Quoting: ElectroDDLast example, g-sync... They went as far as manipulating the branding from monitor manufacturer when they lost the battle against AMD.

I'd say they failed overall. Example: https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-27GL850-gaming-monitor [External Link]

* NVIDIA® G-SYNC® Compatible
* Adaptive-Sync (FreeSync™)

Adaptive sync is mentioned.

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Quoting: GuestThere's actually quite a lot of a video card that isn't used at any given time, so while adding some dedicated raytracing pathways may reduce area dedicated to other features, I don't think the impact is of the magnitude that you might be thinking.

If general GPU compute units can handle ray tracing - then fine, but apparently they aren't good enough for it (yet).

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Quoting: GuestActually Vulkan drivers sit about the same "height" above a GPU as OpenGL drivers, but there's not as much bulk between that level and userspace.

I'd say not, because they don't impose all the state machinery that OpenGL drivers do. They sit as much high up to be generic enough for all GPUs. I mentioned assembly because going lower than what Vulkan provides would make such code already GPU architecture specific. Assembly is just putting it on the hardware command level.

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Quoting: EikeTo turn it downside up: Do you know another promising way to go to make graphics rendered in realtime "photorealistic"(*)?

Make some kind of LPU (Lighting Processing Unit) that only has ray tracing ASICs and can work in parallel with everything else without hindering regular GPU performance.

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Going much lower level you'd need GPU assembly already. So I'd say Vulkan is low level by design, not just in appearance.

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Quoting: EhvisNo, it's a solution the the rendering problems that rasterisers can't solve. It's just the first generation of hardware that attempts to use it in real time graphics. It's as much a gimmick as 3D rendering was with the first 3Dfx card.

It can't solve it adequately this way. I explained above why. Unless you are proposing to have a whole dedicated device alongside your GPU, cramming more and more compute units into ray tracing ASICs to make it actually useful will cost more and more general GPU performance.

It's the same reason GPU was separated from the CPU in the first place.

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Quoting: EikeIt's just a matter of time.

That said, I avoided buying a GTX 2000, because at the moment, it feels more like an expensive gimmick.

It is a gimmick. More of a marketing tool than a really useful feature. To achieve good quality real time ray tracing, you need really powerful hardware. And one that can be fit in a single GPU gives at best some minor enhancement to the lighting, and as I said above, it naturally comes at the cost of everything else.

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I wouldn't say ray tracing became more popular. It was always a known but not commonly used technique (due to how expensive it is). Nvidia are just trying to justify using a chunk of their die for ray tracing ASICs. Other GPU makers aren't sold on the need of doing that, except for marketing purposes to match Nvidia.

I.e. for Nvidia, the more space on the die they use for ray tracing, the less is left for regular compute units. Which requires them to go out of the way to convince everyone how useful ray tracing ASICs are.

It's not clear at all, that the above trade off is worth it. For some minor improvement of ray traced lighting (big improvement can't be achieved even with such ASICs), you need to pay with reduced general GPU performance.

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Complexity of the API

I doubt that can be improved. Vulkan is complex by design due to being very low level. For higher level APIs, developers can use WebGPU, which is not really browser targeted only (so the name is unfortunate, it should have been named OpenGPU). According to gfx-rs project developers, WebGPU should play a role of higher level developer friendly API, that's built on top of solid foundation (Vulkan).

It's exactly what Khronos mentioned was needed as a companion API to Vulkan. I.e. those who are OK with given abstractions and want some comfort can use WebGPU. Those who need higher level of control and full customization ability, can use Vulkan directly.

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@Liam: does it work without the network? If not, I wonder where exactly does it "call" (would be interesting to check, may be with Wireshark).

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