RTX cards. They sure aren’t as impressive as what Nvidia said they would be. Heck, the 2080 is outperformed by the 1080Ti in some instances. When the RTX series was announced, I expected that with ray-tracing on, that it still should have outperformed or been equal with the GTX cards. That we would have the option to choose higher performance and GTX graphics, or better looking and GTX performance. Now we are seeing that without ray-tracing, that the GTX cards are still outperforming RTX cards at times. They then throw on a hefty price tag. The 2080 is $200 more than the 1080Ti but they have less than a 10% performance difference. They are even asking for $1200 for their flagship model, the 2080Ti. The same price as a new iPhone, another topic that we will have to bring up on another day ;). There are only a handful of titles that will support ray-tracing, and we haven’t seen any performance numbers in those titles. VR had a more successful start when compared to this, but like VR I am predicting this will die out. I just don’t think we have the technology to support ray-tracing. Just because we have the ability to climb Everest, doesn’t mean we should. We should wait until it is a guaranteed success and we will get the desired results. I think the same is with ray-tracing. Just to clear things up, we are not getting true ray-tracing with these RTX cards. That is how complex ray-tracing is. With 4 Nvidia Quadros, we still can’t get decent fps if we use true ray-tracing. While the RTX cards to look and sound amazing, it is just a gimmick at this point in time. I would love to see where this technology goes though. I think it could be amazing in the end and worth the effort. I brought up VR earlier, and I feel ray-tracing could help bring VR to a new level. I feel the thing that holds VR back is that it is not realistic enough yet. One step to making it more realistic is getting the lighting and shadows that look like the real thing. When the technology we have improves, when the price goes down, and the number of games that support it go up, then I think ray-tracing will be the next big thing that everyone can embrace.
Tech and Games 