<p>Further on the RTX fumes, I'd recommend checking out Steve from Hardware Unboxed's analysis – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeCPvQcKr5Q</p><p><br></p><p>This is possibly the first new series with lower performance/$ value than the outgoing one. The only good thing to come out of this launch is lower prices for GeForce 10 Series and RX Vega / 500. Best wait for 7nm. AMD is first with Vega 20 end of this year, and NVIDIA is likely to follow next. Note that this is the first time 80 and 80 Ti release together – it's clearly a stopgap. Raytracing isn't going to be realistic in terms of resolution and framerates for years to come. </p>
<p>Games that demand high performance and/or don't specifically benefit from raytracing just won't use it. In fact, games will probably have fallback non-raytraced renderers for a long time.</p><p><br></p><p>There is no doubt that high res, realtime raytracing is still years out, but in fairness it shouldn't be undersold. Raytracing is in many ways the holy grail of rendering techniques because it simulates with high accuracy how light actually works in arbitrary situations, rather than cheaply approximate it with a series of increasingly complicated yet ultimately inadequate techniques. The road to photorealistic realtime graphics almost inevitably involves raytracing.</p><p><br></p><p>Props to nvidia for taking a risk and going all in on raytracing. I will probably skip a graphics card generation or two though while they iron it out.</p>
<p>It's not common that a new gen GPU will show a huge leap in performance. We just had one only because of the massive die shrinks. There are going to be releases like this with first gen new tech which will have ass performance and no support. I remember when shaders were introduced. Each gen from then would have much faster shader performance, but not much improvement for the fixed pipeline, and we had to wait for Carmack to make use of the new stuff. It paid off in the end though.</p><p><br></p><p>Ray-tracing, even at a low resolution is a huge deal! It's a crap-ton of work to get even decent shadows at decent FPS with rasterization. I hope this pays off and becomes standard in new games in a decade or so.</p>