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

(karimsayedre.github.io)
53 points ibobev | 10 comments | 25 Jun 25 21:42 UTC | HN request time: 1.028s | source | bottom
1. sheepscreek ◴[25 Jun 25 22:47 UTC] No.44382488[source]▶
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).
replies(2): >>44384359 #>>44384406 #
2. E-Reverance ◴[25 Jun 25 23:58 UTC] No.44382945[source]▶
See comments as to why this is misleading https://www.reddit.com/r/GraphicsProgramming/comments/1ljmf0...
3. colechristensen ◴[26 Jun 25 05:13 UTC] No.44384359[source]▶
Yup this is an "assume spherical cow" situation where it's not dishonest, but you can't draw any real world conclusions from the experiment unless you happen to be working in a very restricted space.
replies(1): >>44384383 #
4. ChocolateGod ◴[26 Jun 25 05:18 UTC] No.44384383{3}[source]▶
Wouldn't you need to in a real world scenario make the CUDA cores aware of the game geometry adding more work on the CPU?
5. atq2119 ◴[26 Jun 25 05:24 UTC] No.44384406[source]▶
More likely it's because the scene they're using is completely unrepresentative of what people are interested in: almost no triangles, primarily procedural nodes (for spheres), and in general a fairly simple scene.
6. pixelpoet ◴[26 Jun 25 05:40 UTC] No.44384488[source]▶
> 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.

7. kachapopopow ◴[26 Jun 25 06:16 UTC] No.44384652[source]▶
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.

8. esperent ◴[26 Jun 25 06:23 UTC] No.44384685[source]▶
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.

9. kookamamie ◴[26 Jun 25 07:20 UTC] No.44385014[source]▶
> __restrict__ Pointers

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