Turing Discussion Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/28283...ay-tracing

But there’s also another possible outcome here. I want to stress that this is entirely speculation on my part, but it’s possible that Nvidia intends to market RTX as an up-market feature in its own right, similar to how Nvidia has G-Sync displays and has previously sold features like PhysX. In this scenario, the GTX brand becomes the ‘lower-end’ branding on a longer-term basis with a variable crossover point depending on where the sweet spot is. In other words, we might have a GTX 1160 and RTX 2060 that offered equivalent rasterization performance, but with the 1160 occupying a lower price point and the RTX 2060 offering what Nvidia believes are forward-looking features.
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There’s a big downside to this argument that I’ll go ahead and acknowledge: It would make it even harder to push RTX into the mainstream of GPU technology. Right now, the only known games planning to include RTX are Nvidia launch partners. Microsoft’s DXR standard for ray tracing is now part of DirectX, but if you consider the wider market including consoles — and game developers absolutely do when they decide which features to build into games — it’s mostly a market without ray tracing. None of the rumors around Navi suggest it supports ray tracing with specialized hardware, and the compute costs of the feature are high enough that it’s unlikely to be a major focus without additional dedicated resources.
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I’d argue that the second approach — RTX as a premium feature for those willing to pay — actually aligns better with the way Nvidia has historically rolled out features. Even the argument that this exposes the company to weakness if a competitor comes along with a cheaper part is only as true as the presence of a competitor to launch such a GPU in the first place. With AMD currently fielding nothing to compete against Turing and Intel’s GPU efforts likely a year away, Nvidia may have seized on its current position at the top of the stack to introduce premium features as a short-term profit driver in a manner that it would never have attempted had AMD been offering better competition in the first place.

Which is true, if any? We don’t know yet. But with the RTX 2060 reportedly arriving in January, we’ll know more soon.