Real-time raytracing is finally getting outside of Nvidia's castle, and while that has been making big waves, something else is brewing. Microsoft and Sony have outrageous dreams for the performance of their next-gen consoles, but as their AMD hardware doesn't seem to have Nvidia's DLSS, I see disappointment in their future.
Unless, of course, there was another way for them to process a low resolution image so that it looks respectable and increases performance? Nvidia's got their Tensor Cores, but what if an algorithm could be designed to run on AMD's stream processors with the same purpose as DLSS? Of course, this algorithm would need to be quite resource efficient so that the performance gained by the low rendering resolution isn't completely erased. Facebook's not going to be left out of the action, they've got a little thing called Neural SuperSampling in the works, which on the surface seems to be an alternative to DLSS, likely targeting Oculus. It has impressive results even on the daunting task of 16x upscaling. There are few... problems... to put it lightly. Neural SuperSampling requires an Nvidia Titan V to push 40 fps at Oculus Quest resolution, 1440 x 1600 per eye. Seems like there's still a bit of work to do, especially since the Titan V has the same Tensor cores and CUDA support that is in short supply. Back in the console field, Microsoft announced DirectML, a low-level machine learning API, which is what they will be using to compete with DLSS. Sony? Well, their PS5 is packing around 10-15% less GPU power than the Xbox Series X, but the PS5 has more dynamic frequencies for their CPU and GPU, so the 'agility' Sony's been harping on might hold some water. The Xbox Series S will only have 4 TFLOPs of shader power to output ray-traced 1440p, but maybe with a bit of magic from Microsoft the eight Zen 2 cores can pick up some slack for the GPU via machine learning? Or will they use the already limited GPU FLOPS? We shall see, but look out for an update this winter on the performance of the Series S.
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DanielI'm a software engineer, volunteer IT support, amateur blogger, casual gamer, and tech enthusiast. I also love cars and the great outdoors. Archives
May 2021
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