The true Nvidia RTX legacy is not ray tracing, but DLSS
Redesigned graphics. This is how Nvidia launched its first RTX graphics card in 2018. In fact, the graphics card went on sale for the first time this week three years ago. A lot has happened during this period, but is the promise of the new era of Nvidia GPU still valid, and what has changed since then?
Three years is a long time for PC hardware, but somehow, the launch of the first RTX series of Nvidia graphics cards is still a recent phenomenon. However, the RTX 30 series has been with us for a whole year-usually mentally more real than any physical one. However, it was the first RTX 20 series that allowed us to see the prospect of a new era of PC gaming GPUs.
And that promise? All in all, it all seems to be related to ray tracing, at least when it was first introduced to our technical journalists working in an old brewery in Cologne, Germany, this was the most tangible piece of the puzzle. Ray tracing is one of the first things shown to separate the Turing architecture from the old Pascal design.
Since then, the small green “RTX On” logo has been used in screenshots as a symbol of graphic greatness. But, almost buried in the same presentation, after highlighting the unproven potential of grids and variable rate shading, we saw the first faltering steps of DLSS. Advanced RTX graphics chips are a real gift for PC gamers.
Three years have passed, and it is safe to say that ray tracing has not disappeared. In fact, it is everywhere, in almost every gaming platform, except for some handheld devices. Despite the negative condemnation of the computationally expensive nature of real-time ray tracing, Nelson has been fully adopted.
It is not necessarily as transformative as it first appeared. I mean, this is just simulated lighting after all. It is not always used to achieve maximum effect.
However, when it was launched more than a year later, Sony and Microsoft’s next-generation game consoles both decided Have Use ray tracing as an element on their respective spec sheets. And its AMD hardware partners will definitely fail. Therefore, AMD’s RDNA 2 GPU architecture-the graphics core of the latest generation of consoles-now has its own ray tracing implementation, which supports the same Microsoft DirectX ray tracing API as Nvidia’s RT technology acceleration.
Intel also started as the third method of PC graphics, supporting hardware ray tracing through the upcoming Arc-based Alchemist GPU.
However, Microsoft has still insisted that “ray tracing” is a word for three years. Ga.
But the fact remains that although the latest Nvidia RTX 30 series cards have relieved a lot of the silicon burden of ray tracing, it still has high computational requirements, and you will See the performance loss of turning on realistic lighting effects in the game. This is especially true in the case of AMD, and so is the technical implementation of the console.
DLSS is almost the opposite of real-time ray tracing
I still think that ray tracing has only just begun, and it will eventually become a ubiquitous part of the rich feature set of the game, so much so that the idea of listing the game as “with ray tracing capabilities” will become as meaningless as the list it needs. 3D acceleration.
However, this generation of game consoles, although their feature list says otherwise, will never make sense to promote this cause. In fact, developers are actively disabling it from their PS5 or Xbox Series X/S versions to support higher frame rates, Far Cry 6 is unlikely to be the last.
But DLSS is almost the opposite of real-time ray tracing.Ray tracing is about using computationally intensive algorithms on a specific piece of silicon to enhance the visual reality of the scene, while deep learning supersampling is purely about using other pieces of silicon to improve performance while making the scene look like almost As good as normal.
You don’t need a genius to understand why a feature that provides higher gaming performance for almost free is becoming more popular among gamers than features that can lower the frame rate to replace the lighting that we have pre-baked and faked.
Although it does require DLSS 2.0 to really do this, it provides a higher frame rate without the blurry visual effects that often occur in the initial implementation.
AMD’s follow-up in ray tracing may not have the impact Sony or Microsoft might have hoped, but if console developers start using it more frequently, it creates FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) as its own pseudo-DLSS really Can bring benefits. FSR is not exactly the same as DLSS, but it does follow a similar pattern; take a lower resolution input, enlarge it to a higher resolution, and enhance the output to make it look better than traditional methods allow .
What followed was a high frame rate prank.
Intel has followed suit again. Its Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) function is provided with the new Alchemist graphics card, and actually provides two methods. One is unknowable and looks a lot like AMD’s FSR, and the other is rooted in the Arc GPU chip itself and has striking similarities with DLSS.
Although AMD and Intel may want to make other suggestions, I can hardly believe that FSR or XeSS will appear without DLSS.
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Since the launch of the first RTX card, we cannot fail to mention the mammoth in the room where the GPU is in short supply. Although ray tracing does provide some lovely visual effects, it is not necessary in any sense. When new high-end GPUs are more expensive and harder to obtain than ever before, a technology that requires you to sacrifice the limited computing power of the card in the name of more accurate lighting is always a struggle.
However, a feature that has adopted products such as RTX 2060 many years ago and improved its healthy performance to the point where it can make modern games truly playable must feel like a winner.
However, DLSS is clearly not perfect. It must be built into the game by the developers themselves, and although this becomes easier with subsequent iterations, it is not a feature that you can enable in any game and get a free fps boost.
But there is no doubt that the legacy of the Nvidia RTX era ultimately has the most direct impact on PC gamers. This is true whether they use DLSS, FSR, or eventually use the new Alchemist GPU to use XeSS.