Nvidia ,Rtx2080ti,2080,2070, information thread. Reviews and prices September 14.

[cmdrdredd]

Except we have heard that DLSS renders at low resolution by default which is why it gets a performance boost and rendering at high rez likely gets a significant performance hit.

Thing is a lot of us expect a sizeable performance jump just from dropping the card in. Before any special developer additions, patches, and proprietary stuff is even used.

 

[AtenRa]

Dont get me wrong but personally from this demo it makes the game worse artistically, it feels like turning RT on is like increasing the contrast of your monitor.
Unlike the BF demo that the reflections in windows were looking like the real thing and enhancing the game, here in this demo RT is ruin the aesthetics/atmosphere (dark forest) of the game.

 

[Malogeek]

How about you feast your eyes over this fantastic Metro GI video. This is what ray tracing truly means. And this is a monstrous game changing visual upgrade.

Yep looks fantastic, it's going to be great playing something like that in 3-5 years from now. At the moment something like that is 1080p at barely 30hz on a $1300+ 2080ti.

Don't get me wrong, it's great that we're finally getting hardware dedicated to bring RT into gaming hybrid rendering and it's going to be the early adopters, those willing to spend much higher amounts than before, to initiate the base for both Nvidia and developers to start investing in this.

 

[Tweak155]

I had a gigabyte 1080ti oc model when it first came out. It had tons of issues, just not stable at all even at the factory oc modes it came with like game mode, etc. I returned it to Newegg and luckily they were out of stock so they refunded me otherwise they would have just sent another or I'd have to pay restocking.

I ended up with the strix oc model and it's been great. Although I hear if you have issues with Asus the process isn't any easier. Never tried msi but I know it's a safe bet with evga for sure.

Off topic, but a friend of mine and myself bought 2 used GTX 1080 ti OC Strix and his ended up developing a fan issue.

Not only did Asus accept his request for RMA without hassle (even though he is not the original owner as clearly outlined in their RMA policies), the day they got his card in, they sent out a brand new unused (although brown boxed) as a replacement the same day. His turn around time was not even 10 days. I was very impressed.

 

[LTC8K6]

DLSS provides image quality that is similar to TAA, with much improved performance. The much faster raw rendering horsepower of RTX 2080 Ti, combined with the performance uplift from DLSS and Tensor Cores, enables RTX 2080 Ti to achieve 2x the performance of GTX 1080 Ti.

Turing with 4K DLSS is Twice the Performance of Pascal with 4K TAA

From the white paper.

 

[Muhammed]

Except we have heard that DLSS renders at low resolution by default which is why it gets a performance boost and rendering at high rez likely gets a significant performance hit.

It's not low resolution, it's slightly lower resolutions.
NVIDIA shipped DLSS game demos already to the press, you will see at least 50% uplift in performance just from activating it on an RTX 2080 for example. And without any IQ loss whatsoever.

 

[Muhammed]

Dont get me wrong but personally from this demo it makes the game worse artistically, it feels like turning RT on is like increasing the contrast of your monitor.

It looks way more natural to me. It's actually stunning. Finally I can play a game with dynamic GI in my lifetime.

t the moment something like that is 1080p at barely 30hz on a $1300+ 2080ti.

It's going to be 1080p60 in Metro Exodus without DLSS. 1440p60 with it. This is the plan. As I said none of the games shown have any active denoisers in them. denoising will boost ray tracing fps considerably, and DLSS will do the rest.

 

[dlerious]

Video on pricing scheme.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebxp0Ie_abI

 

[coercitiv]

It looks way more natural to me. It's actually stunning. Finally I can play a game with dynamic GI in my lifetime.

Actually it's not stunning at all, not anywhere the way a human eye would perceive that scene. In the example AtenRa posted the RTX Off screenshot is borderline more realistic. Sure it lacks contrast, but the RTX On screenshot is downright drowned, with completely crushed dynamics just to prove a point. It's like listening to a compressed radio mix and pretending the music has more detail.

It's clear RT can bring a new level of realism in games for lighting & reflections, but as far as that demo is concerned, if you are really "stunned" and "glad to experience this during your lifetime"... all I can say is I don't want a taste of whatever you're having.

 

[Dribble]

Except we have heard that DLSS renders at low resolution by default which is why it gets a performance boost and rendering at high rez likely gets a significant performance hit.

Thing is a lot of us expect a sizeable performance jump just from dropping the card in. Before any special developer additions, patches, and proprietary stuff is even used.

DLSS is an image enhancement technique - it can be lower resolution->higher resolution, no AA->AA, raytracing noise->clean. It doesn't matter. All the AI super computer takes is a load of the load quality (for whatever reason) and the perfect high quality images and learns to go from one to the other using maths. The output is a program that encapsulates what it's learned and can run real time on tensor cores.

As I understand it there is one mode where it upscales so goes from say 1440p to 4k. As the tensor cores are independent then the base line performance will basically be 1440p with no AA. Another mode (DLSS 2) goes from 4k no AA to 4k with very good AA, so the base line performance there is going to be 4k with no AA.

Actually it's not stunning at all, not anywhere the way a human eye would perceive that scene. In the example AtenRa posted the RTX Off screenshot is borderline more realistic ......

All the ray tracing is bad/unrealistic talk this reminds me so strongly of when we first got HDR lighting, but Ati couldn't do it to the same quality Nvidia could (DX9b vs 9c). Everyone with red leanings was convinced the effect was terrible and they hated it! Then Ati caught up and now we all think it's great.

 

[Muhammed]

Sure it lacks contrast, but the RTX On screenshot is downright drowned, with completely crushed dynamics just to prove a point. It's like listening to a compressed radio mix and pretending the music has more detail.

clearly you didn't watch the rest of the video. there are far better scenes that demonestrate the advantages of dynamic gi.

I don't really understand how can you say RTX off looks good! it's like saying dynamic lighting looks worse than static lighting. There is a vast difference between the two. The dynamic thing is always better, especially in motion.

but as far as that demo is concerned, if you are really "stunned" and "glad to experience this during your lifetime"... all I can say is I don't want a taste of whatever you're having.

Different tastes I guess.

 

[sze5003]

Off topic, but a friend of mine and myself bought 2 used GTX 1080 ti OC Strix and his ended up developing a fan issue.

Not only did Asus accept his request for RMA without hassle (even though he is not the original owner as clearly outlined in their RMA policies), the day they got his card in, they sent out a brand new unused (although brown boxed) as a replacement the same day. His turn around time was not even 10 days. I was very impressed.

Yeah that's good to know. Perhaps things have changed. I'm glad mine did not exhibit any issues. Hopefully it stays this way for now. Or at least until I get a new one.

 

[Kenmitch]

It's not low resolution, it's slightly lower resolutions.
NVIDIA shipped DLSS game demos already to the press, you will see at least 50% uplift in performance just from activating it on an RTX 2080 for example. And without any IQ loss whatsoever.

Things like this were frowned upon in the past and called cheats. I guess it's acceptable now and justifies the higher pricing.

Using the above photo examples I'd prefer to play in the RTX off mode myself. RTX on looks silly too me. Take away the ON and OFF logos and I'd still feel the same. Off is like the Pirates of the Caribbean while On is like Toontown....Yep a ultra rare disney analogy while discussing gpus.

I can't wait for the comparison videos of how RTX on makes the scenes look silly. Of course we'll have to wait for end users or non sponsored reviews too see the effects. Maybe somebody will make a RTX On greatest blunders video for our amusement.

 

[AtenRa]

There is one more problem with this picture,
If you Render this frame with real RayTracing, the corridor after the wooden bridge wouldnt be dark and black. Due to the rays bouncing from all the materials around (Stones on the left etc) the corridor would be illuminated even without a direct sun exposure, but here with the RT ON we have the exact opposite effect.

 

[zinfamous]

They don't need to go 4K. Just 1440p60 or 1440p50 would be mighty fine with the amazing GI, reflections and shadows from ray tracing.


LOL! Are you some kind of developer or what? Of course we will! See you after they do it. I just hope you will have the guts to admit you were wrong. Although looking at the whole Vega Primitive shader fiasco doesn't give me much hope.

Wow, now there's a huge unintended criticism of this card: "People want to pay $1200+ to play at sub-4K resolutions with some negligible eye- candy, in 2018!" OF course, we could all do that for the last 3 or even 4 years, at half that price or maybe less.

I'm sorry, but any defense of this card's value below 4K can only ever be a criticism of its performance.

 

[sze5003]

I'll be honest I didn't order based on rtx. I don't consider something that has yet to be fully implemented, a selling feature. I saw the initial benches at 4k ultra and I said you know what I like that, looks decent and want to see a bit more. If it turns out they are actually worse I can always cancel my backorder in a day or two.

What I'm really curious is actually gameplay with rtx on at 1440p. I want to see those numbers. Because if that gets decent fps I will use it as I have a 1440p monitor. If not, I have been planning to go to 4k which was my real interest as having a card that can do better at 4k ultra.

Buying just on rtx alone seems dumb in my opinion. Games have to implement it and it will take time for optimizations. The cards are not powerful enough to provide these features at anything other than 1080p for now.

 

[Hitman928]

As I said none of the games shown have any active denoisers in them. denoising will boost ray tracing fps considerably, and DLSS will do the rest.

Every game that has shown RTX has used denoisers. It's a requirement given the current implementation, otherwise the scenes would all look like a static mess. Unless you mean they're not using the AI denoisers, that I haven't seen anyone say anything about except Dice who said they aren't using them for BF5. Not sure how much of a performance increase using the AI will give, there's some pretty good and fast denoisers out there that don't need learning cores.

Another question is if you can use DLSS and have AI denoisers at the same time? My thought is no, because the AI cores would be occupied doing one or the other and would bottleneck the scene trying to do both at the same time, but I haven't seen this addressed at all either. There's still A LOT we don't know about RTX implementation and limitations.

 

[Muhammed]

"People want to pay $1200+ to play at sub-4K resolutions with some negligible eye- candy, in 2018!" OF course, we could all do that for the last 3 or even 4 years, at half that price or maybe less.

If you don"t care about RTX thats fine. Enjoy the 40% uplift above the 1080Ti, it should come in handy @4K.

 

[zinfamous]

If you don"t care about RTX thats fine. Enjoy the 40% uplift above the 1080Ti, it should come in handy @4K.

Except I am unwilling to pay ~100% more for 40% greater performance, all else being equal.

It is irrational to defend this reality, and represents the absolute worst generational advancement in price/performance that I can remember.

Again, these cards wouldn't be getting so much flack if the pricing weren't so obviously extortionate.

 

[Kenmitch]

.

If you don"t care about RTX thats fine. Enjoy the 40% uplift above the 1080Ti, it should come in handy @4K.

Wouldn't it be best to just wait for the official reviews before defending something that may or may not need defending at all?

 

[Hitman928]

As I understand it there is one mode where it upscales so goes from say 1440p to 4k. As the tensor cores are independent then the base line performance will basically be 1440p with no AA. Another mode (DLSS 2) goes from 4k no AA to 4k with very good AA, so the base line performance there is going to be 4k with no AA.

That's what I thought at first too but then Nvidia had a blog post where they specifically say they are rendering at a lower than target resolution to begin (for DLSS). For instance, if you want to game at 4K, they are rendering the game at sub 4K resolution (how much lower is unknown though to get their 2x performance figure, you'd think it's at or close to 1/2 resolution, so 1440p in this case), then taking a 64x super sampled render (64x of 4K I'm assuming) and then letting the AI cores infer what the 1440p render would look like at 4K without aliasing.

So basically you get a 1440p render upscaled to 4K and then sharpened with AI. How well this works is yet to be seen as Nvidia has been really coy with giving direct comparisons. For instance, when they were comparing image quality of TAA to DLSS, it was actually DLSS2x that they were comparing image quality to but then the performance comparison was to DLSS. DLSS2x uses an actual 64x resolution render as the sample space and then the details from there are unclear. My guess is that DLSS2x gives worse than TAA performance but at high image quality.

All the ray tracing is bad/unrealistic talk this reminds me so strongly of when we first got HDR lighting, but Ati couldn't do it to the same quality Nvidia could (DX9b vs 9c). Everyone with red leanings was convinced the effect was terrible and they hated it! Then Ati caught up and now we all think it's great.

To be fair, implementation matters. The first HDR examples weren't all great and some looked downright silly. Given some time, developers learned to use HDR effectively while GPUs improved in performance and could handle rendering HDR light while providing good fps and now HDR lighting is ubiquitous in modern gaming and it looks great. I expect the same will happen with ray tracing.

 

[LTC8K6]

There is one more problem with this picture,
If you Render this frame with real RayTracing, the corridor after the wooden bridge wouldnt be dark and black. Due to the rays bouncing from all the materials around (Stones on the left etc) the corridor would be illuminated even without a direct sun exposure, but here with the RT ON we have the exact opposite effect.

I believe that is rendered plausibly.

 

[LTC8K6]

How much better do you think the 20 series cards will be as drivers (and maybe game patches) improve?

 

[Hitman928]

There is one more problem with this picture,
If you Render this frame with real RayTracing, the corridor after the wooden bridge wouldnt be dark and black. Due to the rays bouncing from all the materials around (Stones on the left etc) the corridor would be illuminated even without a direct sun exposure, but here with the RT ON we have the exact opposite effect.

Dice talked about how for performance reasons, they had to limit the number of bounces a ray could take. Since they are only doing reflections in BF5, that meant that you could only get a reflection of a reflection so many times (I think 4-5 times) before they switched to a cube map ("old school" reflection technique) to finish the render. So in BF5, if you looked in two parallel mirrors you'd only see like 5-6 reflections of yourself whereas in reality you'd have an infinite number of reflections limited only by your ability to see them.

I imagine developers using RTX for GI have to do the same thing where each ray is limited to a certain number of bounces meaning that you won't always get proper indirect illumination and it will probably fall back to some form of pre-baked lighting. I don't know for sure if that's what's happening here, but it's a probable explanation. I'm sure studios are working on the optimal performance to image quality balance and in the end you may get better or worse ray tracing as a trade off for better or worse performance. Dice also talked about experimenting with some sort of ray tracing slider so the user could make the trade-off themselves based on their level of performance and quality preference.

 

[psolord]

It's not low resolution, it's slightly lower resolutions.
NVIDIA shipped DLSS game demos already to the press, you will see at least 50% uplift in performance just from activating it on an RTX 2080 for example. And without any IQ loss whatsoever.

If Nvidia can sell these things at these prices, we are talking about a huge IQ loss unfortunately.