "RTX GPUs" (which aren't Volta GPUs; AKA the Volta Platform...)...

You'll see in the future here, neither Vray, or Cycles being used in RTX demonstrations. Because it's not RTX. They're just mining a tiny bit of data that RT cores can run faster on the "RTX Platform" via the OptiX API. Nothing streaming on the GPU and outputting on the GPU.

In conclusion, cycles is transparent in its use, and Vray calls RTX "support". In general, just using any API for some features most certainly doesn't make your engine/system/website/whatever "It" lol. I'd say the API would have to be handling it all, and output.

[Tamerlin]

I edited my post to make that clear. RTX is Real-Time Raytracing. The API is using the GPU to render. What's being done here is using the API to calculate for specific end goal. Which itself isn't RTX.

This is just using OptiX API and doing some speedy calcs for their cycles/Vray to accelerate rendering.

RTX = Ray Tracing eXtentions. It's not limited to realtime, or to gaming. Optix is using the hardware to enhance ray tracing performance. 

There's a reason that even though AMD implemented ray tracing using its general purpose compute, it's developing hardware ray tracing for itself as well as for the next generation PlayStation and XBox. And the speedup from using Optix in Cycles has been more than double. 

nVidia isn't exactly new to 3D rendering; it's been using general purpose compute to accelerate ray tracing for years with IRay, and the RTX cores grew out of that.

[Tamerlin]

Well, you're wrong, though. Because they are using the OpitX API to run calculations on RT Cores. They aren't using Tensor Cores. As they specifically state, this is for "RTX Class" GPUs. Not Volta GPUs... 
Tesla Volta GPUs have Tensor Cores... Not sure where you're getting your information from. Both Vray and Cycles are using the OptiX API for RT core calculation, two little functions to run structure and intersection calculations that RTX can use in real-time, just much higher fidelity settings in non-real time. However, again, as even NVIDIA specifies, RTX is real-time. The "RTX Platform" are "RTX GPUs" (which aren't Volta GPUs; AKA the Volta Platform...)...

You'll see in the future here, neither Vray, or Cycles being used in RTX demonstrations. Because it's not RTX. They're just mining a tiny bit of data that RT cores can run faster on the "RTX Platform" via the OptiX API. Nothing streaming on the GPU and outputting on the GPU.

In conclusion, cycles is transparent in its use, and Vray calls RTX "support". In general, just using any API for some features most certainly doesn't make your engine/system/website/whatever "It" lol. I'd say the API would have to be handling it all, and output.

Not only are you wrong, but you're also contradicting yourself. The RTX cores are what Optix uses to speed up its ray tracing and BVH traversal operations, because the hardware is customized for them, rather than being repurposed general purpose computing hardware like AMD is using to tide itself over until it has ray tracing hardware.

Blender makes the tensor cores available via an optional denoise shader node, because it's not strictly necessary; instead it's there so that the artist using the renderer can use the denoiser to reduce the number of rays required to achieve a quality render. In other words, it's there as a time saving option. 

Your definition of what qualifies as taking advantage of RTX cores is nonsensical, and obviously exists just to justify your claim that hardware ray tracing extensions can only be used in real time applications, no matter how false.

The way Optix is designed is basically to enable renderer developers to offload the ray tracing calculations to dedicated hardware without having to specifically code to that hardware. The point of that is so that nVidia's developers take care of the under the hood work of identifying how many GPUs with RTX hardware are available and how many RTX cores each has, so that a renderer like Cycles, Vray (or KeyShot, etc) can scale up with more RTX GPUs without the renderer's developers having to handle that part on their own. Hence when nVidia launches Ampere, the same renderers will be able to transparently get a speed boost without having to change their own code.

[WAS]

I edited my post to make that clear. RTX is Real-Time Raytracing. The API is using the GPU to render. What's being done here is using the API to calculate for specific end goal. Which itself isn't RTX.

This is just using OptiX API and doing some speedy calcs for their cycles/Vray to accelerate rendering.

RTX = Ray Tracing eXtentions. It's not limited to realtime, or to gaming. Optix is using the hardware to enhance ray tracing performance.

There's a reason that even though AMD implemented ray tracing using its general purpose compute, it's developing hardware ray tracing for itself as well as for the next generation PlayStation and XBox. And the speedup from using Optix in Cycles has been more than double.

nVidia isn't exactly new to 3D rendering; it's been using general purpose compute to accelerate ray tracing for years with IRay, and the RTX cores grew out of that.

OpiX is the API to use the platform (the GPU, like accessing RT Cores; otherwise you're using just going to be using it like any other legaxy GPU with another API). It's not accelerating anything... and the X most certainly doesn't mean "extensions" as there are no "extensions". It's a new platform and not an extension of one.

You're shooting yourself in the foot out the gate bud, and does nothing for your credence.

You should at least try to research what you talk about. Your shenanigans about OptiX are hilarious.

[Tamerlin]

OpiX is the API to use the platform (the GPU, like accessing RT Cores; otherwise you're using just going to be using it like any other legaxy GPU with another API). It's not accelerating anything... and the X most certainly doesn't mean "extensions" as there are no "extensions". It's a new platform and not an extension of one.

You're shooting yourself in the foot out the gate bud, and does nothing for your credence.

You should at least try to research what you talk about. Your shenanigans about OptiX are hilarious.

I did the research, and you're wrong. Anyone with a few minutes can see that just by looking at the overview in the nVidia developer documentation; it doesn't even require any programming knowledge to recognize this. 

Your flat earther style debating tactics won't get you anywhere except with people just as ignorant as you.

[WAS]

OpiX is the API to use the platform (the GPU, like accessing RT Cores; otherwise you're using just going to be using it like any other legaxy GPU with another API). It's not accelerating anything... and the X most certainly doesn't mean "extensions" as there are no "extensions". It's a new platform and not an extension of one.

You're shooting yourself in the foot out the gate bud, and does nothing for your credence.

You should at least try to research what you talk about. Your shenanigans about OptiX are hilarious.

I did the research, and you're wrong. Anyone with a few minutes can see that just by looking at the overview in the nVidia developer documentation; it doesn't even require any programming knowledge to recognize this.

Your flat earther style debating tactics won't get you anywhere except with people just as ignorant as you.

Their own documentation is so clear they are careful with denotations about real time. Sorry you can't see this. Any modern GPU can do ray tracing, RTX has dedicated hardware for streaming this in real time. That's why Cycles is very clearly transparent on its use of RTX as a means to accelerate intersections and structure, because these things on CPU or GPU through 3rd party software would be slower. This is where RTX is only accelerating a simple function of Cycles, their own renderer. It's not actual RTX. The fact you can't comprehend this, and how APIs being used third party act within your software. So maybe you should be a developer before making a comment. 😂🤣


Also weird you mention new Xbox and PlayStation when Xbox is going to be using AMD, and PlayStation may likely do the same. Price vs performance and all.

If they were creating whole new renderers based on OptiX and RTX platform, it would be RTX. But no, it's simply aided, in a veeeerry small aspect towards the goal of the render.

Again, by inherent definition of it's use with Cycles, etc, it's being used as a calculator. Raw numbers. Takes awhile to process intersection points and structure. So speeding that up is fantastic... But no, the GPU isn't rendering anything with RT cores, or even on main GPU cores where it's using legacy methods for GPU render acceleration.

[WAS]

A great example of this is Terragen using RTX cards and their RT cores for intersection calculation, etc, it will still be Matt's renderer doing the work, thus it's not RTX. The OptiX API is being used to calculate, not render anything. Those raw calculations would than be used by Terragen's renderer, which is not RTX... In the immediate past, GPUs were already doing this. Now they're just making use of hardware specific tasks on the GPU where before it was just software-based, calculated on the GPU.

So Terragen's Renderer, it's own thing, is aided by RTX platforms, but is not RTX, and even would obviosuly have fall-backs for no RTX cards (like Cycles).