Why it is stupid af to buy RTX cards now.

[MrDodojo]

Everyone knows about nvidias new rtx cards with raytracing right? Well there is a likelyhood they will not support upcoming directx rays that will be supported by way more games. 

[Deli]

Just buy it. Life is too short without raytracing.

[Phentos]

People buying RTX cards now are the early adopters of a tech that may or may not take off. Never know. People said PhysX was going to be the next big thing for gaming, and look where that is.

 

Personally I think RT tech will be used in more games as time goes on, but if you own a card like a 1070TI or better you would be smart to wait until prices drop, if an upcoming game you really want will be confirmed to have RTX support, or Nvidia launches the 7nm successors to the current 20-series cards. Like for me, if Cyberpunk 2077 is confirmed to have RTX support and DLSS, then I'll fork up the big bucks for a 2080TI. But I've heard nothing about it so I'm happy to wait.

[Deli]

32 minutes ago, Phentos said:

People buying RTX cards now are the early adopters of a tech that may or may not take off. Never know. People said PhysX was going to be the next big thing for gaming, and look where that is.

 

Personally I think RT tech will be used in more games as time goes on, but if you own a card like a 1070TI or better you would be smart to wait until prices drop, if an upcoming game you really want will be confirmed to have RTX support, or Nvidia launches the 7nm successors to the current 20-series cards. Like for me, if Cyberpunk 2077 is confirmed to have RTX support and DLSS, then I'll fork up the big bucks for a 2080TI. But I've heard nothing about it so I'm happy to wait.

The next gen Nvidia GPU using 7nm node will be 50% faster than the 2080Ti. However it'll be 100% more expensive, at $2400. So people can say the $1200 2080Ti is such a bargain, good value, one in a lifetime deal, etc. No matter how you see it, Nvidia wins.

 

Just buy it. Life is too short without raytracing.

[Phentos]

13 minutes ago, Deli said:

The next gen Nvidia GPU using 7nm note will be 50% faster than the 2080Ti. However it'll be 100% more expensive, at $2400. So people can say the $1200 2080Ti is such a bargain, good value, one in a lifetime deal, etc. No matter how you see it, Nvidia wins.

 

Just buy it. Life is too short without raytracing.

Lol.

[Reznik]

I've got a year old 1070 with absolutely no desire to upgrade to a RTX card and to be honest I'm happy I can skip this generation of cards.  Even if RTX takes off things will still look fine without it.  

[ImNotThere]

it's not stupid af to buy one right now, its just ill advised due to the lack of ray tracing right now.... as said by someone else, if you own a 1070ti or better you'd be smart to wait for the price drops if you desperately need the bleeding edge tech... personally i'm waiting for the price drops on pascal due to turing and ima just buy another 1080 and sli them bad boys 

[RAM555789]

This card was really just meant for early adopters as everyone else is saying. Until there is greater support for ray tracing, which I believe we will see, it won't start to become more widespread until next generation or possibly even two.

[Sett]

Never mind raytracing. Those cards may support it, but they can't really deliver (any reasonable framerate with it). So basically I think of them as Pascals with prettier Antialiasing options (as they can be offloaded to Tenser, instead of CUDA cores), and some additional niche usecases, like raytraced screenshots. The Issue is most of what raytracing does can be approximated with conventional technology, raytracing just makes it much easier for the developers and somewhat more realistic. But it's not good news for developers, because they WILL want to use RTX, and they will love it, but they will STILL need to do everything the old way too, because very few people will be able to (afford to) use this shortcut, so if they ditch the manual labor in favor of RTX, they'll lose a LOT of potential customers. And that is bad news for nVidia. Because if they want RTX to spread, so that they can monetize it, they probably shouldn't have done it at this kind of price premium...

[Settlerteo]

1 hour ago, Phentos said:

People buying RTX cards now are the early adopters of a tech that may or may not take off. Never know. People said PhysX was going to be the next big thing for gaming, and look where that is.

 

 

PhysX was the next big thing for gaming in the same way Brock Lesnar was the next big thing for wrestling entertainment. #NOT 

[Phentos]

44 minutes ago, Settlerteo said:

PhysX was the next big thing for gaming in the same way Brock Lesnar was the next big thing for wrestling entertainment. #NOT 

I don't follow wrestling at all so I don't understand the context.

[Dredgy]

I’ve just had my 780Ti dual SLI rig start to fail, and the RTX 2080Ti is the only single card that can beat those two cards together in every possible scenario, so is a no brainer for me. Also costs about the same as those 2 cards cost me, so financially makes sense.

That said I haven’t bought it yet because no stock, and now that I can finally have a single card am likely to go to an ITX rig.

 

Couldn’t give a crap about ray tracing.

[Frankenburger]

I can see ray tracing becoming the norm in a decode or so, but I'm willing to bet it won't be done through RTX. Proprietary hardware features never become the norm, but it's not uncommon for early proprietary features to start discussions and development into open standards. PhysX never took off, yet helped spawn Open CL rigid body. TruForm and HD2xxx tessellation never took off, yet helped spawn DX Tessellation. GSync is losing ground to FreeSync. Hairworks seems to be losing ground to TressFX. RTX probably won't take off, is helping spawn DXRT

[Cereal5]

2 hours ago, MrDodojo said:

Everyone knows about nvidias new rtx cards with raytracing right?

Never heard of them. (citation needed)

 

2 hours ago, Starscream203 said:

To be honest i could give a Sh@t about ray tracing. I think Nvidia messed up here. Why would you release a card and no games support ray tracing. I think there are hyped up and over priced I have a 1070 and im perfectly fine and happy 

That's like telling someone who bought a 5820K or 6800K to game on that "there's no use for the extra cores, you're just spending extra money". And look where we are now: Intel's mainstream flagship is 6c/12t, and AMD's mainstream flagship is 8c/16t. And people buy them for gaming. Thanks to DX12 and Vulkan (which games still don't use sometimes). So we will see. Time will tell.

 

1 hour ago, Sett said:

Never mind raytracing. Those cards may support it, but they can't really deliver (any reasonable framerate with it). So basically I think of them as Pascals with prettier Antialiasing options (as they can be offloaded to Tenser, instead of CUDA cores), and some additional niche usecases, like raytraced screenshots. The Issue is most of what raytracing does can be approximated with conventional technology, raytracing just makes it much easier for the developers and somewhat more realistic. But it's not good news for developers, because they WILL want to use RTX, and they will love it, but they will STILL need to do everything the old way too, because very few people will be able to (afford to) use this shortcut, so if they ditch the manual labor in favor of RTX, they'll lose a LOT of potential customers. And that is bad news for nVidia. Because if they want RTX to spread, so that they can monetize it, they probably shouldn't have done it at this kind of price premium...

Yeah it's the classic "I have no friends cause I play video games, and i play video games cause I have no friends" argument.

 

7 minutes ago, Dredgy said:

I’ve just had my 780Ti dual SLI rig start to fail, and the RTX 2080Ti is the only single card that can beat those two cards together in every possible scenario, so is a no brainer for me. Also costs about the same as those 2 cards cost me, so financially makes sense.

That said I haven’t bought it yet because no stock, and now that I can finally have a single card am likely to go to an ITX rig.

Um given that the 780 Ti only has 3GB of VRAM, a LOT of single cards will beat it. Probably even a 970 with it's 3.5GB, as long as you need more than 3. And, that's not to mention the whole host of problems that come along with running SLI cards. Some games are great, some games are literally less performance than a single card. I'm surprised you didn't upgrade when the 980 Ti came out, let alone the 1080 Ti. So no, the 2080 Ti is definitely not the only card that can beat SLI 780 Ti's.

[Maticks]

2080ti pricing just came out here in Australia i was going to laugh at a $1,500 price but its $2,299... holy crap.

1080ti's are selling for $1,000 and the 2080ti is only 20% better performance that's just nuts.

 

I don't understand why these things are selling out... am i missing something here.

[PopsicleHustler]

Even if you're a REALLY big fan of a game that supports RTX (Like I am a fan on BF and upcoming BF5 supports it) I don't see a reason to upgrade. Performance hit is huge. So for example if I want to play at 1440p ultrawide with RTX On, I can forget about buying 2060 or even 2070, I would have to go directly to 2080/ti in order to have playable FPS with high settings on 1440p. I rather have decent FPS with default high settings rather than super fancy ray tracing with low settings and 30FPS.

[Frankenburger]

Just now, PopsicleHustler said:

Even if you're a REALLY big fan of a game that supports RTX (Like I am a fan on BF and upcoming BF5 supports it) I don't see a reason to upgrade. Performance hit is huge. So for example if I want to play at 1440p ultrawide with RTX On, I can forget about buying 2060 or even 2070, I would have to go directly to 2080/ti in order to have playable FPS with high settings on 1440p. I rather have decent FPS with default high settings rather than super fancy ray tracing with low settings and 30FPS.

If what is said is true, that the 2080 can't do 60 FPS at 1080p with RTX on, then the only way a current RTX system can pull acceptable performance is with SLI. But I don't see anyone dropping an extra $800-$1200 just for RTX, especially when considering most people with a RTX 2080 are gaming at 1440p or higher.

[Dredgy]

5 minutes ago, Cereal5 said:

Um given that the 780 Ti only has 3GB of VRAM, a LOT of single cards will beat it. Probably even a 970 with it's 3.5GB, as long as you need more than 3. And, that's not to mention the whole host of problems that come along with running SLI cards. Some games are great, some games are literally less performance than a single card. I'm surprised you didn't upgrade when the 980 Ti came out, let alone the 1080 Ti. So no, the 2080 Ti is definitely not the only card that can beat SLI 780 Ti's.

VRAM is not a measure of real world performance, it’s one component of a graphics card.

In some situations, yes, other cards will beat the 780Ti SLI config, but not in all. Gaming is not my primary use case (is barely even a use case). But in my tests (I did buy a 1080Ti a few months after they came out, my frame rates in games I did play - GTAV, GTAIV, Hitman, Planet Coaster - suffered a bit, but my rendering performance dropped by like 30% so I sent it back). Two 780Tis were comparable in real world performance to an M5000 I borrowed from work.

 

I had no problems with SLI, I’m fact I found not a single game that couldn’t be made to work (and work well) with relatively simple config patches. I didn’t run in SLI most of the time (I have 8 monitors so if I needed all displays turned on I couldn’t run in SLI), but when I did performance was generally about 160-170% of a single card. There’s a lot of myths about how hard SLI is to work with, and how bad the scaling is, but they tend to only be true once you start adding more than 2 cards. 

[Cereal5]

2 minutes ago, PopsicleHustler said:

Even if you're a REALLY big fan of a game that supports RTX (Like I am a fan on BF and upcoming BF5 supports it) I don't see a reason to upgrade. Performance hit is huge. So for example if I want to play at 1440p ultrawide with RTX On, I can forget about buying 2060 or even 2070, I would have to go directly to 2080/ti in order to have playable FPS with high settings on 1440p. I rather have decent FPS with default high settings rather than super fancy ray tracing with low settings and 30FPS.

Agreed. And once you get up to high/ultra settings, I can't tell a difference between eye candy stuff like that anyways, when at the end of the day I'm focused on running around finding people to shoot. But enthusiasts will be enthusiasts so I can't blame someone for wanting it lol.

 

1 minute ago, Frankenburger said:

If what is said is true, that the 2080 can't do 60 FPS at 1080p with RTX on, then the only way a current RTX system can pull acceptable performance is with SLI. But I don't see anyone dropping an extra $800-$1200 just for RTX, especially when considering most people with a RTX 2080 are gaming at 1440p or higher.

But, seeing as NVLink is coming to RTX, that could play a big factor in how it performs. Again, only time will tell.

 

 

Honestly, I don't know why everyone has to create a stir. Just wait literally one month, or even a few weeks, and all the details for every nerd out there will available as common knowledge. No point in shitting on it, or in praising it. People still don't REALLY know how the card is gonna perform in actually games with this settings on and that setting off, or in this upcoming game that support ray tracing, or that upcoming game that doesn't. So just let people get their hands on it, let it come out, let NVIDIA get their press release. NVIDIA will be NVIDIA and do stupid stuff as always.

[Frankenburger]

2 minutes ago, Cereal5 said:

But, seeing as NVLink is coming to RTX, that could play a big factor in how it performs. Again, only time will tell.

From the looks of things, the RTX implementation of NVLink is nothing more than the bandwidth and bridge spec of the interconnect. RTX NVLink still shares all the same downfalls as SLI. No VRAM pooling, is reliant on AFR, and needs SLI compatibility bits to enable scaling. Maybe in the future, Nvidia can add in NVLink's SFR mode, but right now it's no better than SLI.

[Sett]

14 minutes ago, Cereal5 said:

Yeah it's the classic "I have no friends cause I play video games, and i play video games cause I have no friends" argument.

That is ... surprisingly accurate comparison, whichever way you look at it (chicken and egg also comes to mind).
Enthusiast gamers won't buy them until there are games than make sensible use of them.
Developers will likely use it right away, but they still cannot abandon emulation until majority of people have them.

Mainstream gamers won't buy them until signifant amount of games start to look noticably worse without them, and until they become cheaper (or rather until the bump in visuals levels out with the bump in price).

nVidia won't make them any cheaper until they optimize the process which means until they are sure they can sell a crapload of them.

And round and round it goes...

[Cereal5]

4 minutes ago, Dredgy said:

VRAM is not a measure of real world performance, it’s one component of a graphics card.

In some situations, yes, other cards will beat the 780Ti SLI config, but not in all. Gaming is not my primary use case (is barely even a use case). But in my tests (I did buy a 1080Ti a few months after they came out, my frame rates in games I did play - GTAV, GTAIV, Hitman, Planet Coaster - suffered a bit, but my rendering performance dropped by like 30% so I sent it back). Two 780Tis were comparable in real world performance to an M5000 I borrowed from work.

Ok that's fair, I mostly thought about gaming, but obviously there are plenty other use scenarios for GPUs. However...

 

4 minutes ago, Dredgy said:

There’s a lot of myths about how hard SLI is to work with, and how bad the scaling is, but they tend to only be true once you start adding more than 2 cards. 

This is definitely not true. SLI is just SLI. The fact that it is being used it what matters more than how many times over it is being used. Looking at some recent pascal SLI benchmarks from the techtubers will make that clear. There's even that whole "Wtf is going on with SLI" video that was hosted by Luke.

 

[Sett]

13 minutes ago, Cereal5 said:

This is definitely not true. SLI is just SLI. The fact that it is being used it what matters more than how many times over it is being used.

IDK it is definitely harder for developers to work with and you will definitely run into a lot of issues on day 1 of any launch, but if you can wait a couple of days...
I ran two GTX660's. I got nearly perfect 2x scaling on Fallout 4 and 60%-80% boost on most other titles, no stuttering or any problem with two exceptions:
1) Cheap SLI bridge + lazy user = LSD experience

2) No Vulcan support (a biggie, since my CPU at the time was an i5-750).
Regarding microstuttering, it is worth noting, that these two got me into 40-50 FPS range in Witcher 3 high. If your intended range is more along the line of 144 or 240 FPS and you start counting individual miliseconds, YMMV.

[Zandvliet]

Everyone keeps saying do not buy... but it really depends on the situation. Yes, if you have 10 series, don't upgrade to RTX, not worth it imo. But, I currently have a 970 which is showing signs of retirement and am therefore looking to get the 2080. The price difference between the 2080 FE and the lowest priced 1080ti is about 100 euro for me, which are the 'lowest end' of the 1080ti bunch. On average the price difference is 50 euro in favor of a 1080ti. That price difference is worth it to me to get he lastest gen. As an example, the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 GAMING ICX is ~150 euro more than the 2080.

 

Plus, I do believe that drivers will help improve the performance of RTX cards in general gaming. RT might be neat but it will take a while before it becomes mainstream (if at all). I won't be buying it for RT, the amount of compute power is a pro for me aswell over a 1080ti. 

[AngryBeaver]

TBH I finally got my 2080ti in. I think I paid like 1350ish for the evga ultra and then another 300ish for the waterblock and backplate. I haven't even used it yet due to the fact I don't want to rip a 1080ti out only to to need to dissemble the loop again in a few weeks.

 

Then again I fully plan on picking up a 9900k when it releases. So I will probably just wait until then.