Nvidia unveils the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080, and RTX 2070

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I don't know why you think I'm desperate to defend higher prices. I think cost per mflop of power is actually coming down, and I think that's a good thing.

Well you are though and you have done it a few times during new releases.

I've always said gaming is a luxury product. What I said regarding price increases is also consistent - since the move away from PCs becoming common place in every household it is going back to the previous times when PC gaming (or even PC anything) was an enthusiast activity so because volume of sales is lower then everything costs a lot more. I don't get the Rollo reference - I'm not the one gaming on a free nVidia card - I'm still an AMD fan and think that they are much more forward looking and have better drivers.

You mean the one DR lent me? I don't own it. Plus also considering how that can get hammered in some not so new games it makes me wonder how the cards I normally get would fare,which emphasised how much things have gotten worse.

It's made me more aware of how much I need to start dialing down what I used to play unless I spend much more.

Plus in the time you have had cards I have had to upgrade more often despite being behind the curve and I might as well not bother it I stay in the normal price ranges I have had for 10+ years.

Plus yes you sound exactly like Rollo since he said the same stuff about luxury and justifying paying more for stuff since it is a luxury.

Also I have still spent more than you on cards in the last few years despite only buying cards as necessity.

I've never agreed with microtransactions - if a game needs them to be value for money then I don't play the game. So for me, I always judge a game on what I get out of the box and whether that's value for me or not.

Because the same argument you used for justifying card prices to increase is what the microtransaction supporters did. It's a luxury,etc.

Then when people pointed out what it would do people attacked them. Even people like Jim Stirling,etc got game fans attacking them. Now they are quiet.

You get everything on the internet. But you also get people who are so short sighted that they would rather a quick term solution that is better for them today than for tomorrow and the rest of the week.

But justifying increasing pricing for cards is that - where does it end?

You don't care since you don't apparently care about graphics or newer AAA games so you selfishly think that everyone else shouldn't.

Did you mean to reply to me? I've never tried to annoy people, and I apologise if anyone is annoyed. Debate on Hexus should always be impersonal - argue against the idea, not the personality.

But you do seem to be trying to that - you self are justifying price increases for the sake of it.

I don't care about the RTX series.

Good for them - they have an equal right to express their opinion politely too. The world would be extremely dull if we all liked the same thing. Hexus wouldn't have a forum for one.

No but again it comes across as dog in the manger, I am alright jack attitude. Plus you justifications for increasing tiers is self defeating long-term.

Again if you hardly buy graphics cards and don't care about modern games or graphics why are you so concerned about justifying higher card prices??

No wonder you got that random person annoyed - I can understand why they look at your post and think that especially if they only visit here rarely.

Anyway we will agree to disagree - you can support higher prices for companies and I will support lower prices for consumers.

Maybe it will be like Magneto and Professor X..... cosplay.

[Iota]

But all hobbies cost money - but you can enjoy hobbies at different levels depend on the depth of your pocket.

It comes to something though, when you can buy a console, plus accessories, plus 4K TV, plus games for less than the price of a single graphics card. I'm not going to defend Nvidia for the pricing they've gone with for the absolute top end on what is meant to be a consumer based card. It's like they've looked at Apple and thought they could do the exact same thing, forgetting that people tend to buy phones on a contract and spread the cost over a number of years.

I guess that'll be the next marketing ploy, releasing a graphics card under contracts with access to AI trained neural networks for games graphics, that link directly to the tensor cores of the asic (can we even call this a gpu anymore???)

Also. Nvidia is taking the piss (no other way to say this.)

2080Ti - $1199.00
2080 - $799.00
2070 - $599.00

does not equate to;

2080Ti - £1099.00
2080 - £749.00
2070 - £569.00

it equates to this;

2080Ti - ~£930.00
2080 - ~£620.00
2070 - ~£470.00

I detest companies that try to price gouge when converting from $US to £Pounds Sterling.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It comes to something though, when you can buy a console, plus accessories, plus 4K TV, plus games for less than the price of a single graphics card. I'm not going to defend Nvidia for the pricing they've gone with for the absolute top end on what is meant to be a consumer based card. It's like they've looked at Apple and thought they could do the exact same thing, forgetting that people tend to buy phones on a contract and spread the cost over a number of years.

I guess that'll be the next marketing ploy, releasing a graphics card under contracts with access to AI trained neural networks for games graphics, that link directly to the tensor cores of the asic

Don't tell them that they will start making up more reasons to pay it. Go with the program dude.

Don't criticise company pricing ever. If you are you are anti company. Company needs are more important than consumer needs. You serve the company not the other way around.

Edit!!

Make sure you include VAT though.

(can we even call this a gpu anymore???)

No it's called a cash cow.

[peterb]

It comes to something though, when you can buy a console, plus accessories, plus 4K TV, plus games for less than the price of a single graphics card. I'm not going to defend Nvidia for the pricing they've gone with for the absolute top end on what is meant to be a consumer based card. It's like they've looked at Apple and thought they could do the exact same thing, forgetting that people tend to buy phones on a contract and spread the cost over a number of years.

I guess that'll be the next marketing ploy, releasing a graphics card under contracts with access to AI trained neural networks for games graphics, that link directly to the tensor cores of the asic (can we even call this a gpu anymore???)

Also. Nvidia is taking the piss (no other way to say this.)

2080Ti - $1199.00
2080 - $799.00
2070 - $599.00

does not equate to;

2080Ti - £1099.00
2080 - £749.00
2070 - £569.00

it equates to this;

2080Ti - ~£930.00
2080 - ~£620.00
2070 - ~£470.00

I detest companies that try to price gouge when converting from $US to £Pounds Sterling.

Depends if you are quoting VAT exclusive prices - £930 plus VAT is £1,116 - which is nearer the price in your second table.

And yes, you can buy a console for less and still enjoy the hobby, albeit at a different level.

And its always dangerous comparing US and UK prices - not only because of the VAT that adds 20% straight off, but different distribution methods, volumes of sales etc. Nvidia can only enforce the price they sell to distributors/retailers, which will be much less than the retail price anyway.

(And I'm not defending Nvidia - just saying that theses thinks are rarely as simple as they seem)

[kalniel]

Well you are though and you do it every time there is a new release.

You repeatedly excuse make for increased pricing.

Where have I made any new excuse for increased pricing with the RTX?

Plus yes you sound exactly like Rollo since he said the same stuff about luxury and justifying paying more for stuff since it is a luxury.

I think you're misunderstanding me - discretionary purchases are exactly that - discretionary. That means it's optional whether to get them or not, it's not any kind of comment on justification of prices.

Because the same argument you used for justifying card prices to increase is what the microtransaction supporters did. It's a luxury,etc.

Saying something is optional is not the same as saying it's justifiably more expensive. In the case of microtransations it's the opposite! I think microtransactions are usually not justified, hence, because they are optional, I don't buy them

You don't care since you don't apparently care about graphics or newer AAA games so you selfishly think that everyone else shouldn't.

I think you're misreading still. Please check what I wrote - I didn't say anything about everyone else, quite the opposite - I welcome all non-personal opinions and if they show me how they come to the conclusions then there's every possibility it'll change my own opinions.

But you do seem to be trying to that - you self are justifying price increases for the sake of it.

Well let me say again, I'm not trying to annoy anyone.

Again if you hardly buy graphics cards and don't care about modern games or graphics why are you so concerned about justifying higher card prices??

Er, I'm not?

It comes to something though, when you can buy a console, plus accessories, plus 4K TV, plus games for less than the price of a single graphics card.

That is annoying for us PC gamers, but I don't see why we have any right to say that consoles etc. shouldn't be that much cheaper. I'm not a console gamer, but I can see that economy of scales is bound to produce an ever increasing gap between small scale, almost custom, products and mass-produced clones.

But my point was, we can always buy a cheaper card that'll still give a great experience - still better than console IMHO. Just because Fiat sell Ferraris for millions, it doesn't mean that I should be angry at them for that when I can still buy a lesser model that does everything I need.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Having said that I can see GPU rental being a thing though or a GPU as a service.

[kalniel]

Having said that I can see GPU rental being a thing though or a GPU as a service.

Oh don't go down that route, our rural internet isn't fast enough for streaming

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Oh don't go down that route, our rural internet isn't fast enough for streaming

Bahahaha you see I don't care as I have non-rural superfast Sky broadband!

Wait it's gone kaput again - damn it! Forget about rural my phone is faster and more reliable lol.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Lol,over on the OcUK thread RTX memes have started up.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

First "review" out:

https://www.techradar.com/reviews/nv...ce-rtx-2080-ti

Performance

Although we haven’t had the chance to benchmark the card thoroughly, we did get to play multiple PC games at 4K and in excess of 60 frames per second (fps) with the RTX 2080 Ti at Nvidia’s GeForce Gaming Celebration event at Gamescom 2018.

Unfortunately, due to multiple non-disclosure agreements we signed, we can only tell you that Shadow of the Tomb Raider looks stunning with ray tracing turned on. Thanks to Nvidia’s RTX technology, shadows do indeed look more realistic – with different intensities everywhere depicted in a stony ruin in the rainforest. We also just gawked at the walls, looking them shimmer as light reflected and refracted off of them.

In terms of frame rate, Shadow of the Tomb Raider ran at a mostly consistent 50-57 fps, which is impressive giving the game is running on a single GPU and in such an early state – on top of all the new ray tracing techniques.

We also played a variety of other PC games that shall not be named, and saw performance run in excess of 100 fps at 4K and Ultra settings. Unfortunately, we also don’t know how much power these GPUs had to draw to reach this level of performance.

We’ll also note that the gaming PCs at Nvidia’s event were arranged in the worst way possible, with almost all the machines exhausting heat directly toward the next one behind it. So, we’ll likely see even better performance once we get a card into our isolated test bench.

So how knows,it might a decent performance jump....in line with the price increase!!

[watercooled]

I wonder if a point has been reached where they've gotten too greedy and pushed too far, too quickly with prices. The main thing I'm seeing in any discussion WRT to this launch is shock and disgust at the pricing. Not many clapping at that announcement!

I've not read the whole thread so forgive me if this has already been mentioned here but in other places I've seen people attempting to defend the pricing (which is pretty indefensible IMHO, not least because they're selling what could, for all we know, be snake oil with the RTX stuff, with no benchmarks etc and expecting people to preorder) based on performance per dollar not decreasing? Seriously? Technology has advanced the way it has precisely because you keep getting more for the same money, not the same for the same money but a tad more if you remortgage!

I'm very interested to see how the actual launch goes in a number of ways. I wonder how much Nvidia will push reviewers to compare apples to oranges with the RTX stuff and avoid any like-for-like benchmarks. I'll definitely be reading between the lines with any related articles!

On one hand you have to give credit for taking a risk and trying something different, but that sort of risk is typically at the expense of the company, not their consumers!! Die size does look to be relatively massive but if half of it ends up unused for all but a few initial tech-demo titles, it seems like a false economy. Looking at it another way, if it does truly turn out to be a more efficient way of doing things (not just in carefully selected demos) then it could well be worth it (in terms of die size), but trying to sell that early on as an expensive ray tracing accelerator card, priced similarly to a GPU, but which only kicks in for a few titles - that would be a hard sell even for all but the worst of fanboys. Nvidia might have looked at market conditions and saw an opportunity to gain some traction while they don't have conventional architectures massively undercutting them - for the first time in a while Nvidia are potentially at a massive die size disadvantage here and could stand to lose a lot of market share if there were high-end competing products as they would not be able to compete with a competitor performing similarly (in non-optimised games) at half the die size and therefore far less than half the production cost.

Having said all that, does anyone know if the ray tracing implementation is an open standard? Feature-locking games to GPUs yet again would only serve to harm everyone, and as has happened many times in the past with Nvidia, could well limit the technology to little more than a cute tech demo in a few games like what happened with PhysX, and meaning it could never really be used for anything related to game mechanics as it would mean fundamentally changing the whole game for each manufacturer.

[Hoonigan]

@CAT-THE-FIFTH

This is my favourite of the RTX on/off memes so far

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Having said all that, does anyone know if the ray tracing implementation is an open standard? Feature-locking games to GPUs yet again would only serve to harm everyone, and as has happened many times in the past with Nvidia, could well limit the technology to little more than a cute tech demo in a few games like what happened with PhysX, and meaning it could never really be used for anything related to game mechanics as it would mean fundamentally changing the whole game for each manufacturer.

MS DX12 ray tracing and machine learning for gaming should work on AMD,Intel and Nvidia GPUs in theory but the rumour is that Nvidia was heavily involved:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12547...ctx-raytracing
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12549...ing-for-gaming

However,Nvidia ray tracing is part of their Gameworks package:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12546...gpus-and-later
https://hothardware.com/news/nvidia-...racing-toolbox

Also Epic has integrated RTX and Gameworks at an engine level in UE4 in addition to MS DX12 raytracing:

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/b...and-nvidia-rtx

Initial benchmarks of the DX12 raytracing software fallback layer from what I have seen,appears to look very bad on AMD cards too,ie,Pascal beats Vega and Polaris.

Apparently Vega has "intermediate support" so maybe partial hardware support,but I am not sure if it is a driver issue on the AMD side or something else.

@CAT-THE-FIFTH

This is my favourite of the RTX on/off memes so far

LOL.

[Corky34]

Having said all that, does anyone know if the ray tracing implementation is an open standard? Feature-locking games to GPUs yet again would only serve to harm everyone, and as has happened many times in the past with Nvidia, could well limit the technology to little more than a cute tech demo in a few games like what happened with PhysX, and meaning it could never really be used for anything related to game mechanics as it would mean fundamentally changing the whole game for each manufacturer.

It's about as open as all DX12 stuff, that's to say it's open to all hardware but only if you use Microsoft's API and operating system.

One thing I've not seen mentioned is if these new GPU's support Radeon-Rays (part of GPUOpen) and in the unlikely event they do how they compare.

It's all a bit odd as (afaik) a while back Nvidia chose to split their uarch between 'professional' and 'gamer' designs because they considered the demands from each segment were diverging so much that they could no longer cover both markets with the same basic design as they had done in the past, AMD still use that philosophy (single uarch for multiple markets), what's odd is that AMD have suffered in the gaming performance stakes by sticking to a single design and now Nvidia are trying to convince the 'gamer' segment that they need a feature mainly used in the 'professional' market so, i assume, they can bring their two separate uarch's back into a single design.

EDIT: I guess that's what Jensen meant when he said they'd been working on realtime ray-tracing for 10 years, its taken them 10 years to make 'professional' features appeal to 'gamers'.

[Dashers]

Nvidia is a classic example of why competition is a good thing. They're no different than Intel has been on several occasions. They're still bringing innovation into the market, but they can charge whatever they like for it as there is no effective competition.

Couple that with anti-competitive behaviour (not necessarily illegal), such as buying up other firms just for the IP, putting in deals with manufacturers of their products (AIB, game studios etc). What we land up with is an organisation that can charge whatever they like - and their historical profit margins are showing that. In 2014 they had a 12% margin, this year we've been touching on 40%, even with their supply chain issues.

So yes, whilst it's entirely discretionary as to whether you buy into this company - by acting as an almost effective monopoly your choice is simply: pay or don't play new games. Not due to manufacturer costs, but because they can demand whatever they like.

AMD have only been competitive a couple of times in my past when I've been in a position to buy, and I've been burnt both times with poor drivers. It's a good thing that Intel are entering the market as it ups competition, which will bring down prices to an acceptable level for punters.

I'm simply not spending that sort of money on a 2070. If the market doesn't move prices to what I deem acceptable then I'll just land up pushing my cards for longer, and might skip a generation or two where previous I haven't. The manufacturer doesn't land up with any more cash from me, just less steady flow - which generally businesses prefer to have.

[kalniel]

So yes, whilst it's entirely discretionary as to whether you buy into this company - by acting as an almost effective monopoly your choice is simply: pay or don't play new games.

Or better, put your money into games that don't need their cards. Then developers will be encouraged to continue making games that don't need their cards, and you won't be missing out.