NVIDIA Titan V Raytraces Battelfield V in RTX mode at proper perf (but does not have any RT cores).

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 01/01/2019 11:03 AM | source: 3dcenter | 68 comment(s)

It is a bit of a remarkable story really, but users have enabled RTX mode on a Nvidia Titan V, which works quite well and performs as fast as the RTX 2080 Ti. Titan V, however, is Volta, and Volta does not have any RT cores.

Of course, Volta is a very powerful card with loads of headroom and tensor cores. DX-R mode enabled, in theory, can work on any compatible DirectX 12 graphics card as long as it is fast enough, as the DirectX Raytracing is merely an extension to the DX12 API. If the hardware is not supported, it could run it in a software modus. However, the findings raise the question, are dedicated RT in hardware cores actually needed?

In the example, the Titan V with a Volta GV100 GPU according to users in this thread over at 3dcenter, would produce framerates that are almost equal to those of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. One user reports 69 fps in Ultra HD resolution at set Ultra high with both cards. Both graphics cards have been overclocked and cooled with water cooling with equal framerates and image quality. Yet another user reports he was playing in a 60-100 fps at 1440p ultra with 80 fps average. In our own review, the RTX 2080 Ti with DXR raytracing averaged 84.3 fps which is pretty damn close towards our results as tested in our Battlefield V article.

These new findings do make us wonder what the actual effect of RT has on performance. It has to be stated, these are merely user reports and we cannot verify any test methodologies used here (testing in an RT enhanced environment would be one concern that comes to mind).

Regardless, these are interesting find but for now, please do take them with caution and a few grains of salt. Below two settings screenshot the users used, as well as a screengrab with RTX enabled on the Volta card.

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Fox2232
Senior Member

Posts: 9845
Joined: 2012-07-20

#5622581 Posted on: 01/01/2019 11:44 AM

"However, the findings raise the question, are dedicated RT in hardware cores actually needed?"
That's not the question I would and do ask.

I do ask: "Are there actually dedicated RT in RTX cards?"

I did ask this before, but it does not hurt to repeat question: "Is anyone who knows details of DX-R able to say what kind of mathematical instructions are required by DX-R?"
Because if it is something like FP16, then Titan V is twice as fast as 1080Ti and still bit faster than RTX 2080Ti.

It should be known that DX-R is part of Microsofts DX12, therefore instructions should not be proprietary.
Some nV guys here with BF V willing to trick game into thinking that you have RTX card?

flashmozzg
Senior Member

Posts: 127
Joined: 2013-01-30

#5622588 Posted on: 01/01/2019 12:44 PM

I wonder if it'l work for an AMD card o_O...

Glottiz
Senior Member

Posts: 493
Joined: 2006-11-18

#5622592 Posted on: 01/01/2019 01:03 PM

I knew it, I f-ing knew it that something like this will possible. Now let's see how quickly Nvidia release new "hotfix" drivers that block all possible RTX hacks on Pascal GPUs

Akumu
Member

Posts: 49
Joined: 2016-12-17

#5622593 Posted on: 01/01/2019 01:05 PM

Very interesting.

MK80
Member

Posts: 80
Joined: 2017-09-11

#5622594 Posted on: 01/01/2019 01:11 PM

How did they do if the game refuses to connect RTX out of rtx2000 graphics? It has already been tried by UFD Tech and they could not get it even using a 2080 ti to start the game and then move on to another graphics card. For me it's fake ..

GlennB
Senior Member

Posts: 216
Joined: 2009-12-12

#5622595 Posted on: 01/01/2019 01:12 PM

I wonder if it'l work for an AMD card o_O...

Great White Shark
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Posts: 50
Joined: 2018-05-17

#5622596 Posted on: 01/01/2019 01:13 PM

I really do think that Nvidia have released the RTX cards really badly. Too expensive, not enough Ray Tracing support. I'm hoping the new 7 nanometer cards will drive the prices down for RTX. But it won't be soon.

BReal85
Senior Member

Posts: 335
Joined: 2016-10-25

#5622599 Posted on: 01/01/2019 01:23 PM

And the question raises: why? They have all the money to release a more powerful card, or they can simply releasea 700-900 like generation leap with a decrease in price like it was in that case.

nevcairiel
Senior Member

Posts: 649
Joined: 2015-05-19

#5622602 Posted on: 01/01/2019 01:27 PM

Raytracing has already been working on AMD cards for quite a while. GCN has a ton of cumpute power to handle raytracing.

https://gpuopen.com/gaming-product/radeon-rays/

Dubbed Radeon Rays, the company’s ray tracing developer suite will now support real-time ray tracing in Radeon Rays 2.0. The new engine is compatible with OpenCL 1.2. Built on Vulkan, Radeon Rays 2.0 leverages the API’s advanced support for asynchronous compute to make real-time ray tracing a reality.

The number of rays they advertise is an order of magnitude lower then NVIDIAs however, which makes the real difference between real-time gaming use, or "just" using it in 3D graphics design and rendering.

Doing Ray Tracing itself isn't "new", doing it really fast is what was missing.

Venix
Senior Member

Posts: 1043
Joined: 2016-08-01

#5622603 Posted on: 01/01/2019 01:33 PM

And the question raises: why? They have all the money to release a more powerful card, or they can simply releasea 700-900 like generation leap with a decrease in price like it was in that case.

if i had to take a wild guess why they did that ... my speculation is that the gpu is a huge monolithic die i really really doubt their yields on 100% functional ones are the best around , so what ever is not good enough to make it as a quadro it trickles down to the gaming gpus instead of throwing em away.

Raider0001
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Posts: 412
Joined: 2006-11-25

#5622606 Posted on: 01/01/2019 01:36 PM

The number of rays they advertise is an order of magnitude lower then NVIDIAs however, which makes the real difference between real-time gaming use, or "just" using it in 3D graphics design and rendering.

Doing Ray Tracing itself isn't "new", doing it really fast is what was missing.

doesn't matter how fast your system would render rays, the option is locked out for all other cards in BF V for a reason or not we do not know !?

Fox2232
Senior Member

Posts: 9845
Joined: 2012-07-20

#5622609 Posted on: 01/01/2019 01:41 PM

That's not way to do it. Did they not learn a thing about graphical drivers? That's why you can't use modern drivers on ancient graphics card. There are no code paths for given architectures.

Way to go is to persuade driver that your GTX card is actually RTX card. One of ways is just change HW ID in driver's inf file for installation. Other way is to change HW ID in vBIOS.
I did that few times in past. Especially with Fury X release as performance was not exactly as expected. And making driver believe that it is different card yielded different performance results.

When Polaris launched and there were some new features, I just changed HW IDs in vBIOS and had some mixed results.

To put it simply:
HW <-> Driver <-> Windows Libraries <-> Game

Driver takes HW an exposes its abilities to windows libraries, in this case to Direct3D. That reports supported features to game.
This is done per device, therefore having 2 different cards will result in 2 different sets of features exposed.

Hack can be done on multiple places. Easiest is to trick driver. Bit more risky is vBIOS mod. And most reliable is actually creating wrapper library between game and Direct3D libraries.
Those will report whatever they (you) want to game and then do whatever they (you) want with instructions returned by game.

Caesar
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Posts: 898
Joined: 2015-06-18

#5622613 Posted on: 01/01/2019 02:01 PM

I was wondering about this fact.

While playing shadow of tomb raider also....notice the reflections (with my 1070Ti)...
Is that software or hardware really?

claydough
Member

Posts: 67
Joined: 2015-01-10

#5622614 Posted on: 01/01/2019 02:02 PM

is this not expected? Wasn't NVIDIA’s RTX technology originally developed...
powered on Volta GPUs? ( I imagine an RT core SM was originally tweaked on Volta SM accelerated in tandem with Nvidia's software component to real time ray tracing? )
With 8 years of development wouldn't Volta benefit from the final version of Nvidia's RTX software technology?
Kind of wondering how the original Nvidia Raytracing Demos that ran on Volta ( like the Starwar's "Reflections" demo ) might run today as the software has probably matured alot since release?

Quote : "
The demonstration is powered by NVIDIA’s "RTX technology for Volta GPUs"
, available via Microsoft’s DirectX Ray Tracing API (DXR)...
"

So I imagine RTX is then supported for Volta as well???

( or hopefully the RTX component used to develop the tech leveraging Volta hardware is not abandoned )

fellix
Senior Member

Posts: 172
Joined: 2005-08-31

#5622620 Posted on: 01/01/2019 02:16 PM

"However, the findings raise the question, are dedicated RT in hardware cores actually needed?"
That's not the question I would and do ask.

I do ask: "Are there actually dedicated RT in RTX cards?"

Turing has the same relative transistor density to Pascal, which suggests that whatever dedicated RT logic is there in Turing it's rather simple ad-hoc solution to the existing compute resources. The rest of the architectural changes are way more significant than RTX.

I did ask this before, but it does not hurt to repeat question: "Is anyone who knows details of DX-R able to say what kind of mathematical instructions are required by DX-R?"
Because if it is something like FP16, then Titan V is twice as fast as 1080Ti and still bit faster than RTX 2080Ti.

Ray-tracing is also very demanding on the memory sub-system and I can only guess HBM2 used for Volta is a major contributor to the RTX performance numbers, along with the large internal caches and registers.
In the case for Battlefield V, ray-traced reflections require a lot more work from the graphics pipeline, since each reflection is actually rendered "projection", accumulated along the ray-path. The ray traversal alone is not that much costly (memory latency sensitive), particularly at single sample per pixel and utilized for one effect only.

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