Monday, August 19th 2019

NVIDIA CEO Says Buying a GPU Without Ray Tracing "Is Crazy"

Aug 19th, 2019 02:52 Discuss (108 Comments)

During NVIDIA's second quarter earnings call, the company's co-founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, talked about earnings and what drives demand. When talking about sales, Huang noted a few things about NVIDIA's RTX lineup of graphics cards and why buying one is the only reasonable thing to do.

Specifically, Huang said that "SUPER is off to a super start for and at this point, it's a foregone conclusion that we're going to buy a new graphics card, and it's going to the last 2, 3, 4 years to not have ray tracing is just crazy. Ray tracing content just keeps coming out. And between the performance of SUPER and the fact that it has ray tracing hardware, it's going to be super well positioned for throughout all of next year."

He says that if you are going to buy a GPU and have it last 2-4 years, you have to "future proof" your system by buying an RTX GPU. What is implied there is that NVIDIA is currently the only company that is building a GPU with ray tracing built into hardware, meaning the only choice for ray tracing enabled games.

Ironically, NVIDIA also offers Turing GPUs without any of the ray tracing capabilities in form of GTX 1660 Ti, 1660 and 1650 GPUs all positioned at low to middle range performance market.

Source: PCGamesN

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108 Comments on NVIDIA CEO Says Buying a GPU Without Ray Tracing "Is Crazy"

#51

yotano211

I had a laptop with a 1070, the only reason why I got a laptop with a 2080 is because it was offered to me from a friend who's company bought him the one I have now.
I dont give 2 $hits about ray tracing and the 2000 gen cards, I was going to skip the 2000 and wait for the 3000 generation. I gave my old laptop to his wife and he gave me the one I have now.

#52

ebivan

Yeah, its just crazy. I mean there are 4 or even 5 games that support Raytracing so everyone who is not on board now is seriously missing out.

#53

HD64G

A rich guy calls anyone who doesn't overpay for his company's overpriced products crazy? :kookoo:

#54

noel_fs

literally bullshit, ray tracing isnt even a thing yet, there is no support and there is no gpus with enough power for it, current rtx gen are just toys.

#55

bug

Dave65Listening to ANY CEO is "CRAZY" .

Not necessarily. But taking buying advice from a CEO that makes the products certainly is ;)

#56

Mistral

So, in a few years when we actually have some RT games to play... which of the current RTX cards that we are crazy for not buying will be able to do 60fps in any of them?

#57

Steevo

Quickly, save face by saying absurd things.....

I still think vector mapping a lot of the angles will allow for actual real time Ray Tracing with much lower computational overhead.

Nvidia is in panic mode, their products aren't in the majority of gaming devices, and the few they are in aren't focused on the visual fidelity, the complete and opposite of their marketing for PC gaming, while their direct competition is in the majority of gaming devices that are setting the standards. Must really suck to know and live with.

#58

bug

SteevoQuickly, save face by saying absurd things.....

I still think vector mapping a lot of the angles will allow for actual real time Ray Tracing with much lower computational overhead.

Nvidia is in panic mode, their products aren't in the majority of gaming devices, and the few they are in aren't focused on the visual fidelity, the complete and opposite of their marketing for PC gaming, while their direct competition is in the majority of gaming devices that are setting the standards. Must really suck to know and live with.

:roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll:
Best joke I've heard in a while.

#59

Steevo

bug:roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll:
Best joke I've heard in a while.

Rivers don't run with water past. Nvidia isn't going out of business, but they sure aren't selling as much as they want to, and it's driven by failure of their new product line, and lack of integrated devices.

Absurd statements on their part are free to be mocked.

#60

64K

FordGT90ConceptBecause of Moore's Law and fiat currencies controlling inflation, that's not true either. $4000 spent on graphics cards at once will not outperform $1000 spent each year on new top-shelf hardware. That's why high performance computing is always swapping out old hardware for new: more performance per watt.

True. I remember the only person that I ever knew of that bought a $3,000 Titan Z back in 2014. He was on here complaining 2 years later because Nvidia had supposedly gimped the Kepler drivers when Maxwell came out. He said something to the effect of he expected Nvidia to keep up his drivers for 8 years because of all the money he spent. About a year later Developers started moving away from SLI support so he was basically only using half of his dual GPU card that he paid so much for.

The better thing to do back then was buy a high end card and then buy the next high end card and sell the old one each time. He would have ended up with much better performance for his $3,000.

#61

BiggieShady

Really, how can you sleep at night knowing that Jensen Huang thinks you are crazy? Waking up suddenly in cold sweat screaming "Jensen please forgive me!"

#62

swirl09

spnidelI guess every single person that bought the 1660 and 1660 ti are crazy too then

My first thought on reading the headline was this. Taking a dump on people who recently bought one of these cards, which are great for 1080p, is a crazy thing to say. As if the AIB of AMDs newest offerings didnt already look great, now you have the added incentive of not giving money to man who is actively giving you the finger.

#63

r.h.p

Is it possible that only people with lots of cash buy these GPUs ?? I mean all the highest scores on Superposition are Nvidia ( granted they are the fastest ) , yet its way too OTT cash WISE I reckon
for a score based experience ….

#64

cyberloner

pocket hurt too :D

#65

Tartaros

I miss when you could buy a cheap 9300 gt for physx. Things are bad when you miss spending money on an addon for physx.

Can't we have 2130s for 70-90 bucks and raytrace all the fuck we want with any gpu? And to drink, meatballs.

#66

Reaperxvii

I've never understood that logic, Tom's hardware did an incredibly biased review when the 2080ti came out along the same lines of "do you want to be left behind without ray tracing".

I understand future proofing but this is money grabbing, by the time ray tracing really takes off I expect the 3080ti or even 4080ti to be out. Then anyone who thought a 2080ti for raytracing is gonna feel pretty silly imo.

I'll stick with my 1080ti till AMD makes hopefully a 5800/5900xt.

#67

mouacyk

This is all sorts of crazy

#68

somethinggeneric

RTX is a dead platform as far as ray tracing goes. Next to zero support and there will never be any. AMD controls the consoles, so developers aren't going to bother wasting time getting ray tracing to work for just the PC platform, and just the gamers who wasted 1200+ on a card so they can play their game at 1080p at 30fps.

#69

Mephis

somethinggenericRTX is a dead platform as far as ray tracing goes. Next to zero support and there will never be any. AMD controls the consoles, so developers aren't going to bother wasting time getting ray tracing to work for just the PC platform, and just the gamers who wasted 1200+ on a card so they can play their game at 1080p at 30fps.

Yeah,about that. RTX already compatible with MS DXR and Vulkan. No matter how AMD implements RTRT in the consoles and their PC GPUs it will have to work with DXR and Vulkan. They aren't going to create a implementation that doesn't work with either. So Nvidia will be fine. It will just come down to which hardware runs it faster.

#70

TheDeeGee

Spending 1200 bucks on a GPU to play 3 games i don't like with RTX support is crazy as well.

#71

somethinggeneric

MephisYeah,about that. RTX already compatible with MS DXR and Vulkan. No matter how AMD implements RTRT in the consoles and their PC GPUs it will have to work with DXR and Vulkan. They aren't going to create a implementation that doesn't work with either. So Nvidia will be fine. It will just come down to which hardware runs it faster.

So why would you buy an RTX card then, better ray tracing? Aside from wanting more performance since after the 2070s level it's only Nvidia.

#72

Steevo

MephisYeah,about that. RTX already compatible with MS DXR and Vulkan. No matter how AMD implements RTRT in the consoles and their PC GPUs it will have to work with DXR and Vulkan. They aren't going to create a implementation that doesn't work with either. So Nvidia will be fine. It will just come down to which hardware runs it faster.

There are already a bunch of other methods to render ray tracing, most of which are faster than Nvidias and also don't need so much filtering, Nvidias implementation from a hardware stand is highly inefficient, mostly as its the first implementation and requires a lot of learning to determine its qualitative benefits VS its performance requirements. Nvidia tried to remake a wheel like they have done with PhysX (could and did run fine on competitive hardware) but walled garden with hits to performance.

The real issue is the RT hardware on these cards makes them too expensive for most users, its not powerful enough to really showcase its effects in modern games that are already pushing performance to the limit of hardware, and by the time RT becomes more mainstream it will be in a evolved form of hardware/software that will make these cards and hardware obsolete. Or it will come in the form of compressed vector lighting maps that a CPU can calculate primary angles from a table that get handed off to the RT hardware on the GPU to handle without the huge performance penalty.

#73

Mephis

SteevoThere are already a bunch of other methods to render ray tracing, most of which are faster than Nvidias and also don't need so much filtering, Nvidias implementation from a hardware stand is highly inefficient, mostly as its the first implementation and requires a lot of learning to determine its qualitative benefits VS its performance requirements. Nvidia tried to remake a wheel like they have done with PhysX (could and did run fine on competitive hardware) but walled garden with hits to performance.

The real issue is the RT hardware on these cards makes them too expensive for most users, its not powerful enough to really showcase its effects in modern games that are already pushing performance to the limit of hardware, and by the time RT becomes more mainstream it will be in a evolved form of hardware/software that will make these cards and hardware obsolete. Or it will come in the form of compressed vector lighting maps that a CPU can calculate primary angles from a table that get handed off to the RT hardware on the GPU to handle without the huge performance penalty.

I'm not arguing that RTX is the ideal way to implement it. Honestly I don't know enough of the low level details to have any idea. My argument was that RTX isn't going to be useless when the consoles come out. As long as RTX is comparable with both DXR and Vulkan it will work with future games. When AMD releases a RTRT implementation, we will actually be able to see who has the better implementation and go from there.

somethinggenericSo why would you buy an RTX card then, better ray tracing? Aside from wanting more performance since after the 2070s level it's only Nvidia.

I'm not sure I understand your question. If you are talking about now, there would be 2 reasons I could think of:

1. You want RTRT. Regardless of what people think of it, right now it is the only way to get RTRT in games.
2. You want to fastest card and don't care about RTRT. Like it or not, AMD doesn't have anything to compete with Nvidia at the high end.

If you mean in the future, well we don't know who will have the best cards going forward.

#74

erocker

Like most isolated from the real world corporate higher-ups they don't have much of an idea on how the rest of the world works.

#75

Unregistered

eidairaman1He is trying to justify keeping the gpu prices inflated over 400 USD across the board.

Ngreedia.

Yep. That was how I translated it. If they want more people to buy Turing GPUs, they might consider getting the prices out of the stratosphere to something reasonable.

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NVIDIA CEO Says Buying a GPU Without Ray Tracing "Is Crazy"

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