Surprised they were able to catch up to Nvidia's latest cards after foregoing high-end for a while. "Catch-up" seems to be AMD's forte lately.
But we'll need to wait for real world testing to see how accurate these claims are.
But we'll need to wait for real world testing to see how accurate these claims are.
However, what I'm seeing out of this mess is that AMD is absolutely competitive on a watt-per-performance basis now. The other problem is that AMD is so far behind nVidia in software (read: AI research mindshare) that it's not clear if we'll be able to see that many titles take on raytracing in future titles or adopt the work necessary to do ML-based upscaling with AMD as the baseline software stack rather than DLSS.
And in any case since Unreal and Unity are integrating DLSS and other "GameWorks RTX" features more and more games will be able to implement them with essentially just a toggle.
The graphical fidelity in indie games has increased dramatically mostly due to the fact that Unreal Engine became very indie friendly and Unity has really stepped up their game with what they offer out of the box.
Eye candy is now easy because the game engines have a lot of these effects and the materials required for them built-in and you also can quite easily get really high quality assets, particles and materials in the engine marketplace for very low cost.
5 years ago developing a water shader for physically accurate water rendering would probably take an indie dev months to do complete and probably could've gotten them a speaking spot at GDC, today it's a toggle switch in the UE4 level editor.
That integration (UE4) comes uses the watermarked dll. Unusable until you get explicitly whitelisted by Nvidia. Only a few tens of games have been whitelisted.
The current rumour mill hints at 3.0 when it goes GA it's also when it should be part of unity.
However you can still grab the DLSS branch that NVIDIA maintains and work on it, if the result is good enough I haven't seen any evidence stating that removing that watermark is particularly difficult.
Who cares if your average indie game doesn't support it, it probably isn't useful in those cases since you're already running it at 900 FPS
> The point is that looking at DLSS supported games, majority are AAA titles, which is what DLSS is for.
No, that's my point, and it is in part due to lock out with Nvidia's explicit whitelisting system.
Considering AMD's core role in next-gen consoles, it's likely that there'll be broad support for raytracing in games (especially cross-platform games). I'd say the question is more whether the 6000 series is anywhere close to RTX in performance for RT (which afaik wasn't shown today).
Is it really, though? Consoles have been doing upscaling without it for years, and one has to assume they're still going to be innovating on that front on RDNA 2.0 with the new generation, too.
The DLSS 2.0 mode where it's used as a super-sampling replacement is kinda interesting, but realistically TXAA in most engines is also pretty solid. It seems like a fairly minor extra feature at the end of the day as a result... Cool, but not game changing at all.
EDIT: although AMD did make mention of something called "super resolution" as part of their fidelity fx suite which sounds like a DLSS competitor but there's no real details. And of course the actual image results here are far more important
They've definitely been far behind Nvidia for a while, though. I haven't seriously considered an AMD GPU in almost a decade outside of budget gaming rigs, and even then I ended up going with a used Nvidia card. Hopefully this is enough to give them a serious foothold in the high-end GPU market so they can give Nvidia competition for years to come.
So Zen 2 would be when AMD "caught up." Zen 3 would be where they surpass (assuming reviews match the claims etc etc...)