Nvidia 2080 series announced

I don't know if we will be seeing a $999 2080 Ti this decade

At least at first it looks like for existing applications and current headsets the improvements in going from 10 series to a like card in the 20 series isn’t earth shattering. People running the numbers are showing a bit over 25% faster in the case of going fom a 1080Ti to a 2080Ti.

Benchmarks with existing applications will give a better picture of what to expect though.

Despite preorders being essentially sold out, there's a fair amount of gnashing of teeth that these new cards are overpriced and don’t deliver the performance gains people were hoping for. Nvidia’s claims of 6-8x speed improvements is disingenuous because nobody did real time raytracing before because it was too slow.

These new cards do appear to be faster but the real benefits will come later with new high res headsets and foveated rendering. That said, I still put one on preorder which I can cancel while I wait for real benchmarks and more information.

Well, there’s at least some information coming out that there may be bigger advantages than just a straight 25%. This article discusses some comparisons:

https://www.techradar.com/news/the-...ally-twice-as-powerful-as-the-nvidia-gtx-1080

Basically the tensor cores can do anti aliasing that looks really good and is done mostly concurrent with the render and frees the render part of subsequent antialiasing. Also a big contribution from the integer engine to give an approximate factor of two in render times. 1.5 straight up so 50% and not 25% improvement over Pascal.

And here you can see it in action - three 1440p pancake displays (7680x1440 total) on a single RTX 2080Ti hitting reliable frame rates in the 90's. It’s a paid promotion so take it with a grain of salt but it’s also the new Assetto Corsa on a triples setup driving rig. Looks like seat movers built out of aluminum extrusion.

Agreed but I have a feeling there might be some surprises. Ray tracing would be nice but I’m most interested in the performance and the AI anti-aliasing.

The boards are full of people knocking the 2080's, saying they are too expensive and that the features aren’t useful (now), and there is some truth to that. But this was posted by Hardware Canuks for whatever it’s worth. It sounds interesting:

Totally agree. I’m no fan of the way Nvidia chose to do this launch. Maybe some marketing guy thinks the cachet and guesswork generates buzz, but many of us just want meaningful benchmarks that compare what these new cards can do with present applications. For me, I fly and drive and occasionally run other apps that interest me. I bet none of them patch for ray tracing.

Yep...I going to wait and see how this pans out - have a 1080TI which is working OK.

if a chip nearing 2x the size of its predecessor isn't A Significant step forward. Somethings a miss.

Videocardz.com says benchmarks are due to hit September 14th. Nvidia is still optimizing drivers and parners are lining up ducks.

Some cool things coming apparently like fully automated tools for overclocking, and the AI upscaling/anti-aliasing - that might eliminate supersampling: https://i.redd.it/49aepf6cl0i11.jpg

Also, being reported - caches are bigger and faster on 2080: https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-upgrades-l1-and-l2-caches-for-turing

And the Turing shader cores are 50% faster than Pascal: https://videocardz.com/77696/exclusive-nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-ti-editors-day-leaks

Hard to know just where performance will actually clock in. I have a feeling the new Assetto Corsa is going to make use of all sorts of Turing features and tricks and PCars2 may get patches though they might be looking to 3 now. I think for apps like P3D, we'll just be relying on brute force for a while but maybe that will be enough. X-Plane will probably be somewhere in between.

But just brute force omprovements might be significant in their own right and that AI smoothing/upscaling could be important where people push their GPUs now to supersample. Time will tell.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/assetto-corsa-competizione-rtx-ray-tracing/

That guy in the video is an idiot. Anyone telling other people to buy or not buy (in his case) without knowing what users are doing or what they need, is doing a disservice. He can be "infuriated" all he wants but he’s giving bad, blanket advice that will be just as right for some as it will be wrong for others. Where are the videos that calmly discus what is known, not known, what the implications are, and let the viewers make their own choice?

Fact is there will be a performance increase, possibly fairly significant. I’ve seen credible discussions that pin the minimum increase on the Ti at 25% with other evidence that predicts a factor of 2x depending on what an application does most. Even if you discount raytracing - even though Assetto Corsa Competizione goes early access 9/12 with an RTX patch coming sometime ater - there will still be benefit to getting one.

What we need are apples to apples benchmarks with the other benefits the icing on the cake and let people make up their own minds. Those are supposed to become available on the 14th next month.

Depending on the price point someone goes for, a 10 series card may be the right choice if you don’t care about RTX or the other benefits. Others might be better off with a 20 if they want the features and performance. That’s all there is to it.

Some new news from Nvidia on the 20 series from Tom Peterson @ Nvidia... Video below but some key bits...

HH = Hot Hardware, TP = Tom Peterson

HH: What can gamers who own 1080 can expect with 2080 for current games?

TP: We could've done a better job on this during the public announcement. Turing is a beast. It will significantly improve experience on old game and "rock it" for new technology. We shared some data that shows a bunch of games, you'll see the perf somewhere between 35-45% better at roughly the same generation. In most cases, if you are on high resolution and not CPU limited, Turing is going to crush it!

HH: Should we really expect 2080 to be 50% faster vs 1080 in current game at least in general sense? (referring to the chart released by NVIDIA)

TP: It's accurate provided you are GPU limited (e.g. 4K, 1440p high refresh rate, or with eye candy). If you're already running at 250 FPS and CPU limited, you won't see the difference. I'd like to be as accurate as possible with this: 2080 will be much faster than 1080 for most cases. 50% on traditional games running cases while GPU limited (e.g. 4K, 1440p high refresh, or maximum settings).

And this discussion of NVLink is very curious and could be they arent quite ready to discuss the VR features just yet (and NVLink isn’t on the 2070 cards it seems). This answer starts about microstutters but ends interesting. Not sure what else he could be referring to besides VR...

TP: NVLink will improve microstuttering but i don't think it will go away. It's more about the current technique of doing mGPU scaling where it's called AFR. It sends one frame to one GPU and another frame to another GPU. If there is a delay between the 2 GPUs, by the time you combine those frames together and send it to the user, there is a little bit of shift (i.e. Microstutter). A lot of it is how the AFR algorithm work to distribute work and combine them together. Turing has all the previous improvements with SLI (e.g. metering) but it won't go away entirely. More importantly, there are other mGPU technologies that's much more compelling in the future but we're not ready to talk about it today. Think about NVLink as a platform and investment that will be with us for a long time. It brings the 2 GPUs much closer with each other and allow them to communicate with each other without worrying about what's happening on PCIE.

TP: It's (overclockability is) really good. The 2080 FE is built for overclocking on both power and cooling side. The chip is faster than I've ever seen. When you look at raw clocks of Turing vs raw clock of Pascal, I've showed 2.1Ghz with random cards during Editors' day. NVIDIA is also launching NVIDIA Scanner and GPU Boost 4.0. People will hear more about it after NDA expires.

That makes me feel much better about the Big Ti sized Hole in my pocket.

Ray tracing for Assetto Corsa Competizione:

That Assetto Corsa video is pretty stunning. Will be interesting to see how it all turns out in VR.

The goal for battlefield 1, for example, was 60fps on a 1080p monitor with ray tracing on.