Turing Discussion Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.techpowerup.com/254700/nvidi...e-revealed

NVIDIA is releasing its most affordable graphics card based on the "Turing" architecture, the GeForce GTX 1650, on the 23rd of April, starting at USD $149. There doesn't appear to be a reference-design (the GTX 1660 series lacked one, too), and so this GPU will be a partner-driven launch. Based on NVIDIA's smallest "Turing" silicon, the 12 nm "TU117," the GTX 1650 will pack 896 CUDA cores and will feature 4 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 128-bit wide memory interface.

https://www.techspot.com/review/1831-ray...enchmarks/

So what does this investigation tell us overall?

• There was no need to test any GTX GPU slower than the Titan X. Two of the three games are already unplayable at 1080p with the Titan.
  
• The only test condition that was remotely usable was Battlefield V at 1080p with Low ray tracing, but even then I would expect a GTX 1080 to barely hit 30 FPS in the most intensive areas and performance to fall away further from there.
  
• Unless you have one of the top-end GTX cards and the ray traced effects aren’t too intensive, Pascal is not fast enough to give gamers a usable ray tracing experience. As more ray traced games are released, Pascal is only going to fall further behind.
  
• In a best case scenario, the Titan X matches the RTX 2060 for ray tracing capabilities, but often falls 30% behind or more, especially when looking at crucial 1% low data. The Titan also delivers less frame rate consistency. Normally (no DXR) the Titan X is at least 25% faster than the RTX 2060 and more, up around RTX 2080 territory.
  

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Finally we must wonder, why has Nvidia bothered testing and enabling ray tracing on Pascal? It doesn’t run well even on high-end GPUs, it’s unlikely to improve with future games, and it just seems like something people wouldn’t use even if it was available.

We have two theories as to why: The first is for developers. Lets say you have a development studio that invested heavily into Pascal and has loads of cards like this very Titan X in their dev machines. Rather than forcing developers into upgrading to Turing to develop games with ray tracing, allowing Pascal cards to ray trace, albeit slowly, could improve the adoption of ray tracing in games. Developers don’t need 60 or even 30 FPS to test ray tracing in their games, so it could be handy for them. This has a variety of benefits for Nvidia as they are interested in improving adoption to sell more RTX cards.

Second: plain old marketing to incentivize RTX GPU upgrades. In our opinion ray tracing alone isn’t enough to justify an upgrade but this will work for a number of Pascal gamers regardless.

Having features unlocked for more GPU owners is generally a good thing and down the line there might be a ray traced game that actually does run well on Pascal. But like most of our articles on ray tracing so far, we’re still in the very early stages for the technology and it will only become a significant factor in a few generations time.