Prediction: RTX Cards Are Barely Faster Than Pascal

[Max_Settings]

This is all speculation by me, but this is something I kind of want to bring up. If you noticed, in Nvidia's keynote they never gave any performance numbers compared to the last generation Pascal GPUs. The numbers they gave compared to the last generation were in a unit that was never used to measure the old series, so frankly we have no clue what that means when it comes to raw FPS games and not improvement in ray tracing. I find it odd that Nvidia gave 0 mention of any actual raw FPS gains over last generation cards. So this is why I am going to predict that RTX cards will be barely faster than their previous generation Pascal cards. I personally believe that RTX cards will be a premium series. The only speed improvements will be from the slightly higher clock speeds and faster GDDR6 memory. I don't think that the 2070 will be much faster than the 1070, nor the 2080 over the 1080, and 2080 ti over the 1080 ti. Instead I think the RTX series will be a premium series for people who care about ray tracing. If you like that tech then you might be willing to pay ~$200 more to get a card with it and a slight performance bump. If you don't care you can still take a regular Pascal card and save a few bucks.

 

I hope I am wrong and these cards are much faster than Pascal, but as of now I really don't see it. I find it so strange that they would not give any gaming benchmarks. And honestly, Nvidia has no need to produce much faster cards yet. AMD has barely even made a competitor to Pascal that launched in May 2016. This is why I believe that RTX cards will only be for people who want ray tracing, they won't be much faster than their previous Pascal counterparts. 

[Lathlaer]

100% Agree. Not a single graph with something like "x% faster than the previous generation" which would've been typical. Everything was about ray tracing and it might really be the case that the new cards are good for that particular option but will not provide good enough raw fps boost.

[Shreyas1]

Rtx is probably going to become another hairworks too...

[givingtnt]

Prediction : We'll know the truth in a few weeks, yall can chill on the theories and questions spam. why do I even bother typing when I can do this : 

[Max_Settings]

Just now, Shreyas1 said:

Rtx is probably going to become another hairworks too...

I somewhat disagree with that. If the RTX cards can do it with no real performance hit, I see this as an actual cool and useful tech. It looks really good.

[Alex Atkin UK]

2 minutes ago, Shreyas1 said:

Rtx is probably going to become another hairworks too...

What do you mean, Raytracing itself?  Seems unlikely seeing as its part of DirectX rather than something nVidia came up with on their own.

 

Screen space reflections are REALLY jarring when you are moving the camera around and see all reflections on large bodies of water vanish, I can see why this is the area a focus as reflections/lighting can make the biggest difference to how a game feels.

[Max_Settings]

Just now, givingtnt said:

Prediction : We'll know the truth in a few weeks, yall can chill on the theories and questions spam.

Absolutely, just thought I would point this out to maybe stop some pre-orders when we don't know anything yet.

[Max_Settings]

1 minute ago, valdyrgramr said:

I'm pretty sure it is bs because Nvidia always makes bs claims and gets called out on it like this.  Didn't they say Pascal was ridiculously faster than the 900 series cards, and that turned out to be bs?

No, it kind of was. 

[Frankenburger]

When Pascal was being previewed, they did a sit down with the GTX 1080 playing Doom, and we were able to extrapolate some real world performance out of the cards before they launched.

 

The fact they didn't do the same with Turing makes me weary. Literally ALL of the "X times faster" approximations were assuming ray tracing would be involved. Take that away, and what performance delta are we left with?

[Max_Settings]

Just now, valdyrgramr said:

Not by the amount Nvidia claimed, it was faster just not by the amount Nvidia was claiming.

I was a what I would call a 2 card boost. Where every card moved up 2 spots in performance compared to last gen, where usually it was just 1 spot. Maxwell to Pascal was the largest jump between generations by far.

[NoRomanBatmansAllowed]

I'm seeing intel refresh level improvements, if that.

 

This is mainly a push for devs to use Ray tracing more, after which the cards will fully shine.

[Taf the Ghost]

31 minutes ago, Max_Settings said:

I somewhat disagree with that. If the RTX cards can do it with no real performance hit, I see this as an actual cool and useful tech. It looks really good.

Raytracing will be useful tech when 2080-class performance is in the xx50 series in 2-3 generations. If there isn't any dedicated Raytracing hardware in the next console generation, it's probably closer to 8 years. Anti-aliasing took years from the time it was introduced until it was actually usable in most games. This is mostly just Nvidia marketing to cover for moving certain tech forward, when it really won't be used for ages.

 

As for the performance, they're adding more CUDA cores, Async Compute, higher clocks and much faster memory. It looks to be about 30% performance increase per SM from Pascal, but no parts appears to be that much faster. Just a lot of little things.

 

It's at least 2021 before we see new architectures, which would be required for large jumps in performance, that isn't just adding more Cores.

[Max_Settings]

Just now, NoRomanBatmansAllowed said:

I'm seeing intel refresh level improvements, if that.

 

This is mainly a push for devs to use Ray tracing more, after which the cards will fully shine.

Yep, my belief exactly. 

[Max_Settings]

Just now, Taf the Ghost said:

Raytracing will be useful tech when 2080-class performance is in the xx50 series in 2-3 generations. If there isn't any dedicated Raytracing hardware in the next console generation, it's probably closer to 8 years. Anti-aliasing took years from the time it was introduced until it was actually usable in most games. This is mostly just Nvidia marketing to cover for moving certain tech forward, when it really won't be used for ages.

 

As for the performance, they're adding more CUDA cores, Async Compute, higher clocks and much faster memory. It looks to be about 30% performance increase per SM from Pascal, but no parts appears to be that much faster. Just a lot of little things.

 

It's at least 2021 before we see new architectures, which would be required for large jumps in performance, that isn't just adding more Cores.

Yep we shall see. I do believe they are faster, but not on the levels people hope. I think these will be a marginal improvement.

[ToastyBear]

If you actually do the math. 2080ti has straight up 21% more Cuda cores than 1080ti. Core for core thats 21% faster already. GDDR6 is 30% faster. Throw in faster clock speeds and the 2080ti can easily be 30% faster than 1080ti. 

[Jurrunio]

On paper 20 series get higher clocks and CUDA core count. Unless they managed to go backwards in terms of IPC and IP-CUDA (instruction per CUDA core), 20 series should be faster.

 

The raise in power draw shows that RT cores arent just emulated with CUDA, so sadly older GTX cards really cannot run RTX. Maybe DX12 Raytracing will do, but... of course Nvidia's gonna throw into the works. Keep in mind that up till now Nvidia still didnt mention hardware support for DX12.

[Attila the hun]

8 hours ago, ToastyBear said:

If you actually do the math. 2080ti has straight up 21% more Cuda cores than 1080ti. Core for core thats 21% faster already. GDDR6 is 30% faster. Throw in faster clock speeds and the 2080ti can easily be 30% faster than 1080ti. 

bearing in mind they are almost 100% more expensive than the 1080Ti 30% improvement doesn't really seem all that impressive though.. let's wait and find out after the reviews are out..

[Jarsky]

9 hours ago, Max_Settings said:

If you noticed, in Nvidia's keynote they never gave any performance numbers compared to the last generation Pascal GPUs.

 

Pretty sure they said that the 2080 Ti would be capable of 14 Tflops? 

For comparison, the 1080 Ti is capable of 11 Tflops, so that should be about 21% faster...

[xAcid9]

If we compare traditional FLOPs per FLOPs.

 

GTX 780 Ti@1.2Ghz = 6 TFLops

GTX 980 Ti@1.5Ghz = 8.5 TFlops

GTX 1080 Ti@2Ghz = 14.3 TFlops

RTX 2080 Ti@1.6Ghz = 14 TFlops

RTX 2080 Ti@2Ghz = 17.4 TFlops

RTX 2080 Ti@2.5Ghz = 21.7 TFlops

 

Since jacket man said 2080 Ti is designed with overclocking in mind maybe it can reach 2.5 Ghz? 

[SliceT]

10 hours ago, ToastyBear said:

If you actually do the math. 2080ti has straight up 21% more Cuda cores than 1080ti. Core for core thats 21% faster already. GDDR6 is 30% faster. Throw in faster clock speeds and the 2080ti can easily be 30% faster than 1080ti. 

 Just what I was about to say... at least that.

But they have to charge a premium because such big die, its expensive! They made a big bet, if they get the dev. behind it then AMD has no chance in the futuree.

[i_build_nanosuits]

10 hours ago, ToastyBear said:

If you actually do the math. 2080ti has straight up 21% more Cuda cores than 1080ti. Core for core thats 21% faster already. GDDR6 is 30% faster. Throw in faster clock speeds and the 2080ti can easily be 30% faster than 1080ti. 

and add to that all the architecture improvement which basically this is a brand new architecture so each cuda core can probably process a lot more and a lot faster than a pascal core...

 

Guys, do you really think nvidia would charge 1000$ for a card that is barely faster than what they had 2 years ago?!

Come one...Nvidia is greedy, they made a lot of mistakes, but disapointing performance is not one of them...this is AMD's business.

Nvidia never disapoint when it comes to performance...these new cards will be in another league.

[Mira Yurizaki]

Given the specifications that NVIDIA showed, I don't believe that the GeForce 20 series will be that much better than the GeForce 10 series in current and past games. In any game that uses DXR with it enabled, it will obliterate previous generation hardware. But that's the gamble that NVIDIA is banking on, that game developers, who've been wanting real-time ray tracing for a long time will want to use DXR. And when a majority of the lighting is done through ray tracing and thus the RT core on GeForce 20, there's really no need to have that many shaders.

[Biggerboot]

I would say the price:performance jump isn't as great if you're comparing to pascal's release- if these were priced the same everyone would be rushing to upgrade and the ray tracing would be the icing.

I do want to see ray tracing evolve first before investing in an RTX card though.  Similar to the RX cards, it could be a rocky launch that improves over time.

[KarathKasun]

MS has a game focused RT API.  RT is where things are going to be heading as far as lighting and effects.

 

We are moving back to specialized hardware for specific types of graphical effects.  Actually, this is what any person who pays attention to tech was expecting.  We cant make general purpose compute units any faster if transistors dont shrink, and specialized hardware is many times faster than GP hardware.

[xg32]

my minimum target for the 2080 ti is 4k/98fps with RT enabled, high settings; and 4k/120fps without RT on medium settings (oc'd 1080 ti does 90-100fps on most of AAA games), if RTX falls short of that, it's gonna be a very tough decision (no alternatives), not going sli.