Nvidia DX12 tech demo Mech Ti

[nvgpu]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Fi1QHhdqV4

Seek to 21:16.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Thats a well explaining video of many features.

Easier to watch from here:
http://techreport.com/news/28434/nvidia-mech-ti-demo-shows-dx12-smoke-shadows

 

[Enigmoid]

Unimpressive.

 

[RussianSensation]

Unimpressive.

Unreal Engine 4 demo had way better graphics 3 years ago. Then 2 years ago they stepped it up even more, delivering graphics that no PC game today even comes close to, not even remotely close. Then this year we got a glimpse of truly next gen graphics - thinking PS5/XB2 graphics in 2019-2020 may get there.

vs.

NV shows 1 mech shooting rockets with smoke where they had to dissect the effects in slow motion for the viewer to even notice some of them.

 

[Alessio1989]

I think it could be more interesting see how it is implemented...

 

[soccerballtux]

Unreal Engine 4 demo had way better graphics 3 years ago. Then 2 years ago they stepped it up even more, delivering graphics that no PC game today even comes close to, not even remotely close. Then this year we got a glimpse of truly next gen graphics - thinking PS5/XB2 graphics in 2019-2020 may get there.

vs.

NV shows 1 mech shooting rockets with smoke where they had to dissect the effects in slow motion for the viewer to even notice some of them.

+1 time to GO OUT SIDE if you want good graphics lol. no joke, crysis was when I realized how awesome a nicely maintained park was

 

[hawtdawg]

Unreal Engine 4 demo had way better graphics 3 years ago. Then 2 years ago they stepped it up even more, delivering graphics that no PC game today even comes close to, not even remotely close. Then this year we got a glimpse of truly next gen graphics - thinking PS5/XB2 graphics in 2019-2020 may get there.

vs.

NV shows 1 mech shooting rockets with smoke where they had to dissect the effects in slow motion for the viewer to even notice some of them.

I personally find the infiltrator demo to be just as impressive as the kite one. That was running on a single 680 too.

 

[DarkKnightDude]

We've gotten to the point where differences has to be pointed out.

 

[SirPauly]

I took the demo as an awareness demo for the potential of the conservative raster and volume tiled texture abilities.

 

[Enigmoid]

I personally find the infiltrator demo to be just as impressive as the kite one. That was running on a single 680 too.

Kite was lacking in that the character model and animation was quite sub par. Environment and lighting/shadows was awesome and looked at some points nearly lifelike. Then you throw in this low res crappy character model (clearly a different art direction - It would have worked in perhaps a differently styled demo but the two art styles clash IMO).

I feel the infiltrator was a better demo, especially considering it ran on 1/6 the vram and < half the gpu power. Both demo's have weak points (infiltrator has weak textures and could use more detail - characters and objects have the bland 'shiny' look) but both are worlds ahead of this feature demo.

 

[tential]

We've gotten to the point where differences has to be pointed out.

We definitely have not...

 

[ThatBuzzkiller]

This is not supposed to be a "best graphics" technical showcase ...

This is supposed to show "applications of conservative rasterization and volume tiled resources" for programmers ...

Conservative rasterization is good for efficient per-pixel accurate shadow mapping as shown in the video but it's also good for things such as voxelization and occlusion culling too ...

Volume tiled resources is useful for doing sparse representations of fluids seen in the video and it's also useful for lowering memory consumption when rendering with voxels ...

 

[at80eighty]

right, i didnt think it was meant to be a best graphics demo either.
it's exciting to see the optimizations on screen. between this and the G/freesync tech, the overall experience for a gamer should see the next big jump from dx9

besides, all the spare resources can be used for the visual goodies we immediately notice, right? up to the devs at the end of the day though.

 

[Azix]

Ultimately it's about graphics. Doing best graphics faster. If they can't show the graphical benefit, what's the point? Maybe as a demo for devs it works

 

[ThatBuzzkiller]

Ultimately it's about graphics. Doing best graphics faster. If they can't show the graphical benefit, what's the point? Maybe as a demo for devs it works

They do show graphical benefits, the demo just simply isn't about best graphics ...

When was it the last time you saw alias-free shadows that didn't have light bleeding ?

Well now with conservative rasterization you can guarantee that ANY primitives that fully and partially cover a pixel will be stored in the primitive buffer which will be useful for rendering high quality shadows as seen in the demo ...

We certainly don't see interactive fluid simulation very often in games but with volume tiled resources it can be done more efficiently which is always a plus ...

 

[Azix]

They do show graphical benefits, the demo just simply isn't about best graphics ...

When was it the last time you saw alias-free shadows that didn't have light bleeding ?

Well now with conservative rasterization you can guarantee that ANY primitives that fully and partially cover a pixel will be stored in the primitive buffer which will be useful for rendering high quality shadows as seen in the demo ...

We certainly don't see interactive fluid simulation very often in games but with volume tiled resources it can be done more efficiently which is always a plus ...

I see your point. its best with the youtube explanation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Fi1QHhdqV4

We'll have to see about the efficient part. Have my doubts. The ray tracing in particular sounds like it'll take its toll in a more complex scene. You can see the framerate in the video is not that great and its a relatively simple scene. For doing shadows that might be overkill.

Edit: they really could have done a better demo. Why shadows? What they showed is way too much work for shadows that just kinda look better than soft shadows. This information shows it's much more useful https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dn914594%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

"Conservative rasterization is useful in a number of situations, including for certainty in collision detection, occlusion culling, and visibility detection"

Haven't seen the rest of that pcper vid though. Just the mech explanation. Maybe they covered the rest

 

[at80eighty]

re: Why shadows?

because i remember using settings to go from standard sharp shadows to penumbra shadows; and they took a heavy hit on performance. it might seem like a non-issue to you, but others might enjoy the difference.

If we can achieve this without taxing existing resources too much, means you can redirect that for other eye candy, no? it is potential being showcased, not necessarily a full scale end product, as in the video they said the spec will only be clear once Win10 is out

 

[gorobei]

there is very little need to raytrace shadows, the only reason the shadowmapped versions looked so bad is because they were so low resolution(ie low quality setting most likely). unless you are going to use RT for area lights(at a massive hit to performance) there is no reason for RT on a simple spotlight hard edged shadow.

RT only really comes in to its own when refraction and multiple reflections are involved.

 

[ThatBuzzkiller]

I see your point. its best with the youtube explanation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Fi1QHhdqV4

We'll have to see about the efficient part. Have my doubts. The ray tracing in particular sounds like it'll take its toll in a more complex scene. You can see the framerate in the video is not that great and its a relatively simple scene. For doing shadows that might be overkill.

Edit: they really could have done a better demo. Why shadows? What they showed is way too much work for shadows that just kinda look better than soft shadows. This information shows it's much more useful https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dn914594(v=vs.85).aspx

"Conservative rasterization is useful in a number of situations, including for certainty in collision detection, occlusion culling, and visibility detection"

Haven't seen the rest of that pcper vid though. Just the mech explanation. Maybe they covered the rest

It's not actually doing the ray tracing, the demo is just trying to build a data structure around the coverage tests which can be used for shadow map rendering. The noticeable framerate drops are due to VTR been disabled since the computational complexity is increased because of the unfiltered volumes ...

Could they have done a better demo of conservative rasterization ?

I thought that shadow rendering was a great use case for it and if they did other things like binning in general or other very technical demos it would've most likely ended up been very boring on the gamer's side of the view plus soft shadow approximations in games these days look very crap to me ...

 

[ThatBuzzkiller]

there is very little need to raytrace shadows, the only reason the shadowmapped versions looked so bad is because they were so low resolution(ie low quality setting most likely). unless you are going to use RT for area lights(at a massive hit to performance) there is no reason for RT on a simple spotlight hard edged shadow.

RT only really comes in to its own when refraction and multiple reflections are involved.

There's tons of reason's to get ray traced quality shadows because current solutions aren't very elegant or are very expensive ...

Even with high resolution shadow maps, aliasing can still occur to a noticeable degree but there's also caveats such as high memory consumption as well as expensive filtering ...

Reflections and refraction aren't the only reasons to consider recursive ray tracing ...

It handles transparency very nicely, indirect shadowing, and simpler visibility determination ...

 

[SirPauly]

May expect these abilities in a Gameworks' library/middleware one may imagine.

 

[railven]

May expect these abilities in a Gameworks' library/middleware one may imagine.

And with this statement, Maxwell is now obsolete.

Maybe I should wait for Pascal?

 

[Gikaseixas]

This is not supposed to be a "best graphics" technical showcase ...

This is supposed to show "applications of conservative rasterization and volume tiled resources" for programmers ...

Agree
i liked what i saw

 

[Pottuvoi]

Conservative rasterization is good for efficient per-pixel accurate shadow mapping as shown in the video but it's also good for things such as voxelization and occlusion culling too ...

Should be great for things like rendering hair with proper AA. (needs OIT as well.)