Hi,
can Nvidia provide an estimate on when Optix will support the new RTX cores in Turing? We’re now five months after the release of Turing, but still no news about Optix with Turing support. We were planning to invest time and resources into GPU ray tracing in the next few months, but this lack of information is quite disturbing.
I do not expect NVIDIA will share an update on the forums. Quoting Ankit Patel's answer from last Novemeber:
Count me in as an interested party for this answer as well.
I think it is really unprofessional (bordering with fraudulent because advertised features do not work!) to sell us a product which we can’t actually use in full capacity for more than 5 months after purchase.
Or maybe NVIDIA management believes expensive hardware purchases can now be treated like game preorders (sell all features at full price, release half-baked, fix later if ever)?
@fwyzard: Thanks for the quote. I’m really surprised that Nvidia or the Optix team isn’t sharing more information.
We were hoping to buy a bunch of Quadro RTX 6000 cards, but I can’t really justify such a purchase in front of management when there’s no software making use of it.
It is much worse than just OptiX:
I always praise NVIDIA for best in class developer support compared to other vendors (AMD, maybe even Intel), but given the list above my arguments are wearing thin.
Yeah, much like 9 women won’t deliver a baby in 1 month.
The worst part of all this?
It makes both consumers and developers sound impatient and entitled.
The fact is we ARE entitled – we paid good money for it which makes NVIDIA’s behavior really inexcusable. Someone should be taking NVIDIA to court over this.
Not trying to sound negative, but I am anxious to try the new RTX cores and see the 8x performance boost in ray tracing. I guess I will try Vulkan (which apparently does support them already) instead of waiting around.
Dear @SuperGastrocnemius and @levicki,
We hear and acknowledge your frustration, we really do. We are excited about the next version of OptiX and we are dying to share it with you as soon as we can.
Let me give you as much information as I can. There are a few assumptions mixed into this discussion, so maybe I can shine a little light on some of these things.
First and most important: we want to release OptiX with RTX support, trust me, even more than you guys want it released. We are working with our NDA partners to shake out the issues with OptiX 6 before we make it generally available. It is later than we hoped, but it is coming. That said, we simply cannot discuss the date before it is finished being tested, approved, documented and formally announced. No amount of discussion here will change that. Please consider whether you’d feel differently, and how, if we had announced it officially and then delivered it late or with low quality.
There is a PM on this forum and the answers here are official. In fact there are no mods on the OptiX forum that are not also OptiX team members, either engineers or managers. We don’t have any separate staff or forum mods for OptiX support.
We, the OptiX team, can’t speak to the video codecs at all. I don’t know anything about the issues you brought up, but you might want to bring up your issues on the video codec forum, or contact NVIDIA support directly. https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/board/244/video-codec-sdk/
Apple is responsible for releasing Apple drivers. The OptiX team has no control over Mac drivers at all. We are also sad that we can’t ship OptiX for Mac right now, as many people on our team have Macs.
Above all, thank you guys for your interest in OptiX and your patience.
David.
Dear David,
I understand that other issues mentioned in my post are not related to OptiX (I was just making a list to let people know OptiX is not the only issue) so in order to stay on topic I will just reply to this part of your post:
Please consider whether you’d feel differently, and how, if we had announced it officially and then delivered it late or with low quality.
As a matter of fact, NVIDIA did announce Turing and its capabilities on August 20th, 2018 and we assumed that most of those capabilities will be there at product launch or a month later at most.
First RTX card was launched on September 20, 2018 and today is January 28th, 2019 – that is 87 business days in the USA, and I am being generous here by not including another 22 business days from August announcement to product launch.
So, NVIDIA did announce and not only it didn’t “deliver late or with low quality”, but didn’t deliver AT ALL and is keeping silent about it for MONTHS.
TL;DR – NVIDIA has our money, but we don’t have a fully working product this time around, and even considering the complexity involved it is taking unacceptably long.
Your teams might be sipping pinacoladas on the beach or they might be burning through a 14 hours per day 6 days per week crunch, but we are not seeing any commitment from NVIDIA because there is no ETA.
Please consider whether you’d feel differently, and how, if the roles were reversed and we were stonewalling you by hiding behind NDAs and other BS excuses after taking your money while flat out refusing to at least let you know when you will be able to utilize the full advertised potential of the product you bought 5 months ago.
It is even worse if, after so much time, the release date for Turing features (RT, Tensor, NVENC) is still unknown because that doesn’t inspire confidence in your brand. Trust is hard to gain but quick to lose.
Hey Igor,
I can see you’re upset, and I understand why. I have answered this thread’s question as directly as I can. The ETA will come with the official announcement. Until then, I can only confirm that we are working on it. I thought that might be some comfort, but if it doesn’t help you to hear confirmation that OptiX 6 is in progress, then maybe it would be better if I do not reply.
RTX features are currently available and accessible, both to consumers, and to developers using the DX and VK APIs. On the OptiX team, we are acutely aware of this fact, and like I and others have said, we’re working as fast as we can to release.
Your frustration is legitimate, but your complaints are not about NVIDIA or the RTX product or Turing features, the issue here is limited to the timing of the OptiX developer SDK. And we know. We hear you loud and clear. You’re talking directly to the team responsible. We love that you use OptiX, we don’t want to lose your trust, and we do want to give you an awesome ray tracing API that supports the hardware, we want that quite a bit, as a matter of fact. If you can hang on, we will get there.
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David.
@David, thanks for your reply, much appreciated.
I think the way the Turing GPUs were marketed five months ago, made expectations for these cards go through the roof. I really hope to see the same ray tracing speedup that was advertised in the slides and that we don’t have to hang on until GDC or GTC to get our hands on Optix 6.
This resembles Optix 3.0 and Kepler GPUs support. I remember our company buying new GPUs with Kepler core and my part of software was using Optix. How hard it is when you can’t even run your soft on newer GPUs and your boss doesn’t understand, WHY! GPU is NVidia, Optix is also NVidia… So, it is YOUR incorrect decision to use this piece of soft in company’s soft!
The same surprize was when NVidia decided to stop supporting 32 bit. Thanks to Optix team, they made special beta-version for me and people like me which was a workaround. But this was BETA, in commercial product!
People who can’t use RT cores now, you should be happy because you can just simply run Optix 5 on newer cards!
PS We stopped using Optix just after that situation and now I understand it was right decision. You can use it to make some student projects or for fun, but some serious soft - NO, unfortunately. I understand that Optix team works hard to make your best and wants to create better product, but you guys are still part of NVidia and these delays result in cancelling using Optix and even NVidia GPUs.
Imagine if NVidia just created new GPU but thermal case for it is delayed. And the cards are released into the market, they are potentially usable if you install your own cooling system.
I’m very pleased to announce that OptiX 6.0 has been released.
You will need a new display driver, 418 or higher. Happy Ray Tracing!
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David.
Hi David,
Thanks for the update.
I installed 418.81 driver and it seems that it breaks existing applications which use Iray and OptiX (namely DAZ Studio):
2019-02-05 18:30:10.337 WARNING: …........\src\pluginsource\DzIrayRender\dzneuraymgr.cpp(304): Iray ERROR - module:category(IRAY:RENDER): 1.5 IRAY rend error: CUDA device 0 (GeForce RTX 2080 Ti): an illegal instruction was encountered (while launching CUDA renderer in core_renderer_wf.cpp:437)
After this error, Iray falls back to CPU rendering.
That’s a really bad regression, hopefully NVIDIA can release hotfix driver fast.
Awesome news!! We will test the new Optix tomorrow.
@SuperGastrocnemius let us know how it goes!
@levicki I’m sorry to hear that, I’ve notified the Iray folks. I also hope we can get the fix out fast.
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David.
Hi Igor, there is a new 419 driver released this morning that fixes the issues with Iray. Official Drivers | NVIDIA
Sorry about the additional delay, and thank you for letting us know so quickly about the regression. Let us know if you have any further issues.
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David.
Hi David,
Thanks for letting me know. I downloaded them, and I will test it in a few minutes.
Can you share any news about Iray SDK update?
I installed the 419 driver and Iray appears to still default to the CPU if both are selected, and of course hangs if only the GPU is selected. Tried a clean install through the installer. Haven’t tried fully uninstalling drivers manually.
After doing a full clean install I managed to get Daz 3D’s Iray partially working. It still won’t render to image, but the preview works as long as it is in interactive mode. Curious if this is just me, or are the 419 drivers just unstable?