Nvidia RTX series

[AA 102]

Intel 2500k

Upgrade your CPU first dude, it'll bottleneck your performance.

 

[CreamyHerman’s]

So now that the RTX 2000 series has launched(on paper it seems like, 2080ti in the coming weeks & the 2070 MIA), any thoughts?

 

[SiccDicc]

So now that the RTX 2000 series has launched(on paper it seems like, 2080ti in the coming weeks & the 2070 MIA), any thoughts?

Judging from all the reaction vids and benchmarks I've seen, it's not worth the money and even when raytracing is patched in or finally in full effect it still might not be worth the cost.

 

[Strange Looking Dog]

Back in ~2003 a russian guy was actually making a first person shooter that was ray traced, it was free and he was making it in his spare time. It was pretty cool to see how it was constructed, everything was built on perfect spheres because it allowed him to make assumptions(because spheres are exactly the same from every angle and ray tracers aren't bothered by non-polygonal graphics) that really sped things up. When I say that everything was made of spheres I mean everything, even the ground, so levels where planetoids.

The basic idea was similar to things like Ecstatica's ellipsoid technique or the terrible game Ballz on the SNES/Genesis. I also have the demo for an unreleased game called Seed somewhere, it did some really cool things for something that came out in '98 or so. It plays like complete shit but it was a tech demo to try to find a publisher.
If you're interested I can try to dig it out an upload it somewhere, it's only 4 megabytes or something like that.

That sounds quite interesting, and I couldn't find anything on those two with a simple google search so it might be worthwhile to upload those games somewhere for posterity.

To my surprise there turns out to be a still extant community for ecstatica, they've even got a well fleshed out wikia, which is far better than I can say of most older or forgotten games. That's a new development I think, I watched a letsplay of it back in 2015 and there was scant information about it at that point.

So, real-time ray tracing have been the holy grail for a long time, a prestige thing, but it has been a fool's errand for a lot of reasons. It's neat that it's happening now but I don't expect too much from it. I don't know how flexible it is, haven't really looked into it, but maybe it can be used for sound reflections? That would make me interested in getting a card like that.

Yeah, in one of their developer interviews the Nvidia rep mentioned that they were intending it be used for sound calculations and AI too. There's probably an unbelievable amount of things you can do with it if you use some imagination.


Also as a complete side track, it seems that Euclideon is still around --and supposing it's not all one very well orchestrated scam, their point cloud rendering technology is looking quite impressive. They've also branched out into virtual reality it seems. I'm wondering if this new rendering technology is going to reach the mainstream sometime, and if it does whether it will compete with RTX or form a symbiosis with it.

 

[SiccDicc]

Yeah, in one of their developer interviews the Nvidia rep mentioned that they were intending it be used for sound calculations and AI too. There's probably an unbelievable amount of things you can do with it if you use some imagination.

And yet Japan will still have developers attaching AI to framerate.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

That sounds quite interesting, and I couldn't find anything on those two with a simple google search so it might be worthwhile to upload those games somewhere for posterity.

To my surprise there turns out to be a still extant community for ecstatica, they've even got a well fleshed out wikia, which is far better than I can say of most older or forgotten games. That's a new development I think, I watched a letsplay of it back in 2015 and there was scant information about it at that point.

Yeah, in one of their developer interviews the Nvidia rep mentioned that they were intending it be used for sound calculations and AI too. There's probably an unbelievable amount of things you can do with it if you use some imagination.

Ok, I'll see if I can find those old files, it might take a couple of days.

Everything has an extensive Wikia these days, everything, except the TekWar books.
http://headhuntersholosuite.wikia.com/wiki/Category:TekWar/Novels
It's almost heartwarming to see the internet finally go "yeah we don't care about that particular thing".

Spoiler

Ecstatica was a great game, it might even be worth playing these days. Psygnosis was also working on a GTA-ish game using a more advanced form of that tech back in the 90's, but it got stuck in development hell and got cancelled IIRC.
edit: oh hey, they have a page for their cancelled GTA-like that upon inspection seems more like a Max Payne-like. http://ecstatica.wikia.com/wiki/Urban_Decay That's awesome, never thought I'd see that game again.

The tensor/RT cores being able to do sound is awesome, it is a fucked up thing that the 20 year old Aureal3D and their SDK is still the best thing I've seen/heard. There's also another thing that sticks out, the Sony thing/library that Silent Hill 2 on PS2 used in what seems like only one location(courtyard in the prison, an invisible horse is running around you in the darkness and it's terrifying but it mostly seems like a tech demo).

Also as a complete side track, it seems that Euclideon is still around --and supposing it's not all one very well orchestrated scam, their point cloud rendering technology is looking quite impressive. They've also branched out into virtual reality it seems. I'm wondering if this new rendering technology is going to reach the mainstream sometime, and if it does whether it will compete with RTX or form a symbiosis with it.

Oh those guys, I check in on them once in a while to see what they're up to, their virtual-thing seemed pretty neat but it came at a pretty bad time(just before the stereoscopic VR boom). Using their thing for a bespoke arcade experience makes more sense than VR-helmets though(less cleaning, less sweaty helmets being passed around, dirty lenses, pinkeye...).
But it's also large, immobile and expensive, probably requires a lot of calibration to set up so it's not like rolling in a fruit ninja machine that spits out tickets.

Other than that, Euclideon/Bruce used to be a sort of minor lolcow and I'm writing this from what I remember from maybe 10 years ago. He made outrageous claims that his engine just didn't live up to if you took a look at it and deconstructed what you were seeing, like everything was obviously instanced from a small set of objects so his claims of huge datasets, eeeeeh. It's like if I duplicated the same jpg a thousand times into a folder and then compressed it with winrar, a fantastic compression ratio, but...
He had made a voxel engine in other words, running in software as is expected which isn't a good thing, but pushed it farther than previous generations, probably because no one made voxel engines anymore, outside of hobbyists, medical imaging software and things like that. Maybe his engine is different now, for a long time he was the only one working on it and he had his blindspots.

But he, Bruce, wasn't a liar, that's where it gets interesting. Much like how the isolated Australia has bred and evolved a lot of weird shit over millions of years Bruce discovered and created techniques that were already known, but he didn't know that and his solutions were slightly different as a result. They had flaws. There were things he had never heard of or even considered and to use an analogy: it was actually really impressive and commendable that he had managed to figure out how to make a combustion engine, then built it largely out of wood AND got it running. But it's not a competitive engine.

Some voxel things that are interesting:

Ken Silverman's old voxlap engine, a hobby project, is pretty cool and he has a couple of versions of it.
http://advsys.net/ken/voxlap.htm

EverQuest Next/Landmark also used a voxel engine running in hardware, something that is necessary or else the console market is locked out.

A Stan Melax demo of destructible terrain that might look familiar to those that have played the first Red Faction games. With source code.
http://melax.github.io/bsp/

 

[Nazi vegeta]

So... still running an Intel 2500k with a GTX970. Is there any reason for me to upgrade just the card?

If your objective is 1080p/60 high settings youre gonna be fine, until ps5 comes out.
Overclock the cpu if you havent though and the gpu as well.
It is free performance and it is pretty easy to do.
Especially the cpu, which is in need of it, since it is 7yold and should easily do 4.5 at least.

 

[Done]

NVIDIA Stock Falls 2.1% After Turing GPU Reviews Fail to Impress Morgan Stanley

by VSG Friday, September 21st 2018 00:35

NVIDIA's embargo on their Turing-based RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti ended Wednesday, September 19 and it appears that enthusiasts were not the only ones left wanting more from these graphics cards. In particular, Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore shared a note today (Thursday, September 20) with company clients saying "As review embargos broke for the new gaming products, performance improvements in older games is not the leap we had initially hoped for. Performance boost on older games that do not incorporate advanced features is somewhat below our initial expectations, and review recommendations are mixed given higher price points." The NVIDIA Corporation share value on the NASDAQ exchange had closed at $271.98 (USD) Wednesday and immediately tumbled down to a low of $264.10 opening today before recovering to close at $266.28, down 2.1% over the previous closure.

The Morgan Stanley report further mentioned that "We are surprised that the 2080 is only slightly better than the 1080ti, which has been available for over a year and is slightly less expensive. With higher clock speeds, higher core count, and 40% higher memory bandwidth, we had expected a bigger boost." Accordingly, the market analyst expects a slower adoption of these new GPUs as well as no expectation of "much upside" from NVIDIA's gaming business unit for the next two quarters. Despite all this, Morgan Stanley remains bullish on NVIDIA and expects a $273 price point in the long term.

https://www.techpowerup.com/247780/...ng-gpu-reviews-fail-to-impress-morgan-stanley

----------
Now watch as AMD fucks up what could be a golden opportunity to get back into the GPU market.

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

Yeah, maybe the 2080ti if you must have the best, damn the cost. But the 2080 and also the 2070 that will cost $600? lol nvidia.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

It's a good time for AMD. Either this is something like the GeForce 256, an ok upgrade leaning heavily towards a feature set that no one used yet, or it's the GeForce FX - yeah, that wasn't good. AMD might pull out a great rasterizer card that cost less, they don't have to compete with ray-tracing yet.

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

Depends how hooked on nvidia people are. Even to this day, some people will still say "but muh drivers" in regards to AMD.

 

[Nazi vegeta]

Depends how hooked on nvidia people are. Even to this day, some people will still say "but muh drivers" in regards to AMD.

even if amd were to pull out the best price/performance gpu like they had done with the 7950/70 vs 670/80 and 290 vs 780, people would still go for nvidia, because they are that much of a bunch of faggots.
and they'd try to justify it with the dumbest excuses, especially because Nvidia drivers have been far from perfect in recent years and I've seen pages of people complaining about new drivers fucking up stuff, like with the dpc latency problem they had a while ago but, somehow ''muh drivers'' is just a huge issue when amd was having problems with them.

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

Yeah, gets irritating always seeing "if only AMD had something competitive...". They always have had something for 1080p, which is where almost everyone games at. Yeah, mining really fucked with prices or else I would have got a 480/580 instead of a used 980ti (it helps it already came with waterblock + backplate). As you said even when they do compete at the high end with the better product, the team green cult mentality still manages to pull through. I see it on HardOCP with people saying they 'balked' at the 2080ti price, yet still buy it. Thanks for letting nvidia they can get away with idiotic prices.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

Yeah, gets irritating always seeing "if only AMD had something competitive...". They always have had something for 1080p, which is where almost everyone games at. Yeah, mining really fucked with prices or else I would have got a 480/580 instead of a used 980ti (it helps it already came with waterblock + backplate). As you said even when they do compete at the high end with the better product, the team green cult mentality still manages to pull through. I see it on HardOCP with people saying they 'balked' at the 2080ti price, yet still buy it. Thanks for letting nvidia they can get away with idiotic prices.

To be fair, Vega 56 and 64 were good, but too expensive and I suspect the reason for that was that it was effectively a test run for a new technology, namely, HBM. Whenever you get the first part based on a new technology it's always a gamble. Intel's very first generation Pentium 60 and 66 back in 1993 were the same - hideously expensive but wonky performance wise and ran far too hot. However by 1995 they'd got the kinks ironed out and the 3.3V parts were much, much better.

I suspect Navi might be competitive, esp. if people realise that bankrolling Nvidia on a promise of jam tomorrow in the form of "ray tracing" that doesn't yet exist outside of professional development environments is a singularly poor idea, and that even by 2020 a comparatively small number of "AAA" titles will run with ray tracing and frankly I've not been that impressed by what I've seen - I'd rather focus on getting 60fps+ at 4K.

 

[Your Weird Fetish]

I don't know a ton about graphics cards but should I take all this to mean that pretty soon there will be a huge price drop in relatively high end AMD cards because muh Nvidia?

 

[DC 740]

I don't know a ton about graphics cards but should I take all this to mean that pretty soon there will be a huge price drop in relatively high end AMD cards because muh Nvidia?

Pretty much, lots of nerds that want the next high end whatever so they'll get rid of their old cards relatively cheap or people trying to get rid of stock. I usually wait a series behind for this reason. Might not upgrade anytime soon though since I'm still happy with my 1080 (not even TI, just 1080)

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

To be fair, Vega 56 and 64 were good, but too expensive and I suspect the reason for that was that it was effectively a test run for a new technology, namely, HBM.

They had already used HBM(1) with Fiji back in 2015. With Vega they used HBM2 and I think something was messed up there, driving up prices and really limiting supply. They were apparently stockpiling HBM2 chips long before launch because of that.


I had intended to buy an AMD card but the prices were just insane, their card that performs like a GT 1030 costs as much as a GTX 1050, the cheapest RX 570 is twice the MSRP, the 580 is more than twice the MRSP... and nothing was ever in stock.

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

Yeah, the 580 is now back to where it should be. Performs very well vs the 1060 and is even cheaper, but it's a bit too late to get anyone who went nvidia because of mining prices (before it also hit nvidia as well).