Friday, September 7th 2018
NVIDIA's 20-series Could be Segregated via Lack of RTX Capabilities in Lower-tier Cards
NVIDIA's Turing-based RTX 20-series graphics cards have been announced to begin shipping on the 20th of September. Their most compelling argument for users to buy them is the leap in ray-tracing performance, enabled by the integration of hardware-based acceleration via RT cores that have been added to NVIDIA's core design. NVIDIA has been pretty bullish as to how this development reinvents graphics as we know it, and are quick to point out the benefits of this approach against other, shader-based approximations of real, physics-based lighting. In a Q&A at the Citi 2018 Global Technology Conference, NVIDIA's Colette Kress expounded on their new architecture's strengths - but also touched upon a possible segmentation of graphics cards by raytracing capabilities.
During that Q&A, NVIDIA's Colette Kress put Turing's performance at a cool 2x improvement over their 10-series graphics cards, discounting any raytracing performance uplift - and when raytracing is indeed brought into consideration, she said performance has increased by up to 6x compared to NVIDIA's last generation. There's some interesting wording when it comes to NVIDIA's 20-series lineup, though; as Kress puts it, "We'll start with the ray-tracing cards. We have the 2080 Ti, the 2080 and the 2070 overall coming to market," which, in context, seems to point out towards a lack of raytracing hardware in lower-tier graphics cards (apparently, those based on the potential TU106 silicon and lower-level variants).
This is just speculation - based on Kress's comments, though - but if that translates to reality, this would be a tremendous misstep for NVIDIA and raytracing in general. The majority of the market games on sub-**70 tier graphics cards (the 20-series has even seen a price hike up to $499 for the RTX 2070...), and failing to add RT hardware to lower-tier graphics would exclude a huge portion of the playerbase from raytracing effects. This would mean that developers adding NVIDIA's RTX technologies and implementing Microsoft's DXR would be spending development resources catering to the smallest portion of gamers - the ones with high-performance discrete solutions. And we've seen in the past what developers think of devoting their precious time to such features.
Additionally, if this graphics card segregation by RTX support (or lack of it) were to happen, what would be of NVIDIA's lineup? GTX graphics cards up to the GTX 2060 (and maybe 2060 Ti), and RTX upwards? Dilluting NVIDIA's branding through GTX and RTX doesn't seem like a sensible choice, but of course, if that were to happen, it would be much better than keeping the RTX prefix across the board.
It could also be a simple case of it not being feasible to include RT hardware on smaller, lower performance GPUs. As performance leaks and previews have been showing us, even NVIDIA's top of the line RTX 2080 Ti can only deliver 40-60 FPS at 1080p in games such as the upcoming Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Battlefield V (DICE has even said they had to tone down levels of raytracing to achieve playable performance levels). Performance improvements until release could bring FPS up to a point, but all signs point towards a needed decrease in rendering resolution for NVIDIA's new 20-series to be able to cope with the added raytracing compute. And if performance looks like this on NVIDIA's biggest (revelaed) Turing die, with its full complement of RT cores, we can only extrapolate what raytracing performance would look like in cut-down dies with lower number of RT execution units. Perhaps it really wouldn't make much sense to add the increased costs and per-die-area of this dedicated hardware, if raytracing could only be supported in playable levels at 720p.
All in all, it seems to this editor that segregation of graphics cards via RTX capabilities would be a mistake, not only because of userbase fracturing, but also because the highest amount of players game at **60 and lower levels. Developers wouldn't be so inclined to add RTX to their games to such a small userbase, and NVIDIA would be looking at dilluting its gaming brand via RTX and GTX - or risk confusing customers by branding a non-RTX card with the RTX branding. If any of these scenarios come to pass, I risk saying it might have been too soon for the raytracing push - even as I applaud NVIDIA for doing it, anyway, and pushing graphics rendering further. But perhaps timing and technology could have been better? But I guess we all just better wait for actual performance reviews, right?
Source:
NVIDIA via Seeking Alpha
During that Q&A, NVIDIA's Colette Kress put Turing's performance at a cool 2x improvement over their 10-series graphics cards, discounting any raytracing performance uplift - and when raytracing is indeed brought into consideration, she said performance has increased by up to 6x compared to NVIDIA's last generation. There's some interesting wording when it comes to NVIDIA's 20-series lineup, though; as Kress puts it, "We'll start with the ray-tracing cards. We have the 2080 Ti, the 2080 and the 2070 overall coming to market," which, in context, seems to point out towards a lack of raytracing hardware in lower-tier graphics cards (apparently, those based on the potential TU106 silicon and lower-level variants).
It could also be a simple case of it not being feasible to include RT hardware on smaller, lower performance GPUs. As performance leaks and previews have been showing us, even NVIDIA's top of the line RTX 2080 Ti can only deliver 40-60 FPS at 1080p in games such as the upcoming Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Battlefield V (DICE has even said they had to tone down levels of raytracing to achieve playable performance levels). Performance improvements until release could bring FPS up to a point, but all signs point towards a needed decrease in rendering resolution for NVIDIA's new 20-series to be able to cope with the added raytracing compute. And if performance looks like this on NVIDIA's biggest (revelaed) Turing die, with its full complement of RT cores, we can only extrapolate what raytracing performance would look like in cut-down dies with lower number of RT execution units. Perhaps it really wouldn't make much sense to add the increased costs and per-die-area of this dedicated hardware, if raytracing could only be supported in playable levels at 720p.
132 Comments on NVIDIA's 20-series Could be Segregated via Lack of RTX Capabilities in Lower-tier Cards
And I bet that most gamers would like to see better facial (and body) animations, no corpse bugs through the textures, better A.I. etc. instead of the realtime lightning and reflections over the ones we have now which you may not know is realtime or not...
Company: Here is a card that is faster and has advanced features
Gamers: WHAT?!?! why does this cost more !!!
The lack of competition does not help i must admit but Nvidia is a for profit business and not a charity, so vote with your wallets i suppose.
If Nvidia actually wanted Raytracing to be a big deal, there would be 4 RT cores per SM instead of 1. Oh, and those "RT cores" are really just re-purposed cores meant for general compute use. They are selling cut-down compute cards to gamers. That's it, and it's hilarious there are people defending these shenanigans. Turing is a cheaper-to-manufacture Volta meant to be able to compete with Vega (Which is a huge threat to Nvidia's professional market).
You are correct that people will NEED to vote with their wallets this year. At a certain point though I worry - It seems like somehow Nvidia really has convinced a wide swath of sheep that they should just keep mailing them their money for almost zero gains every year. Now they are actually trying to convince them that you should pay twice as much for a downgrade to 1080p gaming again.
But hey - if you pay them $2400 I am sure you can game in 1440p on a nice $1000 G-sync monitor with 2080 Ti SLI. Right sheep? Right? Pathetic...
at least with NVidia sometimes we get so see the full chip on mainstream, the Titan. which was never an ideal card for gaming but its there.
AMD also did tried recently with the frontier edition with full chip and stack of memory but it was more of a concept card in the end.
Don't forget that us consumers in this particular market we are the "2nd class citizen.
EDIT: Quick piece of additional info, I was referring to RX 480 to RX 580.
EDIT2: I have a Vega 56 and love it.
images.nvidia.com/content/pdf/tesla/whitepaper/pascal-architecture-whitepaper.pdf
- GP100’s SM incorporates 64 single-precision (FP32) CUDA Cores. In contrast, the Maxwell and Kepler SMs had 128 and 192 FP32 CUDA Cores, respectively.
The silly thing about it all is that Turing is in fact a step backwards, making the SM less focused again, and needing more of them at somewhat lower clocks to get performance.
If they can do that at a higher price for their product then they will, as long as it sells. You are free as a consumer to vote with your wallet as many will, and not buy it. I know I won’t be buying any RTX 20 series.
But it seems like a very decent Titan replacement. I haven't seen a full feature comparison, but the obvious things are present - Tensor cores being the most important part.Well... I'm pretty sure I would look for a notebook with RTX 2050/2060 if it came out, but that seems unlikely.
Nvidia only announced RTX 2080 MaxQ for now.
If I keep a desktop, RTX 2070 seems like a probable choice. It's way out of my typical PC budget, but I should be able to find the extra ~$300 somewhere else.
And if I switch to a notebook, RTX 2070 seems like a good reason to finally try eGPU. :-)
It looks like TU102/4 was specifically made for Quadro cards and making a RT and Tensor core-less GPU just for gaming cards wasnt finacially viable if 7nm is just around the corner.