8 ms·

It seems like they're really emphasizing the difference in RT performance from the previous generation, but I think the gaming market at least will care more ab

It seems like they're really emphasizing the difference in RT performance from the previous generation, but I think the gaming market at least will care more about the difference in raw frames and memory size from the previous generation and AMD's offerings. Personally, I like using RT for some single player showpiece games with a 3080 Ti, RT was useless on my 2080, but the games that I play the most do not use RT at all. DLSS is always great on any title that offers it, but again the real issue is that most of the games that people put real time into are the types of games for which RT is irrelevant. Graphical showpiece stuff is just a lot less relevant to the contemporary gaming market than it used to be.

headwayoldest 4y ago
While RT is a single player gimmick I mostly turn off, it won't take many more increases like this to make it a very real feature. What will we see when developers start targeting these cards, or their successors?
- izacus 4y ago
  What does "single player gimmick" in your sentences here mean?
  - helf 4y ago
    The same thing people who say this always mean: “In /my opinion/, this doesn’t add enough to the game experience to justify the performance penalty. Also, my hardware isn’t strong enough to use it. Therefor it’s a gimmick! Herpa derpa!” That may actually be giving too much credit. It’s probably more like “I don’t like it so it’s a gimmick that no one else should enjoy”
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      Divining people's real motivations is a skill wasted on HN news comments. If you're as good at it as you think you are, you should be brokering multi-billion dollar deals.
      - helf 4y ago
        Oooh quite the burn. Props.
  - Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
    I interpret it to mean that the graphical enhancements that RT can give you are only really appreciable if you're playing a single-player game that allows you to stop and check out how beautiful it is, while in a competitive multiplayer game, you're moving around too fast to really appreciate (or even notice) the difference RT gives you over fake reflections.
    - whatshisface 4y ago
      By that logic, shooters could still have Quake graphics, and given how people still play it, I guess that's right.
      - squeaky-clean 4y ago
        Most Pro-level CS:GO players still play at 1024x768 or 1280x960 and graphics set to the lowest setting. (Best sources I could quickly find on my phone. Annoying ads warning) https://www.prosettings.com/zywoo-csgo/ https://www.prosettings.com/zywoo-csgo/ https://www.gamersdecide.com/articles/csgo-best-resolution-setting https://www.gamersdecide.com/articles/csgo-best-resolution-s...
        chupasaurus 4y ago
        The reason behind the 4:3 low resolution is outside of scope for ray tracing or performance overall: most of pro players found out that widened picture and thus player models are easier to target precisely in motion (AFAIK the phenomenon hasn't being studied properly) and you're limited by vertical resolution of the screen thus 960 is the upper bound for a common 16:9 1080p panel. As for lowest settings, the CS:GO don't have options to put the game into flat panel mess that is professional Q3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3ui0hz6sm0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3ui0hz6sm0
      - pdpi 4y ago
        We're past Quake-level graphics, but competitive eSports games, by and large, have deliberately simple graphics optimised for readability over flare. If you look at LoL, Fortnite, Valorant, Overwatch, they're all kind of the same — fairly flat light, bright colourful characters against a backdrop of pastels and otherwise muted background colours. Texture detailing is discrete and everything almost looks like block colours if you squint. Rainbow 6 Siege, CSGO, PUBG are the same, minus the colourful characters. Even if those games didn't optimise their engines for performance over visual fidelity, their visual design would make them fairly light weight anyhow.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    > What does "single player gimmick" in your sentences here mean? When I've seen this written it's often explained as to do with the fact that single-player is a much more curated experience, where the developers can stage-manage where you go and even where you look, and discard resources they know you won't see again. That's why single-player often looks way better than multiplayer, where a) the experience isn't that curated and b) fps matters much more.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  If it's actually another 2x performance improvement, we're really only another generation away at most. On my 3080 RT caused a performance drop but I was able to decide the trade-off for myself, often it was still playable, I just needed to decide whether I wanted high refresh rates or not. Another doubling or two and it'll barely be a thought at all. The caveat with this still is it requires DLSS for best effect, which is barely a trade off in my experience.
- hoffs 4y ago
  Not even close to a gimmick...
  - Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
    You're right, it really isn't. Gamers don't see it that way though because often, faked reflections are "good enough". In some cases though, the faked reflections are noticeable and immersion breaking. I notice it in MS Flight Simulator. I'm flying over water and approaching a large city, and I can see the reflection of buildings in the water. But when I push the nose down, as the image of the buildings goes off the top of my screen, the reflections go away too. In reality, this wouldn't happen. But in the sim, it does because the reflections are generated by just inverting the rendered image of the buildings. There's a map in Apex Legends where a section has a shiny floor. It fakes a reflection by rendering an environment-mapped texture. It does a decent job at making the floor look like it's reflective, but as you move around and compare what's being rendered to the actual geometry, you notice how it falls apart. But in a competitive FPS, you're not looking at the environment long and hard enough to notice. Duke Nukem 3D had proper reflections, but it did it by actually mirroring all the geometry, a technique that only really works well if the geometry is simple. RT makes reflections Just Work and work properly.
arecurrence 4y ago
I suspect they also highlight RT performance (and AI acceleration which is more-so focused on a different market than these gaming cards) because it is their key differentiator with competitors. Most upper market cards can already run most games well at 1440p or 4k.
aseipp 4y ago
Eh, the current 3080 can already do 60FPS @ 4k HDR on every AAA title I've thrown at it, and that's with an mITX undervolt build (cliffing the voltage at a point). "60FPS @ 4k is readily achievable" has been sort of the gold standard we've been careening towards for years since displays outpaced GPUs, and we're just about there now. The raw frame difference and memory size is nice especially if you're doing compute on these cards, but these weren't holding the gaming market back, at least. So for those segments, you need some juice to go on top of things. I can see why they advertise it this way. Personally, people say RT is a gimmick but I find it incredible on my 3080 for games that support it. In a game like Control the lighting is absolutely stunning, and even in a game like Minecraft RTX, the soft lighting and shadows are simply fantastic. (Minecraft IMO is a perfect example of how better soft shadows and realistic bounce lighting aren't just for "ultra realism" simulators.) It's already very convincing when implemented well. So I'm very happy to see continued interest here.
- TwoNineA 4y ago
  > the current 3080 can already do 4k @ 60FPS HDR on every AAA title I've thrown at it Have you tried CyberPunk 2077?
  - aseipp 4y ago
    No, but not for lack of interest. I simply upgraded from 2k res + 2080 Super to 4k res + 3080 at one point in the last year or so, but I had already beat the game by then and haven't returned to it.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    I have- I upgraded to a 3080 Ti (from a 2080 Ti). 4k @ 60FPS with pretty much every whizz-bang feature turned on. 60fps during the benchmark.
    - ianbutler 4y ago
      How about in the actual game? I have a 3090 at 1440p and swing 60 a lot at maxed everything and with dlss at quality, but more often than not it sits in the 45-50 range, that said I suspect I may be CPU bottlenecked atm.
trafficante 4y ago
I’d be interested in better RT performance for the purposes of VR gaming but, unfortunately, the high fidelity PCVR gaming market died with the Quest 2.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  It died because people who build $5000 gaming computers aren't numerous enough to actually base a business on.
- nomel 4y ago
  PSVR2 will be our savior.
- fomine3 4y ago
  No, average people never play VR with wired headset and highend PC so the market can't grow. Quest2 is acceptable device, and it can be upgraded by wireless Oculus Link with highend PC.
iLoveOncall 4y ago
> but I think the gaming market at least will care more about the difference in raw frames and memory size I'm not sure I understand why memory is important for gaming? For most games, with every settings maxed up, it'll be a stretch if it uses 6GB of VRAM. For other applications than gaming, 100% agree, but for gaming I can't imagine it's important.
- capableweb 4y ago
  > I'm not sure I understand why memory is important for gaming? For most games, with every settings maxed up, it'll be a stretch if it uses 6GB of VRAM. Depends on what kind of gaming you do, not all games consume the same type of resources from the GPU. Simulation games will usually be limited by RAM size/speed, VRAM size/speed and CPU, rather than actual clock speed of GPUs. Action games would require better latency and not so much about VRAM/RAM size and so on.
- mountainb 4y ago
  For the majority of games, no it doesn't matter at all. For a small number of games, it's not hard to eat up all the VRAM with certain settings and especially with 4K gaming. I use a 1440p monitor so it doesn't really matter that much to me, but it does matter more to people who spend a lot on good 4K displays.
EugeneOZ 4y ago
> DLSS is always great on any title that offers it It is very subjective. DLSS for me is always a blurry mess. I'm turning it off in every game - I'll better will turn off some RTX features than suffer that blurriness torture.
pornel 4y ago
Not everyone is a pro CS:Go player. I really like RTX shadow improvements and wish more games supported it. I've bought games for their "showpiece stuff".
- seanp2k2 4y ago
  I wish Valve would put a bit of investment into TF2, as it's still a very popular title with ~100k players on average[1], yet it's 32-bit ONLY and stuck on DirectX 9. The Mac version doesn't even work anymore because it was never updated to be 64-bit. The dedicated server, SRCDS, is also 32-bit only and struggles with 32 players and some fairly light admin mods. It's also mostly single-threaded, so it tends to run better on Intel CPUs with high clock speed. 1. https://steamcharts.com/app/440 https://steamcharts.com/app/440
  - fomine3 4y ago
    I played TF2. It's 15yo game and player count is limited to 32 (instead of official 24), but is it still single thread perf matter?
spywaregorilla 4y ago
I've yet to see a game that my laptop 2080 can't handle on max settings. The only games I've done that asked for raytracing I did was Control and Resident Evil 8. The pool of games that ask for extremely high performance is very small and pretty easy to ignore by accident.
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headwayoldest 4y ago

While RT is a single player gimmick I mostly turn off, it won't take many more increases like this to make it a very real feature. What will we see when developers start targeting these cards, or their successors?

izacus 4y ago
What does "single player gimmick" in your sentences here mean?
- helf 4y ago
  The same thing people who say this always mean: “In /my opinion/, this doesn’t add enough to the game experience to justify the performance penalty. Also, my hardware isn’t strong enough to use it. Therefor it’s a gimmick! Herpa derpa!” That may actually be giving too much credit. It’s probably more like “I don’t like it so it’s a gimmick that no one else should enjoy”
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    Divining people's real motivations is a skill wasted on HN news comments. If you're as good at it as you think you are, you should be brokering multi-billion dollar deals.
    - helf 4y ago
      Oooh quite the burn. Props.
- Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
  I interpret it to mean that the graphical enhancements that RT can give you are only really appreciable if you're playing a single-player game that allows you to stop and check out how beautiful it is, while in a competitive multiplayer game, you're moving around too fast to really appreciate (or even notice) the difference RT gives you over fake reflections.
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    By that logic, shooters could still have Quake graphics, and given how people still play it, I guess that's right.
    - squeaky-clean 4y ago
      Most Pro-level CS:GO players still play at 1024x768 or 1280x960 and graphics set to the lowest setting. (Best sources I could quickly find on my phone. Annoying ads warning) https://www.prosettings.com/zywoo-csgo/ https://www.prosettings.com/zywoo-csgo/ https://www.gamersdecide.com/articles/csgo-best-resolution-setting https://www.gamersdecide.com/articles/csgo-best-resolution-s...
      - chupasaurus 4y ago
        The reason behind the 4:3 low resolution is outside of scope for ray tracing or performance overall: most of pro players found out that widened picture and thus player models are easier to target precisely in motion (AFAIK the phenomenon hasn't being studied properly) and you're limited by vertical resolution of the screen thus 960 is the upper bound for a common 16:9 1080p panel. As for lowest settings, the CS:GO don't have options to put the game into flat panel mess that is professional Q3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3ui0hz6sm0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3ui0hz6sm0
    - pdpi 4y ago
      We're past Quake-level graphics, but competitive eSports games, by and large, have deliberately simple graphics optimised for readability over flare. If you look at LoL, Fortnite, Valorant, Overwatch, they're all kind of the same — fairly flat light, bright colourful characters against a backdrop of pastels and otherwise muted background colours. Texture detailing is discrete and everything almost looks like block colours if you squint. Rainbow 6 Siege, CSGO, PUBG are the same, minus the colourful characters. Even if those games didn't optimise their engines for performance over visual fidelity, their visual design would make them fairly light weight anyhow.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  > What does "single player gimmick" in your sentences here mean? When I've seen this written it's often explained as to do with the fact that single-player is a much more curated experience, where the developers can stage-manage where you go and even where you look, and discard resources they know you won't see again. That's why single-player often looks way better than multiplayer, where a) the experience isn't that curated and b) fps matters much more.
SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
If it's actually another 2x performance improvement, we're really only another generation away at most. On my 3080 RT caused a performance drop but I was able to decide the trade-off for myself, often it was still playable, I just needed to decide whether I wanted high refresh rates or not. Another doubling or two and it'll barely be a thought at all. The caveat with this still is it requires DLSS for best effect, which is barely a trade off in my experience.
hoffs 4y ago
Not even close to a gimmick...
- Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
  You're right, it really isn't. Gamers don't see it that way though because often, faked reflections are "good enough". In some cases though, the faked reflections are noticeable and immersion breaking. I notice it in MS Flight Simulator. I'm flying over water and approaching a large city, and I can see the reflection of buildings in the water. But when I push the nose down, as the image of the buildings goes off the top of my screen, the reflections go away too. In reality, this wouldn't happen. But in the sim, it does because the reflections are generated by just inverting the rendered image of the buildings. There's a map in Apex Legends where a section has a shiny floor. It fakes a reflection by rendering an environment-mapped texture. It does a decent job at making the floor look like it's reflective, but as you move around and compare what's being rendered to the actual geometry, you notice how it falls apart. But in a competitive FPS, you're not looking at the environment long and hard enough to notice. Duke Nukem 3D had proper reflections, but it did it by actually mirroring all the geometry, a technique that only really works well if the geometry is simple. RT makes reflections Just Work and work properly.

arecurrence 4y ago

I suspect they also highlight RT performance (and AI acceleration which is more-so focused on a different market than these gaming cards) because it is their key differentiator with competitors. Most upper market cards can already run most games well at 1440p or 4k.

aseipp 4y ago

Eh, the current 3080 can already do 60FPS @ 4k HDR on every AAA title I've thrown at it, and that's with an mITX undervolt build (cliffing the voltage at a point). "60FPS @ 4k is readily achievable" has been sort of the gold standard we've been careening towards for years since displays outpaced GPUs, and we're just about there now. The raw frame difference and memory size is nice especially if you're doing compute on these cards, but these weren't holding the gaming market back, at least. So for those segments, you need some juice to go on top of things. I can see why they advertise it this way. Personally, people say RT is a gimmick but I find it incredible on my 3080 for games that support it. In a game like Control the lighting is absolutely stunning, and even in a game like Minecraft RTX, the soft lighting and shadows are simply fantastic. (Minecraft IMO is a perfect example of how better soft shadows and realistic bounce lighting aren't just for "ultra realism" simulators.) It's already very convincing when implemented well. So I'm very happy to see continued interest here.

TwoNineA 4y ago
> the current 3080 can already do 4k @ 60FPS HDR on every AAA title I've thrown at it Have you tried CyberPunk 2077?
- aseipp 4y ago
  No, but not for lack of interest. I simply upgraded from 2k res + 2080 Super to 4k res + 3080 at one point in the last year or so, but I had already beat the game by then and haven't returned to it.
- dekhn 4y ago
  I have- I upgraded to a 3080 Ti (from a 2080 Ti). 4k @ 60FPS with pretty much every whizz-bang feature turned on. 60fps during the benchmark.
  - ianbutler 4y ago
    How about in the actual game? I have a 3090 at 1440p and swing 60 a lot at maxed everything and with dlss at quality, but more often than not it sits in the 45-50 range, that said I suspect I may be CPU bottlenecked atm.

trafficante 4y ago

I’d be interested in better RT performance for the purposes of VR gaming but, unfortunately, the high fidelity PCVR gaming market died with the Quest 2.

mrguyorama 4y ago
It died because people who build $5000 gaming computers aren't numerous enough to actually base a business on.
nomel 4y ago
PSVR2 will be our savior.
fomine3 4y ago
No, average people never play VR with wired headset and highend PC so the market can't grow. Quest2 is acceptable device, and it can be upgraded by wireless Oculus Link with highend PC.

iLoveOncall 4y ago

> but I think the gaming market at least will care more about the difference in raw frames and memory size I'm not sure I understand why memory is important for gaming? For most games, with every settings maxed up, it'll be a stretch if it uses 6GB of VRAM. For other applications than gaming, 100% agree, but for gaming I can't imagine it's important.

capableweb 4y ago
> I'm not sure I understand why memory is important for gaming? For most games, with every settings maxed up, it'll be a stretch if it uses 6GB of VRAM. Depends on what kind of gaming you do, not all games consume the same type of resources from the GPU. Simulation games will usually be limited by RAM size/speed, VRAM size/speed and CPU, rather than actual clock speed of GPUs. Action games would require better latency and not so much about VRAM/RAM size and so on.
mountainb 4y ago
For the majority of games, no it doesn't matter at all. For a small number of games, it's not hard to eat up all the VRAM with certain settings and especially with 4K gaming. I use a 1440p monitor so it doesn't really matter that much to me, but it does matter more to people who spend a lot on good 4K displays.

EugeneOZ 4y ago

> DLSS is always great on any title that offers it It is very subjective. DLSS for me is always a blurry mess. I'm turning it off in every game - I'll better will turn off some RTX features than suffer that blurriness torture.

pornel 4y ago

Not everyone is a pro CS:Go player. I really like RTX shadow improvements and wish more games supported it. I've bought games for their "showpiece stuff".

seanp2k2 4y ago
I wish Valve would put a bit of investment into TF2, as it's still a very popular title with ~100k players on average[1], yet it's 32-bit ONLY and stuck on DirectX 9. The Mac version doesn't even work anymore because it was never updated to be 64-bit. The dedicated server, SRCDS, is also 32-bit only and struggles with 32 players and some fairly light admin mods. It's also mostly single-threaded, so it tends to run better on Intel CPUs with high clock speed. 1. https://steamcharts.com/app/440 https://steamcharts.com/app/440
- fomine3 4y ago
  I played TF2. It's 15yo game and player count is limited to 32 (instead of official 24), but is it still single thread perf matter?

spywaregorilla 4y ago

I've yet to see a game that my laptop 2080 can't handle on max settings. The only games I've done that asked for raytracing I did was Control and Resident Evil 8. The pool of games that ask for extremely high performance is very small and pretty easy to ignore by accident.

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