EEVEE and Ray Tracing Card Support

General Forums Blender Development Discussion
1

I have seen some videos describing Eevee and watched a tutorial or two. So far what’s the thinking vis a vis the Nvida RTX ray tracing cards, and possibly future support from AMD. Is there a standard for ray tracing APIs. Is it an API or just a feature?
What about Eevee? I understand that the lower priced cards such as RTX 2060 are not expected to provide high frame rates for games with ray tracing turned on, but it seems to me that if there is an image quality advantage for ray tracing in eevee that a frame rate of 10-20, while no good for gaming might be fine for eevee.

Do we expect higher quality in eevee if ray tracing in the graphics card is used?
What are the plans, if any, to employ ray tracing in eevee? Is support for this more than a checkbox and enable the card to do it?

Thanks,
wp

2

It might be wise for the developers to first see if RTX is really going to take off, as this would bring to Eevee a feature that is only for Nvidia users on the latest generation of cards (while the BF aims to keep everything platform-agnostic when possible).

3

Ok… Sure.
But do we expect any benefit?
And is a lot of work required to implement it?

4

Theoretically, it could be beneficial.

In practice, I doubt we would see any hardware raytracing support for at least 2 years.

Too niche, too early, too proprietary.

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