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  • xXx][Zenith - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link

    Nice write-up! With 25% of the chip area dedicated to Tensor Cores and other 25% to RT Cores NVIDIA is betting big on DLSS and RTX for gaming usecases. With all the architectural improvements, better memory compression ... AMD is out of the game, quite frankly.

    Btw, for the fans of GigaRays/Sec, aka CEO metric, here is a Optix-RTX benchmark for Volta, Pascal and Maxwell GPUs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULtXYzjGogg

    OptiX 5.1 API will work with Turing GPUs but will not take advantage of the new RT Cores, so older-gen NV GPUs can be directly compared to Turing. Application devs need to rebuild with Optix 5.2 to get access to HW accelarated ray tracing. Imho, RTX cards will have nice speedup with Turing RT Cores using GPU renderers (Octane, VRay, ...) but the available RAM will limit the scene complexity big time.
  • blode - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link

    hate when i lose a game before my opponent arrives
  • eddman - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link

    As far as I can tell, GigaRays/Sec is not an nvidia made term. It's been used before by others too, like imagination tech.

    The nvidia made up term is RTX-ops.
  • xXx][Zenith - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link

    Ray tracing metric without scene complexity, viewport placement is just smoke and mirrors ...

    From whitepaper: "Turing ray tracing performance with RT Cores is significantly faster than ray tracing in Pascal GPUs. Turing can deliver far more Giga Rays/Sec than Pascal on different workloads, as shown in Figure 19. Pascal is spending approximately 1.1 Giga Rays/Sec, or 10 TFLOPS / Giga Ray to do ray tracing in software, whereas Turing can do 10+ Giga Rays/Sec using RT Cores, and run ray tracing 10 times faster."
  • eddman - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    I don't know the technical details of ray tracing, but how is that nvidia statement related to scene complexity, etc?

    From my understanding of that statement, they are simply saying that turing is able to deliver far more rays/sec than pascal, because it is basically hardware-accelerating the operations through RT cores but pascal has to do all those operations in software through regular shader cores.
  • niva - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    If you hold scene complexity constant (take the same environment/angle) and run a ray tracing experiment, the new hardware will be that much faster at cranking out frames. At least that's how I'm interpreting the article and the statement above, I'm not really sure if that's accurate though...
  • Yojimbo - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    When did Imgtec use gigarays? As far as I remember they didn't have hardware capable of a gigaray. They measured in hundreds of millions of rays per second, and I don't remember them using the term "megaray", either. Just something along the lines of "200 million rays/sec".
  • eddman - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    Why fixate on the "giga" part? I obviously meant rays/sec; forgot top remove the giga part after copy/paste. A measuring method doesn't change with quantity.
  • Yojimbo - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    Because the prefix is the whole point. The point is the terminology, not the measuring method. Rays per second is pretty obvious and has probably been around since the 70s. The "CEO metric" the OP was talking about was specifically about "gigarays per second". Jensen Huang said it during his SIGGRAPH presentation. Something like "Here's something you probably haven't heard before. Gigarays. We have gigarays."
  • eddman - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    What are you on about? He meant "giga" as in "billion". It's so simple. He said it that way to make it sound impressive.
  • Yojimbo - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    Of course he meant giga as in billion. Of course it's simple. But where did you see "gigarays/sec" before? You didn't. So as far as you know, it is an NVIDIA-made term.

    He said it that way because it's easier to talk about it that way, and because NVIDIA is making a marketing term out of it. And he introduced it with a joke.
  • edzieba - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    'Gigs' is an SI prefix. You put it in front of any unit to indicate 10^9 of that unit.
  • eddman - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    Why does it even matter?! As I pointed out, I meant to write "rays/sec". I forgot to take out the giga part after copy/paste.

    I'm pretty sure a lot of ray tracing developers have uttered the words "giga rays" before jensen.
  • markiz - Monday, September 17, 2018 - link

    Well car makers are also using kilowatts for engines. Bastards.
  • Yojimbo - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    Where do you get these die area estimates from?
  • edzieba - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    If you compare scaled die shots of Turing to Pascal (GP102), isolate an SM, and assume each CUDA core occupies the same die area, then the combination of Tensor and RT cores takes around 24% die area. This is more of an upper bound, as the CUDA cores are likely to be larger due to the concurrent execution capability, there is more space in the SM taken by memory, and more uncore taken by the NVLink interfaces
  • Yojimbo - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    Where are these die shots? Paste them? I think that people are looking at schematics, not die shots.
  • edzieba - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    Nvidia posted them (surprisingly correctly scaled) as part of the Turing unveil presentation.
  • Yojimbo - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    Can you link me to them and to an analysis of them?
  • 808Hilo - Sunday, September 16, 2018 - link

    So far 10% better than 1080ti and 15% over 1080. Really not worth it. Better spend money on MB, new chip, ram and fast SSD if coming from an older PC.
  • Spunjji - Monday, September 17, 2018 - link

    There's no such thing as a bad product, just bad pricing. AMD aren't out of the game but they are playing in an entirely different league.
  • siberian3 - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link

    Good architectural leap for nvidia but it is sad very few of gamers can afford the new cards.
    And AMD is not doing anything for 2018 and probably navi will be mid range on 7nm
  • V900 - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link

    Meh, it’s always been that way with the newest, fastest GPUs.

    Wait 6 months to a year, and prices will be where people with more modest budgets can play along.
  • B3an - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link

    You must literally live under a rock while also being absurdly naive.

    It's never been this way in the 20 years that i've been following GPUs. These new RTX GPUs are ridiculously expensive, way more than ever, and the prices will not be changing much at all when there's literally zero competition. The GPU space right now is worse than it's ever been before in history.
  • Amandtec - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link

    I read somewhere that
    8800GTX + inflation = 2080ti price
    Without factoring in inflation the prices seem unprecedented.
  • Yojimbo - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    And you must factor in inflation, otherwise you are just pushing numbers around.
  • Yojimbo - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    And comparing the 2080 Ti to previous flagship launch cards is not really proper. The 2080 Ti is a different tier of card. The die size is so much larger than any previous launch GPU. It's just a demonstration of the increase in the amount of resources people are willing to devote to their GPUs, not an indication of an inflation of GPU prices.
  • eddman - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    2006 $600 at 2018 dollar value = $750
  • Samus - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    What inflation, exactly are you talking about. The dollar hasn't had a substantial change in valuation for 20 years (compared to other first-world currency.)

    The USD inflation rate has averaged around 2.7%/year since 2000. That means one dollar in 2000 is now worth slightly less than $1.50 today. That means the top-of-the-line GPU released in 2000, I'd take a guess it was the Geforce2 GTS and/or the 3Dfx Voodoo5 5500, both cost $300.

    For those who want to throw in cards like the Geforce 2 Ultra and the Voodoo5 6000, the former a card for nVidia to 'probe' the market for how much they could milk it going forward (and creating the situation we have today) and the other a card that never actually "launched"...we can include them for fun. The Ultra launched at $500 (even though it was slower than the Geforce 3 that launched 3 months later) and the Voodoo5 6000 had an MSRP set by 3Dfx at $500.

    These were the most expensive gaming-focused GPU's ever made up until that date. Even SLI setups didn't cost $500 (the most expensive Voodoo2 card in the 90's was from Creative Labs @$229/ea - you needed two cards of course - so $460.)

    Ok, so you have the absolute cream-of-the-crop cards in 2000 at $500, one was a marketing stunt, and the other never launched because nobody would have bought it. Realistically the most expensive cards were $300. But we will go with $500.

    The most expensive high-end gaming focused cards now are $1000+

    That would assume an inflation rate of over 5% annually, or the value of the dollar DOUBLING over 2 decades. Which it didn't come close to doing.

    Stop using inflation as an excuse. It's bullshit. These companies are fucking greedy. Especially nVidia. They are effectively charging FOUR TIMES more than they used to for the same market segment card. 20 years ago you would have bought a TNT2 Ultra for $230 bucks and had the ultimate card available. Most people purchased entirely capable mainstream cards for $100-$150 like the TNT2 Pro or the Geforce2 MX400 that ran the most demanding games of the day like Counter Strike and Half-Life at 1024x768 in maximum detail.

    http://www.in2013dollars.com/2000-dollars-in-2018?...
  • Yojimbo - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    "What inflation, exactly are you talking about."

    CPI. Consumer Price Index. Even though inflation has been low for quite a while, $649 in 2013 is $697 today. That's almost $50 more, and it's enough to make up the difference between the 2013 launch price of the GTX 780 and the 2018 launch price of the RTX 2080.

    I'm not sure why you are talking about cards from 20+ years ago. It's not relevant to my reply. In any case, those cards were completely different. The die sizes were much smaller and the cards were much less capable. They did a lot less of the work, as much of it was done on the CPU. The CPU was much more important to the game performance than today, as was the RAM and other components that were worth spending money on to significantly improve the gaming performance/experience.

    "Stop using inflation as an excuse."

    I'm not using inflation as an excuse. I'm using inflation as a tool to accurately compare the prices of cards from different years. And doing so clearly shows that the claim that the OP made is wrong. My reply had nothing to do with whether cards were in general cheaper 20 years ago or not. It was in response to "These new RTX GPUs are ridiculously expensive, way more than ever". That's provably untrue. Why are you replying to me and arguing about some entirely different point I wasn't ever talking about?
  • Alistair - Sunday, September 16, 2018 - link

    Except for the GTX 780 was the worse nVidia release ever, at a terrible price. Nice try ignoring every other card in the last 10 years.
  • markiz - Monday, September 17, 2018 - link

    How can it be the same segment of the market, if the prices are, as you claim, double+?

    I mean, that claim makes no sense. It's not same segment. it's higher tier.

    I mean, who is to say what kind of an advancement in GPU and games have people supposed to be getting?

    Buy a 500$ card and max settings as far as they go and call it a day.
    If you are
  • Ej24 - Monday, September 17, 2018 - link

    The R&D for smaller manufacturing nodes hasn't scaled linearly. It's been almost exponential in terms of $/Sq.mm to develop each new node. That's why we need die shrinks to cram more transistors per square mm, and why some nodes were skipped because the economics didn't work out, like 20/22nm gpu's never existed. You're assuming that manufacturers have fixed costs that have never changed. The cost of a semiconductor fab, and R&D for new nodes has ballooned much much faster than inflation. That's why we've seen the number of fabs plummet with every new node. There used to be dozens of fabs in the 90nm days and before. Now it's looking like only 3 or 4 will be producing 7nm and below. It's just gotten too expensive for anyone to compete.
  • milkod2001 - Tuesday, September 18, 2018 - link

    All those ridiculous prices started when AMD have announced 7970 at $550 plus. NV had mid range card to compete with it: GTX 680 at the same price. And then NV Titan high end cards were introduced at $1000 plus. Since then we pay past high end prices for mid range cards.
  • futrtrubl - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    Just a bit on your math. You say $1 accounting for inflation of 2.7% over 18 years is now just less than $1.50. Maybe you are doing it as $1 * 18 * 1.027 to get that which is incorrect for inflation. It compounds, so it should be $1 * ( 1.027^18) which comes to ~$1.62. Likewise at 5% over 18 years it becomes $2.41.
  • Da W - Sunday, September 16, 2018 - link

    Since when does inflation work in the semiconductor industry?
  • Holliday75 - Monday, September 17, 2018 - link

    I was wondering the same thing. Smaller, faster, cheaper. For some reason here its the opposite....for 2 out of 3.
  • Yojimbo - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    "You must literally live under a rock while also being absurdly naive.

    It's never been this way in the 20 years that i've been following GPUs. These new RTX GPUs are ridiculously expensive, way more than ever, and the prices will not be changing much at all when there's literally zero competition. The GPU space right now is worse than it's ever been before in history."

    No, if you go back and look at historical GPU prices, adjusted for inflation, there have been other times that newly released graphics cards were either as expensive or more expensive. The 700 series is the most recent example of cards that were as expensive as the 20 series is.
  • eddman - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    No.

    https://i.imgur.com/ZZnTS5V.png

    This chart was made last year based on 2017 dollar value, but it still applies. 20 series cards have the highest launch prices in the past 18 years by a large margin.
  • eddman - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    There is one card that surpasses that, 8800 Ultra. It was nothing more than a slightly OCed 8800 GTX. Nvidia simply released it to extract as much money as possible, and that was made possible because of lack of proper competition from ATI/AMD in that time period.
  • Yojimbo - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    The sites I look at put $649 2013 dollars at about $700 today. They use the CPI, the Consumer Price Index. That is the standard way to compare values over consumer goods and cost of living in general between different years where the CPI has been recorded. I have no idea where the numbers in your chart have come from. For instance, by the CPI, the 7800 GTX 512, which was released in 2005, is about $840 in 2018 dollars, and $825 in 2017 dollars, far more than the $783 listed in your chart.

    Note that if you have a steady 2% inflation per year over 13 years you get a 29% increase in prices.
  • Yojimbo - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    And besides, your chart, even with the wrong numbers, doesn't show what you claim to show. The 780, the 280, the 8800 GTX, and the 7800 GTX all have launch prices around the RTX 2080, even though the RTX 2080 has a bigger die than any of them.
  • eddman - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    Yes it does. 2080 Ti is the most expensive geforce launch card. It's not my job, as a buyer, to dig up die sizes or even care about them. I only care about performance/price ratios which these cards are terrible at.
  • eddman - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    ... they are terrible because the price/performance ratio hasn't improved in any substantial way. 1080 Ti offered ~70% performance increase over 980 Ti for just ~8% higher launch MSRP.
  • Yojimbo - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    OK, so when GM produced the Hummer that's directly comparable to their Suburban because they were both SUVs. It's not your job to be an intelligent creature and realize that the Hummer opened up a new market segment. Instead, spend your energy resenting GM. You can do what you want but that doesn't make it rational.
  • eddman - Sunday, September 16, 2018 - link

    ... except a Hummer is a Hummer and a Suburban is a Suburban. They are not part of the same lineup. Also, a car is not a video card.

    2080 Ti directly follows 1080 Ti based on the naming. It's not my fault they did it. They could've named it 2090 Ti if they really meant it to be a different product category, but they didn't so based on common branding logic 2080 Ti is the successor to 1080 Ti and therefore it is not out-of-the-ordinary to expect close pricing.

    Rational? What I wrote is completely rational. It is you who is trying to somehow make it look that a ~42% price jump for a 40%-45% performance increase in regular rasterized games is ok. It is not. This is probably the worst generational price/performance ratio vs. the old gen I've seen.
  • eddman - Sunday, September 16, 2018 - link

    ... unless they plan on releasing GTX 2080 Ti/2080 at lower prices, but given the potential confusion that it might cause, probably not.
  • 0ldman79 - Sunday, September 16, 2018 - link

    Oddly enough, going by that comparison the H2 is built on the same platform as the Suburban.
  • Killmorefor - Sunday, September 16, 2018 - link

    That chart is pretty accurate, but would benefit from a 3D showing price drops after the next gen introduction. The chart apples, and but does not show the price jump before the chart started, nor the current jump for the next gen the OP has very good point.
  • markiz - Monday, September 17, 2018 - link

    Yeah, so what?
    I don't understand.. If the price is too high, they will not sell much.
  • gglaw - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    Why bother to make up statements claiming the prices are completely as expected with inflation added without even having a slight clue what the inflation rate has been in recent history? Outside of the very young readers here, most of us were around for 700 series, 8800, etc. and know first hand what type of changes inflation has had in the last 10-20 years. Especially comparing to the 980 Ti, and 1080 Ti, inflation has barely moved since those releases.
  • Spunjji - Monday, September 17, 2018 - link

    This. Most people here aren't stupid.
  • notashill - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    700 series wasn't even close. 780 was $650->adjusted ~$700, 780Ti was $700->adjusted ~$760. And the 780 MSRP dropped to $500 after 6 months when the Ti launched.
  • Santoval - Monday, September 17, 2018 - link

    Yes, Navi will be midrange, at around a GTX 1080 performance level, or at best a bit faster. They initially planned a dual Navi package for the high end, linked by Infinity Fabric, but they canned (or postponed) it, due to the reluctance of game developers to support dual-die consumer graphics cards (according to AMD). They might release dual Navi professional graphics cards though.
    Tensor and RT cores should not be expected either. These will have to wait for the post-Navi (and post-GCN) generation.
  • TropicMike - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link

    Good article. Lots of complicated stuff to try to explain.

    Just a quick typo on page 2: "It’s in pixel shaders that the various forms of lighting (shadows, reflection, reflection, etc) " I'm guessing you meant 'refraction' for one of those.
  • Smell This - Wednesday, July 3, 2019 - link

    Super **Duper** Turbo Hyper Championship Edition
  • Yaldabaoth - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link

    For the "eye diagram" on page 8, the texts says, "In this case we’re looking at a fairly clean eye diagram, illustrating the very tight 70ns transitions between data transfers." However, the image is labeled as "70 ps".
  • Ryan Smith - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link

    Nano. Pico. Really, it's a small difference... =P

    Thanks!
  • Bulat Ziganshin - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link

    It's not "Volta in spirit". It's Volta for the masses. The only differences
    - reduced FP64 cores
    - reduced sharedmem/cache from 128 KB to 96 KB
    - added RT cores

    Now let's check what you want to change to produce "scientific" Turing GPU. Yes, exactly these things. So, despite the name, it's the same architecture, tuned for the gaming market
  • Yojimbo - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    You don't really know that. This article, as explained in the beginning, focuses only on the RT core improvements. There are other Turing features that were left out. I think we have no idea if Volta has variable rate shading, mesh shading,or multi-view rendering. I'm guessing it does not.

    Besides, what you said isn't true even limiting the discussion to what was covered in this article. The Turing Tensor cores allow for a greater range of precisions.
  • Tamz_msc - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    "Besides, what you said isn't true even limiting the discussion to what was covered in this article. The Turing Tensor cores allow for a greater range of precisions."

    You mean lower precision, right? INT8 and INT4 are lower range. From a higher-level view Volta is very similar to Turing, just like the OP described.
  • Yojimbo - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    "greater range of precisions"

    INT8, INT4, FP16, etc., are precisions. The range of precisions an architecture can handle is the set of all precisions it can handle. Turing Tensor Cores can handle INT4, INT8, and FP16, whereas Volta Tensor Cores can handle FP16. So Turing can handle a greater range of precisions.
  • Bulat Ziganshin - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link

    I would pray for 2060 w/o all this RT/FP16 stuff
  • Spunjji - Monday, September 17, 2018 - link

    Seems likely given how nutso these die sizes are. I expect we won't see it until after Pascal inventory is cleared, though.
  • Da W - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link

    Well still playing on my 3-screen Haswell + GTX780 rig, and being pretty satisfied of it, i'll probably just get a cheap GTX 1070 or 1080 for my new Ryzen rig and wait if ray tracing really gets adopted in 1 or 2 years. Seems to me lots of transistors invested for not many games. If history told us anything, it's not because a technology is great that it will get adopted, especially if it asks LOADS more developper time for the game companies.

    Not sure AMD won't come up with something either down the line. They've been given for dead for over 2 decades, guess where they are now!
  • Holliday75 - Monday, September 17, 2018 - link

    I am waiting as well. This is the first attempt to change the game. Next gen or two is where it will be fined tuned and worth purchasing. This feels like a 4k TV purchase. Waste of money.
  • abufrejoval - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link

    I wonder how much Turing is about staking out territorial claims vs. dark silicon also coming to GPUs...

    Obviously Nvidia wants to protect its CUDA machine learning and HPC empire against custom ASIC competitors which finally also include Intel with their Configurable Spatial Accellerator, as well as Cambricon, Google's TPU ASICs and far too many others for comfort.

    But while many seem to bemoan that tensor core or rasterizing real-estate is a waste for gaming and just about raising the purchase prices with overhyped features nobody needs, I wonder if apart from the partial truth in that the other motivating driver is simply that the inability to translate additional transistors into additional performance as additional bandwidth requires step changes in GDDR6 lanes (with unshrinkable pad areas and amplifiers) and hits foundry reticle sizes.

    So they had transistors left over (wonder where those came from without a die shrink: I/O voltage reduction, layout optimizations, really bigger chips?), that could not be turned into direct DX1x performance gains due to bandwidth and TDP constraints and going to a richer functional base with Tensor Cores and raytrace assists would eat alternate bandwidth or TDP budgets, not additional ones.

    Any truth in those assumptions?
  • abufrejoval - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link

    ok, much bigger chips...
    And no rip-off: They are worth what they are charging if only for the inference accelleration.
  • Yojimbo - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    I am not convinced the Tensor Cores take up a lot of real estate. And they are tightly integrated into NVIDIA's SMs. Designing two SMs, one with Tensor Cores and one without Tensor Cores would be a lot more expensive than leaving them in. Plus, NVIDIA sees deep learning as important for gaming.

    Your argument about FLOPS per bandwidth does have validity. It's just that neither Tensor Cores nor RT cores were just thrown in there because they had transistors left over. Look at the die sizes of these new GPUs compared to Pascal GPUs. If they built a smaller chip that performed the same in legacy games then they could sell them more cheaply, and so sell more of them, while making the same profit on each one. That would mean higher margins and greater profits.

    The RTX and Tensor Cores are a strategic initiative. I think in making the decision to include them NVIDIA judged that those two technologies would have a positive impact on the future of gaming. The reason they made that judgment may include the dwindling FLOPS/memory bandwidth trend.
  • bernstein - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link

    really interesting time in gpu's right now... remember a decade ago when intel teased a x86-gpu that promised to do real-time raytracing?

    yet turing may turn out to provide an abysmal price/perf ratio.
    - about half the transistors will only be used in a few upcoming games, they could be used to possibly double performance in rasterization-only games (7nm amd navi anyone?)
    - but if (hybrid-)raytracing takes off quickly, turing will be crushed by 7nm gpu's dedicating way more transistors to the task, as it's performance is still skewed heavily towards rasterization
    - ai inferencing seems like a safe bet, again i'd wager that DLSS will only ever work with the vast minority of games released each day on steam, so it's usefulness will depends on whether developers make other use of the available silicon... (better AI opponents anyone?)
  • bernstein - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link

    a lot of this will also depend on what kind of silicon ends up in the next playstation & xbox generation...
  • Spunjji - Monday, September 17, 2018 - link

    Isn't that already pretty much pinned to AMD? AFAIK Navi is pretty much the consumer interpretation of AMD's PS5 design. Microsoft really aren't likely to jump ship because of their history with Nvidia.
  • Yojimbo - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    I think Turing's price/perf ratio will be better than Pascal's. It's the increase in price/performance that is not spectacular. But since AMD isn't releasing anything at all, that doesn't reflect negatively on Turing in any way.

    I don't know why people are throwing around this "50% of transistors" idea. Where is this information coming from?

    Of course Turing will be crushed by a next generation of 7 nm GPUs that is architected equally as well, as such GPUs will have both additional time for architectural improvements and the advantage of a full node shrink. That will be true for both hybrid and raster-only rendering. And it would have been true for raster rendering no matter if RT cores were included or not.

    It sounds like NVIDIA is providing the DLSS service to developers for free. I'd expect DLSS usage to be widespread for any developers interested in making games geared towards the 4K market.

    I am guessing that Microsoft, at least, will want a raytracing-capable GPU in its next console. I doubt they would spend the effort to make the DXR API extension and then leave the technology out of their console, especially considering the convergence of console and PC gaming they seem to be pushing for.
  • jwcalla - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link

    This is probably my first disinterested nvidia launch. Tensor cores and ray tracing don't really get me excited. I can't imagine half a die used for that stuff. Do the graphics really look that much better? Does hyper-realism even matter?
  • Dizoja86 - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link

    It doesn't even have to be hyper-realism. Just the basic limitations you can see with rasterized reflections in the Battlefield V tech demo paints a strong case for the use of ray-tracing. Being able to see reflections of objects that aren't directly on the screen in front of you seems like an important thing to move towards.
  • HollyDOL - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    classic rasterized shading and reflection is basically one big cheat on human eye. Imagine something along mp3 128kbit being 'cd quality'. Trying to get that cheat closer and closer to 'reality' is more and more a challenge and resource eater. Ray-Tracing _should_ be able to quite simplify the issue on development front in future. And that's not considering possible visuals quality raise.
  • Tamz_msc - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    Lol, players are complaining that in BF V it is hard to distinguish between friendlies and enemies. Adding RTX reflections to the mix would just make it worse.
  • jwcalla - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    Watching the Battlefield tech demo (and the others), I didn't think it added a lot of value. When you analyze it side-by-side with a magnifying glass, yes, you can see some differences. I just don't think they're that dramatic and in the heat of game play you're not even going to recognize it. The improvements to global illumination look good though.

    I just feel like the industry has lost a lot of focus.
  • RSAUser - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    In a game like BF V, you're not just going to stand there looking at reflections, and it's going to hammer your frame rate/force you to go to 1080p or lower.

    I'd rather turn it off and have a high fps on 4k, tyvm, same as near everyone turned off hairworks for witcher 3, though with that it was at least single player so you'd sacrifice performance for visuals.
  • Dizoja86 - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link

    Sometimes I get frustrated with Anandtech, but being able to have these fantastic articles when new technology is released is why I keep coming back.
  • StormyParis - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link

    Fascinating subject and excellent treatment. I feel informed and intelligent, so thank you.
  • Gc - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link

    Nice introductory article. I wonder if the ray tracing hardware might have other uses, such as path finding in space, or collision detection in explosions.

    The copy editing was a let down.

    Copy editor: please review the "amount vs. number" categorical distinction in English grammar. Parts of this article, that incorrectly use "amount", such as "amount of rays" instead of "number of rays", are comprehensible but jarring to read, in the way that a computer translation can be comprehensible but annoying to read.

    (yes: "amount of noise". no: "amount of rays, usually 1 or 2 per pixel". yes: "number of rays, usually 1 or 2 per pixel".) (Recall that "number" is for countable items, that can be singular or plural, such as 1 ray or 2 rays. "Amount" is for an unspecified quantity such as liquid or money, "amount of water in the tank" or "amount of money in the bank". But if pluralizable units are specified, then those units are countable, so "number of liters in the tank", or "number of dollars in the bank". [In this article, "amount of noise" does not refer to an event as in 1 noise, 2 noises, but rather to an unspecified quantity or ratio.] A web search for "amount vs. number" will turn up other explanations.)
  • Gc - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link

    (Hope you're all staying dry if you're in Florence's storm path.)
  • edzieba - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    " I wonder if the ray tracing hardware might have other uses, such as path finding in space, or collision detection in explosions."

    Yes, these were called out (as well as gun hitscan and AI direct visibility checks) in their developer focused GDC presentation.
  • edzieba - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    One thing that might be worth highlighting (or exploring further) is that raytraced reflections and lighting/shadowing are necessary for VR, where screen-space reflections produce very obviously incorrect results
  • Achaios - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    Τhis is epic. It should be taught as a special lesson in Marketing classes. NVIDIA is selling fanboys technology for which there is presently no practical use for, and the cards are already sold out. Might as well give NVIDIA license to print money.
  • iwod - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    Aren't we fast running to Memory Bandwidth bottleneck?

    Assuming we get 7nm next year at 8192 CUDA Core, that will need at least 80% more bandwidth, or 1TB/s. Neither 512bit memory nor HBM2 could offer that.
  • HStewart - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    I wondering when professional rendering packages support RTX - I personally have Lightwave 3D 2018 and because of Newtek's excellent upgrade process - I could see supporting it in future. I could see this technology do wonders for Movie and Game creations - reducing the dependency on CPU cpres
  • YaleZhang - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link

    Increased power use is disappointing. Is the 225W TDP for 2080 the power used or the heat dissipated? If it's power used, then that would include the 27W power used by VirtualLink. So then the real power usage would be 198 W.
  • willis936 - Sunday, September 16, 2018 - link

    I've been in signal integrity for five years. I write automation scripts for half million dollar oscilloscopes. I love it. It's my jam. Why on god's green earth does nvidia think their audience cares about eye diagrams? They mean literally nothing to the target audience. They're not talking to system integrators or chip manufacturers. Even if they were a single eye diagram with an eye width measurement means next to nothing beyond demonstrating that they have an image of what a signal at a given baud rate should look like (it's unclear if it's simulated or taken from one of their test monkeys). If they really wanted to blow us away they could say something like they've verified 97% confidence that their memory interface/channel BER <= 1E-15 when the spec commands BER <= 1E-12 or something. It's just a jargon image to show off how much they must really know their stuff. It just strikes me as tacky.
  • willis936 - Sunday, September 16, 2018 - link

    Also in case there's anyone else in the signal integrity business reading this: does it bug anyone else that eye diagrams are always heatmaps without a colorbar legend? When I make eye diagrams I put a colorbar legend in to signify hits per mV*ps area. The only thing I see T&M companies do is specify how many samples are in the eye diagram but I don't think that's enough for easy apples to apples comparisons.
  • Manch - Sunday, September 16, 2018 - link

    No, bc heatmaps are std.
  • willis936 - Monday, September 17, 2018 - link

    A heatmap would still be used. The color alone has no meaning unless you know how many hits there are total. Even that is useless if you want to build a bathtub. The colorbar would actually tell you how many hits are in a region. This applies to all heatmaps.
  • casperes1996 - Sunday, September 16, 2018 - link

    Wow... I just started a computer science education recently, and I was recently tasked with implementing an effecient search algorithm that works on infinitely long data streams. I made it so it first checks for an upper boundary in the array, (and updates the lower boundary based on the upper one) and then does a binary search on that subarray. I feel like there's no better time to read this article since it talks about the BVH. I felt so clever when I read it and thought "That sounds a lot like a binary search" before the article then mentioned it itself!
  • ballsystemlord - Sunday, September 16, 2018 - link

    You made only 1 typo! Great job!

    "In any case, as most silicon design firms hvae leapfrogging design teams,"
    Should be "have":
    "In any case, as most silicon design firms have leapfrogging design teams,"

    There is one more problem (stray 2 letter word), in your article, but I forgot were it was. Sorry.
  • Sherlock - Monday, September 17, 2018 - link

    The fact that Microsoft has released a Ray Tracing specific API seems to suggest that the next XBox will support it. And considering AMD is the CPU/GPU partner for the next gen XBox - it seems highly likely that the next gen AMD GPU's will have dedicated Ray Tracing hardware as well. I expect meaningful use of these hardware feature only once the next gen console hardware is released - which is due in the next 2-3 years. RTX seems a wasteful expenditure for the end-consumer now. The only motivation for NVidia to release this now is so that consumers don't feel as they are behind the curve against AMD. This gives some semblance to the rumros that Nvidia will release a "GTX" line and expect it to be their volume selling product - with the RTX as proof-of-concept for early adopters
  • bebby - Monday, September 17, 2018 - link

    Very good point from Sherlock. I also believe that Sony and Microsoft will be the ones defining what kind of hardware features will be used and which not.
    In general, with Moore's Law slowing down, progress gets slower and the incremental improvements are minimal. With the result that there is less competition, prices go up and there is not any more any "wow" effect coming with a new GPU. (last time I had this was with the 470gtx)
    My disappointment lies with the power consumption. Nvidia should focus more on power consumption rather than performance if they ever want to have a decent market share in tablets/phablets.
  • levizx - Monday, September 17, 2018 - link

    Actually the efficiency increased only 18% not 23%. 150% / 127% - 1 = 18.11%, you can't just 50% - 27% = 23%, the efficiency increase is compared to "without optimization" i.e. 127%
  • rrinker - Monday, September 17, 2018 - link

    91 comments (as I type this) and most of them are arguing over "boo hoo, it's too expensive" Well, if it's too expensive - don't buy it. Why complain? Oh yeah, because Internet. This is NOT just the same old GPU, just a little faster - this is something completely different, or at least, something with significant differences to the current cop of traditional GPUs. There's no surprise that it's going to be more expensive - if you are shocked at the price then you really MUST be living under a rock. The first new ANYTHING is always premium priced - there is no competition, it's a unique product, and there is a lot of development costs involved. CAN they sell it for less? Most likely, but their job is not to sell it for the lowest possible profit, it's to sell it for what the market will bear. Simple as that. Don't like it, don;t buy it. Absolutely NO ONE needs the latest and greatest on launch day. I won't be buying one of these, I do nothing that would benefit from the new features. Maybe in a few years, when everyone has raytracing, and the games I want to play require it - then I'll buy a card like this. Griping about pricing on something you don't need - priceless.
  • eddman - Tuesday, September 18, 2018 - link

    ... except this is the first time we've had such a massive price jump in the past 18 years. Even 8800 series, which according to jensen was the biggest technology jump before 20 series, launched at about the same MSRP as the last gen.

    It does HYBRID, partial, limited ray-tracing, and? How does that justify such a massive price jump? If these cards are supposed to be the replacements for pascals, then they are damn overpriced COMPARED to them. This is not how generational pricing is supposed to be.

    If these are supposed to be a new category, then why name them like that? Why not go with 2090 Ti, 2090, or something along those lines.

    Since they haven't done that and considering they left and right compare these cards to pascal cards even in regular rasterized games, then I have to conclude they consider them generational replacements.
  • BurntMyBacon - Monday, September 17, 2018 - link

    Good article. I would have been nice to get more information as to exactly what nVidia is doing with the RT cores to optimize ray tracing, but I can understand why they would want to keep that a secret at this point. One oversight in an otherwise excellent article:

    @Nate Oh (article): "The net result is that with nearly every generation, the amount of memory bandwidth available per FLOP, per texture lookup, and per pixel blend has continued to drop. ... Turing, in turn, is a bit of an interesting swerve in this pattern thanks to its heavy focus on ray tracing and neural network inferencing. If we're looking at memory bandwidth merely per CUDA core FLOP, then bandwidth per FLOP has actually gone up, since RTX 2080 doesn't deliver a significant increase in (on-paper) CUDA core throughput relative to GTX 1080."

    The trend has certainly been downward, but I was curious as to why the GTX 780 wasn't listed. When I checked it out, I found that it is another "swerve" in the pattern similar to the RTX2080. The specifications for the NVIDIA Memory Bandwidth per FLOP (In Bits) chart are:
    GTX 780 - 0.58 bits | 3.977 TFLOPS | 288GB/sec

    This is easily found information and its omission is pretty noticeable (at least to me), so I assume it got overlooked (easy to do in an article this large). While it doesn't match your initial always downward observation, it also clearly doesn't change the trend. It just means the trend is not strictly monotonic.
  • nboelter - Tuesday, September 18, 2018 - link

    I had to solve the problem of “random memory accesses from the graphics card memory are the main bottleneck for the performance of the molecular dynamics simulation” when i did some physics on CUDA, and got great results with Hilbert space-filling curves (there is a fabulous german paper from 1891 about this newfangled technology) to - essentially - construct BVHs. Only difference really is that i had grains of sand instead of photons. Now i really wonder if these RT cores could be used for physics simulations!
  • webdoctors - Tuesday, September 18, 2018 - link

    This will likely get lost in the 100 comments, but this is really huge and getting ignored by the pricing.

    I've often wondered and complained for years to my friends why we keep going to higher resolutions from 720p to 4K rather than actually improving the graphics. Look at a movie on DVD from 20 yrs ago at 480p resolution, and the graphics are so much more REALISTSIC than the 4K stuff you see in games today because its either real ppl on film or if CG raytraced offline with full lighting. Imagine getting REAL TIME renders that look like real life video, that's a huge breakthrough. Sure we've raytracing for decades, but never real time on non-datacenter size clusters.

    Rasterization 4K or 8K content will never look as REAL as 1080p raytraced content. It might look nicer, but it won't look REAL. Its great we'll have hardware where we can choose whether we want to use the fake rasterization cartoony path or the REAL path.

    A 2080TI that costs $1200 will be $120 in 10 years, but it won't change the fact that now you're getting REAL vs fake. 2 years ago, you didn't have the option, you couldn't say I'll pay you $5k to give me the ray traced option in the game, now we'll get (hopefully) developer support and see this mainstream. Probably can use AWS to gamestream this instead of buying a video card and than get the raytrace now too.

    If you're happy with non-ray tracing, just buy a 1070 and stick to playing games in 1080p. You'll never be perf limited for any games and move on.
  • eddman - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    You are not getting REAL with 20 series, not even close.
  • MadManMark - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    His point is that we are getting CLOSER to "real," not that it is CLOSE or IS real. Would have thought that was obvious, but guess ti isn't to everyone.
  • eddman - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    It seems you are the one who misread. From his comment: "it won't change the fact that now you're getting REAL vs fake"

    So, yes, he does think with 20 series you get the REAL thing.
  • sudz - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    "as opposed Pascal’s 2 partition setup with two dispatch ports per sub-core warp scheduler."

    So in conclusion: RTX has more warp cores.

    Engage!
  • ajp_anton - Friday, September 21, 2018 - link

    This comment is a bit late, but your math for memory efficiency is wrong.

    If bandwidth+compression gives a 50% increase, and bandwidth alone is a 27% increase, you can't just subtract them to get the compression increase. In this example, compression increase is 1.5/1.27 = 1,18, or 18%. Not the 23% that you get by subtracting.

    This also means you have to re-write the text where you think it's weird how this is higher than the last generation increase, because it no longer is higher.
  • Overmind - Thursday, September 27, 2018 - link

    There are many inconsistencies in the article.
  • Overmind - Thursday, September 27, 2018 - link

    If the 102 with 12 complete functional modules has 72 RTCs (RTX-ops) how can the 2080 Ti with 11 functional modules has 78 RTCs ? The correct value is clearly 68.
  • Wwhat - Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - link

    What the article ignores is that ray tracing went through a long revolution, and one of the findings at one point for example was that triangles weren't covering the need for advanced ray-tracing, after which things like NURBS were thrown into the mix.
    My point being that you would think the RT for gaming development would not start from point A and slowly meander to all the evolutionary steps with constant hardware updates. But it's not clear at the moment if the Nvidia team is 'keeping it simple' for now in their package, or if that's just how it is presented for easy presentation to the crowd.

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