[HN Gopher] Raytracing on Meteor Lake's iGPU
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Raytracing on Meteor Lake's iGPU
Author : rbanffy
Score : 123 points
Date : 2024-04-16 09:34 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (chipsandcheese.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (chipsandcheese.com)
| lynguist wrote:
| - How does this compare to the raytracing units in Apple A17
| Pro/M3 series? They also provide additional eye candy for a
| relatively large cost I would say.
|
| - Why are relatively expensive and large GPUs like in the RTX
| 3070 commonly called "midrange" online? The meaning of "midrange"
| seems to be creeping upward.
| josephg wrote:
| > Why are relatively expensive and large GPUs like in the RTX
| 3070 commonly called "midrange"
|
| Because the 30xx generation of graphics cards includes the
| 3050, 3060, 3070, 3080 and 3090. The 3070 is right in the
| middle of the range. Hence, midrange.
| henriquecm8 wrote:
| And also because it's a generation old. A card like 1080 was
| high-end during its time, and still works well, but it isn't
| high-end anymore.
|
| High-end gpus right now are the 4090 and 4080.
| jrk wrote:
| _Within_ the market of discrete gaming GPUs, there has been a
| hierarchy from "low-" to "high-end" for decades -- since
| before integrated GPUs even existed. For almost 20 years,
| things with 192- or 256-bit memory busses have been "mid-range"
| (vs. 384- or occasionally 512-bit memory busses at the high
| end, and smaller at the low-end). NVIDIA's "7"-tier GPUs have
| historically been the top of the mid-range in this world.
|
| Within this world "midrange" has been creeping upward not via
| big shifts in these fundamental characteristics but via:
|
| 1. Prices increasing steadily across the board, due to
| shortages and market power 2. Power budgets (and corresponding
| board/cooler sizes) increasing across the board
|
| The fundamentals (memory bus width -- still 256-bit; die size
| and performance relative to the top of the line) remain "mid-
| range" in exactly this same sense.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Expressed differently: the memory bus and chip size of a 4070
| is equivalent to a 3060, NOT a 3070.
|
| Nvidia has shifted its portfolio to the left, so they can
| charge more for a smaller chip. I suspect this is mostly due
| to increasing manufacturing costs, not (just) pricing power.
|
| This is also a reason why they are banking on AI upscalers to
| drive improvements in the future.
| xmodem wrote:
| Put another way, they took the gains in technology and
| process improvements and banked them for themselves,
| releasing a new generation that achieves similar
| performance (in some cases worse) to last gen, albeit at an
| improved power envelope, at the same price as last gen, but
| that they have higher margins on.
|
| The fact they can do this speaks to the lack of competition
| in the GPU market at the midrange and up. Compare this to
| the CPU market, where we now have Intel and AMD giving it
| everything to leapfrog each other every 6-9 months.
|
| I don't begrudge nvidia wanting to spend a generation
| consolidating their market position - that's their right -
| just as it's mine to look at a GPU that performs roughly
| the same as one I bought 7 years ago at almost the same
| price and say "no thanks".
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| > _releasing a new generation that achieves similar
| performance (in some cases worse) to last gen_
|
| Afaik the new gen still manages to improve over the old
| one, albeit modestly, do you know of an example where is
| that not the case?
| xmodem wrote:
| See this GN review:
| https://youtu.be/WS0sfOb_sVM?t=666&si=Xt62b_2BfQM-fnuH
|
| Specifically, at 4K, the 3060 outperforms the 4060 in
| Cyberpunk. Most of the charts do show a gain, but I'd
| describe it as marginal rather than modest.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Yeah the smaller memory interface hurts at 4k, that is
| unfortunately to be expected. Raw rasterizer/raytracer
| power shouldn't regress It think.
| dahart wrote:
| > a GPU that performs roughly the same as one I bought 7
| years ago
|
| Out of curiosity, which GPUs are you referring to, and
| how are you measuring or comparing perf?
| xmodem wrote:
| 1080Ti vs 4060Ti. Factoring in nvidia's price creep and a
| worse exchange rate, the 4060Ti costs today roughly what
| I paid for my 1080Ti 7 years ago.
|
| I'm comparing perf by looking at sites likes
| userbenchmark and reading/watching reviews of newer
| cards. I'm running into games I can't play at a level
| that I'm happy with, but based on reviews I don't think a
| 4060 or 4060Ti would make a meaningful difference.
| dahart wrote:
| That's a very tricky comparison at best, 3 gens up but 2
| product lines down. Comparing 1060 to 4060, or 1080 to
| 4080 might be more fair, even accounting for the skew in
| product lines.
|
| I'm not sure how you're doing the price comparison.
| 1080ti launched at $699 (with inflation that's $870
| today). The 4060ti launched at $399. Why does that seem
| the same to you?
|
| We're in a ray tracing thread and for ray tracing,
| there's no contest, the 4060ti wins there by a long way.
|
| UserBench says today the 4060ti is 17% faster for 20%
| lower price today, which is about 33% better perf per
| dollar... which interestingly tends to match their user
| score and sentiment.
|
| https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-RTX-4060-Ti-
| vs-...
|
| Also worth noting that some old games are bottlenecked on
| the software, not on the GPU, so it's not surprising to
| find a game that was around for the 1080 or before and
| doesn't get any better with more modern GPUs. Comparing
| the 1080 to the 4080, fp32 perf went up ~5x, and due to
| Amdahl's law, game benchmarks tend to see more like ~3x
| in overall system perf.
| neogodless wrote:
| Guessing this mostly comes down to exchange rate for you.
|
| As sibling pointed out, the $699 1080 Ti would be $870
| today in U.S. dollars.
|
| The 4060 Ti is also a remarkably bad product (for the
| price). If you swap in the 4070, you're looking at a
| launch MSRP of $599 which is less than the 1080 Ti even
| before inflation, and about 50% faster (and over 30%
| faster than the 4060 Ti.)
|
| Still not mind-blowing given the nearly 7 years between
| launches. There's a big delta going up to the 4080, both
| in price and performance. On UserBenchmark it's "135%"
| faster than a 1080 Ti, but at a mind-boggling $1200.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > The meaning of "midrange" seems to be creeping upward.
|
| That has been the case since before I touched my first
| computer. The first mainframe I touched had 16 megabytes of
| memory, and my first desktop had 48 kilobytes. Both were
| midrange in their respective categories (although the mainframe
| was in the top in memory, it was only average in processing
| power - the Apple II+ was better than a VIC-20 and performed a
| little better than a C-64, but was slower than most of the
| "professional" personal computers).
|
| My work laptop is midrange today and is many, many orders of
| magnitude more powerful than the supercomputers of that period.
|
| To put things into perspective, my phone runs Unix on a RISC
| CPU closely coupled with an array processor.
|
| That's Moore's law. It has slowed down a bit, in part from the
| difficulty of doubling density every couple years, but also
| from the fact even a 5th generation Intel i3 is vastly more
| capable than what the average user needs. In GPUs it's a little
| bit different, with games requiring increasingly ludicrous
| amounts of compute power, pushing the "good enough" range
| upwards every year.
|
| If you really like to play Pac-Man, an 8-bit CPU and a simple
| CRTC should suffice.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Do gamers actually want ray tracing? Or is this something like
| bloom/post effects/motion blur where is computationally expensive
| and gamers who care about their k/d shut it off anyway to see the
| other team easier?
| jackling wrote:
| For single player games it's probably still desireable.
| Cyberpunk 2077 with Ray Tracing looks amazing and enhances the
| gaming experience. Other than framerate issues, there's no
| drawback to having it on. For single player games, immersion is
| important.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| The better question is if developers want ray tracing; for
| them, it can represent a massive time and cost savings in terms
| of lighting games.
| itishappy wrote:
| Raytracing is currently not universally supported and slow,
| so it's used to supplement existing pipelines. It's more
| work, not less.
| corysama wrote:
| That's the story with all new tech. Difficult transition to
| a better tomorrow. Rinse and repeat.
| itishappy wrote:
| Totally agree! We're currently quite early in the
| transition, and the tech is not ready to stand on it's
| own, but the future is bright!
| bhewes wrote:
| For someone who played outside growing up, ray tracing is a
| nice addition, the baked lighting always drove me crazy in my
| games. I put it up there when I noticed Physics engines stopped
| feeling like I was floating through a game.
| 127 wrote:
| Do I want global illumination? Yes, absolutely. Will it make
| games substantially better? Only marginally. The core
| experience will still be the gameplay.
|
| Still, the visual spectacle of what some of these products can
| create is a fantastic experience in itself. It can enhance
| immersion in a drastic way, and especially for story heavy
| games, that can act as a direct multiplier on an already good
| story and structure. Bad games will still never go past being
| just a tech demo.
| itishappy wrote:
| I think people who kneecap their graphics settings to eek out
| the last few millis of latency are the vast minority.
| kimixa wrote:
| From my experience it's the thing gamers enable _after_ getting
| 120fps "ultra" in rasterization already. Rasterization-based
| estimations of many of the visual features are _very_ good now,
| and most people I know tend to have a better end experience
| with higher frame rate than fixing some of the less-noticeable
| issues with them.
|
| So it's probably useful if you've got a 4090, but beyond that
| more try it once, go "Huh, that's neat", and then disable it.
|
| But there's always a chicken and egg problem for every new
| feature - it may make sense to push support even if it's not
| particularly useful right now, as once it's ubiquitous there
| may be more use cases for lower total performance cards -
| "light" ray tracing may be a better solution than some
| rasterization tricks for things like GI, or even things like AI
| line of sight or other non-specifically-graphics tasks.
|
| But as gamedevs have to support the non-RT path anyway, it
| probably doesn't make sense to develop two separate paths. So
| it's relegated to "optional" visual features only.
| ErneX wrote:
| Not every game (or gamer) is of the competitive type.
|
| RT is pretty nice and more and more games are featuring it,
| problem is at least on consoles they cannot go crazy with it so
| some games only do reflections for example or just shadows or
| just global illumination.
|
| Sony is supposedly releasing their Pro model of the PS5 later
| this year with improved support for RT.
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