Edit: The article does compare the ray tracing capabilities of the M1 GPU to a RTX 2070. The RTX 2070 obviously crushes it, as the author points out the obviously unfair comparison. The RTX card uses way more power, is much largerx and has hardware acceleration for ray tracing.
I am interested in seeing if Apple adds hardware acceleration for RT to future chips (or if they will support external AMD GPUs).
Isn't RTX card using less power per ray according to this benchmark? This also applies to ray/size unit I think.
People have been rendering on any CPU they could get their hands on for the last forty years and there is no such thing as "software accelerated ray tracing". That would be like someone saying their car does engine accelerated driving.
Is this a particular term/concept, or do you just mean non-hardware-accelerated ray tracing?
If the former, what does it mean for something to be "software-accelerated?"
If the latter, I apologize if this comes off as nit-picking.
Though I do understand the desire to be pedantic, because ISAs like this and their SIMD instructions can kinda blur the lines between what constitutes as "hardware accelerated". That's why I try to avoid it as much as possible for the sake of simplicity.
GPUs require acceleration because the memory latency on GPUs is pretty large, caches are small, and GPUs have such huge compute that waiting around for the "next = bvh-tree->left" operation takes a huge amount of time.
By making dedicated acceleration structures and hardware, that latency can be mitigated, and the huge compute capabilities of GPUs can be unleashed.
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In contrast, CPUs are already really good (relatively) at pointer-dereferencing loops. CPUs have less compute and more memory-optimizations (relative to a GPU anyway).
so their own raytracers are not real-time either