Trailers for Battlefield V, Metro Exodus, and Tomb Raider show off Nvidia's real-time...

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A hot potato: Nvidia's new ray tracing-focused "RTX" GPUs are finally here, and the company has wasted no time in showing off the power of its new hardware. RTX-oriented trailers for Metro Exodus, Battlefield V, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider have hit the web, and they're filled to the brim with some of the most realistic reflections, explosions, and lighting we've seen to date.

Nvidia's pre-Gamescom event kicked off today, and it came with a few exciting announcements.

Despite company CEO Jen-Hsun Huang's previous claims that new GPUs wouldn't be arriving for a "long time," the event revealed three new consumer-grade GPUs, all of which focus on Nvidia's new "RTX" real-time ray tracing technology.

RTX is a piece of technology that aims to simulate real-world lighting in video games more accurately. With RTX, explosions, fire, and other objects in a scene are reflected off of materials like wood, glass, or metal in a much more realistic manner.

Nvidia partnered up with the developers behind Battlefield V (DICE), Metro Exodus (4A Games), and Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Eidos-Montreal/Crystal Dynamics) to unveil three intense trailers, all of which were designed to showcase the power of RTX.

Battlefield 5's latest trailer is perhaps the best example of Nvidia's tech in action. Explosions from tank shells and streams of fire from flamethrowers accurately reflect off of puddles on the street, shop windows, car doors, and even the eye of a soldier.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider's trailer gives us a brief glimpse of ray tracing in a slightly less chaotic environment. At the start of the trailer, protagonist Lara Croft wanders through what appears to be a night market, with soft shadows illuminating her surroundings as overhead lights swing to and fro.

Metro Exodus really puts Nvidia's technology to the test. Moonlight reflects off of ground puddles as it filters through a dense treeline, and the light emitting from a small firepit scatters across a thick layer of fog. All of these effects combine to create what seems to be a very atmospheric -- and creepy -- experience.

It isn't just the developers behind these three games that plan to adopt Nvidia's RTX technology, though.

In an announcement published today, Nvidia said 11 of the world's "leading" game development studios already plan to utilize RTX in their upcoming games. Whether or not those plans come to fruition remains to be seen, but for the time being, the future of PC gaming is certainly looking bright.

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Brilliant move by Nvidia. Continuously increase prices of video cards all the while putting obsolescence technology in new games that make the competition and Nvidia previous gen cards worse. We don't have performance numbers on these new games but there isn't a single game who's performance wasn't worse off after Nvidia put it's black box into the game.
 
I thought that the trailer looked real good tbh ?

About the video cards, we are all being ripped-off as they are FAR TOO EXPENSIVE.
 
Brilliant move by Nvidia. Continuously increase prices of video cards all the while putting obsolescence technology in new games that make the competition and Nvidia previous gen cards worse. We don't have performance numbers on these new games but there isn't a single game who's performance wasn't worse off after Nvidia put it's black box into the game.

Hard to say it's obsolescent technology, this is their new architecture that is designed to be used for the next 10 years, better get used to it, it's only the beginning. I'm sure the movie industry is going to flock to this tech, I'm sure movies are going to start looking even better now. Not sure how it makes the last gen cards worse either? They simply don't support the technology so it won't be something you can enable? And thus the game will just look like a normal non ray traced game? But you can keep these tin hat theories coming all you like, you do have a 1080ti sooo??? Yeeaaahhh
 
Brilliant move by Nvidia. Continuously increase prices of video cards all the while putting obsolescence technology in new games that make the competition and Nvidia previous gen cards worse. We don't have performance numbers on these new games but there isn't a single game who's performance wasn't worse off after Nvidia put it's black box into the game.

Not being able to use ray tracing tech isn’t really obsolescence at this point. Maybe in 5-10 years or so but by then the cards that can’t run ray tracing will be so old that they won’t be worth having anyway. In the meantime a 1080ti will still be more than powerful enough to run any game at 1440p or lower for a number of years yet. If you do own a 1080ti it looks like the only thing in terms of gaming experience you’ll be missing out on is ray tracing. Which currently only a dozen or so titles seem to be pushing. And none of them are out yet. Certainly, these new cards don’t make any of the 10 series worse but they do make them second best. But that’s very much expected whenever a new generation of hardware drops.
 
Not being able to use ray tracing tech isn’t really obsolescence at this point. Maybe in 5-10 years or so but by then the cards that can’t run ray tracing will be so old that they won’t be worth having anyway. In the meantime a 1080ti will still be more than powerful enough to run any game at 1440p or lower for a number of years yet. If you do own a 1080ti it looks like the only thing in terms of gaming experience you’ll be missing out on is ray tracing. Which currently only a dozen or so titles seem to be pushing. And none of them are out yet. Certainly, these new cards don’t make any of the 10 series worse but they do make them second best. But that’s very much expected whenever a new generation of hardware drops.
Hard to say it's obsolescent technology, this is their new architecture that is designed to be used for the next 10 years, better get used to it, it's only the beginning. I'm sure the movie industry is going to flock to this tech, I'm sure movies are going to start looking even better now. Not sure how it makes the last gen cards worse either? They simply don't support the technology so it won't be something you can enable? And thus the game will just look like a normal non ray traced game? But you can keep these tin hat theories coming all you like, you do have a 1080ti sooo??? Yeeaaahhh

I wasn't saying ray-tracing was obsolescence technology, I was saying GameWorks is. You can implement Ray tracing for new cards only without hurting last gen products. Given Nvidia's recent past and past in general, I doubt that's how it's going to be done though.
 
Not being able to use ray tracing tech isn’t really obsolescence at this point. Maybe in 5-10 years or so but by then the cards that can’t run ray tracing will be so old that they won’t be worth having anyway. In the meantime a 1080ti will still be more than powerful enough to run any game at 1440p or lower for a number of years yet. If you do own a 1080ti it looks like the only thing in terms of gaming experience you’ll be missing out on is ray tracing. Which currently only a dozen or so titles seem to be pushing. And none of them are out yet. Certainly, these new cards don’t make any of the 10 series worse but they do make them second best. But that’s very much expected whenever a new generation of hardware drops.
Hard to say it's obsolescent technology, this is their new architecture that is designed to be used for the next 10 years, better get used to it, it's only the beginning. I'm sure the movie industry is going to flock to this tech, I'm sure movies are going to start looking even better now. Not sure how it makes the last gen cards worse either? They simply don't support the technology so it won't be something you can enable? And thus the game will just look like a normal non ray traced game? But you can keep these tin hat theories coming all you like, you do have a 1080ti sooo??? Yeeaaahhh

I wasn't saying ray-tracing was obsolescence technology, I was saying GameWorks is. You can implement Ray tracing for new cards only without hurting last gen products. Given Nvidia's recent past and past in general, I doubt that's how it's going to be done though.

No you can't, which is why they haven't. In order to do the ray tracing in real time you need specialized hardware to perform the necessary calculations. They covered this back at GDC and today, where they compared the RTX 2080 Ti's ray tracing performance to the 1080 Ti's ray tracing performance.

This is the nonsensical aspect of the hate GameWorks gets.* According to everybody not engineering these chips, Nvidia is somehow supposed to dramatically increase the workload of the technology without significantly impacting performance.

It's like saying you should be able to load additional weight to a trailer without impacting the acceleration or fuel consumption of the truck pulling it.

It doesn't work that way.

*I imagine AMD's special features get similar scorn, but nobody ever talks about AMD unless its CPUs.
 
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I assume there will be a checkbox. Something like this?:

Buys Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Starts game using non-RTX video card
Unchecks box next to Ray Trace eye candy fps killer
Plays Shadow of the Tomb Raider like a normal person

You would assume and yet there are example of these kind of features being integrated into the core game.
 
Not being able to use ray tracing tech isn’t really obsolescence at this point. Maybe in 5-10 years or so but by then the cards that can’t run ray tracing will be so old that they won’t be worth having anyway. In the meantime a 1080ti will still be more than powerful enough to run any game at 1440p or lower for a number of years yet. If you do own a 1080ti it looks like the only thing in terms of gaming experience you’ll be missing out on is ray tracing. Which currently only a dozen or so titles seem to be pushing. And none of them are out yet. Certainly, these new cards don’t make any of the 10 series worse but they do make them second best. But that’s very much expected whenever a new generation of hardware drops.
Hard to say it's obsolescent technology, this is their new architecture that is designed to be used for the next 10 years, better get used to it, it's only the beginning. I'm sure the movie industry is going to flock to this tech, I'm sure movies are going to start looking even better now. Not sure how it makes the last gen cards worse either? They simply don't support the technology so it won't be something you can enable? And thus the game will just look like a normal non ray traced game? But you can keep these tin hat theories coming all you like, you do have a 1080ti sooo??? Yeeaaahhh

I wasn't saying ray-tracing was obsolescence technology, I was saying GameWorks is. You can implement Ray tracing for new cards only without hurting last gen products. Given Nvidia's recent past and past in general, I doubt that's how it's going to be done though.

No you can't, which is why they haven't. In order to do the ray tracing in real time you need specialized hardware to perform the necessary calculations. They covered this back at GDC and today, where they compared the RTX 2080 Ti's ray tracing performance to the 1080 Ti's ray tracing performance.

This is the nonsensical aspect of the hate GameWorks gets.* According to everybody not engineering these chips, Nvidia is somehow supposed to dramatically increase the workload of the technology without significantly impacting performance.

It's like saying you should be able to load additional weight to a trailer without impacting the acceleration of fuel consumption of the truck pulling it.

It doesn't work that way.

*I imagine AMD's special features get similar scorn, but nobody ever talks about AMD unless its CPUs.
Nah, AMD never gets yelled at over this because their tech isnt "black box wrapped in a nice bow" stuff, so its obviously better.
 
Unimpressive to say the least. I do 3D-rendering in Maya (Vray, mental ray, Arnold) for a living and unless you did a side-by-side comparison with and without "realtime ray tracing" I couldn't have told you they thought this way raytraced. Every rendering I've done in the past ten years looks better than every frame I saw in either video, and I'm small potatoes.

We know it's only raytracing a few key effects (reflections, refractions-kinda, and shadows) and overlaying them in rasterization, but I don't see their GI as being very good at all here. Nor have we seen caustics yet. CGI "caustics" are those photon-scattering effects you see when light shines through a prism or glass or gemstones. I don't see anything like that in these, not that it's terribly important in gaming - but it is VERY important in foliage rendering, which is why video game plants always look like video game plants.

A long way to go on this one, but I won't be upgrading for "raytracing" in games anytime soon. It's a weak version of raytracing to say the least, especially to hit 30-60fps vs Vray-RT's or Redshift's 1spf much less the 60-minutes per frame (print resolution) we render at in arch/viz.
 
It's a start. Ray tracing is one piece of the formula to achieve realism in games, but, as Jared noted above, it'll take more than a new video card to achieve any meaningful progress in this area. NVIDIA must have found some short-cut algorithms, or some way to "fake it", because true realtime ray tracing requires brute force far beyond the capabilities of this card, or did I miss something?
 
Nah, AMD never gets yelled at over this because their tech isnt "black box wrapped in a nice bow" stuff, so its obviously better.

Your comment is a perfect example of whataboutism. First, even if we did assume that AMD is equally as bad (which they aren't), it doesn't change the fact that Nvidia has done and is doing some very crappy things. That said, kind of hard to get yelled at for something they've never done. Every game that integrated AMD tech with the help of AMD (like tressFX) works great on Nvidia hardware as well. Nvidia could integrate Free-Sync if it wanted to since it's an optional display port standard. It chooses not to.

We aren't talking about AMD though, we are talking about clear anti-consumer practices that continue to come from Nvidia. Nvidia doesn't just donate it's engineers to devs with good intentions. Their GameWorks program has never been about performance or visual fidelity, it's about pushing more expensive graphics cards even at the cost of Nvidia users. The yearly price increase and product segmentation is the exact same thing Intel did, only Nvidia is going for a much more aggressive price increase. We went from $500 top end GPUs to $1,200. That's ridiculous, inflation included or not.
 
I'm not against Nvidia, but just so you know real world is not a shiny place.
For some reason that MICROSOFT game came to my mind called, MIDTOWN MADNESS. I remember being a kid and couldn't believe how shiny and reflective the cars were in that game. 20 years later I laugh and thought that game was "too Shiny."
 
So what did we expect Huang to say .? don't buy a 1080 now because the 2080 will be coming right along.. he is a lieing pos capitalist . and told us what he wanted us to hear. so people wouldn't hold out on buy the 1080 ,and I bet it worked too. I wonder how many bought a 1080/ti because the next gen won't be here until next year..maybe.... I'd buy quick if those games came with the card....
 
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The yearly price increase and product segmentation is the exact same thing Intel did, only Nvidia is going for a much more aggressive price increase. We went from $500 top end GPUs to $1,200. That's ridiculous, inflation included or not.

You just snapped a thought into my head about Nvidia pricing. I spent decades as a cheapskate audiophile so while I see reviews about $20K speakers and flea watt tube amps, the tech is interesting but I'll never buy it. You get used to it pretty quickly and just buy the good stuff under $300.

I guess I see $1000 top end consumer GPUs as part of the ecosystem and I don't see that $500 top end GPU as, well, not a right or even an expectation. Top end is whatever price they want to set and people will pay, more economics driven than expectation driven. If everyone buys below $500 then they're up the creek, the market will decide that.
 
Brilliant move by Nvidia. Continuously increase prices of video cards all the while putting obsolescence technology in new games that make the competition and Nvidia previous gen cards worse. We don't have performance numbers on these new games but there isn't a single game who's performance wasn't worse off after Nvidia put it's black box into the game.
Sounds like the makings of an anti-trust suit by some government.
 
The yearly price increase and product segmentation is the exact same thing Intel did, only Nvidia is going for a much more aggressive price increase. We went from $500 top end GPUs to $1,200. That's ridiculous, inflation included or not.

You just snapped a thought into my head about Nvidia pricing. I spent decades as a cheapskate audiophile so while I see reviews about $20K speakers and flea watt tube amps, the tech is interesting but I'll never buy it. You get used to it pretty quickly and just buy the good stuff under $300.
It's all about mystique, perception, and marketing - especially in the case of Bose, IMO. But even at the relatively low cost of Bose speakers, you can get speakers from other companies that are far better. I've been a Paradigm owner for years so I am partial - but their newest low-end offering looks quite good for the money, and has me wondering whether what I spent on Prestige series speakers was worth it.

And it sounds like nVidia is trying to take advantage of the same sort of thing. Real-time ray tracing sounds like it is not much more than eye candy. Is it really going to matter all that much in the context of a game? Sure, there might be the rare case where you catch a glimpse of a baddie in a puddle and it might give you an advantage, but I cannot imagine that it would make that much of a difference in the long run that it looks better. nVidia seems to be trying to spin this as the next best thing since perforated toilet paper - which sounds to me like they are really only trying to justify the price they are asking for this latest gen.

I am eagerly awaiting benchmarks.
 
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