Raytracing - Compatibility with older hardware, possible quality drops, and other related Info

Justo

I just watched Marmoset's video on the new raytracing features and tried looking around in their website, but was left with the following doubts.

1-This raytracing feature has nothing to do with screenspace methods, such as rays only being projected on what the camera sees or whatnot, correct? 
2-Is it fair to compare now Marmoset to other ray-tracing-based renderers like Keyshot for best results, or do these apps use different methods for their raytracing?
3-Is it possible to use all raytracing features with non-RTX cards? If yes, will the only difference be the time the GPU takes to produce the final image, or will image quality be compromised?


Googling around, I found the following, but not from an official Marmoset staff source, so I'm not entirely sure:

"Marmoset 4 it has native hardware support for Nvidia's current-gen RTX GPUs, which included dedicated ray tracing cores, but it works on “all modern GPUs”, including AMD cards."

Justo

Got in contact with Marmoset and Mark Doeden replied. Posting his answers here for anyone else interested in these points.

1 - Correct, Toolbag 4's new ray traced renderer is a full path traced rendering engine. Alternately, we still support raster rendering mode too (it's the fallback with RT disabled) which offers some advanced screen space rendering options such as SSAO, and local specular and diffuse reflection controls.

2 - Yes, it's fair to compare, at least we hope so  
3 - Yes, Toolbag 4's ray tracing is supported on most modern GPUs, both AMD or NVIDIA. Additionally it features RTX support, so users with RTX GPUs will notice significantly faster render and baking times. Overall final image quality will not suffer with non-RTX cards, just total render time. 

EarthQuake

Yep, all of that is correct. Currently, we have two ray tracer backends, a generic one that will run on practically any modern GPU, and an Nvidia RTX specific (Optix) mode, which is faster if you have an RTX card. There shouldn't be any difference in image quality. The generic mode is faster if you don't have an RTX card, the RTX mode faster if you do.

We're looking into options for hardware acceleration for the new AMD cards too, that should come in a future update.

NhodgesVFX

EarthQuake said:

Yep, all of that is correct. Currently, we have two ray tracer backends, a generic one that will run on practically any modern GPU, and an Nvidia RTX specific (Optix) mode, which is faster if you have an RTX card. There shouldn't be any difference in image quality. The generic mode is faster if you don't have an RTX card, the RTX mode faster if you do.

We're looking into options for hardware acceleration for the new AMD cards too, that should come in a future update.

You guys probably have it figured out but I thought I would list some options just in case. Radeon Rays might be an option if AMD adds support for their cards raytracing hardware. DirectX 12 DXR is multivendor but not cross-platform. Vulcan's new raytracing extensions are cross-platform and cross-vendor. For Vulcan you would get windows and Linux natively and for mac os you could get it via MoltenVK. MoltenVK doesn't support raytracing acceleration yet though.

Anyways thanks for the cool new texturing and raytracing.

EarthQuake

NhodgesVFX said:

EarthQuake said:

Yep, all of that is correct. Currently, we have two ray tracer backends, a generic one that will run on practically any modern GPU, and an Nvidia RTX specific (Optix) mode, which is faster if you have an RTX card. There shouldn't be any difference in image quality. The generic mode is faster if you don't have an RTX card, the RTX mode faster if you do.

We're looking into options for hardware acceleration for the new AMD cards too, that should come in a future update.

You guys probably have it figured out but I thought I would list some options just in case. Radeon Rays might be an option if AMD adds support for their cards raytracing hardware. DirectX 12 DXR is multivendor but not cross-platform. Vulcan's new raytracing extensions are cross-platform and cross-vendor. For Vulcan you would get windows and Linux natively and for mac os you could get it via MoltenVK. MoltenVK doesn't support raytracing acceleration yet though.

Anyways thanks for the cool new texturing and raytracing.

Yeah, we're looking into DX12/DXR now that AMD's RT cards are out. There may be some performance/memory advantages over Optix for Nvidia cards as well. A lot of work/research to be done here but we're optimistic.

The Mac situation is a little less clear in general, we're looking into native support for the new Apple silicon and we'll probably learn more about what is possible there for RT acceleration soon as well. Our generic ray trace back end should run on recent Macs right now though.