Hearthly wrote:
Doctor Glyndwr wrote:
Yes, but also no. The Porsche demo video was running on two Quadro RTX cards (I can't find out which ones, the top one cost $10k...) The Star Wars demo from E3 was done on (IIRC) 4x Titans. But
that same Star Wars demo can now be done on a single Quadro RTX, so there's a very significant performance boost from this new RTX engine. Of course these Quadro cards are aimed at digital artists and designers.
We won't know anything meaningful for us until we see the 2070 and 2080 unveiling and find out what they are capable of. It seems unlikely anyone is going to be releasing fully ray-traced games anytime soon. The question is then: how successful will Nvidia be at creating a hybrid raytraced/rastered image pipeline (this was explicitly discussed yesterday as a goal), and then encouraging games developers to adopt it?
What I was getting at is exotic hardware compared to any sort of normal home setup that's likely to exist in the near future. Even a single 2080 is likely to cost £500-£600 or more, that's pretty exotic by most folks' standards.
Looking at the raw power of the 2070/2080 compared to the current cards, yes they're more powerful but not massively so, and the RTX engine can only do so much. (i.e. It's likely to be a future card, or even more expensive card, that's actually capable of rendering RT games, even in a sort of hybrid mode.)
Also, if Nvidia do split the market between RTX and non-RTX cards, then you're only looking at a small subset of the market having the ability to run RTX games (and none of the console market).
It'd be nice if AMD could provide some meaningful competition in the GPU space, as Nvidia are now effectively competing with themselves, which means they can pull shit like fragmenting their own market because they're a borderline monopoly.
That said, if Nvidia do limit RTX to the top-end cards, and the only way to experience RTX enabled games is to bin what may otherwise be a perfectly good older GTX card (I'm not intending to replace my 1080 anytime soon), then how much of a market for RTX content will there really be?
(Yes I realise it'll get there in the end as the tech trickles down, of course.)
Whilst I have absolutely no doubt that RT is the next big thing I don't think it will be worth having for a while yet. The only title that has any mention of RT that I have seen is the new Metro, and even then it was silly stuff like a table lamp in a big room on a small corner table.
Then of course we have the dev cycle. 3-5 years on a big game.
And then finally, is what Nvidia has (and especially what will come to gamers) powerful enough to even run RT? I strongly doubt it. I think it will be a few more gens at least until we see something man enough. Using four Quadro cards is cheating tbh.
Then again I am being very pessimistic, so I really hope I am completely wrong (I just doubt it, having bought into so many junk techs over the years).
OK so I have been reading today and garnering opinions on the matter. A lot of truth tbh. Basically as we know AMD got the console contracts. This means that basically all devs will code for the consoles first (as per the norm) and then make the games work on a PC. But, due to the limitations of the AMD APU (well, I say that it's actually better than anything Nvidia had obs) it means that basically we are going to get console "like" games on a PC.
This explains a lot, and would be why not one single game has been released to take advantage of all of the cool things DX12 had going for it. Things like mGPU, explicit multi adaptor and so on. We were promised a replacement for SLi that would work better and work on any GPU combination. Thus far no games at all have used it to anything even resembling worthwhile. Opinion is that this is because the consoles come first, which makes a lot of sense.
Which kinda paints a pretty bleak picture of RT really doesn't it? I mean, if they are not even bothering with reasonably important coding for the PC it doesn't exactly fill me with hope that not only are they going to spend time and money on development, but to do so solely for one manufacturer (IE - Nvidia). Nvidia have obviously played it sensible by getting the next pretty big game onboard (Metro, will be the biggest game launched for a while) to make sure that loads of people buy into RT. It just concerns me (or rather doesn't actually) as to what future it will have.