9 ms·

I know these are just preliminary but I am really excited to get my hands on a few of those cards. This is absolutely amazing! Thanks for sharing the benchmark.

• mhh__ 6y ago
  The fact that the not even top of the line (3080) card is knocking the door on 8K gaming is amazing to me. It's still not cheap but who says moore's law is dead (I know its apples and oranges, but 60% gen-to-gen performance is great). The first games I played were already 3D and looked ok, but the idea that we'll probably be playing movie-quality raytracing within a decade is really something to look forward to.
  • Ygg2 6y ago
    8k gaming? Supposedly 3090 is capable, but I gotta ask - who games in 8k? 8k monitors are still far too experimental. Not to mention that scaling is going to be a pain.
    • zimpenfish 6y ago
      > who games in 8k? I think it's more that if you can render 8K at 60fps, you can probably render 4K at 180fps or more which gives you a lot of wiggle room on a 60hz or even 120hz display.
      • s9w 6y ago
        Even the 3080 is just able to render most modern games at 144 fps at fullhd (!) - and only barely able half of them at 1440p. There is no such thing as practical 4k or 8k rendering, at least not at pleasent refresh rates and without party tricks (DLSS).
        • mhh__ 6y ago
          The 3080 can push 65 fps on average on Assassin's Creed Odyssey at maxed graphics settings in 4K (https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-review?page=5 https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-nvidi...). That's perfectly playable, and Odyssey isn't particularly well optimized (They've got it on full but it has lots of settings that you can turn down but make almost 0 difference to the details your eyes actually notice).
          • formerly_proven 6y ago
            Control at 1440p is still just shy of 60 fps on the RTX 3080.
            • gambiting 6y ago
              The thing is....just play it without raytracing? I love control, it's a great game, but the raytracing is such a huge gimmick(in this game) that I don't really understand why it dominates every benchmark other than as a curiosity. I have an RTX card and raytracing on/off in Control is noticable....for the first 2 minutes. Then it just blends in with the rest of the look and I don't even notice those super expensive effects anymore. Switched them all off, kept the rest on ultra, can easily game in 1440p at 100fps+. The game is still incredibly pretty and has plenty of fantastic visual effects anyway.
              • kaibee 6y ago
                The real benefit from RTX will be on the game development side. A lot of games currently don't look that different with RTX off, because a lot of artist time goes into making sure that non-RTX (which are the majority of the player base by far) lighting/effects still look realistic.
    • mhh__ 6y ago
      The Endgame has to be VR at this point - 4k is more than enough for "non-gameplay" games (i.e. I play CSGO at low settings in a stretched resolution but I play Assassin's Creed as hard as she'll go cap'n). Until the angular resolution of a pixel is good enough an inch from your eye there will be increasingly higher resolutions in the HMDs
    • friedman23 6y ago
      4k ultrawide i think is more practical than 8k and will probably require close to as much power
    • srtjstjsj 6y ago
      Does 2x2 monitors count as 8K? Think driving or flying sim, or just a taller/wider field of view in any game without losing detail.
    • emu 6y ago
      I love using a 32" 8k monitor for working with text/code. To me, as a software engineer who stares at code all day, higher quality text rendering is sufficient justification for 8k. I tried playing a few games at 8k (just for fun) and found that it simply wasn't worth the frame rate hit, or really even that noticeable an improvement with the assets in the games I tried. One nice property of 8k resolutions is that they have an integer scaling factor from both 4k (2x) and 1440p (3x), so if you have an 8k monitor you can play games at either of those resolutions with high quality scaling.
      • zepolen 6y ago
        Is 8k really noticeable vs 4k for text?
        • galkk 6y ago
          Not OP, but I use 4k 43" (larger diagonal) and I'm certain that on 43" it'll be noticeable
        • steffan 6y ago
          I have a 32" 4K monitor and the text quality is noticeably worse than on my Macbook Pro w/ Retina display and my iPad Pro. The dpi on the UP3218K is actually higher than my iPad (280 vs 264 iirc). That will likely be my next monitor unless another manufacturer introduces a 30-32" 8K monitor in the next few months.
        • emu 6y ago
          Yes, the difference between 4k and 8k text is easily noticeable for a 32" monitor, and I'm not particularly eagle-eyed. Text is sharper and finer details are better rendered. For videos and images I don't notice the difference in practice. I had a 4k 32" monitor at work and found that it simply didn't give sharp, high resolution text, driven by either a Macbook or by a Linux box. And you wouldn't really expect that, either: a 4k 32" monitor is only ~140dpi, which is only marginally higher resolution than the ~100dpi screens we had for many years. I think the best point of comparison for the Dell UP3218k monitor which I have is a Retina Macbook Pro screen: subjectively, it's a similar experience in terms of text sharpness and legibility (>200 DPI, glossy), just in a 32" form factor. I suspect 8k at 32" is actually a bit higher resolution than necessary (~280dpi), but there's nothing else on the >30" high resolution monitor market other than Apple's 6k display, which is significantly more expensive. Be aware that there's no Mac OS support for 8k displays, but Linux and Windows on a desktop with a reasonably modern NVidia GPU work great.
  • mantap 6y ago
    You have to compare performance per watt though to see the real gains. They can't keep pumping more and more watts through these things indefinitely, surely we are already at the limit.
    • mhh__ 6y ago
      The 3090 has a TDP of 350W which is a lot but it's not unprecedented either. There have definitely been cards from even the Fermi days in that region (590?)
      • formerly_proven 6y ago
        I remember the GTX "Thermi" 590 getting close to 450 W in benchmarks, but IIRC that was a dual-GPU card just like AMD's x990 series.
      • driverdan 6y ago
        The 290x could easily hit 350W.
    • PetahNZ 6y ago
      Well I can supply plenty of watts, but at some point I reach the limit of performance.
    • dbkinghorn 6y ago
      This is one thing that impressed me with the 3080 .. it looks like 2 of these will be around the performance (for some compute tasks) of 4 x 2080Ti The 4 2080Ti would max out at 1KW the 2 x 3080's at ~700W ...
  • jiggawatts 6y ago
    What's really freaky is that the RTX 30xx series of cards aren't even being manufactured on the current-gen process! NVIDIA is using Samsung's 8nm process, which has about 60 million transistors per square millimetre (MTr/mm^2). That's not cutting edge! The crown is currently held by TSCM's 5nm process, at 173 MTr/mm^2. Some time next year, TSMC is starting "risk production" of their 3 nm process, which is expected to hit about 300 MTr/mm^2. That's a solid FIVE TIMES higher density than the process used for the RTX 30xx series. Unlike general-purpose CPUs, where transistor density does not linearly translate to real-world performance, GPUs are designed for embarrassingly parallel problems and have nearly linear scaling. More transistors equals more "CUDA cores" equals more performance. The only thing holding back GPU performance is memory bandwidth. Current-gen consumer cards are just shy of 1 TB/s of memory bandwidth, but to get 5x performance, they would need 5 TB/s memory throughput to match. That's... difficult. Even with HBM2E, you'd need to stack a bunch of them to get near that. But yeah. 8K gaming is crazy. Real time raytracing was an utter fantasy just a few years ago, and I just played through Control at 60fps and it was a visual feast. I grew up in an era where wire frame 3D graphics took seconds to redraw the screen. I used keyboard macros to control a CAD program because it had no hope of keeping up with mouse movements. My unborn son is going to grow up to play in a world of 8K raytracing as standard, with visuals better than Pixar movies of just a few years ago. That blows my mind.
    • ekianjo 6y ago
      > Real time raytracing was an utter fantasy just a few years ago We still don't have real time ray-tracing. Even the demos that only use ray-tracing are throwing the strict minimum of rays and they apply a series of complex filters (using machine learning) to remove the artifacts and the noise.
      • jagger27 6y ago
        It’s still pretty cool that these cards have enough oomph to get close enough to real-time for DLSS to work.
      • jamwaffles 6y ago
        As I understand it, the Quake RTX demo is fully ray traced but I could be wrong on that. The FPS isn’t super high but definitely playable.
  • vbezhenar 6y ago
    Moore's law is about transistors. It's not dead, it's alive. The problem is you can't use that law to increase speed of CPUs. You don't need more transistors, you need faster transistors and Moore's law does not help with that. We had 4GHz 15 years ago, most of CPUs still work under 4 GHz nowadays. But with more transistors you can implement some common operations in hardware (like crypto, vector operations). Also you can just increase core count. Or you can put energy-efficient core along with energy-hungry core. And those things happen with CPUs. Unfortunately many workloads are still single-thread capped. GPU on the other side is inherently multi-threaded. You need 8k? You just need 4x transistors compared to 4k resolution. So GPUs will evolve even further and there's no limit, at least until we hit transistor wall.
  • zokier 6y ago
    > It's still not cheap Its funny to me that some people complain about nvidia price gouging etc, but if the sales of 3080 are any indication then based on basic supply&demand idea if anything they are massively underpriced. Lowering the prices would seem to just mean that more people would be disappointed from not actually being able to get them because the supply is so limited. The little I know about chip manufacturing also suggests that its likely that fabs have been producing ga102s at full capacity and its not like you can just get another fab to produce more of them in blink of an eye, so availability is probably really just constrained by production.
    • antiterra 6y ago
      I think this is a marketing problem, where selling the 3080 at $1200 would hurt future sales once supply meets demand, even if the price is lowered later. Maybe the optimizing solution would be something (awful) like a car dealership where the price is negotiable based on volatile local factors. As a complete layperson when it comes to economics, I’m curious if someone has extensively analyzed ‘market value’ vs MSRP over the lifecycle of a product rollout and come up with a workable formula for calculating the optimal price.
      • zokier 6y ago
        I actually was thinking about this after failing to acquire 3080. Maybe for limited launches like this it would make sense to auction off the supply? It would be arguably fairer system for consumers than selling out in seconds, and potentially both more profitable and less stressful for nvidia. Of course the auction system needs carefully designed, but maybe something like uniform price sealed auction with last accepted bid pricing (with reserve) would work here? Sealed auctions seem especially well suited because they feel less timing critical.
  • Aerroon 6y ago
    Keep in mind that video games are optimizations on top of hacks on top of optimizations on top of hacks on... This is necessary, because we simply don't have the number-crunching capability to simulate the video game world better. If developers could have that horsepower, then they'd probably use it. In other words: as people get faster hardware video games will start using more computational power. This allows developers to scale back some optimizations and usually allows some different styles of games. Another thing to consider is that the number of pixels pushed to your screen is one thing. Another thing is that you will need higher quality assets with more detail too.
• alibert 6y ago
  Prepare to wait a bit if you didn't secure one yesterday. The 3000 serie launch is the exact definition of paper launch.
  • dispat0r 6y ago
    paper launch means no hardware. This is just very limited supply. The only atrocious thing is the FE edition is 100$ less then the cheap AIB models.
    • apetresc 6y ago
      You're not operating on the same definition of paper launch as everyone else. It's generally used also for limited-quantity releases. Lots of chips can be produced in small batches that can't be mass-produced yet.
    • Pet_Ant 6y ago
      > paper launch means no hardware If it's effectively a paper launch because they aren't available in commercial quantities. Much like Intel's overly binned high end chips.
    • pixl97 6y ago
      >The only atrocious thing is the FE edition is 100$ less Some people are calling this rather scummy behavior on nvidias part. "Nvidia has the cheapest card that this performance level ever!" is what the headlines will say. But if only a few hundred/thousand of these cards show up at this price over the next 6 months or so, and the AIB models go for $100+ more is really more of a way of manipulating headlines with no desire to follow up on the savings.
  • cillian64 6y ago
    Apparently the supply of hardware was similar to the last few nvidia launches and it was demand which was substantially higher this time.
    • bserge 6y ago