Is anyone impressed by nVidia's RTX GPU's?

I sure am. Over the past half decade or so we have been seeing is improvements in performance which is great but not really improvements in graphics fidelity. With the introduction of Mantle (later Vulkan) in 2013 we got low level API's that are supposed to improve performance by removing any "overhead" during the communication between the GPU and coding of games so it's more "close to the metal". DX 12 did similar things but we never really got improvements in graphical features with DX 12 or Vulkan unlike previous iterations of DX generations like DX 11 or DX 9.0 with things like tesselation with DX 11.0.

I am glad that nVidia is trying to push Ray Tracing step by step. My GTX 1060 6GB can play pretty much all games maxed out at 1080P but I am not really seeing any major graphical improvements in games with the exception of few, even then graphical improvements aren't that big of a jump compare to previous iterations of games I have seen.

What is happening now is very similar to the early 2000's when we got programmable shaders like Pixel Shader 2.0 with GeForce 3 in 2001. nVidia improved upon the performance with GeForce 4 Ti and later the GeForce FX. Later with Pixel Shader 3.0 + HDR we got major improvements in graphics with games like Far Cry. I remember playing Far Cry with Pixel Shader 3.0 + HDR and the stunning graphics it produced on my GeForce 7600 GT. The water looked better and HDR was just graphics nirvana.

So, props to nVidia for trying to implement Ray Tracing. I expect similar thing to happen with Ray Tracing like what happened with days early days of Pixel Shader where by the second, third and forth iterations of GPU's that support Pixel shaders it will become more mainstream and more and more games will start to use it.

Only gripe is the price. Which we all know whose fault is that. ;)

Do you even know what HDR is?

yeah

Yes and no, yes in being impressed by the sense that some type of real time ray tracing is happening but at the same time not impressed about the performance hit and lack of real progression in performance of standard rasterization rendering from Pascal. Everyone that has Vega 56 or 1070+ type of gpu needs to bypass these cards until 7nm next year. Everyone that rushes out to get these cards are going to be kicking themselves..... when within a year's time Nvidia with 7nm will have the next series that will be nearly 2x faster across the board over 1st gen Turing.

It's a cool effect. Long time since it was first showed though.

Personally I think even the 2080Ti to weak in this regard to utilize it very well.

The last 2 gens had much bigger jumps in performance.

The 970 was able to fight against the 780ti and the 1070 was able match if not exceed the 980ti at times.

Now I am hearing that the 2080 it only a little bit better than the 1080ti. So the 2070 must only be a little better than the 1080.

Most likely not, if it has only 7.46 TFLOPS

@Xtasy26: I will be impressed once I see it within a game and not exaggerated as when Blur and DoF effects came out there were everywhere.

Do you remember NFS Underground blur effect? thank god it was a bit improved over Underground 2 and Most Wanted.

Also yeah it's nice to have special effects with our GPUs, since we don't want to stuck on console graphics and PCMR should lead graphical improvements as Crysis did and plenty PC exclusives back then.

I do remember upgrading from GeForce 4 to FX5000 series and actually gaining more colors on NFS Underground/Underground 2 (can't remember which one)

I think the demos look amazing.

While I'm not rushing out to buy one just yet, I'm really excited for the future. This also has applications for sound design and particle effects too.

Who knows? Maybe the future is actually more tensor cores for all the dynamic stuff, and traditional rasterization will only be used for static models and textures.

Game devs have already been praising the tech since it 'just works'. It allows them to focus less on the tricks to make things look more realistic and more on just making awesome environments.

@pyro1245: I just played BFV beta last night and it looked and ran pretty amazing without any ray tracing at 3440x1440 max settings while running at well over 60fps. No way I would play the game at 1080p/60fps just for ray tracing. Not going to happen. Especially not for $1200. LOL

@pyro1245: I think the price is what is causing the backlash, if a 2080 and a 1080 was the same price I don't think anyone would choose the 1080 over the 2080.

I think raytracing should be the future we have gone as far as we can with traditional rasterization, but for raytracing to catch on we need competition from amd and intel, the cpu side of hardware development is more competitive now with faster clocks, more threads and cores than ever before, its the gpu side of the equation that needs to make greater strides.

edit: I should say I think the majority would choose the 2080 over the 1080 if the prices were the same.

Well somebody has to start somewhere. GeForce 3 gave us programmable shaders with pixel shader 2.0 and made the games look better, obviously it made some baby steps and it wasn't that significant jump over GeForce 2 Ultra. It wasn't until GeForce 4 Ti that there was better performance with pixel shader 2.0. And after the GeForce FX and especially with GeForce 6000 series we saw huge jump in performance using programmable shaders. I expect to get a significant boost in performance in the generation after the RTX 2XXX series. And the generations after that I would expect to see significantly more games using Ray Tracing just like by 2004 major AAA titles all used programmable shaders, 3 years after programmable shaders was introduced. I expect by 2021 most games will have some form of Ray Tracing.

True true, the proof is in the pudding when we actually get to play games with Ray Tracing. Yes I do remember the NFS Underground blur effect. And I do remember it looking better with newer generation graphics cards that used pixel shader 2.0. Underground 1 and 2 didn't look as good and was actually missing some effects with GeForce 4. It wasn't until later on when I remember playing on my Mobility Radeon HD 3650 that I saw significant improvements in the graphics because it supported pixel shader 2.0/3.0 along with HDR.

I think the improvement was with Underground 2. And by Most Wanted we got HDR. See that's the kind of progress I am talking about. We need to give it 2 - 3 years at least for it to become more mainstream just like when programmable shaders came out.

No way I am saying current games look bad especially with the new Frostbite engine. I am actually in the process of downloading BFV. But we haven't seen the next great "leap" in graphics over the past decade or so. I just shake my head at the people who all of a sudden think that they can play at 4K with ray tracing. That's like expecting to play pixel shader 2.0 games at 1080P on GeForce 3 instead of 1024x768 or 1280x1024 back in 2001. Yes the price is insane. I am not going to argue that but we all know that's because nVidia has no competition in the high end unlike back in 2001 where we had GPU's like the ATI Radeon 8500 which went toe to toe with the GeForce 3 series.

Nah, pass. I am more interested in the upcoming CPU's.

These GPUs do not make sense in domestic settings (games and general use) or basic professionals (Photoshop, Premiere etc). It's like buying a racing car to go for bread... It serves, but there is no profit. Where it works is in a racing circuit.

This is GAMEspot, it has game in the title, its not DOMESTICspot or BASICPROFESSIONALspot, I highly doubt 99% of the people that come here don't talk/like games to some degree.

Why doesn't it make sense in games? Rather it's progressing gaming as it's introducing Ray Tracing and increasing the visuals of PC Gaming.