Turing Discussion Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia...37672.html

Unsurprisingly, consumers have some passionate responses to these prices. Readers in the Tom’s Hardware forums are calling for more competition from AMD, wondering if the performance benefit is worth it and saying they just won’t buy right now. On the Nvidia subreddit, there were similar thoughts on competitive pricing and keeping existing cards.

So, why are Nvidia's new Turing cards so expensive? Nvidia didn’t respond to questions about why the cards are priced as they are, but we’ll update the story if we hear back.

Analyst Jon Peddie suggests that the cost may just be a result of what it takes to make this kind of hardware.

“Simple cost-of-goods… “ he told Tom’s Hardware over email. “These giant (and they are really big) chips cost a lot to make and test, and the huge amount of memory is expensive plus the cooling systems - just [cost of goods]. There's no rip off here, no conspiracy.”

But it could also be for a variety of other reasons. Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD, suggested it could be due to inventory or availability.

“I think they are likely trying to price these as very premium products,” Baker said. “Certainly if there is a significant amount of series 10 cards floating around they would want to at least draw that down somewhat.”

Baker also suggested that they can use the high pricing for a gradual release as the company better understands demand: “The market for cards has been so crazy the last couple of years, between the explosion in interest in gaming, the cryptomining bubble and the upgrade in quality and demand that they would be doing themselves a disservice to come out at lower prices,” he said. Lastly, he theorizes that high prices could be a way to protect against limited inventories after the launch.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wait-t...37673.html

Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX 20-series graphics cards were just announced, but there’s a few solid reasons you shouldn’t jump on the ray-tracing train and purchase one of the new Turing-based GPUs. At least not yet.

High Pricing (For Now)
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No Gaming Benchmarks (Yet)
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Ray Tracing Isn’t A Thing (Yet)
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Pre-Orders Are Already Out of Stock (Mostly)

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/27...080-family

Buying CPUs and GPUs for a first-generation feature is almost always a bad idea. If you bought an Nvidia Maxwell or Pascal video card because you thought DX12 and Vulkan were the future, do you feel like you got what you paid for as far as that feature is concerned? Probably not. AMD doesn’t get to take a bow on this either. True, DX12 has been kinder to Team Red than Team Green, but if you bought a 2013 Radeon thinking Mantle was going to take over the gaming industry, you didn’t get a lot of shipping titles before it was retired in favor of other APIs. If you bought a Radeon in 2013 thinking you were getting in on the dawn of a new age of gaming, well, you were wrong.

The list goes on. The first DX10 cards weren’t particularly fast, including models like Nvidia’s GTX 8800 Ultra. The first AMD GPUs to support tessellation in DX11 weren’t all that good at it. If you bought a VR headset and a top-end Pascal, Maxwell, or AMD GPU to drive it, guess what? By the time VR is well-established, if it ever is, you’ll be playing it on very different and vastly improved hardware. The first strike against buying into RTX specifically is that by the time ray tracing is well-established, practically useful, and driving modern games, the RTX 2080 will be a garbage GPU. That’s not an indictment of Nvidia, it’s a consequence of the substantial lead time between when a new GPU feature is released and when enough games take advantage of that feature to make it a serious perk.

But there’s also some reason to ask just how much performance these GPUs are going to deliver, period, and Nvidia left substantial questions on the table on that point. The company showed no benchmarks that didn’t involve ray tracing. To try and predict what we might see from this new generation, let’s take a look at what past cards delivered. We’re helped in this by [H]ardOCP, which recently published a massive generational comparison of the GTX 780 versus the GTX 980 and 1080. They tested a suite of 14 games from Crysis 3 to Far Cry 5. Let’s compare the GPUs to the rate of performance improvement and see what we can tease out:
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Now we come to RTX 2080. Its fill rate is actually slightly less than the GTX 1080. Its core count increase is smaller than either of the previous two generations. Its bandwidth increase is smaller. And those facts alone suggest that unless Nvidia managed to deliver the mother of all IPC improvements via rearchitecting its GPU core, the RTX 2080 family is unlikely to deliver a huge improvement in games. This tentative conclusion is further strengthened by the company’s refusal to show any game data that didn’t focus on ray tracing this week.
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But the RTX hardware in the Nvidia GPU, including the RTX 2080 Ti, isn’t going to be fast enough to simply ray trace an entire AAA game. Even if it was, game engines themselves are not designed for this. This point simply cannot be emphasized enough. There are no ray tracing engines for gaming right now. It’s going to take time to create them. At this stage, the goal of RTX and Microsoft DTX is to allow ray tracing to be deployed in certain areas of game engines where rasterization does poorly, and ray tracing could offer better visual fidelity at substantially less performance cost.
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Look to the RTX’s features to provide a nominal boost to image quality. But don’t expect the moon. And never, ever, buy a GPU for a feature someone has promised you will appear at a later date. Buy a GPU for the features it offers today, in shipping titles, that you can definitely take advantage of.

I’m unwilling to declare the RTX 2080’s performance a settled question because numbers don’t always tell the whole story. When Nvidia overhauled its GPUs from Fermi to Kepler, it moved to a dramatically different architecture. The ability to predict performance as a result of comparing core counts and bandwidth broke as a result. I haven’t seen any information that Turing is as large a departure from Pascal as Kepler was from Fermi, but it’s always best to err on the side of caution until formal benchmark data is available. If Nvidia fundamentally reworked its GPU cores, it’s possible that the gains could be much larger than simple math suggests.

Nonetheless, simple math suggests the gains here are not particularly strong. When you combine that with the real-but-less-than-awe-inspiring gains from the incremental addition of ray tracing into shipping engines and the significant price increases Nvidia has tacked on, there’s good reason to keep your wallet in your pocket and wait and see how this plays out. But the only way the RTX 2080 is going to deliver substantial performance improvements above Pascal, over and above the 1.2x – 1.3x suggested by core counts and bandwidth gains, is if Nvidia has pulled off a huge efficiency gain in terms of how much work can be done per SM.