The Amiga was one of the first affordable old school ray tracing platforms as the results could be seen due to the Amigas good graphics. Ray tracing is still kind of a buzz word that draws attention from ex-Amiga fans. Real time ray tracing arrived several years ago but was expensive and power hungry. Despite this, it has become standard on high end modern consoles from Sony and Microsoft. More recently, reductions in power have made it possible to bring hardware ray tracing to market "in a mobile power budget".

https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/chasing-pixels/ip-path-to-ray-tracing Quote:

The IMG CXT-48-1536 RT3 features the Ray Acceleration Cluster (RAC), a new low-power, dedicated hardware GPU block which accelerates and offloads more of the ray-tracing computations from the shader cores compared to less-efficient Level 2 RTLS architectures. 1 Imagination says the IMG CXT RT3 offers up to 1.3 GRay/s. That, says the company, delivers photorealistic ray traced shadows, reflections, global illumination, and ambient occlusion, with high frame rates, in a mobile power budget.

So far the smart phone companies have been slow to adopt the technology.

https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/chasing-pixels/ip-path-to-ray-tracing Quote:

Imagination Technologies pioneered hardware-accelerated ray tracing 10 years ago and has scaled it for the mobile market with its new PowerVR Photon architecture.1 Ray tracing has always been a someday technology. In 2017 based on a demo Nvidia made using four Quadro AIBs, I predicted (by extrapolating Moore’s law) that we could see real-time ray tracing by 2021 or 2022. Then in late 2018 Nvidia lit up the world and showed RTRT running off of a single AIB. That was a defining moment for the industry and combined with Nvidia’s powerful marketing consumers learned about ray tracing. The next challenge was to get RTRT to work on a mobile device. Adshir in Israel showed RTRT on a mobile device the same time Nvidia showed theirs on a PC. Adshir’s solution was all software and although elegant and highly effective, Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, and others in the mobile market didn’t employ it—still a mystery to me. In the meantime, Adshir has been acquired. Nonetheless, consumers knew there was such a thing as ray tracing and by golly they wanted it. Three companies in the mobile space are in a race to provide RTRT: AMD, Imagination Technologies, and SiliconArts. AMD will show up in Samsung phones. Imagination will be showing up in phones next year and one can speculate about what round-house company will announce it. SiliconArts is waiting for permission from its customer to announce its use of the technology. So by the end of 2022, we will have tangible examples of RTRT in a mobile device. The some-day tech is finally here.

The ray tracing IP technology is licensable today for a SoC and there are companies working on it. While low end low power ray tracing may be less impressive than high end ray tracing, it has the advantage of being easier for developers as it is easier to define the lighting of a scene which works correctly from all viewpoints. It is possible to scale the technology up with more hardware units. Is Amiga a follower of technology or leader? Will the Amiga miss another technology and marketing opportunity in the Forever Never Never Land?

https://www.imaginationtech.com/products/gpu/img-cxt-gpu/

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

"someone should slap the Amiga name on some new raytracing thing"





ok.

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Last edited by QBit on 05-Jun-2022 at 05:40 AM.
Last edited by QBit on 05-Jun-2022 at 04:50 AM.

@matthey: Amiga has no chance at all for raytracing (in general: not only for the masses).

Ray tracing requires a HUGE computational power -> A LOT of cores. Amiga is strictly a mono-core system.

Modern assets requires also a HUGE space -> even more than 4GB only for graphic memory. Amiga has a 2GB full address space limit.

So, really, no chance.

@cdimauro

Who cares!

@cdimauro

Quote:

even more than 4GB only for graphic memory. Amiga has a 2GB full address space limit.

A-eon/Hans was able to bypass this for their 3D drivers.

Last edited by pavlor on 05-Jun-2022 at 07:51 AM.

@matthey

Can't you use blender on AmigaOS4.1 ?
I believe it works pretty well.
If you aren’t making a movie, the CPU speed is not major issue.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 05-Jun-2022 at 01:25 PM.

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From an aesthetic point of view, hardware accelerated raytracing arrived too late IMO. It's great as an enabling technology and there's no putting the genie back in the bottle but let's be honest, the amount to which RTX improves the visual fidelity of titles that support it is pretty minimal. It stands out more on older titles or titles that have inherently simpler graphics, e.g. Quake 2 RTX and Minecraft.

The reason for this is primarily due to the fact developers and artists got so good at faking the most important features (global illumination, reflections etc) that the additional impact of seeing those things done "correctly" isn't so great. I think upscaling (DLSS, FidelityFX) have done more to improve immersion by keeping frame rates high at higher spatial resolution.

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cdimauro Quote:

Amiga has no chance at all for raytracing (in general: not only for the masses). Ray tracing requires a HUGE computational power -> A LOT of cores. Amiga is strictly a mono-core system.

What were the copper and blitter in the mono-core Amiga system? What is a gfx card for the Amiga using many shader cores?

cdimauro Quote:

Modern assets requires also a HUGE space -> even more than 4GB only for graphic memory. Amiga has a 2GB full address space limit.

It is easy enough to use the other 2GB of Amiga address space even with a 32 bit CPU and no PAE like address space accesses or MMU tricks. The Elbox Mediator makes use of the normally unused 2GB and other expansions likely do also. It is true that a 32 bit address space can be limiting for all but the lowest end gfx hardware. It is also true that the AmigaOS requires 32 bit pointers in many structures for compatibility. I believe much of the AmigaOS can be kept in 32 bit address space while great benefit can be obtained from 64 bit addressing. This may seem like too much of a limitation but it has the benefit of reducing the AmigaOS footprint as well as maintaining compatibility.

cdimauro Quote:

So, really, no chance.

I would say the Amiga situation and leadership are more of a problem than hardware limitations but we still may arrive at the same conclusion. Polls allow everyone to express opinions. Not many people have voted because I expect the poll makes Amiga users feel uncomfortable. They would like to vote what they want from the Amiga but the honest expectation is that Amiga hardware will never be for the masses (mass produced and cost reduced) or a technology leader again. The poll is still better than the useless polls recently and makes people think about something they are interested in. Have you detached yourself so far from the Amiga that you do not feel the turmoil?

@matthey

Let's flip this around. Blender is blender, whether you run it on OS4, MorphOS, Linux, Windows, MacOS or other. It has a broadly consistent UI and people that use it aren't going to be as bothered what the OS is than they are the other software they use alongside blender in their workflow. What they are going to care about is render time, because time is money in the animation business.

You can swap Blender our for pretty much any of the nonfree alternatives here. People will use whatever has the best performance for a given price envelope. As it stands, that's not going to be an Amiga of any flavour today.

When Lightwave3D was still the standard for rendering, there were DEC Alpha based accelerators available for it that sat on your network doing the render cycles for you. The Amiga was just the front end. The Amiga itself just wasn't fast potent enough

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@NutsAboutAmiga

He's clearly talking about real time ray tracing.
Even if there was drivers for gpus that support it the ppc cpus OS4.x hardware uses are just to weak to utilize the hardware even close to a modern gpus potential, as are the busses and RAM bandwidth.

@Karlos

Currently the improvement in visuals real time raytracing offers isn't huge, but that will change as the volume of rays is increased. Not so much just just because of raw grunt, but effort required.
Reflections of reflections of reflection of reflection, etc. with shadows, lighting, and so on and so forth when each single pixel is also multi-textured is going to be an absolute pita at some point to code in a faked manner.

Karlos Quote:

From an aesthetic point of view, hardware accelerated raytracing arrived too late IMO. It's great as an enabling technology and there's no putting the genie back in the bottle but let's be honest, the amount to which RTX improves the visual fidelity of titles that support it is pretty minimal. It stands out more on older titles or titles that have inherently simpler graphics, e.g. Quake 2 RTX and Minecraft. The reason for this is primarily due to the fact developers and artists got so good at faking the most important features (global illumination, reflections etc) that the additional impact of seeing those things done "correctly" isn't so great. I think upscaling (DLSS, FidelityFX) have done more to improve immersion by keeping frame rates high at higher spatial resolution.

Good points yet you did not vote that ray tracing is a gimmick. Yes, developers did get good at faking the lighting. It would be interesting to know how much time they spent to optimize lighting environments and avoid non-aesthetic lighting situations. Hardware ray tracing has become cheaper power wise and is now usable in a mobile power budget. Do you think it is too much of a gimmick or not worthwhile to add to low end hardware?

@matthey

It's definitely not a gimmick. Light transport is something of a sideline interest of mine. There's a beautiful elegance to ray tracing as a single simulation technique that essentially yields visual reality as the emergent side effect. It's the brutal computational complexity of it that renders (pardon the pun) it so impractical. The specific features of interest from a hardware acceleration point of view (damn these puns) is the ray BVH intersection and denoising.

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@matthey

Quote:

Not many people have voted because I expect the poll makes Amiga users feel uncomfortable.

becouse none of the options are true, maybe?

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@NutsAboutAmiga

I think the poll lacks relevance. Realtime ray tracing is a bit niche just now, for high end PCs (and latest consoles) but will be a mainstream feature in a hardware generation or two at most.

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@Karlos

Real Time Ray Tracing I belive is GPU feature.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 05-Jun-2022 at 07:13 PM.

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@NutsAboutAmiga

Correction. Parts of the day tracing process have been given dedicated hardware acceleration. Specifically, working out which things a ray intersects and denoising.

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LENS FLARE!!!!

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