Nvidia launches RTX 2000 series

Any number of links will do, but might as well choose the first one...

https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/20/17758724/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-specs-pricing-release-date-features

I watched some of the launch on Twitch earlier, I have to say the ray tracing does look pretty cool. I also have to say I dislike the naming convention they've gone with, RTX 2080 sounds clunky to me - I know they wanted to differentiate it from Pascal but... meh

I also dislike the prices, but I'm renovating a house right now, so I rock a Galax 970 and will do until the 10 series gets affordable so it doesn't really bother me anyway - I'm more interested in the tech knowing I will get there at some point...

It seems likely the up to 6x performance will be limited to the more modern features and DX12 games, with gains for older titles I suspect will be much more modest, and probably only worth the upgrade if you want 4K at all times at this stage (assuming the benchmarks will bear that out).

Is anyone thinking of getting one, or maybe you have an eye on 10 series cards now, or even on a knock on effect on AMD's cards?

Neat, but the prices are absurd. These need to come down in price a lot for me to truly be interested, considering most developers will still be targeting the current gen consoles and any graphics improvements these bring will be fluff.

I'm glad to hear they're pushing for real-time raytracing. I've been out of the hardware scene for a while because it seemed like there weren't any interesting advancements.

When first reading this news I was really excited to see what a step up they are from the GTX 1000 series. However, having given some thought to how my Palit GameRock GTX 1080 Premium Edition is basically giving me 60 FPS 4k on everything I've thrown at it (including Forza Motorsport 7, Wolfenstein 2 and Doom 2016), and is normally massively underutilised, I'm not sure the upgrade is worth pursuing.

Looking at the numbers, an RTX 2080Ti would be better than the temporary twin SLi setup I had with my graphics cards, and if I sell my current remaining one for the same money as the other one went for, I'd have a net spend of roughly £650 on a FE model. I'd probably go for a vendor one with a minor OC if it's cheaper, though, like without the GTX 1080 I've got. Tempting, certainly, particularly if real-time ray tracing is widely adopted in the next games, but probably not strictly necessary.

11 hours ago, pritch said:

It seems likely the up to 6x performance will be limited to the more modern features and DX12 games, with gains for older titles I suspect will be much more modest, and probably only worth the upgrade if you want 4K at all times at this stage (assuming the benchmarks will bear that out).

 

Does this surprise you? Older games are inevitably limited by their implementation which was based on then current hardware and APIs.

And it has been stated countless times already that older APIs like DX11 or OpenGL do not have the means to keep up with modern graphics hardware.

Which means that either DX12 or Vulkan will be a requirement to fully exploit this hardware. If you think about it, you already need games written in such modern APIs to fully exploit today's hardware.

So yeah, for Doom ports this will probably bring no improvements at all, except for being able to render higher resolutions.

3 hours ago, Jerry.C said:

 

Does this surprise you?

 

Oh no, not at all. I suppose I was more raising an eyebrow to the whole 6x thing as a marketing ploy (I'm old enough to remember blast processing!).

All the same, I'm interested to see what the numbers will be on the established gen stuff when the benches start coming through. As Phobus said, the 1080 has been killing most things at 4K, but it'll be interesting to see what, if anything, 20xx can bring to the party beyond 60 fps (this is generally interesting to me because I've had the same 60hz 1080p monitor for years, and this is the next thing I'm likely to replace with something better). This of course is also relevant for the 2060 and 50ti in due course, and how they'll stack up value wise against used 10xx cards. Now more than ever it feels like they've waited forever to release a new series and it's still come too soon, for the gaming market at any rate. When the 10xx came out it seemed that 9xx prices didn't suffer a drop-off, but that was strongly influenced by peak mining, now I'm wondering if that will repeat itself, despite Nvidia pitching this as more of a tick than a tock, because the games just aren't here yet?

RIP Pre-rendering.

Where's my $4000 RTX Titan?

Great. I might be able to justify buying a 1080 in a few months once prices go down. I'm still pretty happy with my 760.

I honestly just find this whole obsession with ray tracing hilarious. ATI did this 10 years ago with the HD 4800 series. They had that Crossfire 4800 series live rendered ray tracing tech demo.

No one cared.

But when Nvidia does it...

10 years ago no one cared because it simply was not usable under real world conditions. Hell, 10 years ago, hardware was barely capable of programmable shading for the first time. I cannot even find what this was all about, it seems to have gotten lost in the vastness of the internet.

But if this actually works in real time it will be huge. Of course its viability first needs to be proven, but mark my words: This is the first step into a new era of hardware rendered graphics.

And remember: You cannot expect the first step to be an unqualified success, but as a whole real time ray tracing is what every developer had been wishing to use in their games for decades, it just was too slow. And even if this first generation of capable hardware may be too expensive or not powerful enough to do it at a fluent 60 Hz, this won't mean the end. Just like programmable shaders got better and more performant over the years, so will this.

On 8/23/2018 at 7:05 AM, Jerry.C said:

And remember: You cannot expect the first step to be an unqualified success...

Truth.

I look forward to this path more so than VR, which to me seems like a gimmick (unless its being used for simulators, which in that case I'm really hyped and hope for a virtual cockpit for flight simulators).

My comment was more so to point out the irony.

It looks ok so, but I've only seen examples of hard reflections so far, which isn't that exciting. If it can handle refraction, occlusion/radiosity and subsurface scattering in real-time, then that's a big deal and possibly worth the bucks they're asking for.

On 8/23/2018 at 11:55 AM, Jello said:

Great. I might be able to justify buying a 1080 in a few months once prices go down. I'm still pretty happy with my 760.

And I thought I was far behind with my 960. :P

I will most likely be replacing my aging 3770k & 2x680GTX setup later this year. Need to see some reviews first though.

I think I'll keep my 970 another two years.

Idk the RTX 2070 looks like a heavy contender to the 1080 while way cheaper. Even before more support from games themselves. (not to mention the newer shader model and all the stuff that aren't tested yet)

1 hour ago, Avoozl said:

And I thought I was far behind with my 960. :P

And me with my 950.

Tell that to my 650... But since I do not play modern games there's hardly any point upgrading. Doom ports won't run better for it.

6 minutes ago, Jerry.C said:

Tell that to my 650... But since I do not play modern games there's hardly any point upgrading.

Except once your computer breaks down, you will be going for a new computer.

Who wouldn't? But it really pays off not to go cheap on the CPU, that'll really allow it to last for many years.

1 hour ago, Jerry.C said:

Tell that to my 650... But since I do not play modern games there's hardly any point upgrading. Doom ports won't run better for it.

If you use the hardware renderer in ports like GZDoom I believe graphics cards affect it. 

2 minutes ago, Novaseer said:

If you use the software renderer in ports like GZDoom I believe graphics cards affect it. 

I think you meant OpenGL.

17 minutes ago, Jerry.C said:

Who wouldn't? But it really pays off not to go cheap on the CPU, that'll really allow it to last for many years.

And GPU. Sheesh, a powerful machine really isn't cheap, which is why I'm moving to console when it comes to games.

Just now, Agent6 said:

 

I think you meant OpenGL.

Oh yeah, I did. Sorry. I'll edit it, hang on.

6 minutes ago, Novaseer said:

If you use the hardware renderer in ports like GZDoom I believe graphics cards affect it. 

Surely it does. But the only thing this card cannot do is using shadowmaps at full resolution. I have to reduce this from 1024 to 128 to make it work without slowdowns. Aside from that, GZDoom is hardly an engine that can put a modern graphics card under full load.

45 minutes ago, Agent6 said:

And GPU. Sheesh, a powerful machine really isn't cheap, which is why I'm moving to console when it comes to games.

If you want a powerful computer, you need money. Consoles have hardware that is less powerful than what a powerful computer would be, so that's why they tend to cost less. There's a reason why Xbox One S and Xbox One S cost more than the Xbox One. Same for PS4 Pro.

@Jerry.C unless you have a laptop with a crappy intel HD like me where if you try to put AO on it tanks the framerate from 150 to 8 :(

That's hardly a "modern" graphics card...

The CPU in my system comes with an Intel HD 4000 and just for fun I once installed drivers for it and ran GZDoom. It clearly was underwhelming to put it mildly.

I'm waiting for real benchmarks.  Their marketing sounds fishy to me at the moment, it's like Nvidia's argument is "but it does raytracing" to justify their absurd prices.

The price would be absurd if it didn't sell for it. But from the looks of it the enthusiasts cannot wait to own one and are willing to pay that price. Why not milk those people up front before servicing the mainstream customers. These are essentially what finances NVidia's research.