Question: If even most PC gamers are pretty take it or leave it, on the whole real time raytracing thing in AAA PC games, it being more of a flex rather than a must have, then what's the point of having this tech on a phone for iOS games?
I don't game on my phone, so am I missing something wild here where seeing raytraced reflections on a six inch screen would be the ultimate game changer and have everyone rush out to upgrade their phones?
I wonder if they might be applications for accelerated raytracing in augmented reality applications? There have been a handful of publications suggesting it for a while, such as https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6297569 .
You're missing the fact that Apple uses the same building blocks for their chips across all of their devices.
The M1/M2 are "just" a bunch of the same CPU cores found in A14 and A15.
They do the same with the GPU blocks — the GPUs in M1/M1 Pro/M1 Max/M1 Ultra (and presumably M2/3/4 etc. iterations of those chips) also have the same GPU cores, "just" more of them (and probably clocked differently, not sure on that).
So missing the RT hardware for iPhone 14 Pro is probably not a huge deal. Missing it for A16 tape-out, which if the pattern holds, means it'll also be missing in M3-generation of chips, is a much bigger one.
I don't think your premise is true. PC games look great on RTX cards. People like it; they just have trouble affording cards that support it. So there is limited appetite for developers to support ray tracing below AAA. Getting the tech on iPhones would change that.
It's a bit more complex than that. Hardware raytracing is still so slow that it requires sophisticated ray allocation and denoising schemes to look good. These are where the real implementation effort goes in all contemporary hardware accelerated raytracing implementations. Nvidia has DLSS as a very good and rather versatile denoiser, but it's not generally available. You need to go through an application process and considered worthy (by whatever criteria they have).
So the bottom line is that not a lot of developers can afford to tackle hardware raytracing as a feature at that point. It's too expensive to get right for them.
I agree. Metal's new upscaling is Apple's answer to DLSS, but of course a) it's only just arriving now, b) Apple will never offer optimizations customized to individual games the way Nvidia works with developers. So, we should expect no application process as they keep rolling out better hardware and software, but less drastic results in exchange for that. And the same story will be with improved ray tracing capabilities, except in that case I'm more confident that Apple will release a GPU that can do a certain amount of it usefully for the usual reasons (known hardware to support, lower resolutions.) Nvidia should also be doing that right now, but they've chosen quite a different pricing/availability strategy than Apple has in the last few years of GPU development.
> Apple will never offer optimizations customized to individual games the way Nvidia works with developers.
My understanding is that Metal (and Vulcan) are really meant to be about _not_ doing this, and instead exposing something much closer to the underlying hardware. So it would instead be, Nvidia developer relations working with a game studio to optimize the studio's engine code for Nvidia cards.
This is highly debatable. LTT did a video of a blind test where people were shown games with RTX on and off and we're asked which looked better and most couldn't tell the RTX one was better looking.
Plus, RTX on a 24"+ screen and on a 6" screen are completely different things. If people can't tell RTX on a large PC monitor, what are the changes they'd actually see any difference on a tiny phone screen.
I don't game on my phone, so am I missing something wild here where seeing raytraced reflections on a six inch screen would be the ultimate game changer and have everyone rush out to upgrade their phones?