Quake II RTX is out now for free

[ACatWithThumbs]

2 hours ago, Waffles13 said:

The problem I have with RTX is that it seems wildly wasteful for what you get. Yes, you can get significantly better performance than using just compute based RT on modern cards, but you are sacrificing massive amounts of die space for the privilege, and the end result is barely even playable.

 

Even if we assume next gen is 7nm plus higher "IPC" on the RT cores, I still doubt you are going to easily get 60+ fps at 1440p+ on AAA titles, all while sacrificing a ton of real estate that could instead be dedicated to both better rasterization and better compute performance (which in time will lead to better RT performance). And even then we're still talking about a hybrid/partial RT solution, and not the real thing which is even more unobtainable.

 

I feel like in the best case scenario we are at least 5-10 years away from ray tracing being a totally common and usable feature. The RT cores may help move that timeline forward a year or two, but it's at the cost of every other aspect of what a GPU is (cost, rasterization, heat, power). I'd much rather that they invest their time into compute focused RT algorithms that will be applicable to any GPU, especially since I don't see them shipping cards with RT cores for more than a couple generations, especially since both AMD and Intel seem to be pushing full software RT. 

Well, Microsoft just announced hardware-based RT for the new Xbox and with that confirmed support for hardware-based RT on Navi.
RT is likely going to be the new base for all upcoming AAA games, so Nvidia might double down on it and increase space for RT in favor of traditional raster performance.
Now it's going to be really hard to tell what will happen in the next few years as we might see a shift in GPU architecture. 

[illegalwater]

32 minutes ago, Waffles13 said:

 

Fair enough, I haven't paid a ton of attention to RTX benchmarks since right around launch, when a lot of the demos were pretty rough. Regardless, everything else I said still stands; you are trading a lot in every other category in exchange for a slight/moderate graphical advantage in a tiny subset of titles.

 

Meanwhile you can look at Vega, which admittedly has much worse RT performance, but not orders of magnitude different (obviously hard to tell apples to apples since they don't run the same games, but it seemed to run the original Quake II RT mod reasonably well). And that was without sectioning off large sections of the die for single use hardware.

Trading a lot? No. RT cores only take up a small portion of the GPU. Regardless, Nvidia absolutely made the right call with the introduction of RT cores as both the PS5 and next gen Xbox have hardware accelerated ray tracing. Intel has talked about RT on their GPUs, and AMD will inevitably bring RT to their desktop GPUs whether it's this year with the initial Navi launch or next year with another Navi release.

 

The future of games is ray tracing.

[mr moose]

2 hours ago, Waffles13 said:

The problem I have with RTX is that it seems wildly wasteful for what you get. Yes, you can get significantly better performance than using just compute based RT on modern cards, but you are sacrificing massive amounts of die space for the privilege, and the end result is barely even playable.

That's just the nature of the beast I'm afraid,  remember when an i5 was the best buy for gaming and the i7 was overkill with the exception of a few games that actually needed real multiple cores?  It's the same thing, for gaming on GPU's,  the sweet spot (read "wise" spot for average gamer's) is less than half the price of the RTX 2080, but you won't be enjoying RT and the RTX lineup should still last a while.   

 

2 hours ago, Waffles13 said:

Even if we assume next gen is 7nm plus higher "IPC" on the RT cores, I still doubt you are going to easily get 60+ fps at 1440p+ on AAA titles, all while sacrificing a ton of real estate that could instead be dedicated to both better rasterization and better compute performance (which in time will lead to better RT performance). And even then we're still talking about a hybrid/partial RT solution, and not the real thing which is even more unobtainable.

 

I feel like in the best case scenario we are at least 5-10 years away from ray tracing being a totally common and usable feature. The RT cores may help move that timeline forward a year or two, but it's at the cost of every other aspect of what a GPU is (cost, rasterization, heat, power). I'd much rather that they invest their time into compute focused RT algorithms that will be applicable to any GPU, especially since I don't see them shipping cards with RT cores for more than a couple generations, especially since both AMD and Intel seem to be pushing full software RT. 

I am pretty certain AMD will be pushing RT in the next year or  two.  It's just the way technology moves on.  AMD were first with multiple cores and 64bit and people said "what a waste of money".    Nvidia was first with frame sync and RT,    Intel were first with (I'm sure they were first at something).

 

Note to the technical people who want to dispute the who's first bit,  I am talking about the domestic market, being able to walk into a parts shop and buy a multi core 64bit CPU off the shelf for your desktop without buying server grade parts.

[Mira Yurizaki]

15 hours ago, Waffles13 said:

Meanwhile you can look at Vega, which admittedly has much worse RT performance, but not orders of magnitude different (obviously hard to tell apples to apples since they don't run the same games, but it seemed to run the original Quake II RT mod reasonably well). And that was without sectioning off large sections of the die for single use hardware.

Do you have a source for the RT cores taking up "large sections" of the die? Because if we were to take this die shot of Turing:

 

A little over half of it is the actual execution portion of the GPU. Everything on the side is for I/O and memory controllers. Everything in the middle is cache. The only thing I can remotely guess is the RT core if this die image is accurate are the blocks on the left side of the TPCs, which if true, take up about 3-4%.

[NumLock21]

Downloaded the demo, still have not tried it on my 2070 yet. I did try to run it on my MX150 and it would not even open, it spits out an error saying No Ray Tracing Capable GPU found. MX150 is part of the GeForce 10 series, the same as their GTX 1050 to 1080Ti. So it seems, their latest driver update only turn on Ray Tracing for selected GeForce 10 series gpus.

[RasmusDC]

On 6/7/2019 at 11:38 AM, mr moose said:

 

 

TBF,  we're 8 months in, have 3 real world titles (not including quake) which are measurable proof RTX performs better than current DXR on any other card.  Just because they charge an arm and leg (and maybe a little bit of spleen too) and the performance difference is not light years in front,  doesn't make it a marketing ploy.  In fact if it wasn't for the big push with RTX you can bet your arse we wouldn't have much in the way of RT on anything.     Developers didn't care about it when they introduced DXR, but as soon as RTX was launched all of sudden you have 15 something titles working on it.    When your enjoying DXR on AMD hardware next year don't forget to thank Nvidia for the push.

i have a 1080ti, so not really going red yet..

 

the hit that performance takes on running these elements, are not really worth it, and adding raytracing to a simple title like Quake, and hitting the FPS that much just shows that it is not matured yet. yes it performs better than DXR, but none of them are really viable options yet, well RTX might be okay if you chose to run in 1080p...

 

it is the main driver of the 20xx series, but it is just not ready yet, the cards need more OMPF, if it needs to be worth it for the customers..

 

i don´t really care about the markup myself, but it just removes people more and more from PC gaming, over to consoles, simply because it is getting insane, cost wise if you want a decently performing pc...

 

the 30% + performance of the 2080ti vs 1080ti, is actually decent, it is an okay 4k card... 

 

but what i am really searcing for is a high resolution VR capable GPU for my racing simulator, 1080ti does not really support HTC vive pro, and the coming next gen of VR, especially the HP Reverb... so personally i need BRUTE HP, not fancy lighting.

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, RasmusDC said:

i have a 1080ti, so not really going red yet..

 

the hit that performance takes on running these elements, are not really worth it, and adding raytracing to a simple title like Quake, and hitting the FPS that much just shows that it is not matured yet. yes it performs better than DXR, but none of them are really viable options yet, well RTX might be okay if you chose to run in 1080p...

 

it is the main driver of the 20xx series, but it is just not ready yet, the cards need more OMPF, if it needs to be worth it for the customers..

That's just a matter of personal opinion.  They are selling quite well given what they can do, everyone knows you pay an early adopters tax, so it's not like people didn't know what they were in for.

 

1 hour ago, RasmusDC said:

 

i don´t really care about the markup myself, but it just removes people more and more from PC gaming, over to consoles, simply because it is getting insane, cost wise if you want a decently performing pc...

Which I am sure Nvidia have allowed for in their pricing.  However if that's the only reason they move then I hope they don't feel too bad when they see that RTX wasn't the only option for PC gaming.

1 hour ago, RasmusDC said:

the 30% + performance of the 2080ti vs 1080ti, is actually decent, it is an okay 4k card... 

 

but what i am really searcing for is a high resolution VR capable GPU for my racing simulator, 1080ti does not really support HTC vive pro, and the coming next gen of VR, especially the HP Reverb... so personally i need BRUTE HP, not fancy lighting.

 

While that sucks, the reality is if AMD doesn't have anything to offer in the next few months then you have just stumbled on a bad time to search for more horse power.  You already have what is still considered a one if the most powerful GPU's.  The advent of RT cores or Tensor cores in RTX may not have effected the raw performance as much as you would have liked anyway (meaning they don't actually take up that much real estate and simply adding more cuda cores is not as easily done as we think).