Hardware RTX Cards Discussion, Ray Tracing & DLSS

[SG854]

So with the RTX 20 series cards being out for a while & the eventual release of the 30 series around the corner what are your opinions on the RTX features like Ray tracing and DLSS? Are you excited for the future of Ray Tracing? Are you unimpressed?

Very few games support Ray Tracing right now, but with the next generation of consoles supporting RT this might change and may be more common to the point where an RT card is going to be more enticing.

For the people that own an RTX card was it worth the purchase? Especially for the really expensive 2080ti. Or did you regret your purchase? Anybody going to wait for newer rtx cards 30, 40 and above, that'll give better RT performance? Anybody that doesn't care about RT and think its overhyped? Is FPS more important the then RT? Anybody still rocking the older 10 series card or card from a different brand? Share your opinions.

 

[FAST6191]

DLSS (deep learning super sampling, nominally a way to upscale textures in an "intelligent" way) might be reasonable to make everybody, or indeed every tree, not appear like clones when walking around an open world or otherwise add a bit of variety, and that could easily be achieved by other means. No particular concern otherwise as it is just another in a long line of reducing the processing in the distance tricks and scarcely more interesting than 2d/3d change in the distance.

Ray tracing. I first met it decades ago when it was a popular demo in qbasic and other things. Still remains a fun tech demo for the most part. I don't particularly expect any games to make real use of it (maybe a couple of indy games find a nice feature, possibly a horror game), much less its use to go widespread unless it becomes a cheap way to offload light calculations. Even then it will probably be a flawed outing and its failures will be apparent for an iteration or two (see reflection, bloom and the like).

I am mostly just concerned everybody is pushing largely needlessly into 4k and crazy fps rather than pushing polys and textures (or dropping latency), and speaking of textures I have not checked up on the new hotness there for a while as there was some good stuff happening with weight, animation and deformation there.

 

[raystriker]

I feel sorry for anyone who bought a Turing card, they really got the short end of the stick. RTX2000 cards will not age well, especially since it is anticipated that Ampere's Ray tracing will be multiple times quicker and the whole product stack is getting it. RIP "GTX". Same goes with DLSS. Turing really was just a test bed for both of them.

There is gonna be a mess. Next gen games initially made for consoles will play nice with RDNA2, whereas Nvidia just keeps on making it's software stack more proprietary.

 

[Magsor]

RTX is considered "a gimmick" think of the 3d on the 3ds. Best example there is.

 

[sj33]

I feel sorry for anyone who bought a Turing card, they really got the short end of the stick. RTX2000 cards will not age well, especially since it is anticipated that Ampere's Ray tracing will be multiple times quicker and the whole product stack is getting it. RIP "GTX". Same goes with DLSS. Turing really was just a test bed for both of them.

There is gonna be a mess. Next gen games initially made for consoles will play nice with RDNA2, whereas Nvidia just keeps on making it's software stack more proprietary.

I dunno, at the end of the day the Turing cards will be more than 2 years old before we see any Ampere-based retail cards, which is on par with the 10x0 series. Nobody bought Turing expecting future-proofing because that just doesn't exist in the PC space.

I will say that buying into either Turing or RDNA at this point in time would be a mistake unless you really need a new card right now.

As an aside, saying that ray tracing is a 'gimmick' is to greatly misunderstand the technology. It certainly will not be a requirement for a good few years yet, but a better comparison would be the switch to pixel shaders. It was revolutionary but change didn't happen overnight.

 

[raystriker]

RTX is considered "a gimmick" think of the 3d on the 3ds. Best example there is.

It's not really a gimmick, the science is there and it's legit. Nvidia made the wrong call to push for ray-tracing with Turing instead of letting it mature with Ampere. None of the games released till now with RTX "enabled" were good implementations because of that.

 

[sj33]

I find it hard to be too critical of Nvidia for doing that, though. It's a chicken and egg situation where somebody has to get the technology out there so devs can begin to support it. I don't really want to berate them for being somewhat progressive.

Regarding DLSS though, obviously proprietory technologies are a bad thing. DLSS itself works well but locking people into Nvidia cards isn't good for anybody. Hopefully more vendor-agnostic solutions like DirectML begin to take off.

 

[SG854]

I dunno, at the end of the day the Turing cards will be more than 2 years old before we see any Ampere-based retail cards, which is on par with the 10x0 series. Nobody bought Turing expecting future-proofing because that just doesn't exist in the PC space.

I will say that buying into either Turing or RDNA at this point in time would be a mistake unless you really need a new card right now.

As an aside, saying that ray tracing is a 'gimmick' is to greatly misunderstand the technology. It certainly will not be a requirement for a good few years yet, but a better comparison would be the switch to pixel shaders. It was revolutionary but change didn't happen overnight.

The 20 series may not age as fast depending on how DLSS evolves. Its something that gets better and better as time goes on with AI learning, AI will learn better and performe better. They may squeeze a little more life out of those cards. Dropping the resolution but have AI build a higher resolution picture having less impact on performance. Maybe get 4k 144hz without raytracing out of a 1440p image.

Would probably work on a handheld like Switch pro. And definitely work on a power house graphics card like the 2080ti. May have been super expensive to buy one but it may pay off later on as things evolve.



And direct x12 ultimate pushing for better raytrace performance. Raytracing will be more efficient as drivers and software evolves.

It's not really a gimmick, the science is there and it's legit. Nvidia made the wrong call to push for ray-tracing with Turing instead of letting it mature with Ampere. None of the games released till now with RTX "enabled" were good implementations because of that.

They wanted to be first. That's really it. But the benefit is that it put raytracing out there, so developers work on it sooner. So we would be getting it sooner then if they waited for mature cards. And I'm not sure the PS5 or Xbox series x would have supported it if it wasn't for that early push.

 

[sj33]

Yep, AMD almost certainly wouldn't have rushed to put ray tracing features into RDNA2 if Nvidia hadn't put the feature out there in the first place, frankly. Nvidia could easily have focused on even faster rasterisation instead.

I have a relatively lowly RTX 2060 so it only just about makes the threshold for ray tracing, but it has been pretty fun to mess with. My screen is only 1080p @ 82Hz (overclocked from 75Hz) so I've been able to use ray tracing in Quake II RTX, Metro Exodus and Control, with DLSS 2.0 at a minimum of 60Hz (and 82Hz in the case of Control). It's not quite as useless as people assume, although quite how well equipped the current RTX cards will be in the future will depend entirely on reconstruction techniques.

I'm not biased towards Nvidia, by the way. I had an RX 480 before this and might even get an RDNA3 in the future if the price makes more sense. But this time I just felt that experimenting with new technologies was more interesting that yet more frames.

 

[FAST6191]

A technology that will go unused is a gimmick, even more so if it is not going to be one of those "criminally ignored" type things. Would rather have had the effort on something else and waited a few years until such time as it is either good for a bigger section of the fancy crowd or even hard to ignore (assuming it gets there).

That said I am still not sold on it either from the making things look fancy perspective, or the will relieve burdens from devs allowing either smaller devs (what few still exist or might emerge) to play at higher levels or high end devs to spend the silly money on other things. Not even sure it is a good stepping stone, though there are paths they could take to something I would consider actually useful.
Or if you prefer ray tracing or something that the AI could make use of to do fun calculations, something which would probably also able to be twisted by the GPU computation crowd as well if we are also considering sales vectors for the graphics card maker.

 

[SG854]

Yep, AMD almost certainly wouldn't have rushed to put ray tracing features into RDNA2 if Nvidia hadn't put the feature out there in the first place, frankly. Nvidia could easily have focused on even faster rasterisation instead.

I have a relatively lowly RTX 2060 so it only just about makes the threshold for ray tracing, but it has been pretty fun to mess with. My screen is only 1080p @ 82Hz (overclocked from 75Hz) so I've been able to use ray tracing in Quake II RTX, Metro Exodus and Control, with DLSS 2.0 at a minimum of 60Hz (and 82Hz in the case of Control). It's not quite as useless as people assume, although quite how well equipped the current RTX cards will be in the future will depend entirely on reconstruction techniques.

I'm not biased towards Nvidia, by the way. I had an RX 480 before this and might even get an RDNA3 in the future if the price makes more sense. But this time I just felt that experimenting with new technologies was more interesting that yet more frames.

I'm guessing the premium prices that alot of people complained about in the 20 series was because they would be less likely to upgrade with DLSS technology. So Nvidia was trying to make up for that.

And also new tech tends to be more expensive for early adopters, like when DVD first came out or OLEDs. Its something that always happens so its to be expected. But prices comes down eventually as more competition enters and they refine the production process.

I just hope NVIDIA doesn't purposely skimp out on software holding back on how good it could be just so they can force people to upgrade their cards for more money. We'll see how DLSS 3.0 and beyond will evolve.