My feeling is the 3090 or Titan will be a twin gpu model with 24GB
The feeling is supported by the fact that the leaked 3080 images show no Sli port - so Sli is clearly not supported and this is because they will be selling a twin gpu Big Navi killer And they have seen what AMD have done to intel - Nvidia will be taking no chances - it’s deffo a twin gpu card to my mind And the 3090 will be untouchable.
My concern is this
Nvidia sold us the Ray tracing “dream” with plenty of talk and two years on that is all it is - talk.
Whilts the pascal performance was a Reasonably worthy upgrade from 1080ti to 2080ti The ray tracing was frankly pathetic , it killed the fps and there was little of it to enable
Two years on there are still only half a dozen titles that have ray tracing in and frankly the 2000 series ray tracing selling point for me was frankly a total rip off.
My feeling is it’ll be the same rip off with the 3000 series loads of talk and few titles that actually use it, whilst the ray tracing performance will at last be what it should have been the first time with little FPS cost ray tracing is pointless with no volume of games supporting it.
Unless these cards are cheap I won’t be adopting one and knowing Nvidia they won’t be cheap.
My real hope is that Big Navi surprises everyone and really kicks ***, I’d love Big Navi to make me want to buy it.
Id love to see AMD do well and close the gap because whilst Nvidia are unlikely to make the same mistake intel have a decent Big Navi care might keep prices of the 3000 and the 2000 series down and as PC gamers that can only be good for all of us.
I doubt Nvidia would have a twin-GPU for the launch or be making one any time soon.
Twin-GPU cards are far more complex to develop and the design can't be downscaled without cutting into other segments while being far less financially performant compared to downscaling a single-GPU card.
I agree on the RT part but I would like to mention a few things about it:
- this was the first iteration of the technology and, much like the first 3D games, it was very underwhelming compared to rasterized graphics with a lot of baked effects + screen space effects (basically the norm in AAA games today)
- even this next iteration will be underwhelming because going from a highly-optimized raster development pipeline to a strictly RT one is impossible right now as the hardware availability just isn't there... and that doesn't happen overnight
- game development will slowly evolve by adding small parts of the RT spectrum to enhance the current effects and reduce the development costs associated with having to use a complex raster pipeline
- games won't be able to use the full spectrum of RT any time soon as the hardware power just isn't there, and we're talking orders of magnitude here, not percentages
- I recommend you view some of Digital Foundry's youtube videos about how RT is handled in games today to better understand this
- the full spectrum of RT is nowhere near even the "Ultra" RT settings of current games that use it: imagine dropping from 4k 60 FPS of no RT, to 4k 30 FPS of "Ultra" RT, to 4k 2FPS of full RT... and yes, the quality differences are massive between "Ultra" and the full shebang of RT features
- it will likely be until the next-next generation of consoles before RT use will start becoming mainstream
- I wouldn't be surprised if, at one point, we get a crazy game that only uses RT and becomes the next "Crysis", needing at least 2 GPU generations to be playable at max RT
