Normally, I would just add such news to the already existing thread on Metro Exodus, but this is such exciting news I thought it deserved a thread of its own. This reviewer confirms that Metro Exodus will be the first AAA title to incorporate Nvidia's new RTX ray tracing technology, and describes how Nvidia and AMD are drawing lines in the sand as to how much of the technology will be open source and proprietary. Area shadows, glossy reflections, and ambient occlusion are among the first things that might occasionally benefit significantly from using ray tracing, but the AI and other things ray tracing makes possible could be among the first applications we will see in some of these first ray traced games coming out. The next video is the real time ray traced demo for Metro Exodus and hints at the limitations of the technology at this point. The picture stutters a great deal suggesting it is pushing the graphics cards to the limit and, if you notice, the grass often has large patches that become a complete blur. That gives you some idea of just how few rays they are actually using to render the imagine, and the blurring is their noise correction being applied so it doesn't look even worse. Very likely, real time ray tracing will require at least 20-40 teraflops or more compute power to do any justice to a busy scene, which is why this demo does not contain any animals or characters. Thus far, ray tracing in video games has often been limited to objects such as cars and to cut-scenes, but we should see it starts to be used for other things with the introduction of the Ampere video cards. However, all that could change dramatically overnight, as developers figure out new ways to implement the technology. Already Otoy has developed the technology to make real time ray tracing commonplace on even cellphones, but bigger displays require a lot more power. He has also figured out how to add real time ray traced lighting to any existing rasterized engine. Notably, by combining cloud computing, such as Liquid Sky and Nvida Now it could be possible to produce much more compelling examples of ray tracing in games in the near future, but at lower frame rates. Thankfully, Nvidia's Gsync and AMD's Freesync now make gaming at lower frame rates and higher resolutions significantly more attractive, between the two companies they have eliminated the worst remaining problems with using current monitors and rasterization, and are now moving on to ray tracing.
This reviewer is the first I've come across to state the obvious, that AMD needs to come out with its own hardware accelerated ray tracing video card if they are to compete with Nvidia. Unfortunately, AMD just lost their gpu guru to Intel and, at a guess, could easily be six months or more behind Nvidia on hardware acceleration. Normally, when releasing an entirely new video card or chip, AMD mysteriously springs leaks like a hundred year old boiler but, thus far, I've not heard any rumors about any new graphics cards from them this year. If they do have something cooking up their sleeves, they are more likely to tell people at least three months in advance, and build up a little hype before launching their new product. It could also be that AMD simply doesn't have a new product ready, but does have enhanced 7nm versions of its current products, and may simply wish to undercut Nvidia's high end card sales by releasing cheaper versions of the Nvidia gtx 1080, which is a great video card for HD gaming. AMD's lisa Su, has already started a "Zen" project for their next gpu, where the engineers concentrate on lower latencies in their newest Navi gpu. However, these are all recent developments and its impossible to say how fast their progress has been. My guess, either AMD manages to dramatically pull a rabbit out of their hat, or we won't see anything competitive from them on the high end gpu until next year. Of course, AMD has the long term advantage of making 8 and 16 core processors, that can help accomplish ray tracing, and could dramatically reduce the costs within a few years in combination with their gpu hardware acceleration. For certain tasks, once you get up to at least 8 cores, you can think of a multicore cpu processor as roughly 1/3 the speed of the gpu, which is fast enough for it to take some of the load off the gpu.
