“GTX 2080” Engineering Sample Suggests ‘RTX’ Branding was an Afterthought

[Fouquin]

A pre-production sample of the Turing based RTX 2080 appeared on eBay on February 17th with some peculiar physical characteristics; namely the GeForce GTX branding of its predecessors.


GeForce "GTX" 2080 Engineering Sample. Click to see full image.

Seen above, the card’s other physical characteristics are generally unaltered from the Founder’s Edition cards that ship today. The card is clad in the same silver shroud with the redesigned dual-fan cooler underneath, and has the powdered black I/O bracket with the NVIDIA logo and name etched into it. There is no way to tell when the card was manufactured, so it’s difficult to ascertain what time frame the naming and marketing shift would have occurred, but the inclusion of a tiny white “RTX 2080” label on the I/O bracket does suggest that the card is fully featured and not some possible reduced function ASIC like the recently announced TU116.

The overall package appears complete and ready to ship lacking the RTX branding that the final product wears. This could lend some credence to the rumors surrounding RTX being a rushed launch, bolstered by the initial lack of any supporting software utilizing the technology. It’s not hard to theorize that RTX could have initially been a slow-burn feature for all RT and Tensor Core equipped Turing cards to take advantage of as software materialized, rather than being the central identity of the entire lineup.

What do you think? Discuss below.

 

[hat]

Faaaaaaaaaaaaake. No way a next gen ES could be out on eBay when nobody has even heard of anything beyond GTX/ETC 1xxx...

 

[FreedomEclipse]

They should of kept it slow burn. If you want to sell something, if you want to make profit from selling things there must be:

(A) A Market for such product
(B) A Demand for such product

This criteria both have to exist otherwise you will go out of business or people will straight up call you a scammer because what you are trying to sell is snake oil.

Nvidia have nailed the market but not the demand. Had they kept the technology under wraps for another year, approached developers with such technology and worked with them during a transition or testing period then came out and gave a teaser of whats to come. I bet people would have been more hyped for RTX.

Basically its what Robert Space Industries are doing to a lesser extent. They have the market and the demand but the problem with them is they are failing to produce any product but still taking money from people on the basis that it will be coming soon and throw another tech demo as a bone for people to chase.

If Nvidia had created a demand for RTX before coming out and saying "This is what it does" then Im sure people would of been more interested. the technology has been available for 6 months and all we have are 3 games that just about run it because of reasons.

Its no worse that EA getting you to pay $60 for a game that is clearly half finished and should still be in beta.

 

[Fouquin]

Faaaaaaaaaaaaake. No way a next gen ES could be out on eBay when nobody has even heard of anything beyond GTX/ETC 1xxx...

The Turing based GeForce RTX cards launched in September, 2018. This is not a sample of a future product.

 

[MrGenius]

Faaaaaaaaaaaaake. No way a next gen ES could be out on eBay when nobody has even heard of anything beyond GTX/ETC 1xxx...

The what? Get back in your time machine and catch up to us in 2019.

 

[hat]

Uhh... it's been a long day.

 

[Vya Domus]

They should of kept it slow burn. If you want to sell something, if you want to make profit from selling things there must be:

(A) A Market for such product
(B) A Demand for such product

This criteria both have to exist otherwise you will go out of business or people will straight up call you a scammer because what you are trying to sell is snake oil.

Nvidia have nailed the market but not the demand. Had they kept the technology under wraps for another year, approached developers with such technology and worked with them during a transition or testing period then came out and gave a teaser of whats to come. I bet people would have been more hyped for RTX.

Basically its what Robert Space Industries are doing to a lesser extent. They have the market and the demand but the problem with them is they are failing to produce any product but still taking money from people on the basis that it will be coming soon and throw another tech demo as a bone for people to chase.

If Nvidia had created a demand for RTX before coming out and saying "This is what it does" then Im sure people would of been more interested. the technology has been available for 6 months and all we have are 3 games that just about run it because of reasons.

Its no worse that EA getting you to pay $60 for a game that is clearly half finished and should still be in beta.

Basically if you have to argue and convince your customers that something is worth getting you already lost.

 

[Deleted member 67555]

A pre-production sample of the Turing based RTX 2080 appeared on eBay on February 17th with some peculiar physical characteristics; namely the GeForce GTX branding of its predecessors.

View attachment 116856
GeForce "GTX" 2080 Engineering Sample. Click to see full image.

Seen above, the card’s other physical characteristics are generally unaltered from the Founder’s Edition cards that ship today. The card is clad in the same silver shroud with the redesigned dual-fan cooler underneath, and has the powdered black I/O bracket with the NVIDIA logo and name etched into it. There is no way to tell when the card was manufactured, so it’s difficult to ascertain what time frame the naming and marketing shift would have occurred, but the inclusion of a tiny white “RTX 2080” label on the I/O bracket does suggest that the card is fully featured and not some possible reduced function ASIC like the recently announced TU116.

The overall package appears complete and ready to ship lacking the RTX branding that the final product wears. This could lend some credence to the rumors surrounding RTX being a rushed launch, bolstered by the initial lack of any supporting software utilizing the technology. It’s not hard to theorize that RTX could have initially been a slow-burn feature for all RT and Tensor Core equipped Turing cards to take advantage of as software materialized, rather than being the central identity of the entire lineup.

What do you think? Discuss below.

Did you get it?

 

[dj-electric]

I know that "Core i9" was. I have an ES Core i7 7900X.

 

[Fouquin]

Did you get it?

No, sadly. Bit out of my price range.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

Basically if you have to argue and convince your customers that something is worth getting you already lost.

Basically Yes. You want people fighting each other to get an RTX card

 

[mtcn77]

I hope we reach a consensus at this hour to the real identity of baddies here and moderate shills rather than trolls, like myself, who do it for the sport. I mean do we have to have teaser accounts making the same announcements? The level of shill is too high when it pulls the whole community down leaving with a bad after taste...

 

[qubit]

No, sadly. Bit out of my price range.

Ah, chicken, you're not a true enthusiast!

 

[Vayra86]

Told y'all so. Turing is a hand-me-down from datacenter technology, and RTX is a weak attempt at trying to sell it to gamers at a major premium with cut down leftovers. Gamers aren't the target market here. Turing is built for Quadro and content creation. Not brute forcing it in real time, that was, and still is preposterous no matter how much DLSS and spin you apply.

'But it'll get better'. Cool, ring me up when you're done. Life's too short and the price too high to live in permanent beta testing. We're past that, because games in general look good enough and with enough time and talent devs can make pretty much anything. Efficiently, and capable on a broad range of hardware without wasting a significant bit of die space to situational nonsense.

 

[John Naylor]

I am always amazed at the ire that comes against free technology. The RTX 2070 and radeon 7, **when both cards are overlcocked** are within 2 or 3% of one another.

https://tpucdn.com/reviews/AMD/Radeon_VII/images/relative-performance_2560-1440.png
https://tpucdn.com/reviews/AMD/Radeon_VII/images/overclocked-performance.png
https://tpucdn.com/reviews/MSI/GeForce_RTX_2080_Gaming_X_Trio/images/overclocked-performance.png

@ 1440p ....

Radeon VII = 100 % with 130.0 / 121.1 fps gain when OC'd = 108.18
RTX 2080 = 114 % with 180.2 / 155.0 fps gain when OC'd = 132.53

Scenario 1 - 1440p 60 Hz Monitor

For the sake of argument, let's imagine you are playing the imaginary Witcher 3 (new RT Edition) on your Radeon VII at 95.4 fps (103 fps OC'd) but it's not really bringing anything ti the table w/ your 60 hz Monitor. Your brother is playing the same game at 109.2 fps (127 fps) on his 1080 which isn't helping him with his 60 Hz monitor. But with our imaginary new version, bro can turn on RT and lose 1/3 of the game's performance ... no pain there as fps still well above above what monitor can display

Scenario 2 - 1440p 120 Hz Monitor

Same as above... you cam play the game at 103 fps, but bro can choose whether to play at 127 ... or he can play with RT enabled at 85 fps. What am I missing ? What's the problem here ? Bro is getting 23% more performance for the same investment. Or he can plat at 85 fps (83% of yur fps) ... well into the range where he can enable MBR ***AND*** experience RT. If bro finds it adds to the gaming experience... super; if it doesn't, SO WHAT ? It's not like he paid more for his GFX card than you did.

I really don't care if we see only 4 or 5 games using RT with a year of the technology popping .... I on;t really use my AC in my car a few days per year but I sure don't leave it off when stuck in traffic and it's 95 outside. When looking to upgrade my monitor, we waited for MBR capable monitors were available ... initially weren't getting the fps necessary from then current GFX cards (w/o SLI) to really take advantage of it but now that they are here, it's never turned off. It's like getting 4WD for free and then complaining because you don't need drive in the snow that much. It's free, who cares, if you need it, or want it, it's there. Does it really make sense to say, "No thanks, I'd like to pay more more for one without 4WD ... and costs more to own".

As for the nobody's buying doom and gloom, if ya look at PC partpicker and newegg for example... we see that at any given time a large % (usually 33 to over 50% depending on series (2080 numbers getting lower, 2080 ti still over half . Since vendors don't make money for products they don't have, neither nVidia or the vendors have cause to cut prices. We are recommending that users hold off till 3 months after the problems are solved to flush all the early steppings out of the channel ... by then hopefully the tariff will be gone also. The Radeon VII isn't really competing with the 2080 but it will server to keep proces down. But the 20180 Ti will continue to sell at huge margins, until a) competition arrives, b) yields improve and they can put more out there and c) the number of folks who "must have the best and keep buying out existing stock" drops to below yield levels.

With many games 3 or more years in development, I don't feel I'm in a position to guess what devs will or will not undertake. What I'd love to get some insight on is the work effort by devs and how that changes. As in architectural rendering, back in the day, manhours were spent to "paint" lighting effects, later, it was all done by software. I have not seen this addressed in any article so far in how using RT will affect development time. If anyone has seen such, please link as most curious.

 

[mtcn77]

How about we let AI design its own hardware filtering algorithm and implement it, rather than the other way around? We are in the age of predicated parametrisation. There is no limit on the size of a search tree we can consume end points in, even the architecture designers are not safe from the hazard of industrial engineers.

 

[Fouquin]

Ah, chicken, you're not a true enthusiast!

I'm just a poor enthusiast.

 

[qubit]

I'm just a poor enthusiast.

I know that feeling, buddy. <sigh>