In-depth RTX demonstration on Battlefield V

[maartendc]

I am pretty underwhelmed by the Battlefield V demo they showed. Ooooh it has more realistic reflections, big whoop! I'm not running out and buying a $1200 graphics card for that.

 

I understand that the technology is in it's infancy, and this is early adopter kind of stuff. I am sure the technology is very promising in the long run. But for now, the visual upgrade it provides over a standard GPU is hardly noticeable.

 

Also: For FPS games, people always sacrifice visual fidelity for framerate. Always have, always will. So all this Battlefield V demo stuff is all well and good, but who wants to enable Ray Tracing and get only 60fps at 1080P, when you can disable it, get a cheaper card, and get 144 fps at 1440P instead?

 

Until they can get ray tracing working with no additional performance penalty, this technology is not going to hit mainstream for FPS games. RPG games or story driven games are a better target for this.

[jasonvp]

2 minutes ago, maartendc said:

Also: For FPS games, people always sacrifice visual fidelity for framerate. Always have, always will. So all this Battlefield V demo stuff is all well and good, but who wants to enable Ray Tracing and get only 60fps at 1080P, when you can disable it, get a cheaper card, and get 144 fps at 1440P instead?

Look at it this way: it's a switch you can turn on and off in the settings.  If you have an RTX card and don't want the slower frame rate with pretty visuals while playing online: cool.  Turn it off.  I'd do the same thing.

 

The demo was done for a few reasons:

1.  To show the tech off for NVidia

2.  To show the tech off for fans of Battlefield and Frostbite

3.  To give you a glimpse of what the engine can do if you let it.

 

That third one is important because Battlefield will also include a single player campaign.  You may not want to play it; others will.  I will, for instance.  Just for the giggles.  And during the campaign you can bet your ass I'll have all of the visual fidelity cranked to 11.

[Brooksie359]

23 minutes ago, maartendc said:

I am pretty underwhelmed by the Battlefield V demo they showed. Ooooh it has more realistic reflections, big whoop! I'm not running out and buying a $1200 graphics card for that.

 

I understand that the technology is in it's infancy, and this is early adopter kind of stuff. I am sure the technology is very promising in the long run. But for now, the visual upgrade it provides over a standard GPU is hardly noticeable.

 

Also: For FPS games, people always sacrifice visual fidelity for framerate. Always have, always will. So all this Battlefield V demo stuff is all well and good, but who wants to enable Ray Tracing and get only 60fps at 1080P, when you can disable it, get a cheaper card, and get 144 fps at 1440P instead?

 

Until they can get ray tracing working with no additional performance penalty, this technology is not going to hit mainstream for FPS games. RPG games or story driven games are a better target for this.

If I wanted to play a really competitive fps game I wouldn't play battlefield tbh. I am getting the 2080ti and will be using the raytracing because I can and I like the visuals. 

[Jackson]

PC Gamer looks like they got the same access and did their own video which I figured adds to this topic. Looks like the same build with the same settings. 50-60FPS at 1080p with noticeable dips in their video with a note that they were shown an updated build with those dips mostly eliminated (still 1080p). It seems clear that the 2000 series is just the beginning for RTX, with future generations being the ones that will hopefully allow for better performance at higher resolutions. It would be interesting if you could get 2 20xx series cards, or even use a 1080/Ti card as a "dedicated ray tracing card". I have no idea if that is possible, but it just reminds me of how expensive PhysX was initially on the GPU and how (for those that used it) people used separate cards just for PhysX back in its early years.

 

https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-15-minutes-of-battlefield-5-running-on-an-rtx-2080-ti/

 

[maartendc]

59 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

If I wanted to play a really competitive fps game I wouldn't play battlefield tbh. I am getting the 2080ti and will be using the raytracing because I can and I like the visuals. 

I disagree. To me, playing Battlefield online is competitive, and I like to win. The fact that it is not considered an "e-sports" title is irrelevant to me as an average player.

 

That is great if you think it is worth the cost, go for it and enjoy it. To me, it doesn't seem worth it, but that is a personal opinion.

1 hour ago, jasonvp said:

Look at it this way: it's a switch you can turn on and off in the settings.  If you have an RTX card and don't want the slower frame rate with pretty visuals while playing online: cool.  Turn it off.  I'd do the same thing.

....

 

That third one is important because Battlefield will also include a single player campaign.  You may not want to play it; others will.  I will, for instance.  Just for the giggles.  And during the campaign you can bet your ass I'll have all of the visual fidelity cranked to 11.

But if I am switching off Raytracing, why would I pay the premium for an RTX card? I would buy the 1080Ti, which is a great deal at the moment, for under half the cost of a 2080Ti, and play that way. They haven't said anything about the performance of these new 20 series cards without Ray Tracing, so I am betting the improvements are 20% over last generation at most.

 

Sure, that is why I am saying it makes more sense for RPG's and stuff (or singleplayer games in general, as you mention). But let's be honest, most people play Battlefield online. The war stories mode was like what 10-15 hours long? I played over 200 hours of Battlefield 1 online.. so... yeah.

 

For Rise of the Thomb Raider, that demo made more sense to me, because it is a single player game. But even then, it seems like these cards cannot do 144fps with Ray Tracing turned on. And some people prefer their singleplayer games at 144 Hz as well.

 

All in all, some people just want the latest and greatest, and that is fine and good for them. But these cards just don't seem great value, and the ray tracing effects are really underwhelming so far, IMO. Kind of like Hairworks in the Witcher 3 all over again: massive performance penalty for a minor visual upgrade. Better leave it turned off.

[S w a t s o n]

1 minute ago, maartendc said:

For Rise of the Thomb Raider, that demo made more sense to me, because it is a single player game. But even then, it seems like these cards cannot do 144fps with Ray Tracing turned on. And some people prefer their singleplayer games at 144 Hz as well.

 

 

"These cards can't do 144 FPS with Hairworks turned on"
"These cards can't do 144 FPS with max draw distance"

"These cards can't do 144FPS with MSAA on"

 

If you want to play 144FPS you turn all the good looking shit off, RTX is not a special case

[jasonvp]

1 minute ago, maartendc said:

But if I am switching off Raytracing, why would I pay the premium for an RTX card?

The "minor visual upgrade" you mention later in your post is just not true.  At all.  Done properly, ray tracing is a complete game changer when it comes to visual fidelity.  And that's one of the reasons you buy a new RTX card: you want that visual fidelity in your games.  Another reason you want them is the increase in performance over the previous generation cards.  They will be better.  How much better, we don't know.  But they will be better.  Guaranteed.

 

I'll stand by my statement: for online competitive-style gaming: RTX is probably best left off for now.  But for single player campaigns?  Oh hell yes!

[Brooksie359]

17 minutes ago, jasonvp said:

The "minor visual upgrade" you mention later in your post is just not true.  At all.  Done properly, ray tracing is a complete game changer when it comes to visual fidelity.  And that's one of the reasons you buy a new RTX card: you want that visual fidelity in your games.  Another reason you want them is the increase in performance over the previous generation cards.  They will be better.  How much better, we don't know.  But they will be better.  Guaranteed.

 

I'll stand by my statement: for online competitive-style gaming: RTX is probably best left off for now.  But for single player campaigns?  Oh hell yes!

Well the 2080ti has a little over 20% more cuda cores and can do async compute so I would say 20% is the bare minimum in gpu bound games. 

[asus killer]

the shadows look insanely good, but sometimes it feels too much like everything is so shinny and polished. Way overdone in my opinion. The gameplay looks meh. 

 

[Brooksie359]

6 minutes ago, asus killer said:

the shadows look insanely good, but sometimes it feels too much like everything is so shinny and polished. Way overdone in my opinion. The gameplay looks meh. 

 

It isn't released yet and I think they might edit the reflective values for some of the materials.

[Brooksie359]

51 minutes ago, maartendc said:

I disagree. To me, playing Battlefield online is competitive, and I like to win. The fact that it is not considered an "e-sports" title is irrelevant to me as an average player.

 

That is great if you think it is worth the cost, go for it and enjoy it. To me, it doesn't seem worth it, but that is a personal opinion.

But if I am switching off Raytracing, why would I pay the premium for an RTX card? I would buy the 1080Ti, which is a great deal at the moment, for under half the cost of a 2080Ti, and play that way. They haven't said anything about the performance of these new 20 series cards without Ray Tracing, so I am betting the improvements are 20% over last generation at most.

 

Sure, that is why I am saying it makes more sense for RPG's and stuff (or singleplayer games in general, as you mention). But let's be honest, most people play Battlefield online. The war stories mode was like what 10-15 hours long? I played over 200 hours of Battlefield 1 online.. so... yeah.

 

For Rise of the Thomb Raider, that demo made more sense to me, because it is a single player game. But even then, it seems like these cards cannot do 144fps with Ray Tracing turned on. And some people prefer their singleplayer games at 144 Hz as well.

 

All in all, some people just want the latest and greatest, and that is fine and good for them. But these cards just don't seem great value, and the ray tracing effects are really underwhelming so far, IMO. Kind of like Hairworks in the Witcher 3 all over again: massive performance penalty for a minor visual upgrade. Better leave it turned off.

Honestly I am way more hyped about the new metro game. They have always had amazing lighting so it will be interesting to see what they can do with raytracing. 

[Rune]

I'm cool with a month delay. Gives me time to get my 9900k up and overclocked proper

[Humbug]

3 hours ago, maartendc said:

I am pretty underwhelmed by the Battlefield V demo they showed. Ooooh it has more realistic reflections, big whoop! I'm not running out and buying a $1200 graphics card for that.

Don't overthink it.

 

Just buy it.

[Mira Yurizaki]

Looking back at the history of GPUs, new fangled technology not vastly improving, or maybe degrading, performance compared what's currently being used has been the rule, not the exception.

• S3 ViRGE, commonly considered one the first first consumer level 3D accelerators, was given the nickname "3D deccelerator" for not being able to push performance faster than software rendering given anything more than just texturing polygons.
• GeForce 256, which introduced hardware transform and lighting. This would offload polygon processing and lighting calculations to the GPU (3D accelerators back then only did rasterizing and texturing). It didn't convincingly perform better than software methods and it was believed at the time that a fast enough CPU would overcome the lack of hardware T&L.
• GeForce3, which was the first foray into fully programmable pipelines, also couldn't convincingly outperform NVIDIA's former top-of-the-line GeForce 2 Ultra unless the application was specifically designed for DirectX 8 (http://ixbtlabs.com/articles/gf3/, https://www.anandtech.com/show/742/11)
• First generation DirectX 10 hardware had trouble hitting 60 FPS except for the top-end at the then common resolution of 1280x1024 (https://www.anandtech.com/show/2267). You can't blame Vista though, since Vista had minimal performance impact in games (https://www.extremetech.com/computing/80294-gaming-performance-windows-vista-sp1-vs-xp-sp3/5)
• First generation DirectX 11 hardware also had trouble hitting 60 FPS except for the top-end even at 1280x1024. (https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_480_Fermi/27.html, http://www.legitreviews.com/ati-radeon-hd-5970-dual-gpu-video-card-review_1141/10 , https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_580/ (note this is for the GTX 580, but there are previous generation results in the mix))

And while I'm sure for DX8, DX10, and DX11 there were improved visuals in the first games that used it, there wasn't really any "wow" factor except in outliers.

 

The only exception to this trend was DX9. ATI built a beast of a card that didn't compromise on the original DX9 spec.

[Humbug]

That digital foundry video was useful. Really showed some of the benefits this tech can have once the performance is better.

 

I see this generation of GPUs as the ones to introduce ray tracing, we had to get the ball rolling somewhere and start putting the hardware in the hands of gamers. But this is not the generation of GPUs which you buy for ray tracing, it turns the 2080ti into a 1080p 60fps card. With ray tracing turned off 1080p 60fps is what my four year old R9 290 does....

And imagine the 2080 and 2070 will be slower still with ray tracing. 

 

For a $1200 GPU turning off ray tracing means you are going to be able to both play at 4K and increase your framerate. Alternatively with ray tracing turned off there is so much GPU power freed up it allows the devs to use that horsepower to enhance image quality with other graphical enhancements.

 

Still I am glad this technology is coming out now and getting used, even though only a fraction of a scene will be ray traced for now it is a start.

 

I just wish Nvidia had used these RTX cards to replace the old generation. This should have become the current product stack with 2080 replacing the 1080 etc. Then we would have nothing to complain about and they can sell it as a performance upgrade over the old gen in all games, plus the added benefit of being able to dip your toe into ray tracing. Instead what they have done is created new pricing tiers and put these new products on top of the old ones. Usually a new generation of GPUs brings a perf/$ improvement.

[mr moose]

3 hours ago, Humbug said:

 I just wish Nvidia had used these RTX cards to replace the old generation. This should have become the current product stack with 2080 replacing the 1080 etc. Then we would have nothing to complain about and they can sell it as a performance upgrade over the old gen in all games, plus the added benefit of being able to dip your toe into ray tracing. Instead what they have done is created new pricing tiers and put these new products on top of the old ones. Usually a new generation of GPUs brings a perf/$ improvement.

I really don't have a problem with that, for people who are watching the pennies they can still get a 1080 or 1070* or even a 1060.   While those who want a card with stupid amounts of spare processing they can.   I think the problem here is people were expecting that perf/$ improvement rather than a different product.

 

*yes I had a chuckle when I realised I said you could save pennies buying a 1080/1070. 

[Humbug]

4 hours ago, mr moose said:

I think the problem here is people were expecting that perf/$ improvement rather than a different product.

That's how every new GPU generation had been until now, technology moving forward allowing you to get more for your money... Perf/$ upgrade, so it's understandable...

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, Humbug said:

That's how every new GPU generation had been until now, technology moving forward allowing you to get more for your money... Perf/$ upgrade, so it's understandable...

understandable maybe, but things change and tech changes, people need to learn the difference between past iterations and this one. This is a new product with new hardware, that adds a cost by itself that previous iterations didn't come with.    If people want to treat it like previous new releases then they need to account for the new features i.e remove the cost of those from the equation before making comparisons.

[maartendc]

9 hours ago, mr moose said:

understandable maybe, but things change and tech changes, people need to learn the difference between past iterations and this one. This is a new product with new hardware, that adds a cost by itself that previous iterations didn't come with.    If people want to treat it like previous new releases then they need to account for the new features i.e remove the cost of those from the equation before making comparisons.

Whatever, judging by what they showed, the tech is not ready. The games that will support it are few, it cannot do 144 fps with raytracing turned on, it cannot go beyond 1080p with raytracing turned on, etc. etc.

 

So if besides adding raytracing, they are not improving the non-ray-traced performance by at least 30% from 1080Ti to 2080Ti, you can't expect people willing to pay a lot more than 50% or so in terms of price increase, not double the price.

 

I am glad they are getting pushback for this. The value is just not there, the cards are not worth the money, and Nvidia thought they could get away with it because they have zero competition in the high end market.

[leadeater]

16 minutes ago, maartendc said:

I am glad they are getting pushback for this. The value is just not there, the cards are not worth the money, and Nvidia thought they could get away with it because they have zero competition in the high end market.

But multiple pre-order shipment waves are already sold out from what I heard, more noise than push back. Lots of people are buying the cards so Nvidia is only going to take it as a noisy minority while the cards are selling well.

[maartendc]

12 minutes ago, leadeater said:

But multiple pre-order shipment waves are already sold out from what I heard, more noise than push back. Lots of people are buying the cards so Nvidia is only going to take it as a noisy minority while the cards are selling well.

That is too bad honestly. I guess people are really impressed with the tech demo's they've seen so far, without having actually ZERO independent benchmarks of performance of these cards.

 

Or is Nvidia just creating artificial scarcity on launch and saying they "sold out" to increase hype?

 

Or has it been so long since last generation that there is so much pent up demand people will literally buy anything at this point.

 

For all we know the 2080TI offers only like 20% performance increase on average over the 1080Ti in non-ray-traced applications, in which case it would be a TERRIBLE buy. You could just buy a 1080Ti for half the price. 

 

The only positive thing about these cards so far, as far as I am concerned, is that you can pick up a Pascal card for a good price now.

[Brooksie359]

2 hours ago, maartendc said:

That is too bad honestly. I guess people are really impressed with the tech demo's they've seen so far, without having actually ZERO independent benchmarks of performance of these cards.

 

Or is Nvidia just creating artificial scarcity on launch and saying they "sold out" to increase hype?

 

Or has it been so long since last generation that there is so much pent up demand people will literally buy anything at this point.

 

For all we know the 2080TI offers only like 20% performance increase on average over the 1080Ti in non-ray-traced applications, in which case it would be a TERRIBLE buy. You could just buy a 1080Ti for half the price. 

 

The only positive thing about these cards so far, as far as I am concerned, is that you can pick up a Pascal card for a good price now.

If you already have the 1080ti and have been waiting for extra performance at 4k then the 2080ti is the only option and some might say they want it enough to spend 1200 on. 

[S w a t s o n]

3 hours ago, maartendc said:

Whatever, judging by what they showed, the tech is not ready. The games that will support it are few, it cannot do 144 fps with raytracing turned on, it cannot go beyond 1080p with raytracing turned on, etc. etc.

 

So if besides adding raytracing, they are not improving the non-ray-traced performance by at least 30% from 1080Ti to 2080Ti, you can't expect people willing to pay a lot more than 50% or so in terms of price increase, not double the price.

 

I am glad they are getting pushback for this. The value is just not there, the cards are not worth the money, and Nvidia thought they could get away with it because they have zero competition in the high end market.

Again, no one would expect raytracing to do 144FPS, you're insane. It definitely goes past 1080p. This super unoptimized build already does 4k 30 it's not even using the RT cores. You're talking out of your ass! You do realize that Nvidia is just touting 4k60 at all (without RTX) for the 2080 right?

 

You're saying the tech is not ready because not literally every game is incorporating it when it's brand new? Do you understand how adoption cycles work?

[maartendc]

22 minutes ago, S w a t s o n said:

Again, no one would expect raytracing to do 144FPS, you're insane. It definitely goes past 1080p. This super unoptimized build already does 4k 30 it's not even using the RT cores. You're talking out of your ass! You do realize that Nvidia is just touting 4k60 at all (without RTX) for the 2080 right?

 

You're saying the tech is not ready because not literally every game is incorporating it when it's brand new? Do you understand how adoption cycles work?

Go buy it then.

[Brooksie359]

23 minutes ago, S w a t s o n said:

Again, no one would expect raytracing to do 144FPS, you're insane. It definitely goes past 1080p. This super unoptimized build already does 4k 30 it's not even using the RT cores. You're talking out of your ass! You do realize that Nvidia is just touting 4k60 at all (without RTX) for the 2080 right?

 

You're saying the tech is not ready because not literally every game is incorporating it when it's brand new? Do you understand how adoption cycles work?

Not only that they were talking about being able to lower the resolution of the Ray tracing allowing for much less performance hit. Probably more important for the 2080 and 2070 vs the 2080ti.