Was RTX a big scam? – Performance & image quality analysis

[Mira Yurizaki]

My only gripe: about 2 minutes in, the video makes it sound like driver support is explicitly needed for DXR support. It doesn't because back in November 2018 or so there were people on Reddit running the DXR fallback samples on non RTX hardware: https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/9lcs4u/microsoft_dxr_demos_compiled_for_windows_10/

 

All NVIDIA did was make it driver wide, rather than require explicit application support. AMD can do the same thing if they want.

[Iansk_MT]

I have a 1080ti which replaced my old 1060 GTX 6gb. Do you think I can use the 1060GTX for the RTX calculations and the 1080ti just to meld everything together?

 

I'm quite curious if the unlocked drivers would allow such a thing.

[indrora]

5 hours ago, valdyrgramr said:

1080 Ti was 700 USD on MSRP.  The 2080 Ti's MSRP is 1200 bucks.  There is no justification to the MSRP on the 2080 Ti.  The so called justification for the price hike on the 2080 was the Real Time Ray Tracing and DLSS feats which barely are supported and when they are it's a hot mess.  The price increase is not justified by performance solely.  It's literally them trying to say Real Time Ray Tracing and DLSS is worth the price in crease until you get to the Titan and the 2080 Ti then those are just a fuck you to the consumer because no competition.

You're uh, new to this whole "cost of new tech" thing, aren't you? First generation of something that hasn't really been done before (remember that this is not GPGPU -- this is not CUDA -- this is adding special silicon for things like Tensor cores and ray tracing) will be more expensive. This isn't re-purposing texture shaders for something else, this is literally dedicated, first generation silicon. There's R&D cost that has to be recouped somewhere. That cost goes to you, the consumer.

 

When CUDA came out, the cards cost more. Hell, dedicated compute cards like the nVidia Titan still cost a pretty penny.

 

I remember when you had to make sure you had to make sure that the game you were buying supported your soundcard. Nothing like getting home from Fry's only to realize that your fancy new game (now out of the shrink wrap) doesn't support AdLib except for a few crappy MIDI renditions of the soundtrack because it was built for the Soundblaster PCM FM channels, so you go and buy a SoundBlaster only to realize that it's the same MIDI renditions just with slightly better sounding instruments. Today, there's little difference: Software support is still getting there and the first few generations of software and hardware are going to be... spotty, if not a little lacklustre.

 

Remember when HDR was new? And how we all oohed and ahhed when it was all over our faces, only to realize it was just Bloom and some subjective lighting? How about when everybody realized Doom wasn't really 3D? Or when you really honestly needed an SLI setup to make Unreal work right?

[Kisai]

13 hours ago, GabenJr said:

We didn’t care much for RTX when it launched… And now that RTX is available on GTX cards, has ANYTHING changed?

 

 

Buy a GeForce RTX 2080:
On Amazon: https://geni.us/wmWXXvN
On Newegg: https://lmg.gg/8KVRb

 

Buy a GeForce RTX 2060:
On Amazon: https://geni.us/vWn7vq
On Newegg: https://lmg.gg/8KVRQ

 

Buy a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti:
On Amazon: https://geni.us/Y9y6Gv
On Newegg: https://lmg.gg/8KVR6

 

RTX is at present stuck in the same doldrums as the CUDA cores. Nothing will ever use it directly, and only nVidia's libraries will ever make use of it without telling the developers specifically how to use it. If a GTX card could do everything that the RTX can do, then they would have devoted more die space to it in the first place.

 

Like you have to look at it in the same way as hardware-offload works back when AGP cards had "Mpeg motion calculation" as a defining feature for then Mpeg-1 and Mpeg-2 video (DVD), it may exist as a fixed-function feature until the central chip logic can do it in programmable logic at a reasonable cost. Like in theory, the lowend RTX card probably can do "ray tracing" in it's RT fixed function blocks at a level that is better than the GTX 1080ti in programmable logic, but that doesn't mean the 2060 RTX is going to run circles around it in any game, because clearly the way the RT stuff has been setup is to extend from the programmable shader logic at present and not necessarily really kind of path-tracing.

 

At any rate I don't see this being the same issue as VR or "3D screens" both which are essentially dead tech that's been revived only to see customers ignore it.

 

[Kisai]

54 minutes ago, indrora said:

Remember when HDR was new? And how we all oohed and ahhed when it was all over our faces, only to realize it was just Bloom and some subjective lighting? How about when everybody realized Doom wasn't really 3D? Or when you really honestly needed an SLI setup to make Unreal work right?

 

That's wrong. HDR is used in camera photography by sampling multiple exposures so you get more detail from the same image. That was before 4K UHD and rec.2020 colorspace. With rec.2020 you actually get "whiter than white" and "blacker than black" on OLED screens. So things like lightning, mirrors and water surfaces actually reflect light in a way that looks natural rather than just clipping at the maximum color reproduction value.

 

In a 3D game, HDR is essentially unused except when you transition between an indoor and an outdoor environment. Nobody has a 4K rec.2020 screen, most gamers still use TN screens with 6-bit color channel depth. So they of course don't see any HDR effects. You need 10-bit channels for that data to be present.

[Egg-Roll]

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

At any rate I don't see this being the same issue as VR or "3D screens" both which are essentially dead tech that's been revived only to see customers ignore it.

 

I think for VR it's the price, always has been always will be. 3D screens are annoying to many people (which is why the 3DS had the option to be turned off). IMO 3D glasses and VR are the best of the 3 the glasses are cheaper than the screens and VR allowed a full immersion experience. As tech moves forward I can see VR picking up pace (it's not dead, it's in a 10 year infancy). The problem with VR is much like all EV makers and their charging methods their heads are up their butts trying to make you the consumer buy theirs instead of working together. We'll get there where VR can be had for sub $250 w/o using a phone, and no I don't count Oculus Go.

[williamcll]

At one point during the crypto mining craze the 1080ti was as expensive as the 2080 ti

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

On 5/17/2019 at 12:22 AM, Arika S said:

scam? no

overpriced? yes

Thus making it a scam.

[Arika]

8 minutes ago, OrbitalBuzzsaw said:

Thus making it a scam.

Being overpriced doesn’t automatically make something a scam...

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

2 minutes ago, Arika S said:

Being overpriced doesn’t automatically make something a scam...

Depends on your definition of "scam" I guess. Personally I define most Apple products as a scam because you're paying above average rate for below average performance, as an example. With RTX the improvement is minimal (having tried it on my 1080 Ti) and you pay $100-250 more for the video card as a result making it a scam - it doesn't deliver the promised improvements, not to mention the FOUR games that support it

[Ankerson]

Nope, it's been great so far IMO.

 

New technology has to start someplace just like always.

 

Those of us who have been around and a long time remember the OLD DAYS and all of the improvements over the years because we lived through them.

 

 

 

 

[indrora]

On 5/17/2019 at 2:19 AM, Kisai said:

That's wrong. HDR is used in camera photography by sampling multiple exposures so you get more detail from the same image. That was before 4K UHD and rec.2020 colorspace. With rec.2020 you actually get "whiter than white" and "blacker than black" on OLED screens.

I'm not talking about the camera trick that produces funky looking images, I'm talking about the HDR we get in games. It also doesn't inherently need multiple exposure samples (you can do certain amounts of HDR with RAW DNG and compensation techniques, a cheater HDR that some photographers use when handling moving subjects and want to avoid ghosts).

No, I'm talking about games supporting HDR. Some of the first were in Unreal 3 and an early demo (HL2: Lost Cost), and a lot of the work was done by keeping two textures around and in other areas apply a bloom shader effect to the bright bits of the scene. It wasn't real HDR, but it was close enough. For an interesting look at how Valve cheated, they talked about it at SIGGRAPH 06, but the basic gist of it is that they're not really doing the raytrace HDR that you would want to do (and which RTX/DXR enables today) but instead pre-baked all their HDR stuff before rendering it fully.

 

The long and short of it is thus:

• Microsoft released DXR into the world
• nVidia then released their RTX cards which have hardware support for DXR
• A few games kinda-sorta rush DXR support in
• nVidia announces they're kinda supporting DXR on GTX 10-series cards through CUDA cores, but that it comes with a significant performance hit
• Unreal Engine is slowly adding the baked-in support for DXR
• People get angry that there's a performance hit on GTX cards
• Everyone completely loses their mind and the rational folk in the room apply Hanlon's Razor
• Look where we are now.

PhysX needed special physics cores that later were integrated into GPUs by nVidia and then replaced with CUDA GPGPU kernels -- in fact It wasn't until much later that GPU support was added. Only two games supported the accelerator card anywhere near its launch. When GPU support was added (which required quite high spec cards,) only five games supported physX on the GPU. Was physX a scam too? You later could run the physics simulations on the CPU but your framerate would tank.

If we really apply the logic that's been going on, the Voodoo2 cards were a scam! There were a handful of games that depended on the Voodoo2 in order to provide 3D accelerated graphics and later got software rendering support. Hell, we can even go back as far as the Intel 8087 Math Coprocessor, since there were games that demanded it but worked fine after patching that out... but with tanked framerates because of the integer approxomations.

 

Hmmm... It's like we've been down this path before.

[Kisai]

On 5/18/2019 at 1:19 PM, indrora said:

 

PhysX needed special physics cores that later were integrated into GPUs by nVidia and then replaced with CUDA GPGPU kernels -- in fact It wasn't until much later that GPU support was added. Only two games supported the accelerator card anywhere near its launch. When GPU support was added (which required quite high spec cards,) only five games supported physX on the GPU. Was physX a scam too? You later could run the physics simulations on the CPU but your framerate would tank.

 

We always go down this path with supposedly new tech, or re-wrapped new-old-tech. Certain kinds of tech have to be introduced together for mass adoption, otherwise it just falls on it's face as a niche product.

 

Everything old is new again, Stereoscopic photographic has been around since 1838. You'd think someone would have figured out how to do this properly in 180 years. It remains a niche. Don't believe me, look up "viewmaster", which was the most successful incarnation of this. Yet, if you owned one of these, you'd see what the limitation is. It doesn't look "3D", it looks like a pop-up book. Some were better than others. 3D glasses for 3D films? The effect isn't 3D, the effect is "things being thrown at the audience for a throw-away gag". The 3DS was only slightly better at this, since it works on a different effect. Instead of popping out of the screen, it rather had "depth" into the screen. Current generation VR headsets make people sick, and current generation "3D" stereo glasses give people headaches. This is something that could be fixed, but it requires increasing the frame rates.

 

Surround sound? It seems like it got no adoption outside of the very-expensive-man-cave people. The problem with adoption of is that you can't add a $1000 surround receiver to a $200 TV/Monitor. A $300 headset? Still stereo. USB ones claim to be surround sound, but they don't actually process surround sound like a home theater would. 

 

Haptic feedback? Remember the dual-shock controllers on the playstation? That was the first mass-practical use of this tech (it was previously available in chairs, and vests or as the .1 in the 5.1 surround theater via the subwoofer signal.) Still no haptic feedback in VR, the closest we've come is haptic feedback on keyboards of mobile phones and tablets. We seem to be coming back to the vests again for VR.

 

 There's actually a ultrasound tech that could combine the surround and the haptic feedback. It's yet to be seen in a gaming environment.

 

All this tech exists in the theater in some form (If you pay for the D-BOX experience at the theaters in BC, you basically pay $50 for seats the move/vibrate/push air, I can't remember all of it, I've only paid for it twice.)

 

You'd think that surround sound and 3D graphics would be in the same hardware, since the GPU is processing the 3D visuals...

 

Ray-tracing is the last piece of the puzzle here. Where 3D positional audio requires knowing where sound originates, ray-tracing requires knowing where light originates. So trace the sounds and light, and you will finally get a true immersive experience. Current VR experiences are low-resolution, mostly just stereo experiences that feel gimmicky in the same way that the Viewmaster reels do. At present VR's only real practical use isn't games, it's real estate/engineering which would allow engineers and potential buyers see how these buildings look pre-build, instead of building "showcase" units that get demolished later.

 

So what I predict is that we may see "VR" escape rooms before we see home versions of VR that aren't bad. 

[SkyHound0202]

(https://www.geforce.com/whats-new/guides/borderlands-2-borderlands-the-pre-sequel-tweak-guide#11)

 

History always repeats itself.

[ThePD]

On 5/16/2019 at 8:36 PM, Egg-Roll said:

No false advertisement is not scamming.

Nvidia had pages on their own website saying that RTX had been supported in over 25+ games before RTX even launched. We have 3....
To quote some...

Player Unknowns Battlegrounds
Battlefield V

Metro: Exodus
Ark: Survival Evolved
Final Fantasy XV

Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Anthem

 

This was from their own website, and we know most of these games had nothing but graphical problems and bugs when RTX first appeared in the games. So yes, Nvidia did lie by saying what games supported the technology. In fact, most of the games listed got RTX implemented AFTER the RTX cards hit the market.

RTX was absolutely a scam. It was sold to people as an amazing tech that worked in so many different titles when even today it is in all of 3 games.

[Egg-Roll]

3 hours ago, ThePD said:

Nvidia had pages on their own website saying that RTX had been supported in over 25+ games before RTX even launched. We have 3....
To quote some...

Player Unknowns Battlegrounds
Battlefield V

Metro: Exodus
Ark: Survival Evolved
Final Fantasy XV

Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Anthem

 

This was from their own website, and we know most of these games had nothing but graphical problems and bugs when RTX first appeared in the games. So yes, Nvidia did lie by saying what games supported the technology. In fact, most of the games listed got RTX implemented AFTER the RTX cards hit the market.

RTX was absolutely a scam. It was sold to people as an amazing tech that worked in so many different titles when even today it is in all of 3 games.

Once again, not a scam. A scam would require them to refuse you to return the item.

Also Nvidia got confirmation that those game makers where willing to implement the RTX cores in their games, Nvidia can not be held accountable for when (or even if) it happens let alone how well it works on a game to game bases, as well system to system too since many computers don't have identical setups. Do you know why? I'll give you a hint:

 

NVIDIA IS A CHIP MAKER NOT A GAME MAKER!

 

So once again RTX is not a scam, at worst it was used to mislead their customers to buy their new cards with the promise of many games, new cards that could technically be returned. However once again Nvidia can not (and will not in any legal system) be held accountable as to when games get released with RTX abilities. If you think otherwise, why not try suing them? You'll fail and lose a butt ton of money in the process.

 

Oh FYI returns on the premise the game that should have it enabled didn't will incur restocking fees because said developer was slow, as the card technically functions as intended. Unless it was bundled with the card with the guarantee at the time of sale it would work right from the box.

[ThePD]

31 minutes ago, Egg-Roll said:

So once again RTX is not a scam, at worst it was used to mislead their customers to buy their new cards with the promise of many games, new cards that could technically be returned.

Deceptive marketing is a scam. The definition of scam is a dishonest scheme. It was dishonest for Nvidia to claim they had 28 games that supported RTX. Misleading customers is by definition a scam. They market the RTX lineup telling you that you can use all those shiney new features on 28 games. That was done so that it would entice people who play those games to go and buy the new RTX cards. I know someone who bought a 2080ti specifically for RTX features in Final Fantasy XV and Ark: Survival Evolved. That kind of marketing works and it is indeed a scam. A scam goes way beyond the pricing of a product...

[Egg-Roll]

8 minutes ago, ThePD said:

Deceptive marketing is a scam. The definition of scam is a dishonest scheme. It was dishonest for Nvidia to claim they had 28 games that supported RTX. Misleading customers is by definition a scam. They market the RTX lineup telling you that you can use all those shiney new features on 28 games. That was done so that it would entice people who play those games to go and buy the new RTX cards. I know someone who bought a 2080ti specifically for RTX features in Final Fantasy XV and Ark: Survival Evolved. That kind of marketing works and it is indeed a scam. A scam goes way beyond the pricing of a product...

Deceptive marketing is not a scam it's deceptive marketing. Legally speaking one who does deceptive marketing could see jail time, but since we are surrounded by it almost nothing happens, that's right almost every company does it.

 

What part about this image is deceptive or dishonest?

 

The soon part? or the Coming part? Or maybe it's peoples brains taking information they want to see and ignoring everything else? Yea that sounds like it.

 

Once again not a scam, you can call it a scam but unless you can prove without a doubt Nvidia went out and claimed all the games will be 100% no delays available (which no company would ever do even if they made those games themselves) it is not a scam. What it is is a very well made marketing campaign that tricked people into buying their new fancy top of the line items, sound familiar? No? Well here's a hint Apple and Sammy do it all the time.

 

As for your "friend" they fell for a well worded marketing setup where your friend likely made the mistake of not reading the fine print or the entirety of the page they read when they made the decision to buy the best card offered.

 

Once again no law unless there was indeed intent to mislead swindle take (usually including running off with) peoples money will back you up on this scam claim. RTX was well marketed and people took what they wanted to hear, that is not Nvidias fault, that's the peoples fault. Like I said Apple and Sammy (along with many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many others) do this to get gullible people to either go into their stores or see a sales rep in a authorized place to attempt to push a sale of their item in question. The worst offenders of this kind of marketing ploy are beer manufacturers, why do you whine about them instead?

 

Seriously tho if you want to set up a class action lawsuit against Nvidia spend the hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars in legal fees along with the up to 5 or so years in the system just to get $50 back for everyone who bought a RTX card. BUT! That is if you have proof of your claims, this means on their site or in a press release someone HAD to of said that these games would all be working with RTX WHEN RTX gets released, but even then the courts might throw the case out, you know why? ONCE AGAIN NVIDIA IS A CHIP MAKER, AND NOT A GAME MAKER! You bought a card based on a 3rd party words instead of thinking smart and asking the ACTUAL company that makes the game. In that case you might see money you might not but your case becomes so much harder then, simply because a lawyer on Nvidias side could argue you failed to take due diligence because "errors can happen". Look at Elon Musk and his issues with Tesla and Twitter.

 

So show me the proof Nvidia actually claimed these games would work right away with RTX upon buying their card.

[BleachedFur]

tl;dr, some of you know nothing and yes, RTX cards are definitely a scam. One reason I'm still using 1070s.

[Egg-Roll]

13 minutes ago, BleachedFur said:

tl;dr, some of you know nothing and yes, RTX cards are definitely a scam. One reason I'm still using 1070s.

Explain what part of RTX is a scam then if you believe it to be so? You know the law doesn't simply go based on what Webster claims it to be right?

[FirstMateCapnJamesMchord]

I bought rtx 2080 because nvidia raised the 1080ti price a bunch making the 2080 a better deal when they have similar performance.

[BleachedFur]

20 minutes ago, Egg-Roll said:

Explain what part of RTX is a scam then if you believe it to be so?

the fucking price

 

My 1070s in SLI perform better than a 2080 in supported applications. I bought them for $200 each for a total of $400.

 

Now YOU tell me how much the 2080 cost.

[Egg-Roll]

18 minutes ago, BleachedFur said:

the fucking price

 

My 1070s in SLI perform better than a 2080 in supported applications. I bought them for $200 each for a total of $400.

 

Now YOU tell me how much the 2080 cost.

Price = Not a scam, Nvidia makes the chip and the suggested MSRP, then sells the chip to manufactures at which time they decide the final price with in the contract guidelines. If they wanted to sell the 2080 Ti for $100,000 they can nothing is stopping them.

your 1070 SLI are not new and bought used I'm guessing if not you bought them when they are classified as old tech, not to mention SLI has just as much compatibility as RTX in games and far less stable imo, maybe a little more but it is far older tech.

 

With your logic a fully loaded Lincoln is a scam compared to 2 2 year old Ford base versions of the same car because it's newer pricier with fancier features and doesn't fit 2x the capacity.

 

Simply put your reasons are not reasons for it to be classified as a scam.

[BleachedFur]

1 hour ago, Egg-Roll said:

Price = Not a scam,

the price of RTX cards is 100% the scam here.

 

 

1 hour ago, Egg-Roll said:

Simply put your reasons are not reasons for it to be classified as a scam.

simply put your reasoning is flawed and you should stop posting until you think long and hard about why you're wrong

[Egg-Roll]

38 minutes ago, BleachedFur said:

the price of RTX cards is 100% the scam here.

 

 

simply put your reasoning is flawed and you should stop posting until you think long and hard about why you're wrong

Fine sue Nvidia and see where your logic will go then. As they make their chips invest in new tech, they have the legal right to sell at what ever price they wish and make back costs at what ever rate they wish, and this includes their manufactures under contract they sell their chips to. They do not have a monopoly in the market, yes they have market share but they do not have what is required to make such high pricing on products illegal. So no you need to stop posting and go back to school and learn something about how businesses operate and their rights to operate.

 

Your posts make it look like you are just whiny because you bought 2 1070's (I own one and have no plan on upgrading because it works perfectly for my needs) instead of buying a 20 series card to enjoy RTX. Nothing RTX or AMD equivalent is going to be cheap at first and speaking of AMD if you don't like Nvidias business strategy/method they do make cards you know, and semi competent too.

 

Price will never mean scam unless said company holds a monopoly or if they team up with all GPU fabricators (currently only AMD, intel internals don't count really) creating a manipulated market, best example gas prices since all companies raise and lower at the same time same amounts (it's not magic).

 

Don't like price? Don't buy the product or other products by said company. Simple.