Be Excellent To Each Other

You wouldn't be able to if you had a power cut.

Or if you fell ill, and were in a coma.

Because it doesn't fit. That's how all this started, right?

Oh right, yeah. But as soon as I finished Dishonored 2 I just uninstalled it from the SSD and put the new game on. A lack of space isn't "never play this", just "remember to install it later, which is mildly annoying".

https://www.overclock3d.net/news/misc_h ... ctronics/1

So some of the small fry (if you could call them that) have been fined.

nVidia revealed new pro-grade GPUs yesterday, the first with the new Turing architecture and the first with a new hardware based realtime raytracing rendering engine. There's a consumer announcement next week and it seems likely the RT engine will be in those cards too.

This was rendered in it. In realtime. Gosh.

Is this too late now to be the sort of thing that'll be in the next consoles?

Very pretty, be interesting to see how it performs in the wild.
Also, and I know this is a tech demo so is using every bell and whistle going, but cars aren't that reflective in real life. Tone it down a bit and it could be very realistic.

It wasn't that long ago (erk, 12 years ish) that we were using 15 Pentium 4 PCs in a cluster to render things like that at about 5 minutes per frame. Now they can do it at 1080p 60fps.

Stunning.

There's a good video over at AdoredTV about these cards, leaks suggest that Nvidia are going to deliberately split the market into RTX and GTX cards, and nobbling the GTX cards at either a driver or hardware level to mean that you'll have be dropping $500+ on an RTX card to get the ray-tracing functionality.

Looks like it'll be the preserve of the wealthy for a little while to come.

Also note that the realtime demos seen so far are using some pretty exotic hardware configurations.





I believe the next-gen consoles are already locked down to AMD CPUs and GPUs, basically the same as XBox One/PS4 but a generation along. (i.e. Using the Zen architecture CPUs that are currently in the PC desktop space.)

This ray-tracing stuff is an Nvidia gig.

I asked the exact same thing on a tech forum the other day. Apparently AMD do not have a way to do hardware ray tracing, so I would say it is doubtful.

AMD will be using Vulkan for their RT.

It's probably also worth noting that even though RT is apparently about to become a thing, the hardware to do a fully RT game is likely many years off.

Just looks like the new carrot to me. Well, at the moment any way. There is one game coming that apparently uses some RT (and it's on things like lamps and etc) and according to the devs it absolutely cooks GPUs. I'm talking about the new Metro game. Other than that? nothing much else even in dev yet.

I would imagine early RT will be like early DX11 (where it was just a few very minor effects and lighting).

Edit. More on AMD's RT.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12552/am ... rofiler-12

Also. From what I recall the "hardware" used on Nvidia to do RT is the "Tensor Cores" on Volta. I don't know if Turing, Ampere or whatever Nvidia are calling it this week even has those cores.

https://www.overclock3d.net/news/gpu_di ... _tracing/1

Apparently it does have the Tensor cores on it. Well colour me surprised, I really thought they would drag that out until the next Ti card.

Good job you're fully into consoles now and don't have to worry about PC hardware anymore.

Yeah, and consoles are much more reliable too. You never have to wipe them and re-install everything.

Yes, but also no. The Porsche demo video was running on two Quadro RTX cards (I can't find out which ones, the top one cost $10k...) The Star Wars demo from E3 was done on (IIRC) 4x Titans. But that same Star Wars demo can now be done on a single Quadro RTX, so there's a very significant performance boost from this new RTX engine. Of course these Quadro cards are aimed at digital artists and designers.

We won't know anything meaningful for us until we see the 2070 and 2080 unveiling and find out what they are capable of. It seems unlikely anyone is going to be releasing fully ray-traced games anytime soon. The question is then: how successful will Nvidia be at creating a hybrid raytraced/rastered image pipeline (this was explicitly discussed yesterday as a goal), and then encouraging games developers to adopt it?

This is wrong, as your own posted link shows:

I'm not waiting 52+ years to find out more about ray tracing cards!

This is a software API. It's not remotely the same thing as Nvidia's announcement of a new hardware capability.

DX12 has ray tracing API, so maybe it's not too far away.

NVidia were talking about a hybrid mode, with some traditional rasterisation and then some added ray-tracing elements. Using that API. That seems more likely in the near term, to me, as the Quadro cards demoed yesterday have a huge, expensive core that probably won’t scale down to mass market consumer cards. My guess is the 2080 and 2070 cards won’t be the same Turing core.

What I am unsure of is whether they really are "Ray Tracing corez l337" etc or whether they are simply tensor cores, given a fancy name to get people excited. IE - are they really truly proper ray tracing cores or, for example, the DP that Nvidia disabled on Maxwell?

What I was getting at is exotic hardware compared to any sort of normal home setup that's likely to exist in the near future. Even a single 2080 is likely to cost £500-£600 or more, that's pretty exotic by most folks' standards.

Looking at the raw power of the 2070/2080 compared to the current cards, yes they're more powerful but not massively so, and the RTX engine can only do so much. (i.e. It's likely to be a future card, or even more expensive card, that's actually capable of rendering RT games, even in a sort of hybrid mode.)

Also, if Nvidia do split the market between RTX and non-RTX cards, then you're only looking at a small subset of the market having the ability to run RTX games (and none of the console market).

It'd be nice if AMD could provide some meaningful competition in the GPU space, as Nvidia are now effectively competing with themselves, which means they can pull shit like fragmenting their own market because they're a borderline monopoly.

That said, if Nvidia do limit RTX to the top-end cards, and the only way to experience RTX enabled games is to bin what may otherwise be a perfectly good older GTX card (I'm not intending to replace my 1080 anytime soon), then how much of a market for RTX content will there really be?

(Yes I realise it'll get there in the end as the tech trickles down, of course.)

Whilst I have absolutely no doubt that RT is the next big thing I don't think it will be worth having for a while yet. The only title that has any mention of RT that I have seen is the new Metro, and even then it was silly stuff like a table lamp in a big room on a small corner table.

Then of course we have the dev cycle. 3-5 years on a big game.

And then finally, is what Nvidia has (and especially what will come to gamers) powerful enough to even run RT? I strongly doubt it. I think it will be a few more gens at least until we see something man enough. Using four Quadro cards is cheating tbh.

Then again I am being very pessimistic, so I really hope I am completely wrong (I just doubt it, having bought into so many junk techs over the years).

OK so I have been reading today and garnering opinions on the matter. A lot of truth tbh. Basically as we know AMD got the console contracts. This means that basically all devs will code for the consoles first (as per the norm) and then make the games work on a PC. But, due to the limitations of the AMD APU (well, I say that it's actually better than anything Nvidia had obs) it means that basically we are going to get console "like" games on a PC.

This explains a lot, and would be why not one single game has been released to take advantage of all of the cool things DX12 had going for it. Things like mGPU, explicit multi adaptor and so on. We were promised a replacement for SLi that would work better and work on any GPU combination. Thus far no games at all have used it to anything even resembling worthwhile. Opinion is that this is because the consoles come first, which makes a lot of sense.

Which kinda paints a pretty bleak picture of RT really doesn't it? I mean, if they are not even bothering with reasonably important coding for the PC it doesn't exactly fill me with hope that not only are they going to spend time and money on development, but to do so solely for one manufacturer (IE - Nvidia). Nvidia have obviously played it sensible by getting the next pretty big game onboard (Metro, will be the biggest game launched for a while) to make sure that loads of people buy into RT. It just concerns me (or rather doesn't actually) as to what future it will have.

Nvidia results show a collapse in revenue to cryptocurrency mining and it expects it to be permanent:

https://twitter.com/jwangark/status/1030194513170636800

Nvidia's down ~5% after its Q2 report. They expected $100m in crypto revenue. Actual was $18m. They are modeling for $0 going forward. ‼️ pic.twitter.com/11Z3MosmLv

— James Wang (@jwangARK) August 16, 2018

Gimme dem cheap 1080Ti cards plzthxbai

Either that or they'll just sit on existing inventory until it shifts or just price up the next gen cards to create a new tier £100-£200 above where the 1080/1080Ti are sat.

(I think it'll be the latter, with the 2xxx coming in at a higher price point whilst they try and shift all the 1xxx cards at their current price point.)

I’m actually thinking of a glut of second hand ones if the cryptominers start offloading them. Sure, you might get one that’s had a hard life, but if they’re cheap enough maybe that’s OK...

I remember speaking with Richard Swinburne within the first week of mining exploding, and asking him his take on whether AMD and Nvidia would go in balls deep on production. He writes for CPC and used to post on the Bit-tech forums. He has worked for Asus, and lives in Taiwan as an industry analyst. Any way, he said that Asus told him that they personally were being incredibly careful, as they didn't want to be left "holding the baby".

Fast forward a year on and basically that is exactly what has happened.

I think the latter will be correct also. I had heard that these new 20 series cards were going to be mad expensive a while back. Almost belief defying prices had been mentioned.

I think there will be a glut at some point though. I've noticed at the end of every GPU range (well, after a new one has launched) that OCUK seem to get massive (very cheap) shipments of MSI and Gigabyte cards. It isn't just limited to those two though, but yeah they get tons. That was where I got my GTX 470 for £170. IIRC Hearthly got a 480 on the cheap around the same time.. I also had a 6970 Lightning for £170 and so on.

There will be a huge amount of mining cards up for grabs. All I would really do is just clean them and give them some fresh thermal paste and job done.

https://www.overclock3d.net/news/gpu_di ... pictured/1

2080 *and* 2080Ti "leaked".*

Are Nvidia going for the full pull? there are already rumours of a 5gb GDDR6 2060 that apparently goes about as fast as a 1070 8gb. But yeah, are they actually going to release the full range at once? or entice in "enthusiasts" with a 2080, then slap a Ti out 8 months later?

Time will tell I guess.

* everything these days is leaked. A leak. I guess it's that thing I was talking about a few weeks ago where humans find things far more interesting if they are not supposed to be seeing/doing them. This is much more of a publicity stunt by MSI to say "hey look at our cards".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms7HQ7rckpA

RTX now apparently. If you own a GTX you smell of poo.

Edit. I have a feeling having watched that video that Nvidia are going to do a 2080Ti on turing (mid range silicon) and will save the full Volta for whatever they come out with next. A master stroke, if you like buying everything they sell.

2080Ti (cheap and cheerful) to cost a grand.

https://www.overclock3d.net/news/gpu_di ... ications/1

Makes you wonder how much a Strix would be, for example.

Nvidia. Screwing over gamers for miners since whenever, then making gamers pay for their business mistakes.

*turns his XB1X over and rubs its belly*

"The pricing below appears to be a placeholder value, with the RTX 2080 Ti sitting at $1000 while the RTX 2080 costs $800. Final pricing is expected to be lower. "

Not buying it (PTP). The placeholder prices were $1500 recently.

If the 2080 is set to RRP between $599 (yeah, right) and $699 as "leaked" then how much will the Ti cost?

We shall see I guess.

1080s are still starting at around £470-£500, 1080Tis from about £650.

I suspect they're just going to be total wankers and kick the 2080 off at £600+ and the 2080Ti from £800+

By all accounts the supply chain is still swimming in unsold 10xx cards so if they pitch the 20xx series higher across the board it makes the 10xx cards look viable as they're the 'cheaper option'.

This is what happens when there's no (meaningful) competition. Intel only woke up when AMD punched them in the gut with Ryzen.

Yup, they are definitely getting meaner as AMD fade away. This is why I reckon this time around the Ti may well cost a grand because they have been increasing the prices steadily as AMD fade. I remember the Titan costing £699 and eyebrows being seriously raised. However, it was generally accepted. Then the Titan Black came along at £699 and same. However, the Titan X (Maxwell) lost DP and cost £960 and it has pretty much been upward since then. The XP was £1300 or so at launch (no DP) and the Xp was around £1200 for a few more CUDA cores.

Titan V was £3000, with the Tensor cores and about 25% more performance than my XP (and also had woefully insufficient cooling) so that doesn't exactly fill me with hope.

Then again who am I kidding? firstly I wouldn't want a new GPU having paid £650 for mine a year ago and secondly I love my XB1X. Thirdly I simply can't afford to drop £800 on a GPU now with all that is going on with my life and knowing I am moving soon etc.

I'm not holding out much hope for 7nm Vega either.

I’ll wait for the 4KTis.

What the fuck even is this.

Nvidia isn't a charity and by your own admission have little meaningful competition so yeah, of course their new, shiny shit is going to cost the earth. Now maybe if they were the only suppliers on Earth of insulin or clean water I could get worked up about that, but come on. These are high end gaming graphics cards for nerds with more money than sense and/or a desperate need for e-peen. No-one has to buy this stuff. If you don't like the price, wait for them to get cheaper like the rest of us. Nvidia exploiting people with more money than sense doesn't make them "wankers." It makes them canny businesspeople. If you want to get annoyed at capitalism there's a million things more worthwhile to get excised over.

Well, yeah! That's a ridiculous price, no-one would spend that sort of money on a GPU, what were Nvidia thinking?! Total idiots the lot of them.Oh.

I'm over it dude. Seriously.

FWIW I bought it used, and the original owner had paid the full £1300 for it. I also bought it about two weeks before crypto exploded, so could have cashed in at any point (easily getting back £1100 or so). I kind of knew then though that it would be the last time I would pay a high price for a GPU.

Before the XP (big pee) I had a XM (Maxwell) I paid £370 for a week before the 1080 came out, and before that I had a used Fury X. So I do see that differently to rushing out and buying a new GPU. In fact the last new GPU I bought (was two actually) was a Titan Black. I bought two new, then bought a third used and from there I have not bought a single new one. Even my Fury X was a week old from a pal who didn't like it.

But yeah, just so over it. Gaming has been really struggling and £1300 GPUs are not helping it. When something becomes all about capitalism it eventually implodes and disappears up its own ass.

I genuinely could not believe how good my 1x was at running a game at 4k. OK, so if I take a screenshot and then sit on my PC and scrutinise it (on a 32" monitor) from 18" away? yeah it doesn't look all that good. However, moving along and sitting 17ft or so away? it looks stunning. I even found a video on Youtube of some guy trying to build a gaming PC that could do what the 1x does for the same price (around £430 new) and he could not. In fact, most of the PC games he ran would not even run properly at 4k, even though the 1x was having no such trouble.

Did I miss some posts here that merited such an aggressive response? Anyway, let's work with what we've got.

The problem with gouging at the high-end is that it filters down the entire product stack. So whereas it used to be possible to get close to the top end cards for £250 or less (i.e. GTX970), now that'll barely get you a look in at the midrange (GTX1060).

Exploiting a monopolistic position is a wankery thing to do IMO, or 'generating shareholder value' as I'm sure some would describe it as. It's a sign of dysfunctional market, and demonstrates how 'market forces' can easily fail to do what they're allegedly so good at doing.

Is it the most egregious example of capitalism fucking things up? No, of course it isn't, but I wasn't talking about that, I was talking about the price of graphics cards.

Nvidia are a company with a long history of anti-consumer practices, so this is very much just par for the course for them.

Sorry. I'm a bit grumpy right now, I'm going through some Stuff which is clearly getting on top of me. Mea culpa.

Ahhh right no problem old chap, hope the 'stuff' gets sorted out soon!

GTX 590, circa 2011.



Two enormous great dies, totally OTT. Yours for £590, which I remember thinking was a *lot* of money. Now they want £3000 for a Titan V.

Edit. That's why they call me bullet... Just finally noticed the irony between the model number and price. Oh, and don't forget to add the custom PLX chip that it had too, 'cause they are not cheap.

The Titan V isn’t a gaming card. It’s a professional grade workstation card for people who need GPU compute for their jobs, and is priced according to that market. Under my desk in work is a 72 core Lenovo workstation with 200 GB of RAM; that cost a pretty penny too, but it doesn’t mean squat for the gaming PC ecosystem.

Can it run Crysis though?

Not enough memory

That rig must be able to crack out some serious emails.

And as many as THREE chrome tabs, SIMULTANEOUSLY.

And one of them can be Google Maps.

I doubt it, it has some tiny little passively cooled Quadro GPU.

So what you're saying is, you're only a £1 GFX card from playing Crysis?

...maybe? And the mere trifle of losing my job for installing random software on a secure workstation, of course.

They'd understand. This is for SCIENCE.

Brwaark, brwaaaak, BRWAAAAAAAAARK!!!