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CUDA Ray Tracing 2x Faster Than RTX: My CUDA Ray Tracing Journey

69 points by ibobev

by E-Reverance

0 subcomment

See comments as to why this is misleading https://www.reddit.com/r/GraphicsProgramming/comments/1ljmf0...

by esperent

0 subcomment

I think the title of this should be changed, at the moment it's click bait. It should be something like:
CUDA Ray Tracing 2x Faster Than RTX when Rendering Spheres
As far as I can see, this renderer can't do anything else except spheres (and maybe planes).
It's no bad achievement to beat a general purpose production renderer at one specific thing, but a renderer that can only do spheres is just a hyper-optimized toy, and here it's being presented as far more than that.

by sheepscreek

2 subcomments

I’m guessing it’s because they’re using all the computing power the GPU has to offer in CUDA mode, as opposed to sharing the GPU with other functions (when in RTX).

by kachapopopow

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wow, bypassing a rendering backend makes things go faster, what a surprise!
This only runs on nvidia, vulkan is designed to be cross-compatible with not only gpus, but operating systems as well. Vulkan is pretty direct compared to something like dx11 thought so I guess it is interesting to see performance improvement non the less.

by pixelpoet

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> FMA performance here is a non-issue, I'm not just flexing—I'm showing off my CUDA prowess. But hey, got to demonstrate I know my hardware!
This article is pretty embarrassing, and as others have noted, very misleading due to the RTX units hardly being used.

by kookamamie

1 subcomments

> __restrict__ Pointers
Ahh, my favorite nitpick from C++ not having sane default aliasing rules spills to the CUDA-land.