Turing Discussion Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/2879...ffectively

In fact, Nvidia’s entire blog post seems mostly calculated to persuade people not to run ray tracing workloads on GTX GPUs. The company takes multiple opportunities to note that the ray tracing portion of the rendering algorithm runs up to 10x faster on RTX cards, and that by enabling DLSS, RTX 2080 GPUs are up to 3x faster than GTX 1080 Ti GPUs.

According to Nvidia, attempting to run ray tracing on a GTX GPU will send the frame rate cratering, all the way down to 18fps on a GTX 1080 Ti. Of course, there are a few caveats to that. First, the 1080 Ti is using 1440p, despite the fact that 1080p was a target resolution for the RTX 2080’s ray tracing support to start with. Second, the 1080 Ti is using ray tracing set to Ultra. These aren’t the comparison points you’d use if the goal was to showcase that the 1080 Ti can deliver ray tracing. They’re the comparisons you use to show how the GTX 1080 Ti can’t actually deliver ray tracing, because you want to push gamers towards buying RTX cards.
...
Nvidia’s efforts to paint RTX as an unvarnished breakthrough for GPU rendering have foundered on the rocky shoals of objective reality. But game developers won’t adopt a feature if there’s no support for it, and support is built through GPU sales — sales which, according to the Steam Hardware Survey, are sharply off Pascal adoption rates last generation. So Nvidia is hoping that by seeing RTX support on GTX cards, consumers will respond more strongly.
...
Nor does Nvidia have any reason whatsoever to provide them. The point is to push players into upgrading, not offer acceptable performance on older hardware. This is not to say that Nvidia would take steps to cripple the performance of ray tracing on older GPUs, but they certainly don’t have any reason whatsoever to optimize it.