It'll be interesting to see where the RT performance is on the 50 series. 4090 still wasn't 'there' for me.
Sadly, the 5090, 6090, 7090 and 8090 won't be enough for "pure" RT or PT without heavy ML/AI assistance. We are still generations away from having hardware powerful enough to do it without any help. That's why nVidia (and others) are going balls to the wall with AI/neural/ML technologies. There seems to be an awful lot of hate aimed at these new technologies, though! Claims that developers should optimise their games better, or that these technologies and FG (frame generation) etc. are just "fake" frames. No amount of optimisation is going to make
realtime RT a reality without AI help!
The new technologies are enablers that are
essential in modern rendering pipelines. We are getting to a point where rasterisation is starting to rapidly falloff in terms of gains from one generation to the next. Even a modest GPU can power through ridiculous amounts of shaded (non-RT) geometry and polygon counts are pretty much a thing of the past. It's a bit different to the early days on PlayStation and Nintendo64 where you were pushing things if you had 2000 polygons across an entire level and wanted to hit 24 or 30fps! 🤣 Rasterisation is also a real pain in the ass given the complexity of the shaders needed to realise the high-fidelity visuals we expect. It is all smoke and mirrors and the hoops and hacks needed to get shadows, (many) multiple light sources, AO, reflections, and so forth using pure rasterisation is painful. However, developers have become very good at overcoming many issues over the last 30 years. The move away from rasterisation was always going to happen, but the problem lies in the size of the step needed to take it to that next level. It's a big one. To bridge that gap and to ensure we can attain a good level of visual fidelity as we move towards RT, well, that's where the AI/neural/ML tech comes in. RT does away with a lot of problems and restrictions imposed by the rasterisation render pipeline, but it introduces other problems that are very different to deal with, and require some rather novel (and new) techniques to overcome. It's a very exciting time if you're into the technology rather than just a pure gamer.
I'm rambling. 🤣
