1 hour ago, 2reds2whites said:

Ray tracing absolutely obliterates performance. It's the first thing that anyone would turn off the pick up more frames - it's so resource intensive. It'll cut your FPS in half basically.

The first generation of GPUs supporting a major new rendering feature will almost always have rather shaky support, much like the first DirectX 10 GPUs back in 2006 and in 2007. Turing is probably not going to age well in that regard, with several rumours suggesting that Ampere and RDNA 2 will feature much better ray-tracing performance. The actual gains remain to be seen, but we already know that they have made strides with the tensor cores in Ampere, which could further help with denoising and other tasks.

1 hour ago, 2reds2whites said:

It's also in my view fairly pointless in a flight simulation. The only place you'd possibly notice it is in the cockpit, but even then with good textures and standard lighting you'd do incredibly well to notice a worthwhile difference. Flight sims aren't really what ray tracing is designed for. 

Actually I think the cockpits will not benefit at all, as they seem to already have a good solution that reflects parts of the cockpit not shown in the screen, perhaps local planar reflections. But with hangars, water and wet tarmacs, the limits of screen-space reflections are very obvious. I recommend watching the leaked hangar video if you haven't already, ray-tracing will benefit those shiny floors immensely.

9 hours ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

The first generation of GPUs supporting a major new rendering feature will almost always have rather shaky support,

Although I agree that Turing GPUs have not had the greatest support for ray tracing, they aren't the first generation of Nvidia GPUs to utilize RT. Pascal GPUs also support RT. The difference is that Turing GPUs have separate processors designed just to handle RT and the performance is improved over Pascal GPUs.

7 hours ago, jabloomf1230 said:

Although I agree that Turing GPUs have not had the greatest support for ray tracing, they aren't the first generation of Nvidia GPUs to utilize RT. Pascal GPUs also support RT. The difference is that Turing GPUs have separate processors designed just to handle RT and the performance is improved over Pascal GPUs.

Actually Turing GPUs were the first to support RTX, support for Pascal and TU116 was added in a later driver update. Pascal was never designed to support RTX anyway, NVIDIA enabled support purely to highlight the strength of the dedicated RT cores, and to provide some sort of preview mode (albeit at a slideshow) to give Pascal owners an incentive to upgrade (because honestly, there aren't many). This is purely an example of brute-forcing a newer technology on shaders, and considering the unplayable results, I'd hardly call it support.

Of course this only concerns RTX, and does not mean that a good ray-tracing solution cannot be done on shaders. This summer we will see how the vendor-agnostic ray-tracing solution in Crysis Remastered holds up compared to the hardware solutions.

My comment re

On 6/12/2020 at 4:18 PM, ChaoticBeauty said:

The first generation of GPUs supporting a major new rendering feature will almost always have rather shaky support, much like the first DirectX 10 GPUs back in 2006 and in 2007. Turing is probably not going to age well in that regard, with several rumours suggesting that Ampere and RDNA 2 will feature much better ray-tracing performance. The actual gains remain to be seen, but we already know that they have made strides with the tensor cores in Ampere, which could further help with denoising and other tasks.

Actually I think the cockpits will not benefit at all, as they seem to already have a good solution that reflects parts of the cockpit not shown in the screen, perhaps local planar reflections. But with hangars, water and wet tarmacs, the limits of screen-space reflections are very obvious. I recommend watching the leaked hangar video if you haven't already, ray-tracing will benefit those shiny floors immensely.

My comment re: the cockpit is simply because as that's where you do most of you flying, that's where you're going to notice it most - especially with any depth of reflection/illumination in instruments/glass etc.

I am familiar with the hangar video, and having watched it again to review - in my opinion that video is actually a superb example of why ray tracing is absolutely not important. I really don't think it would benefit those shiny floors immensely, in fact I'd go as far to say I don't think you'd be able to tell them apart. Simple lighting, simple reflections, not a huge amount of opacity etc etc. 

In any case RTX, even on a modern title with superb textures and lighting simply doesn't make a noticeable amount of difference. It barely makes a difference in still shots, let alone in dynamic moving scenes. Combine this with the massively lower quality textures and lighting required to run a flight sim at anything other than a powerpoint slide show and you've lost any potential benefit - especially if you're not running on a superb quality screen (which 99% of users aren't).

 

Edited June 14, 20205 yr by 2reds2whites

1 hour ago, 2reds2whites said:

My comment re

My comment re: the cockpit is simply because as that's where you do most of you flying, that's where you're going to notice it most - especially with any depth of reflection/illumination in instruments/glass etc.

I am familiar with the hangar video, and having watched it again to review - in my opinion that video is actually a superb example of why ray tracing is absolutely not important. I really don't think it would benefit those shiny floors immensely, in fact I'd go as far to say I don't think you'd be able to tell them apart. Simple lighting, simple reflections, not a huge amount of opacity etc etc. 

In any case RTX, even on a modern title with superb textures and lighting simply doesn't make a noticeable amount of difference. It barely makes a difference in still shots, let alone in dynamic moving scenes. Combine this with the massively lower quality textures and lighting required to run a flight sim at anything other than a powerpoint slide show and you've lost any potential benefit - especially if you're not running on a superb quality screen (which 99% of users aren't).

 

Something like DLSS 2.0 would be far more beneficial for a flight sim than RTX. Imagine getting extra 5-10 fps for free. That's literally what dlss can do.

Edited June 14, 20205 yr by Kopteeni

2 hours ago, 2reds2whites said:

in fact I'd go as far to say I don't think you'd be able to tell them apart. Simple lighting, simple reflections, not a huge amount of opacity etc etc. 

To me the parts of the reflections hidden by other objects in the front stick out like a sore thumb in a scene that is otherwise rendered greatly, this was obvious even in that out-of-focus shot in the E3 trailer. But I guess eliminating this sort of artifact is not equally as important to everyone. Just because most games make the surfaces look extremely reflective to promote the ray-tracing effect does not mean it cannot be done in a more proper, subtle manner. Asobo have done a great job with the reflections in the cockpits and even with the screen-space reflections despite their limitations, so I'm sure their ray-tracing implementation is going to be great and provide a nice improvement.

2 hours ago, 2reds2whites said:

It barely makes a difference in still shots, let alone in dynamic moving scenes. Combine this with the massively lower quality textures and lighting required to run a flight sim at anything other than a powerpoint slide show and you've lost any potential benefit - especially if you're not running on a superb quality screen (which 99% of users aren't).

Because as I said, this is the first generation of a hardware ray-tracing implementation. If this would keep being such a resource hog over the years, the consoles wouldn't be supporting ray-tracing already. Both the quality of the effects and the performance will improve massively over the next few years, it just needs to get started. Then it would make little sense not to support it.

On 6/11/2020 at 5:01 PM, Greazer said:

Wrong the developer has a 10 year contract with MS.  Fool to expect 1 product in 10 years.  They would give up millions in sales.

I think, you are wrong. Did you hear about Windows 10? 🙂 Only one version, continuously updated. MSFS will be a similar type of product. Only one version with continuous update for 10 years. There will be a in game store for add-ons, which will be continuously generate some cash for MS.

Edited June 15, 20205 yr by ludekbrno