Agree with Simon, very helpful analysis! I found your interpretation of the B580 limiting its efforts for Path Tracing in very challenging cases like Cyberpunk to make a lot of sense. Even a 4090 is taxed significantly by CP2077 with everything turned up to the highest settings, and you explained well how Path Tracing costs a lot of bandwidth and compute that is then missing elsewhere. Boils down to the graphics (drivers) team choosing wisely which battles to fight. 11 FPS just don't look good 😄.
Would be interesting to know how, for example, Nvidia's drivers deal with those choices across GPUs with very different capabilities. And, if someone from Nvidia reads this: Send Chester a 5090, so he can treat us to a great deep dive on Blackwell !
And, AMD, how about doing likewise with the 9070XT? RDNA4 sounds mighty good, maybe even better after a deep dive into it by Chester!
I also wonder what's happening with that! A B780 would be a welcome addition, especially if Intel decides to stay a bit ahead of the pack and provide 18 or 20 GB GDDR6 for a large Battlemage dGPU.
I don't think it's too hard to see that there's enough happening at Intel anyway without having to spend big on another dGPU tape-out for a chip that, realistically, will have 0% market share anyway. ;)
Thanks for the analysis. Battlemage RT implementation looks like it's balanced out for hybrid rendering engines in mind given it's budget market priority.
Agree with Simon, very helpful analysis! I found your interpretation of the B580 limiting its efforts for Path Tracing in very challenging cases like Cyberpunk to make a lot of sense. Even a 4090 is taxed significantly by CP2077 with everything turned up to the highest settings, and you explained well how Path Tracing costs a lot of bandwidth and compute that is then missing elsewhere. Boils down to the graphics (drivers) team choosing wisely which battles to fight. 11 FPS just don't look good 😄.
Would be interesting to know how, for example, Nvidia's drivers deal with those choices across GPUs with very different capabilities. And, if someone from Nvidia reads this: Send Chester a 5090, so he can treat us to a great deep dive on Blackwell !
And, AMD, how about doing likewise with the 9070XT? RDNA4 sounds mighty good, maybe even better after a deep dive into it by Chester!
I have a 9070 on-hand and I'm working through rdna 4 stuff. There's a lot to do, give me some time :P
👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻 Thanks, and looking forward to your article on RDNA4! I'm sure you're plenty busy right now 😄.
I would love to see an in-depth comparison between the recent architectures of the big players.
Great article as always. Man, if only there were a big battlemage chip
I also wonder what's happening with that! A B780 would be a welcome addition, especially if Intel decides to stay a bit ahead of the pack and provide 18 or 20 GB GDDR6 for a large Battlemage dGPU.
>I also wonder what's happening with that!
I don't think it's too hard to see that there's enough happening at Intel anyway without having to spend big on another dGPU tape-out for a chip that, realistically, will have 0% market share anyway. ;)
Great and helpful analysis, as always. Thank you!
(I might be wrong, but I think that any-hit shaders are used for shadows, not for transparency. With transparency, order matters)
I think they're used for both, though in different ways. An any-hit shader gets invoked for any intersection with transparent geometry (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3d12/any-hit-shader)
Thanks for the analysis. Battlemage RT implementation looks like it's balanced out for hybrid rendering engines in mind given it's budget market priority.
Can't wait for the RDNA4 deep dive. Cheers!
>It reminds me of DirectX 9 GPUs striking a balance between vertex and pixel shader core counts.
Hopefully we might see yet another "shader unification" phase soon enough, then. :P