5 ms·

Graphics card generation is over and it was mostly trash

48 points by isaacfrond 3y ago

h2odragon 3y ago
The market is splitting into GPUs on one hand, that still have latency concerns, and dedicated vector processors that can be high latency but need their own resources and maybe even dedicated OS. I'd like to see GPUs that are closer to dumb frame buffers again, with their need for fast RAM access served by the main system RAM and that capability benefiting the whole system.
bullen 3y ago
I have stopped at 1030, the 2GB of VRAM is a limiting factor that I appreciate. As someone who is targeting Raspberry 4 and Vision Five 2 where the low end is still 2GB shared RAM there is zero point to go higher. Embrace the limitation!
- Joker_vD 3y ago
  Crysis 3 very comfortably ran on 2 GiB of VRAM. I wonder what its system requirements would have been if it were developed today?
- flyingfences 3y ago
  Likewise, the last time I can recall a notable increase in my own enjoyment from a new GPU was my GTX 660. It ran all the games I was playing back then (TF2, Skyrim, Civ V, Bioshock Infinite...) on mid to high settings. The newer cards I've bought since then have only felt like marginal improvements. Yeah, the graphics have more detail, more effects, better lighting. So what? Do the games actually look better, aesthetically? Are the worlds more immersive? Is the gameplay any better? Nope.
  - bullen 3y ago
    1030 DDR5 is as good as the 660 but at 30W instead of 140W. I can still play all games, the only games that struggle are the ones that hit their head in efficiency roof because of engines or pushing the boundaries too far. Most titles are CPU bound too!
Aardwolf 3y ago
> Nvidia is already very keen on emphasizing DLSS as the solution to this problem, and AMD is likewise tauting its own tech as well. Personally I dislike DLSS so much: If I enable it in Cyberpunk 2077, there are some visible noise patterns that pop in and out of view especially near shadows on flat textures all the time, it looks horrible and distracting. And if I disable DLSS, if the game updates sometimes it enables it back so I see the horrible things again! Why do you need AI to upscale anyway if it looks this bad, why not just use Lanczos/bicubic/... upscaling? They are not only simpler and faster, but look better too, because they don't create the above mentioned horrible visible noise patterns. Then they have the inter-frame thing that causes input lag, another bad degradation. Then they 'solve' input lag by touting a vendor lock-in-sounding feature (Nvidia Reflex), while the real solution to input lag is not add vendor lock-in feature but ensure you compute 1 frame at the time and do so fast (which is of course not simple, but is a matter of optimization and not of brand-named features, and perhaps not generating and inserting additional frames would help). Then there is the fact that DLSS is something that needs to be supported by games themselves: why? This again makes it sounds vendor-lock-in-ish because they can have it "exclusively" in some games. But nothing about upscaling, nor frame generation, sounds like something that requires game engine support to me. The graphics card should have enough info to do that by having all the pixels. I mean, it was always possible to play games at different resolutions (DLSS is basically also like playing the game at lower resolution), and there always has been some upscaling required for that (whether it's the monitor or the graphics card doing it). This never required special engine support.
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  > This again makes it sounds vendor-lock-in-ish because they can have it "exclusively" in some games. But nothing about upscaling, nor frame generation, sounds like something that requires game engine support to me Because DLSS is a AI-based solution with customized settings and inputs for each game. (The “Deep Learning SuperSampling” is right in the title.) This is also why it requires NVIDIA’s bespoke Tensor cores to function. DLSS 2.0 removed most per-game optimization but there’s still some support work required. AMD’s FSR is basically a traditional upscaling solution, just with low overhead. FSR runs fine on NVIDIA and even the Nintendo Switch - but almost all reviewers agree DLSS is superior in most games. Except, perhaps, Cyberpunk 2077. But that’s not a fair metric to measure DLSS by because everything about that game has been a technical disaster.
a13o 3y ago
Who can blame them, I mean where's the motivation? Gamers aren't asking for 4k gaming, they want 2k gaming at high refresh rates. Modern game engines aren't credibly capable of 4k gaming, given the market's desire for high refresh rates. The fine print will show that they are doing 4k@30Hz which is like going back in time to the PlayStation 2 era but with really fancy geometry. The bar to clear is 4k@120Hz. However getting there requires a full stack refresh. A high end panel made in the last two years that not only can handle high refresh 4k, but has the required state of the art HDMI or DisplayPort tech to stream that many bits. Since nobody else is in place yet -- the monitors, the game engines -- there's no incentive for the graphics card to be early to the party. RTX 40 series was for people with more money than market sense. Nvidia is going to pay gaming lip service and bide its time until there's an actual growth vector in that space. All their attention is, and should be, on monetizing the 'AI' hype curve.
- tetris11 3y ago
  If the surge of indie game popularity has shown anything, it's that games can be 8-bit hot pixellated messes but still touted as visual masterpieces as long as there's a decent global lighting engine somewhere in the mix. I think, as you say, AI will be the next paradigm for gamers, and having specialised chips on these GPUs that can turn a scripted NPC story-based interaction into a do-what-you-want-under-these-contraints a la "AI town"[1] might keep them in business a little longer before they have to start upping the visuals again. 1: https://github.com/a16z-infra/ai-town https://github.com/a16z-infra/ai-town
  - danaris 3y ago
    Even more importantly, a game can have crunchy 8-bit graphics that no one praises, but still be an amazing game. No one (at least that I've heard) is saying, for instance, that Undertale or Deltarune are "visual masterpieces". They don't need to be. They're well-made games that do and say some interesting things.
    - sph 3y ago
      Pixel art or 3d... graphics are overrated. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad/ (Haven't had the chance to play yet, but I've heard great things)
zbrozek 3y ago
I really hope Intel doesn't pull an Intel and prematurely give up on GPUs. They put out a solid first crack and the market desperately needs some capable competition.
- agloe_dreams 3y ago
  This. A770 was hampered by driver issues but when they finally hit their stride it really shocked people. I don't think anybody expected it to be on the level is was.
  - KennyBlanken 3y ago
    What shocked people was how bad they were at drivers given they've been making GPUs for decades. The cards performed significantly worse than a 1070, which is a mid-tier GPU from 2016, and the drivers had such terrible and inconsistent performance (not to mention all the crashes) that the cards were useless.
    - agloe_dreams 3y ago
      Unless your 1070 is magically faster than a 3060Ti, you are either mistaken or acting in bad faith about the DX9 issues which are basically solved.
intrasight 3y ago
Advertisers say that 90% of their ad spend has no results the problem is they don't know which spend that is. Graphics cards have the same problem. 90% of the pixels aren't being looked at. The problem is the card doesn't know which ones they are. This is the problem to solve.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  I’ve been reading about eye tracking and selective rendering for at least twenty years now.
  - morjom 3y ago
    Then I guess you should sign up somewhere in the VR sector.
  - fidotron 3y ago
    In vr this is known as foveated rendering and is a thing.
    - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
      I am aware. But, didn’t mention that because that isn’t the topic of desktop rendering.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Guvante 3y ago
  My estimate is 70% is peripheral and the eye can move across the screen in 105ms or so. (60° FOV 18° excluding peripheral and 400°/sec speed) That makes things really hard when your absolute minimum input latency (that nobody gets in practice) is already 24ms at 60Hz. Maybe once we start talking about higher frequencies it can make sense. VR is trying hard for higher refresh rates since we are more sensitive to input latency for things we are experiencing and is hoping that tech helps get there.
causi 3y ago
I dropped a thousand dollars on a new card this generation to replace my GTX 1070 from 2016. Gotta say, I probably shouldn't have bothered. The old card was running modern games at 1080p60 just fine and I can't tell much difference between 1080p run through an mClassic hardware upscaler and native 4K. Even on my 75 inch TV it wasn't a huge leap.
bcatanzaro 3y ago
I don’t know why this journalist says the industry needs to “level” with consumers about the death of Moore’s law. NVIDIA has been announcing the end of Moore’s law at least since 2017 [1]. [1] https://www.techspot.com/news/71172-nvidia-boss-moore-law-dead-gpus-soon-replace.html https://www.techspot.com/news/71172-nvidia-boss-moore-law-de...
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
Dunno how you could call any gen with the XX90 series in it "trash", even if the rest of the lineup has issues the fact that level of power and VRAM exists this side of $2000 let alone $10,000 is crazy. Compare it to the 20XX series where the top of the line card only has 11GB of VRAM, less than the 1080Ti... and the flagship feature "raytracing" just isn't viable at the power of any of those 20XX cards.
agloe_dreams 3y ago
What an easily discreditable article. The comments on the 12VHPWR connector (while calling it a 12HPWR) are a joke where they setup the situation, comment Nvidia's claims, and then just go rogue on the cause blaming the power consumption of the card instead of extremely well-defined research showing faulty connectors that make a bad connection and poor information available to customers caused the failures. Obviously a faulty connector will fail faster if it gets more power though it. Meanwhile the 4090 isd actually rather efficient and the article downright ignores the entire rest of the lineup having better performance/watt.
- ls612 3y ago
  The only thing is that there were a bunch of 3rd party adapters (and a couple first party ones too) which had design or manufacturing flaws which caused them to melt. This kinda muddied the waters on the issue this year but it seems that the vast majority of issues after the problem was figured out were due to the specific 3rd party product. It’s also the fact to some degree that the safety factor on the 12vhpwr connector is less than the old 8-pin, so smaller issues lead to melting. I know that I am slightly stressed about my 4090 even though I’ve thoroughly verified that it’s fully plugged in.
standardUser 3y ago
Are we once again allowed to buy high-end graphics cards at retail price, or are the crypto-boys still ruining it for everyone else? Last couple times I went to look at cards the prices were jacked up and eventually I stopped looking. Though I suppose it's for the best since my GTX 970 still gets the job done all these years later.
- ancientworldnow 3y ago
  Crypto hasn't been a factor on GPU pricing for nearing two years now.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  AI is probably now what's ruining it for everyone else, especially because NVIDIA essentially has a monopoly on a very broad segment of that market right now and so can hike their margins with little downside.
daft_pink 3y ago
Don't we have another year on this graphic's card generation for Nvidia users at least? Pretty sure we have at least a year before the 50xx series will be released, assuming it's called that.
PeterStuer 3y ago
The problem is: you have a square inch of TSMC 4N. Do you turn that into a 2k Gtx 4090 or a 25k H100 that will sell even faster than the former?
Narishma 3y ago
The title was truncated.
- rollcat 3y ago
  This title was likely truncated because a lot of click bait titles start with the word "this".
Havoc 3y ago
Ended up with a 2nd hand 3090. Decent gaming and 24gb for ai shenanigans. All for much cheaper than a mid tier 4000 series

48 points by isaacfrond 3y ago

The market is splitting into GPUs on one hand, that still have latency concerns, and dedicated vector processors that can be high latency but need their own resources and maybe even dedicated OS. I'd like to see GPUs that are closer to dumb frame buffers again, with their need for fast RAM access served by the main system RAM and that capability benefiting the whole system.

bullen 3y ago

I have stopped at 1030, the 2GB of VRAM is a limiting factor that I appreciate. As someone who is targeting Raspberry 4 and Vision Five 2 where the low end is still 2GB shared RAM there is zero point to go higher. Embrace the limitation!

Joker_vD 3y ago
Crysis 3 very comfortably ran on 2 GiB of VRAM. I wonder what its system requirements would have been if it were developed today?
flyingfences 3y ago
Likewise, the last time I can recall a notable increase in my own enjoyment from a new GPU was my GTX 660. It ran all the games I was playing back then (TF2, Skyrim, Civ V, Bioshock Infinite...) on mid to high settings. The newer cards I've bought since then have only felt like marginal improvements. Yeah, the graphics have more detail, more effects, better lighting. So what? Do the games actually look better, aesthetically? Are the worlds more immersive? Is the gameplay any better? Nope.
- bullen 3y ago
  1030 DDR5 is as good as the 660 but at 30W instead of 140W. I can still play all games, the only games that struggle are the ones that hit their head in efficiency roof because of engines or pushing the boundaries too far. Most titles are CPU bound too!

Aardwolf 3y ago

> Nvidia is already very keen on emphasizing DLSS as the solution to this problem, and AMD is likewise tauting its own tech as well. Personally I dislike DLSS so much: If I enable it in Cyberpunk 2077, there are some visible noise patterns that pop in and out of view especially near shadows on flat textures all the time, it looks horrible and distracting. And if I disable DLSS, if the game updates sometimes it enables it back so I see the horrible things again! Why do you need AI to upscale anyway if it looks this bad, why not just use Lanczos/bicubic/... upscaling? They are not only simpler and faster, but look better too, because they don't create the above mentioned horrible visible noise patterns. Then they have the inter-frame thing that causes input lag, another bad degradation. Then they 'solve' input lag by touting a vendor lock-in-sounding feature (Nvidia Reflex), while the real solution to input lag is not add vendor lock-in feature but ensure you compute 1 frame at the time and do so fast (which is of course not simple, but is a matter of optimization and not of brand-named features, and perhaps not generating and inserting additional frames would help). Then there is the fact that DLSS is something that needs to be supported by games themselves: why? This again makes it sounds vendor-lock-in-ish because they can have it "exclusively" in some games. But nothing about upscaling, nor frame generation, sounds like something that requires game engine support to me. The graphics card should have enough info to do that by having all the pixels. I mean, it was always possible to play games at different resolutions (DLSS is basically also like playing the game at lower resolution), and there always has been some upscaling required for that (whether it's the monitor or the graphics card doing it). This never required special engine support.

gjsman-1000 3y ago
> This again makes it sounds vendor-lock-in-ish because they can have it "exclusively" in some games. But nothing about upscaling, nor frame generation, sounds like something that requires game engine support to me Because DLSS is a AI-based solution with customized settings and inputs for each game. (The “Deep Learning SuperSampling” is right in the title.) This is also why it requires NVIDIA’s bespoke Tensor cores to function. DLSS 2.0 removed most per-game optimization but there’s still some support work required. AMD’s FSR is basically a traditional upscaling solution, just with low overhead. FSR runs fine on NVIDIA and even the Nintendo Switch - but almost all reviewers agree DLSS is superior in most games. Except, perhaps, Cyberpunk 2077. But that’s not a fair metric to measure DLSS by because everything about that game has been a technical disaster.

a13o 3y ago

Who can blame them, I mean where's the motivation? Gamers aren't asking for 4k gaming, they want 2k gaming at high refresh rates. Modern game engines aren't credibly capable of 4k gaming, given the market's desire for high refresh rates. The fine print will show that they are doing 4k@30Hz which is like going back in time to the PlayStation 2 era but with really fancy geometry. The bar to clear is 4k@120Hz. However getting there requires a full stack refresh. A high end panel made in the last two years that not only can handle high refresh 4k, but has the required state of the art HDMI or DisplayPort tech to stream that many bits. Since nobody else is in place yet -- the monitors, the game engines -- there's no incentive for the graphics card to be early to the party. RTX 40 series was for people with more money than market sense. Nvidia is going to pay gaming lip service and bide its time until there's an actual growth vector in that space. All their attention is, and should be, on monetizing the 'AI' hype curve.

tetris11 3y ago
If the surge of indie game popularity has shown anything, it's that games can be 8-bit hot pixellated messes but still touted as visual masterpieces as long as there's a decent global lighting engine somewhere in the mix. I think, as you say, AI will be the next paradigm for gamers, and having specialised chips on these GPUs that can turn a scripted NPC story-based interaction into a do-what-you-want-under-these-contraints a la "AI town"[1] might keep them in business a little longer before they have to start upping the visuals again. 1: https://github.com/a16z-infra/ai-town https://github.com/a16z-infra/ai-town
- danaris 3y ago
  Even more importantly, a game can have crunchy 8-bit graphics that no one praises, but still be an amazing game. No one (at least that I've heard) is saying, for instance, that Undertale or Deltarune are "visual masterpieces". They don't need to be. They're well-made games that do and say some interesting things.
  - sph 3y ago
    Pixel art or 3d... graphics are overrated. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad/ (Haven't had the chance to play yet, but I've heard great things)

zbrozek 3y ago

I really hope Intel doesn't pull an Intel and prematurely give up on GPUs. They put out a solid first crack and the market desperately needs some capable competition.

agloe_dreams 3y ago
This. A770 was hampered by driver issues but when they finally hit their stride it really shocked people. I don't think anybody expected it to be on the level is was.
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  What shocked people was how bad they were at drivers given they've been making GPUs for decades. The cards performed significantly worse than a 1070, which is a mid-tier GPU from 2016, and the drivers had such terrible and inconsistent performance (not to mention all the crashes) that the cards were useless.
  - agloe_dreams 3y ago
    Unless your 1070 is magically faster than a 3060Ti, you are either mistaken or acting in bad faith about the DX9 issues which are basically solved.

intrasight 3y ago

Advertisers say that 90% of their ad spend has no results the problem is they don't know which spend that is. Graphics cards have the same problem. 90% of the pixels aren't being looked at. The problem is the card doesn't know which ones they are. This is the problem to solve.

SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
I’ve been reading about eye tracking and selective rendering for at least twenty years now.
- morjom 3y ago
  Then I guess you should sign up somewhere in the VR sector.
- fidotron 3y ago
  In vr this is known as foveated rendering and is a thing.
  - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    I am aware. But, didn’t mention that because that isn’t the topic of desktop rendering.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Guvante 3y ago
My estimate is 70% is peripheral and the eye can move across the screen in 105ms or so. (60° FOV 18° excluding peripheral and 400°/sec speed) That makes things really hard when your absolute minimum input latency (that nobody gets in practice) is already 24ms at 60Hz. Maybe once we start talking about higher frequencies it can make sense. VR is trying hard for higher refresh rates since we are more sensitive to input latency for things we are experiencing and is hoping that tech helps get there.

causi 3y ago

I dropped a thousand dollars on a new card this generation to replace my GTX 1070 from 2016. Gotta say, I probably shouldn't have bothered. The old card was running modern games at 1080p60 just fine and I can't tell much difference between 1080p run through an mClassic hardware upscaler and native 4K. Even on my 75 inch TV it wasn't a huge leap.

bcatanzaro 3y ago

I don’t know why this journalist says the industry needs to “level” with consumers about the death of Moore’s law. NVIDIA has been announcing the end of Moore’s law at least since 2017 [1]. [1] https://www.techspot.com/news/71172-nvidia-boss-moore-law-dead-gpus-soon-replace.html https://www.techspot.com/news/71172-nvidia-boss-moore-law-de...

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

Dunno how you could call any gen with the XX90 series in it "trash", even if the rest of the lineup has issues the fact that level of power and VRAM exists this side of $2000 let alone $10,000 is crazy. Compare it to the 20XX series where the top of the line card only has 11GB of VRAM, less than the 1080Ti... and the flagship feature "raytracing" just isn't viable at the power of any of those 20XX cards.

agloe_dreams 3y ago

What an easily discreditable article. The comments on the 12VHPWR connector (while calling it a 12HPWR) are a joke where they setup the situation, comment Nvidia's claims, and then just go rogue on the cause blaming the power consumption of the card instead of extremely well-defined research showing faulty connectors that make a bad connection and poor information available to customers caused the failures. Obviously a faulty connector will fail faster if it gets more power though it. Meanwhile the 4090 isd actually rather efficient and the article downright ignores the entire rest of the lineup having better performance/watt.

ls612 3y ago
The only thing is that there were a bunch of 3rd party adapters (and a couple first party ones too) which had design or manufacturing flaws which caused them to melt. This kinda muddied the waters on the issue this year but it seems that the vast majority of issues after the problem was figured out were due to the specific 3rd party product. It’s also the fact to some degree that the safety factor on the 12vhpwr connector is less than the old 8-pin, so smaller issues lead to melting. I know that I am slightly stressed about my 4090 even though I’ve thoroughly verified that it’s fully plugged in.

standardUser 3y ago

Are we once again allowed to buy high-end graphics cards at retail price, or are the crypto-boys still ruining it for everyone else? Last couple times I went to look at cards the prices were jacked up and eventually I stopped looking. Though I suppose it's for the best since my GTX 970 still gets the job done all these years later.

ancientworldnow 3y ago
Crypto hasn't been a factor on GPU pricing for nearing two years now.
rcxdude 3y ago
AI is probably now what's ruining it for everyone else, especially because NVIDIA essentially has a monopoly on a very broad segment of that market right now and so can hike their margins with little downside.

daft_pink 3y ago

Don't we have another year on this graphic's card generation for Nvidia users at least? Pretty sure we have at least a year before the 50xx series will be released, assuming it's called that.

PeterStuer 3y ago

The problem is: you have a square inch of TSMC 4N. Do you turn that into a 2k Gtx 4090 or a 25k H100 that will sell even faster than the former?

Narishma 3y ago

The title was truncated.

rollcat 3y ago
This title was likely truncated because a lot of click bait titles start with the word "this".

Havoc 3y ago

Ended up with a 2nd hand 3090. Decent gaming and 24gb for ai shenanigans. All for much cheaper than a mid tier 4000 series