While we still haven’t seen a single game taking advantage of the new RTX technology, game developers have been recently experimenting with it. One of them is Roblox and according to its Technical Director, Arseny Kapoulkine, the new NVIDIA RTX series is 3X faster in Vulkan when using mesh shading than traditional raster.
Modern GPUs are crazy. But this GPU is especially so. Scene has 100 Happy Buddhas (100*1.087M tri). Traditional raster takes 17.2 ms. RTX code from my stream (with some perf fixes/tweaks) renders this in 6.3 ms – almost 3x faster. This is 17B triangles per second. 2080 non-Ti.
— Arseny Kapoulkine 🇺🇦 (@zeuxcg) October 30, 2018
In a particular scene that has 100 Happy Buddhas (1 Buddha is 1.087 million triangles) traditional raster takes 17.2 ms on a non-Ti RTX2080. The RTX code from his stream though, with some performance fixes and tweaks, renders the same scene in 6.3 ms which is almost 3X faster.
6.3 ms are timings with SetStablePowerState. SetStablePowerState limits the GPU clocks. Running without SetStablePowerState is faster – 5.5ms. Changing meshlet indices to uint16 (up to 4M vertices/mesh) – 5.4 ms. This is 20.1B triangles per second. TWENTY BILLION TRI/SEC.
— Arseny Kapoulkine 🇺🇦 (@zeuxcg) October 30, 2018
Now as Arseny noted, this isn’t related to raytracing but rather to the performance of the RTX when using mesh shading. By some further tweaks, he was also able to achieve 20 billion triangles per second on the RTX2080 when using task/mesh shaders + cluster cone culling.
Just to clarify since it's ambiguous – RTX refers to "mesh shading code we've been writing on Vulkan streams that runs on an RTX GPU", not "raytracing". 20B tri/sec is the perf of RTX 2080 raster path when using task/mesh shaders + cluster cone culling.
— Arseny Kapoulkine 🇺🇦 (@zeuxcg) October 30, 2018
In case you are not aware of, Mesh Shading is a new technique that has been introduced with the NVIDIA Turing graphics cards and below you can find a video showcasing it. Whether developers will take advantage of it or not remains to be seen!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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