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

[Emily Young]

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

[Guest]

Best voice of any LTT host.

[AlTech]

Very high-key the answer is yes imho.

[porina]

19 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Very high-key the answer is yes imho.

Rule of thumb for video/article titles. If it is written as a question, the answer is usually no. If it was a yes, it wouldn't be a question.

[AlTech]

3 minutes ago, porina said:

Rule of thumb for video/article titles. If it is written as a question, the answer is usually no. If it was a yes, it wouldn't be a question.

Well I do believe it was a scam.

[19_blackie_73]

the calming video I needed
and that's not because I still don't care about ray tracing, but the calming way the content was presented

[GrockleTD]

seems legit

[Janybanny]

 [deleted]

[Guest]

49 minutes ago, 19_blackie_73 said:

the calming video I needed
and that's not because I still don't care about ray tracing, but the calming way the content was presented

It's @GabenJr's voice. The confidence he has in his work shines through. Very reassuring to the audience in both tone and pacing.

[Nicnac]

@GabenJr your Voice is the Zen we all need with our Linus. 

[indrora]

First off, I'm enjoying Anthony's style. Calm, collected, and a nice flip-side to the often energetic Linus. Linus is great for telling us about the Hot New Thing, but Anthony has a fantastic, slightly slow-burn style that works well for technical overviews. @GabenJr -- Please, pitch more of these sorts of things! Find a topic that interests you and just write a script, even if you end up putting it on a personal channel!

 

I think the conclusion here isn't as clean-cut. Was it a scam? Not really, in my opinion -- as Anthony said, NVidia has come first to market and we're seeing the ripple effect of early adopters getting the kinks out. For those of us old enough to remember when eight times speed CD-ROM drives were the hot rage, I remember the occasional discussion as to if you needed anything better than 4x -- you'd saturated the controller on your sound card (yes, kids, sound cards ran your CD drives back then!) and there was dismissal as to if you'd want it. After all, you'd have to slow down for the CD audio!

 

Thomas J. Watson, late head of IBM, is often quoted as saying that there would be a market of maybe 5 computers in the world, with others making similar statements. In the 90s, there was debate over the need for 3D accelerators in pairs or for high-resolution textures, high framerates, if online gaming would ever catch on, and even a hot take article in Boot Magazine that said, effectively, "3D games won't be popular, 2D board games will." In that same issue, they even had the truly bad-in-hindsight spicy take from Alex St. John, one of the people behind DirectX and later the founder of WildTangent, that Java would die a painful death... and look now: one of the most successful games on the planet is written in Java (Minecraft), the most successful mobile OS on the planet runs on Java (Android), and inside most every ATM cards and SIM card is a tiny version of Java, in many places in the world used for everything from banking to just general account management tasks! (JavaCard)

 

I suspect it'll take a few years before we really get the hang of rayracing on the GPU (How many people remember "VR" being the hot thing in marketing land and now we're seeing sub-$1000 headsets from Lenovo, HP, Acer, etc). It'll take time, tooling changes, and developers having time to work out the kinks. When CUDA and OpenCL came along, there were only marginal gains over traditional software processing, but now we're seeing more things running on the GPU than ever before.

[Jarsky]

3 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

Well I do believe it was a scam.

 

In what way? 

 

As Anthony just showed in the benchmarks, for DXR enabled games the RTX cards stream ahead pointing out that unless you're a lowely 1080p player, then dedicated Ray Tracing cores really are required for DXR especially for the full mode. 

 

 

It was also very well communicated that few DXR games would be available at launch to take advantage of the RTX cards. But the RTX cards are also a big bump in performance with the 2080Ti being 30-40% performance gain over 1080Ti, and similar with the 2080 vs 1080. With a 60% price increase, given they have a 30-40% performance bump + RTX...being the premium top cards on the market and still cheaper than Titans, I personally don't think theyre a scam.

 

[Nocte]

In my opinion:

- Was it a scam? No.

- Should have you bought a "first-gen" RTX card as an upgrade? No (as you usually never want to buy a first-gen product anyway if you care about value for money).

[Arika]

scam? no

overpriced? yes

[Egg-Roll]

So when are the robots going to overthrow Linus?

 

As for the RTX topic, it's (for now) over priced junk, not because they are bad but because they are new and useless to 99.999999999% of people.

[Jarsky]

 

27 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

 

To answer the question in the video, yes it was a fucking scam.   Even if you ignore the 3 problems only 5 things support it 8 months while Jensen kept saying, "It just works!"  Um, in maybe 5 things with some problems.   Then he pays off Tom'sHW to make that by now thing to help push his scam then Tom himself had to come out of retirement to calm the backlash down against his name.  I'm not really seeing a point of the problematic TAA replacement or spending so much money on a card for a feature that is barely supported yet advertised as "it just work!"  Um, no it doesn't and I provided proof of that.

 

 

I'm not saying that DXR isn't a scam, the title clearly is "Was RTX a big scam" which is a specific line of Nvidia Turing GPU. The fact is theyre outperforming Titans that were more expensive as far as gaming. 

Theyre relatively the highest performance cards for gaming, and have better value (price > performance) vs the 1080Ti, 1080, 1070Ti & 1070....the fact they support DXR is yet another justification of why they are better; regardless of the game developers releases to date. 

 

If AMD releases a VegaRT with DXR support, and there was a video titled "Was VegaRT a big scam" the same thing would apply....its not a technology, its a brand and should be subjected to the same holistic critique. The video isnt called "Was Ray Tracing a scam"

[Egg-Roll]

8 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

When you're advertising it as "it just works" and there's a ton of problems it is a scam, though.  Which, I pointed out above.

So because some dumb ass corporate higher up said something stupid it has to be a scam? Shit don't tell Tesla that because than all EV's and even hybrids are all scams, there is no global warming we 100% won't kill out planet at our rate of use of fossil fuels, and we live on a flat earth...

 

If one was smart enough to look at Nvidia past, this BS one liner would have been laughed out of the room, but nope much like Apple Fanny packs and Tesla Toddlers all Nvidia ninnies applauded in aw of how awesome some piece of tech will work without issues. Seriously if your bullshit meter didn't break from being over exposed than I really can't help anyone with that. NOTHING JUST WORKS! That is impossible.

[Jarsky]

1 minute ago, valdyrgramr said:

Well, the price hike on the cards then stating "it just works" is indeed in a scam.  You might see it as a plus, but it's not really much of a plus when it's barely supported and doesn't just work.  The price hike of implementing it is part of the scam.  It wouldn't be if the problems weren't that bad and there was more support.  But, the only cards in the RTX line is the 2060, the 2070, the 2080, the fuck you to the consumer, and the RTX Titan which is made kinda pointless by the previous card unless you need more VRAM.  However, there are quadros branded as RTX.  But, we're not exactly talking about those.  The thing is these cards wouldn't have moved well without Jensen scamming people, so in the end it is indeed a big a scam.

 

Where I am, a GTX1080Ti is about $1400 average, a RTX2080 which is relative performance is an average of $1300. In America, the RTX2080 is around US$750 now which is slightly cheaper than the 1080Ti's used to be at around US$850. There isn't really a price hike when you compare the relative performance cards, there is just a more expensive tier with the RTX2080Ti.  The new Titan RTX is US$2499, thats $500 cheaper than the Titan V was when it launched. 

 

I think you may be conflating the pricing issue with the fact that retailers were stocking the cards at 30%+ above Nvidia's RRP until supply stabilized. 

[Egg-Roll]

3 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

It's called false advertising when that's your marketing gimmick.  Which is both illegal and a scam, yes.  Which has Nvidia has been to court over before.

No false advertisement is not scamming. Scamming is the intent to steal money from the victim. False advertisement is what he basically did, he didn't fail to provide the equipment to make it "just work", he and his company failed at making the product "just work", which ultimately can be fixed threw updates in software.

 

The difference? Fines vs Jail times, victims getting money back vs never seeing a penny again. However the only way things like this will ever see courtrooms is if some consumer advocate agency goes after them for it. No one will do that because even tho they are big they are not Apple big so it is basically a waste of time for them, not to mention you'll likely only ever see $5-$50 back after 5+ years of waiting.

 

Simply put if this is scamming than almost every deadline Elon Musk has ever made has been one entire scam, but according to the law it is not a scam because both  Tesla and Nvidia delivered (less the $35,000 base model 3) to some extent a product to their clients, one of the 2 are always late, the other will be late via software.

[Blademaster91]

7 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

Okay then let's call it false advertising and not a scam.  Just like they did with the VRAM on the 970.

The gtx 970 was false advertising because the hardware didn't work as Nvidia marketed it, the RTX cards are just simply overpriced because its a early adopter product.

[Jarsky]

17 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

I'm talking about price based on MSRP as shown in the video.  The 2080 Ti launched at Titan priceswhere the launch of the 1080Ti and every other 80 Ti was less than a grand.  Asking me for more for a feat that barely works right and is barely supported to the point it's hundreds more then you can go fuck yourself.  Which is why I refuse to buy a 2080 Ti.  That price is literally a fuck you from Nvidia.  The extra feats and lack of competition equated to hundreds more than previous versions of each card.  A 2080's MSRP is higher than that of a 1080, 980, and even the 780.  It's the same with Turing's 2060, 2070, Titan.  The MSRP is the price hike I was talking about.  Not the scalping of older cards vs the price of Turing cards.

You can't compare the 2080Ti to the 1080Ti and 2080 to 1080, theres far to big a gap in performance. 

Essentially the 2060 is a 1070, the 2070 is a 1080 and the 2080 is a 1080Ti...the 2080Ti would be the equivelant of a Titan V. With that comparison, they're relative in MSRP to their respective performance and hardware. 

[KaitouX]

6 minutes ago, Jarsky said:

You can't compare the 2080Ti to the 1080Ti and 2080 to 1080, theres far to big a gap in performance. 

Essentially the 2060 is a 1070, the 2070 is a 1080 and the 2080 is a 1080Ti...the 2080Ti would be the equivelant of a Titan V. With that comparison, they're relative in MSRP to their respective performance and hardware. 

If it worked like that the 1060 would have costed $600, or the 970 would have been $700 which in this case would cause the 1060 to be over $1000, luckily it doesn't work like that, otherwise prices would double every generation.

Also if you consider what you are saying, the 2000 series is barely better than the 3 year old 1000 series while costing the same without any significant improvement on efficiency or noise level which then comes back to how useless the main features of the 2000 series are.

[Jurrunio]

1 hour ago, Jarsky said:

You can't compare the 2080Ti to the 1080Ti and 2080 to 1080, theres far to big a gap in performance. 

Essentially the 2060 is a 1070, the 2070 is a 1080 and the 2080 is a 1080Ti...the 2080Ti would be the equivelant of a Titan V. With that comparison, they're relative in MSRP to their respective performance and hardware. 

You can say we're spoilt by gains from Kepler to Maxwell, Maxwell to Pascal. Pascal to Turing brought along a LOT of price hike, way more than the general performance gain, just because it has extra features called RTX which is rarely used (and ignore how some features get used badly).

[Fatih19]

I like how in this thread people are actually arguing about whether it's a scam or not but in the YouTube comments section, people are just praising Anthony. 

[recoSNIPE13]

Ray tracing is great, exciting technology and will truly bring life-like graphics to games while reducing the workload of game developers. It's how rendering should be done and I really respect and admire Nvidia for boldly bringing it to everyone's attention with their RTX cards. Really looking forward to ray tracing becoming more mainstream!