Why did RTX 2000 series got so much backlash?

[Gat Pelsinger]

I still remember all the LTT backlash about RTX 2000 series, but if you look at the benchmarks, the 2060 was way faster than the 1060. I still see so many people upgrading to a 2060 today. Not mentioning the 2060 super exists, and also even 2080 ti was a very powerful graphics card, so why so much backlash?

[HM-2]

Pricing.

 

On release, the 2080 was $719 RRP which made it marginally more expensive than the 1080ti (~$699) and miles more expensive than the 1080 ($599). The rasterization performance was broadly similar to the 1080ti, and exactly three games made use of the Tensor cores, so ray tracing was basically pointless in the early years of RTX cards. 

[ki8aras]

5 minutes ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

I still remember all the LTT backlash about RTX 2000 series, but if you look at the benchmarks, the 2060 was way faster than the 1060. I still see so many people upgrading to a 2060 today. Not mentioning the 2060 super exists, and also even 2080 ti was a very powerful graphics card, so why so much backlash?

cuz thats when the 1000$ gpu was born (meaning price hikes)

[Eigenvektor]

Because it didn't offer much of a performance upgrade for its price and came with the (back then) mostly useless feature of RT instead (whether it is more useful now is debatable)

[Dreckssackblase]

as the other people mentioned the prices were higher than previous gen but I think it also was the fact that RTX as a big selling point basically didn't exist yet.

On release two games supported it at all if I recall correctly and DLSS 1.0 was a heavily ghosting smeary mess at launch with barely any support either.

 

Now on the second hand market the prices are reasonable and a fair amount of games support RTX features.

[WereCat]

Most of the tech in 2000 series was "useless" for other purposes than benchmarking.

RT was a joke on anything under 2080 performance class and these days even 2080 struggles with it.

DLSS was absolutely terrible on release and it was advertised as THE main selling point along with RT.

Prices were higher than 1000 series with no apparent or meaningful performance uplift from it on launch.

 

The saving grace of 2000 series is the much improved async compute vs 1000 series but it did not really matter on launch or even few years after. It's only now that games are starting to use it extensively which is starting to make the 2000 series pull ahead quite a bit more from the 1000 series so it makes a lot of sense to get it on used market for cheap rather than spending that on 1000 series.

[PDifolco]

52 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

Because it didn't offer much of a performance upgrade for its price and came with the (back then) mostly useless feature of RT instead (whether it is more useful now is debatable)

I think it was the first time that perf/price increase was really poor, people had the habit to see +40% perf for +10% price at each new gen, then with 2000 they had like +20% perf for +15% price

But now it's +10% perf for +15% price

 

[Gat Pelsinger]

@HM-2 @ki8aras @Eigenvektor @WereCat @Dreckssackblase @PDifolco

 

But what about the benchmarks? The 2060 destroys the 1060.

[PDifolco]

4 minutes ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

@HM-2 @ki8aras @Eigenvektor @WereCat @Dreckssackblase @PDifolco

 

But what about the benchmarks? The 2060 destroys the 1060.

Yeah progress for 60 series was good, but for 70 and 80 price increase was nearly as much as performance increase

1070 $380; 2070 $500 that's +30% for +35% more performance (according to TPU benchmarks), so ...

 

[Dreckssackblase]

26 minutes ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

But what about the benchmarks? The 2060 destroys the 1060.

Sure but on the other hand the 2060 sold itself as an RTX card and can barely handle any actual Ray tracing. I had a 2070 and it already struggled hard at 1080p.

And while those tensor cores today are great for DLSS. That was ,as mentioned previously, pretty damn bad at launch and not a selling point.

Especially with no games supporting it at launch either.

[porina]

Generally agree on the reasons given already. It was more "new features" than "more raw performance", and especially rough given you have to start new tech somewhere so there was little support while it was current.

 

Still I don't think it was that bad. Looking it up on techpowerup, the 1080Ti was 92% of a 2080 at the same launch price. The 1080Ti being the outgoing generation may have been cheaper by that point. 2080Ti came out later at +20% perf over 2080. I think part of the problem was more that Pascal was a bit too good. In a similar way Ampere was above long term average leading to Ada looking worse than it is.

 

Today, AMD still lagging performance in RT combined with their presence in consoles means game devs have found a way to make RT work on weak hardware. 2070 is roughly comparable in performance to current gen consoles.

[Middcore]

Sold based on features that weren't ready for primetime, with poor value for money, plagued by hardware issues like the "space invaders," and then a largely pointless mid-cycle refresh where the original cards continued to be sold alongside the refreshed ones resulting in a bloated lineup. We also have to consider the 16-series cards as part of the debacle: cards with all of the 20-series selling point features stripped out to fill the bottom of the lineup... and also offering underwhelming improvement over older cards, a bloated lineup, and poor value.

[porina]

3 hours ago, Middcore said:

then a largely pointless mid-cycle refresh where the original cards continued to be sold alongside the refreshed ones resulting in a bloated lineup.

That was quite a value adjustment. AMD were playing the raster value game, and still do today. Super then helped NV with the perf/price balance in their lineup.

 

3 hours ago, Middcore said:

We also have to consider the 16-series cards as part of the debacle: cards with all of the 20-series selling point features stripped out to fill the bottom of the lineup... and also offering underwhelming improvement over older cards, a bloated lineup, and poor value.

1650 today is probably still be best in <75W power class - consumer GPUs not requiring an external power connector. Somewhat niche I'd admit. I only found out RTX 4000 Ada would be best in class but as a professional tier product it comes at quite a price.

 

What were the alternatives around that time? Polaris and Vega were already established, especially with Polaris taking up low cost end. First gen RDNA came later. I'd argue that made even less impact than Turing did.

 

[Mark Kaine]

expensive, dumb "rtx" feature,  not very reliable.  coming from the GOAT 1080TI i wonder why people were disappointed.  

[HM-2]

On 12/28/2023 at 12:29 PM, Gat Pelsinger said:

@HM-2 @ki8aras @Eigenvektor @WereCat @Dreckssackblase @PDifolco

 

But what about the benchmarks? The 2060 destroys the 1060.

The RTX 2060 was priced closer to the 1070 at launch, though.

Which it beats, but not by that big of a margin. 

[xAcid9]

1) Because Pascal price/perf was too effing good
2) DLSS 1 was dogshite
3) Ray traced game kinda sucks and very small in number

[YoungBlade]

On 12/28/2023 at 7:29 AM, Gat Pelsinger said:

But what about the benchmarks? The 2060 destroys the 1060.

The name doesn't matter there. The price does.

 

The RTX 2060 launched for an absurd $350, which meant that it launched for basically the same price as the GTX 1070 (MSRP $380).

 

And compared to the GTX 1070, the RTX 2060 is only about a 20% improvement while having 25% less VRAM. So it was basically stagnation, not progress. You get slightly better performance with 2GB less VRAM for the same price.

 

This was the case across the lineup. The RTX 2080 was only about 10% faster than the GTX 1080 Ti while costing the same MSRP and having less VRAM. The RTX 2070 was only about 20% faster than the GTX 1080 while costing the same as you could find the GTX 1080 for already. And the RTX 2080 Ti had an insane $1000 MSRP, that then effectively became $1200 for most of the life of the product.

 

Generational improvement from the 1060 to the 2060, or the 1070 to the 2070, etc was not the problem - the price was.