On Monday, Nvidia officially announced and showcased their 2000 series of graphics cards.
This is a company that’s already ahead of the competition. And now, here they are, taking
another step forward. They claimed that this is the greatest leap they’ve made since 2006.
And I won’t contest that! But whereas I was very concerned for AMD before the presentation
began, by the end I wasn’t so worried. The Geforce 2000 series is a completely new
design, optimised for raytracing. This IS the future of videogame graphics. It’s kind
of the holy grail. Once this is reached, I’m not sure how- or even if- it could get better.
So, it’s mightily impressive that Nvidia is showcasing it in real-time with these graphics
cards. But I don’t think we’re ready for it.
Full, real-time raytraced showcases still seem to be at 20ish frames a second and at
a very limited resolution. I think, give it a few generations and a couple of die shrinks,
we’ll get there, but for now we need to weigh raytracing up against the benefits that
we’ll be leaving behind. Today’s games use tricks to mimic how light works. We can
imitate radiosity! Blurry shadows. We can use advanced shaders on materials to make
them appear shiny, or translucent. And whereas raytracing does all of these things better,
I don’t think it’s worth the performance hit just yet. Using the tricks today’s games
are using, we can achieve 95% of the effect for a fraction of the performance hit. In
the presentation, Nvidia used a number of examples in games of raytraced shadows and
reflections. And although I can see the difference when it’s pointed out, it would still take
me a moment to realise WHY it was better, and if anything it kind of made me more appreciative
of how good were at faking the effect before! For me, at least, the most noticeable thing
about this kind of raytraced effect will probably be the framerate drop!
So really, Nvidia’s greatest enemy is themselves. They- and everybody in the videogame industry-
have spent decades developing stuff that looks GOOD ENOUGH, simply because they know how
demanding real raytracing is. Eventually we’ll do it all properly, I’m sure of it. It’s
just that for now I don’t think it’s worth the sacrifices required.
And just as the 2000 series has to fight against old graphics techniques, it also has to compete
with the 1000 series- a generation of cards that were optimised to run existing graphics
techniques! Which begs the question: how much faster will this new generation of cards be?
Well, on top of all the new technology, they also managed to cram more of their CUDA cores
into these cards than ever before. So hopefully they won’t be SLOWER than the previous generation!
By getting the number of these cores, and by multiplying by their frequency, we can
get a ROUGH ESTIMATE of how powerful these cards will be. Kind of. And from this, the
2070 looks to be 16% faster than the 1070, the 2080 is 13% faster than the 1080, and
the 2080 TI is 19% faster than the 1080 TI. I did find it interesting that the 2080 TI
is coming out with the rest- in past generations it’s been reserved until later- but here,
maybe it was required because the 2080 wasn’t powerful enough to beat the older, last-generation
1080 TI. It wouldn’t have looked very good for Nvidia to have been beaten by their older
cards, would it? And it wouldn’t have given rich gamers a good reason to upgrade. So I
have no doubt that the 2000 series will be faster in every way. But I wouldn’t be surprised
if it wasn’t as much of a generational leap as we’re used to from the company.
Remember: this is a brand-new architecture that’s designed to render games in a new
way. The fact that it can do this, whilst still shoehorning in enough horsepower to
also be good at older methods, is mightily impressive in itself. But in the presentation,
not once did they compare these cards to the older ones in proper game benchmarks. Not
once! The closest we got was the Infiltrator tech-demo running at 4K on the 1080 TI at
30 FPS and what I assume is the 2080 TI, running at 60 or above. But even this wasn’t a fair
comparison: they were using different antialiasing methods and that was the focus of the comparison.
We don’t know how much of this framerate difference is because the 2000 card is faster,
and how much is because the older antialiasing technique is slower than their new AI-driven
AA. This is a case where what we’re not told,
tells us more. It all reminded me of AMD’s Vega previews. They did everything they could
to avoid apples-to-apples comparisons with Nvidia’s cards. They disguised a Vega crossfire
showcase as a thread ripper one. They hosted blind tests to show there wasn’t a difference
between how Vega and Nvidia cards ‘felt’. They tried to change the benchmarking from
being about average FPS to being about minimums, and touted value for money on a computer-wide
level, rather than it being about just the price of the graphics card. They did everything
they could, other than to reveal the performance of the cards!
Sound familiar? Yeah, I got the same feeling from Nvidia’s presentation. Of course, they’re
not AMD, and are already ahead, so they might not do the same things. But anybody watching
the presentation will have picked up on something being off about the whole thing. He even explained
how we needed to rethink how we benchmark cards, showing what goes into a ‘Turing
Frame’. And even then, he focused on the raytracing element, rather than the bulk of
what goes into powering today’s games. Once again, this all sounds like he’s trying
to distance it from direct comparisons with older graphics cards.
The day after the presentation, Techradar posted a 2080 TI ‘review’- though I wouldn’t
call it that, since Nvidia chose exactly what they could and couldn’t say. Let’s take
a look at the ‘Performance’ section, but with pedantic cynicism. Tomb Raider ran below
60 FPS with the new raytracing features enabled. Could have been at 4K, but might have just
been 1080p. Multiple games ran at 4K 60 FPS, and at least 1 in excess of 100 FPS at 4K.
Of all this information, this last bit probably reveals the most. The only new and upcoming
game I can imagine running at 100 FPS would be Doom Eternal. The original Doom, running
on the 1080 TI and with really pretty AA reached 98 FPS. So if the 2080 TI’s a bit more powerful,
Doom Eternal’s a little bit more demanding, and they switch the AA to Nvidia’s new AI
one to reduce the overhead… yeah, the 2080 TI is on track to be like the 1000 series,
but a bit better. And I got the feeling from the article that we should expect power consumption
to be noticeably higher as well- I mean, with so much crammed into one card, something’s
got to give, right? Nvidia’s marketing the 2000 series as having
superior image quality, as though that’s its main selling point. But I wouldn’t rule
out it being faster as well. It’s just that this won’t be achieved using the traditional
brute-force methods, but rather through clever use of artificial intelligence. The Infiltrator
demo was used to show it running anti-aliasing with less of a performance impact- but I wonder
if this is just the start of what it can achieve. I wonder if AI could even be used to achieve
something like checkerboard rendering- to intelligently upscale games to make them appear
as though they’re running on a higher resolution than they actually are! Suddenly, it doesn’t
matter so much if raytracing can only be run at 1080p, if AI can then be used to upscale
and to bear the burden of anti-aliasing. I think they did the right thing with the
2000 series. I’m more excited about this new approach than if it was just about being
faster than the generation before it. Raytracing is looming on the horizon. It makes sense
that, while they’re ahead of AMD, they can get the teething problems with raytracing
out of the way, to develop hardware and software that’s optimised for it and then just to
sit back and to wait for moore’s law to carry them the rest of the way. It’s just
that early adopters of this technology won’t get to experience it without the compromises
and limited support that is to be expected from something this new and revolutionary.
And although this is the greatest leap from Nvidia in a long time, why aren’t I so worried
about AMD? In the long-term, I am concerned- maybe even more so. AMD doesn’t just have
to catch up in terms of performance, but also to develop their own raytracing-optimised
hardware and deep learning algorithms in order to compete. That’s a lot of work, that Nvidia
has already done and can build upon! Nvidia’s market dominance means that where they go,
AMD must also follow, and the RTX series may force AMD’s graphics division to re-evaluate
what they hope to achieve with their next-next gen cards.
But at least they have time. Time before raytracing, even limited versions of the tech, becomes
a standard -or even desirable- feature in games. It’s still early days but it sounds
like, even with a 2080 TI, Battlefield and Tomb Raider struggle to reach 60 FPS at 1080p,
even with just a few raytraced features. Unless AI can be used to artificially increase either
the resolution or the framerate, I don’t see raytraced features being widely adopted
in games or by gamers for a number of years and even then, I suspect many won’t find
the framerate impact worth it. Nvidia has taken a risky gamble with their
2000 series, burdening themselves with the difficult job of making raytracing appealing
and in getting it supported in upcoming games. All the while, this buys AMD time to catch
up in terms of performance, and from what I’ve HEARD, this raytracing tech is part
of DX12, so it’s not like a traditional gameworks feature that would lock AMD out
of the market. It’s free for all, and if AMD does a good enough job they might even
find a superior way of doing it. But that’s a lot of IF’s. For now, Nvidia
holds all of the cards and I’m happy that they’re continuing to innovate and to push
forward without the hint of stagnation that we saw from Intel in the CPU market. Prices
are higher than ever before… but then not since Polaris have they been reasonable. I’d
wait for benchmarks. I have only covered gaming in this video and
in that regard, I feel the 2000 series (and its pricing) gives AMD a fighting chance to
get back in the race. But let’s be honest here. Nvidia’s new Turing architecture is
about a lot more than just gaming. Raytracing is a huge deal to anybody working in 3D design.
But in my opinion, there’s even more potential with AI. It’s justified in a gaming card
to help speed up raytracing and to improve antialiasing, but that’s just the start
of what it can do. Honestly the sky’s the limit and I really see Turing as being Nvidia’s
next step towards world domination.