I'd never have thought the arrival of actual functional real-time raytracing would be met with such disdain. No, wait, it was pretty much expected that anything other than the 2080Ti launching at 970 prices would be met with wailing and gnashing of teeth. I feel slightly more vindicated on jumping on the notionally-more-expensive-except-for-AIB-and-reseller-markup FE version, even if it's back to 8800GTX era pricing.
hm, one for £710, hopefully by xmas they will be about £650. I still wont be buying one tho until there is a good second hand market for them,
Yup, that’s me officially no longer in the enthusiast bracket. £700 was hard enough to swallow for the 1080ti, but nearly double? Shove it right up your hoop!
Don't get me wrong, the technology is breathtaking for sure, I was astonished enough to get dodgy looks on the train home, but those prices are also breathtaking. A 2070 FE is £570, so you can bet the top vendor cards like the Evga Cheesecake will be crica £650 at least. That's more than twice the cost of my 970 from just 4 years ago. In 2012 my old i5 3570k cost £175.00 (as per bt review price), 5 1/2 yeares later the equivalent i5 with 2 extra cores cost £260 on release. A 115% cost increase for the "equivalent" gpu vs a 50% cost increase for the "equivalent" cpu over a 25% greater timeframe. That, in my opinion, is outrageous.
It's going to be tricky to tell what the 'equivalent' GPU is until some benchmarking has been performed. "The last two numbers are the same, so it must be the same" has never been a good purchasing strategy (plus the 9xx series was also a huge outlier in pricing). If value for money is you concern then price/performance is the metric you should be looking at, and the product name is about as relevant as box art.
That's kind of why I gave it the old inverted commas, but although it's just a name, it's still the same rung in their performance ladder: Ti>80>70>60>50. It could be Bob>Burt>Bill>Barry>Brian, but third card down the pecking order is still the third card down. If 2018 Bill outperforms a 2016 Bob that's progress, that's development, that's their entire purpose. Charging us twice as much because 'we made it too fast' is total BS. A 1070 beats a 980ti in most scenarios, but didn't cost as much. Now we're paying Bob prices for Bill. And Bill only has one leg. How much is down to lack of competition? Are we having to subsidise the subsidies given to developers as incentives to implement RTX? Is there a genuine cost increase for this particular gpu? Or gddr6? Or hens teeth in snake oil? Yeh it's been '10 years in the making', but all that means is someone dreamt up ray tracing then had to wait for technology to catch up to drive the programming for them to then put this technology in place. And it's one particular aspect of the cards. What's the relative performance without RTX razzle dazzles on? Imagine if we get the real reviews and there's only a 15-20% bump in performance on most titles because they're dedicating so much of the chip to this one technology. That'd really make your balls sting.
I put my 1080ti up for sale expecting a good price on the 2080ti but holy hell nvidia have shot them self's in the foot.
The same as I was expecting only those who pre-order a card to defend these outrageous prices. Talk about price/performance all you like, they have cornered the market and are gouging accordingly.
Wait, you've actually put the money down before the reviews are out? Surely that's like buying a car without test driving it??
Yes the prices are too high, don't get me wrong. But nvidias cards are becoming more complex and with more features and this time truly next generation tech. Not in any form a rehash or rebrand. This is 10 years in the making. So I can sorta understand the prices are higher as this isn't your average new GPU release that we are use too, but I think the gtx 10xx series price hike was unjustified but that leads us to them hiking it up from last gen (10xx). I think they should be more like: £450 - 500: RTX 2080 and £650 - 700 or the RTX 2080 ti. Are they going to be great cards yes, are they over priced yes, will they sell out regardless yes. Can they do what the hell they like till 2020 when Intel steps in and Amd graphics shut down yes. I'm personally looking forward to having 7nm Zen2 Ryzen cpu with ddr5 and a Intel GPU in 2020 ..
It seemed massively OTT in their demos, kind of like how HDR was when it first appeared. I've never seen that clear a reflection off any car for example, the Tomb Raider shadows were nice, but I wasn't blown away, the Metro room was ok. Also it wasn't great that in the BF5 demo, when they turned RT off it was as if they didn't do any lighting what-so-ever. The flamethrower ceased to have any light on the buildings and floor IIRC. And whoever does the window cleaning for those building in wartorn (was it germany?) country, I want to hire them because they were dazzling. There was also stuttering in the tomb raider games, and the real time star wars demo was done at 22fps. While this is a massive achievement, I doubt many people will want a massive performance hit that ray tracing looks like it'll introduce. Until we get benchmarks we can't know how good it actually is, and until we get games we won't know if devs will just 'REFLECT ALL THE THINGS!!!!1!' because they can. I'm waiting for a breakdown on the hardware as I generally find that an interesting read
When they showed that render at GDC in March, Nvidia used their $68,000 DGX render box to do the video at only 18fps. Now they show us a $1000 consumer GPU that can the same thing 20% faster!
I've seen the tested RT core performance of Turing in the Quadro cards, and it's the RT performance I'm most interesting for VR environments (having non-hackey lighting models makes a MASSIVE difference to environment realism) and non-rectilinear rendering (super-interesting for trying out some more obtuse optics). Raster performance can potentially remain 'good enough' at 1080Ti levels and still be suitable for what I want it for, though I'd expect some performance improvement due to the extra (~20%) CUDA cores. Plus there's a month for benchmarking before I need to pony up any cash (per-orders from Nvidia are charge-on-ship), and if it's anything like all the previous high-end launches in the event I need the cash back the resale market will be above RRP for a few weeks anyway. Or I can just return it, though dealing with Digital River always sucks so I'd much rather resell on Bit-tech for purchase price than refund.
...or like that 'this scene of a thing spinning towards the camera is blatantly for the 3d crowd' in a lot of films Personally, I think the first batch or raytracing-enabled games are going to look... not great... you'll see a lot of shoehorned in and/or OTT 'look, we have raytracing... look! look at the raytracing! LOOK AT IT!'... tl-dr: lots of trips into the uncanny valley.
I eagerly await the Nvidia 7040LE that can do it at 60FPS for a bargain price of £400. Yep, 100% agree. They'll dial it up to the max to try and show how awesome it is, just like, as you mention, they did with 3D. I actually liked some of the 3D effects in films when they were subtle and not OmFgInYoUrFaCe!1!1!!! Lets also hope that they get the performance up in tomb raider. 30FPS at 1080p in places, with a Ti....
Sounds similar to the introduction of tessellation which saw a "Tessellate all the things" approach, just because... The Ray Tracing tech is brilliant. How good it ends up being in games whilst the 2080/Ti are relevant (this is the key point - see HD5870 and Tessellation) is a very different question. The other question is in said games, how much better does it look vs the performance hit. This is all before we look at the hilarious price.
The man speaks sense! The memories rocking an Athlon XP and Radeon while sticking two fingers up at team green are very fondly kept!
I suspect RT for lighting may take off faster than expected, mainly because it makes things so much easier than stacking multiple lighting models to approximate the same results (OK, so you've got your point lights, your emulated area-lights, your global lights, your cubemaps, your transparency pass, your shadow pass, your soft shadows, your contact hardened shadows, your SSAO, etc...). If anything, Nvidia may have more trouble persuading developers not to skimp on raster lighting effects for newer games (which would result in them looking worse but performing 'better' than with RT lighting on older cards) once engine support is mature.
