Gadgetory

welcome back to the Hadron box news corner no celebrations this week but there has been a bunch of news to come out of both the Game Developers Conference and envious GTC including news that Nvidia is bringing ray-tracing to Pascal cards a new Intel graphics control panel more epic games exclusives and a few of interesting topics so let's get into it we'll start with the story of Nvidia bringing DirectX ray-tracing to Pascal because this is an interesting one that's been generating a bit of discussion in terms of what is happening this is a fairly straightforward story if you have either a GeForce 10 or GeForce 16 series GPU in April you'll be able to download a driver that we let you run DXR effects on your gtx card so talking about dicks are reflections in battlefield 5 ray-traced global illumination in Metro Exodus and the new DX our shadow implementation in shadow of the Tomb Raider plus any future DXR games you won't be able to run rate racing on every Pascal card Nvidia is restricting the feature to owners of the gtx 1066 gigabyte and up plus both current GTX cheering models the GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Ti as well as the Volta based Titan v4 the few people on one of those however you won't be feature restricted in video slides says these cards will only be good for basic arty effects but I think this is more referring to performance as all of the supported cards will be able to at least enable all of the various DXR effects of course the big question here is performance it's hard to say exactly how fast Pascal GPUs will be at rate racing but the expectation is that the cards will be very slow nvidia officially says there are TX GPUs are two to three times faster rate racing but this gap could widen depending on the rate racing workload especially in games that have intensive DXi implementations NVIDIA slides also suggests that there will be a performance difference between Pascal and GTX tearing cards Pascal cards can only run rate racing on the standard FP 32 CUDA cores whereas cheering can take advantage of concurrent in 32 processing to speed up the process somewhat gtx turing will we'll be anywhere near as fast as a GPU that has proper RT cores but it should be a step above Pascal consume that when you enable ray tracing on an art xgp you in the games released so far you typically get a twenty-five to fifty percent drop in framerate Pascal GPUs will likely be completely useless for ray tracing I think we'll see Pascal cards running at one third or maybe even one quarter of the framerate with ray tracing enabled even on something as powerful as a Titan XP with even Nvidia expecting Pascal to struggle with heavy rate tracing effects this begs the question of why NVIDIA would enable this functionality one reason is for developers not all game devs have access to RTX hardware but still might want to work on ray tracing effects for gamers that do a developer could easily test out these effects at low frame rates without spending big on our TX which could help with the adoption of our TX tech the other angle is potentially about marketing Nvidia enabling ray tracing your Pascal could be an incentive to get users to upgrade to a new Turing our TX GPU if they see the effect running extremely poor you on that Pascal card with an RT X graphics card a nice easy solution to that performance problem Nvidia might get a few extra sales it will also help demonstrate to the doubters that yes arti cause actually are necessary to run right tracing in the games we have at the moment I have seen a few comments saying that with ray tracing coming to Pascal this max our TX cards unnecessary but I really don't think this is the case if you're interested in ray tracing our DX card should still be orders of magnitude faster and we'll just have to wait and see how that goes when the driver becomes available in April we thought that said Crytek has demonstrated that you don't need an RT X GPU to run their latest implementation of real time ray tracing in their Newton nyan nyan demo the demo shows how real time mesh ray-traced reflections and refractions can deliver highly realistic visuals for games this effect is part of a new total illumination engine that's set to come in CryEngine 5.5 later this year this demo has certainly caused a lot of discussion and undoubtedly is very impressive especially as it runs at a 4k resolution at 30fps on a mere value 56 not one of invidious r-tx cards with hardware ray tracing acceleration some people have been jumping up and suggesting this makes in videos RTX cards completely unnecessary but really I don't think that's the case even though I've personally been a bit of a critic of r-tx since its launch there's many things to consider here firstly ray-tracing has always been possible on other GPUs it's not magically restricted to RTX GPUs as nvidia has shown by opening it up to pascal cards the question has always been about performance and it seems Crytek have uncovered a technique to lower the computational requirements of real time ray tracing enough so that runs on a GPU like Vega 56 secondly this demo is showing off just real time ray-traced reflections there's no information to suggest this technique can accelerate other ray-traced effects like global illumination or shadows cryogens total illumination uses s bo g for global illumination rather than traditional ray tracing for example SVG is a high quality effect but it's not the same as ray-traced global illumination in Metro Exodus this is also just a tech demo there have been many times we've seen extremely impressive demos running well on modest GPUs only to spend years waiting for that Tecna materialize all who discovered that in real world game implementations it's not quite as impressive and doesn't run as well hopefully this tech will smoothly transition into actual games but loads certainly who wouldn't guarantee it and finally cards with dedicated ray tracing hardware will always have an advantage when it comes to accelerating ray tracing if this demo can be run at 4k 30fps on value 56 it should run significantly faster on a card like an RT X 2070 with Nvidia saying they fully expect to accelerate this sort of technology this technique will help bring ray tracing to many more mainstream game this but it sounds like there will still be a significant advantage to dedicated arty cards at the high end we'll just have to see how this one plays out intel has overhauled their graphics control panel through a new version they're calling the graphics command center all of you guys probably haven't spent too much time in the Intel graphics control panel if you've got a discrete AMD or nvidia GPU in your system but anyone that has used the old version will tell you that it was a bit lackluster to say the least this new graphics command center has a modern design that's more in line with AMD's Radeon settings in terms of style more explanations as to what items do and in general is just a better design that's built around being user-friendly intel has also begun the process of offering one-click game optimization another feature that is found in control panels from other GPU vendors perhaps the biggest change is how you get the graphics command center rather than being bundled with the driver download instead the utility is distributed through the Microsoft on Windows 10 as a UWP app this allows you to receive automatic updates and it will receive these updates separate to regular driver updates which could come in handy as features get rolled out at different times to drive optimizations the new control utility works with Intel 6th gen skylax CPUs and newer though this really is just to set the foundation for intel's upcoming discrete GPUs that are set for launch in the coming years after all if Intel wants to compete with the big boys in the GPU market it will need a competitive platform and that includes a decent driver utility and associated software Microsoft has standardized variable rate shading into the DirectX 12 API this feature first made a major appearance as part of invidious truing architecture and it seems like a really neat way to improve performance in games rather than shading the entire frame at a constant rate variable rate shading allows the GPU to focus more GPU resources on shading important areas of the scene with the greatest level of detail while using lower shading rates for less important areas an example of again that uses variable rate shading today is Wolfenstein 2 Microsoft is dividing hardware support for variable rate shading into two tiers tier one which encompasses most dx12 capable GPUs and tier two which is for GPUs that fully support variable rate shading so tier two GPUs right now are essentially just chewing GPUs from Nvidia with Intel's general Evan GPU designed to also support the feature tier 1 GPUs can still use variable rate shady but it can only do so between separate draw calls whereas tier two GPUs can vary the shading rate within the frame the tier 1 technique does come at a small visual quality loss but improves performance by around 20% in one demonstration while the better tea to implementation sees no loss to visuals for a 14% increase to performance hopefully through integrating this technology into DirectX 12 it will encourage more developers to use it in their game because it seems like a really neat way to improve performance without affecting visuals too much much to the annoyance of all the epic game store haters out there a bunch of new games are coming exclusively to the epic games store over the next year or so headlining the offerings is obsidians upcoming the outer worlds which admittedly will also be on the Microsoft although it won't be on Steam another upcoming one year epic store exclusive is control from remedy which I believe is also an RT X title then on top of that Quantic Dream's are also bringing some of their previously PlayStation exclusive tiles to PC but as epic game store exclusives the games in question are heavy rain beyond two souls and Detroit become human pretty neither these games are headed to PC for the first time for that exclusivity deal it's probably going to annoy a lot of people Epic Games did say that eventually they will stop negotiating exclusives but for the time being that seems to be their clear plan to establish themselves in the market it'll be interesting to see if steam plants any responses to this onslaught of exclusives with epic also giving developers a better cut of the revenue so far they've just complained about it without making any real changes so we'll see if that changes anytime soon HP has new laptops that use AMD's rise in mobile 3000 series ap use in what is a shocking development one of the few companies to make rise in mobile laptops using the previous generation of products HP has launched a new envy x-360 15 that offers either the Rison 5 3500 U or the rise in 7 3702 in addition to standard ultra portable hardware the new Envy x-360 15 is also available in an Intel version with either the core i5 80 to 65 U or the core i7 85 65 u the Intel models are about $70 more expensive with the AMD model starting at $800 which keeps this laptop in that nice mid-range bracket I'm hoping your test sunrise in 3,000 laptops soon to see how the refreshed APU stack up with other mobile offerings that's it for this week's news corner as always you can subscribe to get this segment in your inbox every Friday consider supporting us on patreon to get access to our monthly live streams which are coming up soon and we'll catch you in the next one