Relationship between graphic cards and graphic engines like Unreal 5?

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I see companies like NVidia constantly releasing changes that immediate impact gaming visuals (ex full ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077). How do these take affect without the graphic engine changes. And vice versa, how do graphic engines constantly improve on existing hardware?

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6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Graphic card drivers do contain lots of little game specific hacks (that’s what the “game ready” version of the driver means), usually to fix graphical glitches or improve performance, but for any major features they do need to be implemented in the game engine.

For example I’ve seen plenty of press releases for CDPR adding support for things like full path raytracing to Cyberpunk 2077, but not for NVIDIA adding features to games on their own. Do you have a link for the press release you saw? Potentially game devs can be given early access to new drivers so features can be enabled as soon as the driver is released publicly.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Hardware changes need the graphics engine to be modified, especially with something as different as ray tracing. There will have been a lot of communication between Nvidia and the engine developers to ensure that everything is hooked up correctly and functioning as expected.

When going the other way (graphics engines improving without new hardware), this is because graphics hardware is programmable (if you’ve ever heard of a shader, this just means a program running directly on the GPU). This means that new effects can be designed that run quickly on the hardware, without needing hardware to be changed to specifically support the effect. The downside is that lots of fancy effects require the GPU to do more work, so performance reduces.

Raytracing is a very tricky problem, and can’t really be implemented quickly just with shaders, it needs a large amount of special hardware.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Hardware changes need the graphics engine to be modified, especially with something as different as ray tracing. There will have been a lot of communication between Nvidia and the engine developers to ensure that everything is hooked up correctly and functioning as expected.

When going the other way (graphics engines improving without new hardware), this is because graphics hardware is programmable (if you’ve ever heard of a shader, this just means a program running directly on the GPU). This means that new effects can be designed that run quickly on the hardware, without needing hardware to be changed to specifically support the effect. The downside is that lots of fancy effects require the GPU to do more work, so performance reduces.

Raytracing is a very tricky problem, and can’t really be implemented quickly just with shaders, it needs a large amount of special hardware.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Graphic card drivers do contain lots of little game specific hacks (that’s what the “game ready” version of the driver means), usually to fix graphical glitches or improve performance, but for any major features they do need to be implemented in the game engine.

For example I’ve seen plenty of press releases for CDPR adding support for things like full path raytracing to Cyberpunk 2077, but not for NVIDIA adding features to games on their own. Do you have a link for the press release you saw? Potentially game devs can be given early access to new drivers so features can be enabled as soon as the driver is released publicly.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Graphic card drivers do contain lots of little game specific hacks (that’s what the “game ready” version of the driver means), usually to fix graphical glitches or improve performance, but for any major features they do need to be implemented in the game engine.

For example I’ve seen plenty of press releases for CDPR adding support for things like full path raytracing to Cyberpunk 2077, but not for NVIDIA adding features to games on their own. Do you have a link for the press release you saw? Potentially game devs can be given early access to new drivers so features can be enabled as soon as the driver is released publicly.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Hardware changes need the graphics engine to be modified, especially with something as different as ray tracing. There will have been a lot of communication between Nvidia and the engine developers to ensure that everything is hooked up correctly and functioning as expected.

When going the other way (graphics engines improving without new hardware), this is because graphics hardware is programmable (if you’ve ever heard of a shader, this just means a program running directly on the GPU). This means that new effects can be designed that run quickly on the hardware, without needing hardware to be changed to specifically support the effect. The downside is that lots of fancy effects require the GPU to do more work, so performance reduces.

Raytracing is a very tricky problem, and can’t really be implemented quickly just with shaders, it needs a large amount of special hardware.