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Nvidia announces RTX 2000 GPU series with ‘6x more performance’ and ray-tracing

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Re: Nvidia announces RTX 2000 GPU series with ‘6x more performance’ and ray-tracing

#231
post #12

Hmm, 24%-42% performance increase (14/16TFlops vs 11.3TFlops) for 70-90% price increase... And prices were already inflated by crypto that is now collapsing. Not sure who is the target market for this tech honestly. Still only 11GB RAM, even if 50% faster, making it a nonsense purchase for Deep Learning enthusiasts (state-of-art models are already larger). Unless somebody invented RTX-based coin of course, then this…

>Not sure who is the target market for this tech honestly. These are gaming GPUs being announced at a games conference to an audience of gamers and games journalists. The focus of Huang's talk was how accelerated ray tracing will improve the graphical fidelity of games. GPU compute is a spin-off from gaming. Gamers remain the primary market. They generate the volume that allows Nvidia to sell a supercomputer on a car…

Seems like gaming has long since hit an "eternal September" as producers are spewing out ever more impressive tech demos.

I have long since taken to killing every graphical effect game devs can think of throwing into a game (if they supplied a toggle for it) simply so i can tell where the enemy is without wearing sunglasses indoors in a dark room.

Re: Nvidia announces RTX 2000 GPU series with ‘6x more performance’ and ray-tracing

#232
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spec page says 8K HDR @ 60fps.

Talking about two different things here... You mentioned that card is capable of outputting 8k HDR @ 60Hz, i.e. your Windows desktop can happily have 7680x4320@60. I mentioned that running games at 4k@60Hz or 3k@144Hz smoothly might not be possible for some demanding games and that many gamers expected that from the new generation.

You can slow any hardware with sufficiently inefficient program (or sufficiently detailed scene, if we're talking about GPUs). You can easily make any videocard work at 0.001 FPS if your scene is heavy enough. So it only depends on game developers, it's unfair to blame Nvidia for that. GPU progress is astonishing, at least when compared with CPU progress.

Re: Nvidia announces RTX 2000 GPU series with ‘6x more performance’ and ray-tracing

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is way too expensive for regular gamers Better cancel my pre-order then... > 2080Ti likely won't be able to do 4k@60Hz like 1080Ti couldn't either My 1080ti and 4k monitor beg to differ.

what kind of FPS can you get in Doom, all features on, at 4k? my 1070 would do it, but it was garbage fps

What CPU do you have? My 1070 plays doom at 4k no problem.

Re: Nvidia announces RTX 2000 GPU series with ‘6x more performance’ and ray-tracing

#234
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking about two different things here... You mentioned that card is capable of outputting 8k HDR @ 60Hz, i.e. your Windows desktop can happily have 7680x4320@60. I mentioned that running games at 4k@60Hz or 3k@144Hz smoothly might not be possible for some demanding games and that many gamers expected that from the new generation.

You can slow any hardware with sufficiently inefficient program (or sufficiently detailed scene, if we're talking about GPUs). You can easily make any videocard work at 0.001 FPS if your scene is heavy enough. So it only depends on game developers, it's unfair to blame Nvidia for that. GPU progress is astonishing, at least when compared with CPU progress.

> GPU progress is astonishing, at least when compared with CPU progress.

I have a dual xeon rig with sixteen cores that I used to use for video transcoding. It could transcode a movie in about 12 hours.

I read that a cheap Nvidia GPU could do the job in less than 30 minutes. It seemed way too good to be true, but I figured I'd spend $120 to find out.

It turned out the hype was wrong; it didn't take 30 minutes to do what sixteen Xeons spent 12 hours doing, it took fifteen minutes.

Unreal.

Re: Nvidia announces RTX 2000 GPU series with ‘6x more performance’ and ray-tracing

#235
post #230

Is ray-tracing a very large improvement for rendering quality or do you have diminishing returns now that "conventional" rendering techniques already employ such good heuristics and approximations to make the scenes look good? Just curious since I don't know much about the state of the art of rendering and the implication of ray-tracing (other than the fact that it's, somewhat trivially by how it works, the most accu…

A lot of the clever tricks employed to get effects like reflections, ambient occlusion, soft shadows and GI effects using rasterization are 'hacks' with a lot of edge cases and artifacts. They're not terribly robust. Ray tracing let's you get better quality with fewer artifacts because there's less 'cheating' going on. You can get better quality in more situations with less manual tweaking, if you can afford the performance cost.

Artifacts around the contact points of shadows and reflections and artifacts for reflections and ambient occlusion of off screen objects are places where ray tracing can give much better visual results.

Re: Nvidia announces RTX 2000 GPU series with ‘6x more performance’ and ray-tracing

#236
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lookup AmoebaNet-D if you think you don't need a GPU farm these days. Those were times when 1-2 GPUs were enough...

You know, there is more to deep learning research than meta-learning/architecture exploration. Sure you can explore the hyper-parameter space faster with 500 GPUs and get yet again a 0.05% better test score on ImageNet (or more I don't actually know), but there are other ways to do something meaningful in DL without using such compute power.

That's a fair point and I agree. It's just sometimes difficult to beat automated exploration; as a standard company you probably don't have access to top-end researchers/practitioners, just average ones, and those might get a significant boost by trading smartness for brute force and run many models in parallel in evolutionary fashion.

When you e.g. look at how Google's internal system constructs loss functions and how many combinations do they try, one has to have an unexpected idea to beat their results, and that idea can be usually quickly incorporated into their platform, raising the bar for individual researchers. At Facebook they basically press a few buttons and select a few checkboxes, then wait until best model is selected, leading to frustration among researchers.

Re: Nvidia announces RTX 2000 GPU series with ‘6x more performance’ and ray-tracing

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly not, but the infuriating part is historically the performance of those cards trickles down to the lower tiers at more reasonable prices as the generations go by. The GTX 1070 beat the GTX 980 Ti at an MSRP $200 less just one generation later, meanwhile at least from pure TFLOPS numbers the RTX 2080 is less powerful than the GTX 1080 Ti while costing around the same. One would be forgiven for expecting rough…

This all sounds like normal r&d and market forces. New stuff is low volume and premium prices. Once it becomes more common and more production lines are switched, the prices fall and the features get included into other models. This applies to virtually every product. Or did you want to highlight something else I missed?

The new products are launching at the same price point similarly specced parts from the previous generation have been selling at. "Low volume" doesn't really play when you're talking silicon manufacturing, when you spend millions of dollars to make a mask you want to get ROI on it quickly - the GTX 1070 sold at over $200 less than the GTX 980 Ti, for example, at launch.

When you sell a product that actually has less compute performance (the RTX 2080) at the same price point as the higher-end part from the last generation (GTX 1080 Ti) something has gone horribly wrong. A lot of this is likely due to the Tensor/RTX units on the new GPU's taking up die space and there hasn't been an appropriate process shrink to make up for it, but it's all the more reason these are REALLY unappealing options for anyone outside the top-end enthusiast segment (the GTX 1070 is the most popular enthusiast card this generation, because even enthusiasts have budgets - which is usually the $400-500 range for GPUs).

tl;dr; Prices here make no sense, cards with similar or less performance selling at the same price point you could get from the previous gen - just with raytracing support added on top (so it won't net you WORSE performance with this new functionality utilized). I don't know who Nvidia thinks is going to buy these from a gaming perspective.

Re: Nvidia announces RTX 2000 GPU series with ‘6x more performance’ and ray-tracing

#238

I feel like there is a hard limit on rendering tech right now. We saw 4k upgrades to the PS4/xbox and next gen consoles might be a way off. I thought the gaming industry was waiting for hardware that would let you render Marvel movie style graphics. Things that just barely hit that uncanny divide; that would give the player comic book film style immersions. The demo video they posted does look pretty impressive. Is t…

Art direction has more influence on realism than hardware capability. Good visual artists can get much closer to "real" than poor artists simply by choosing what to depict.

It's not either / or. A given artist can get better results with less manual effort with path tracing. That's the main reason almost all offline rendering has moved to path tracing despite it being much more computationally intensive. Artist time is more valuable to them than CPU time.

Pixar thinks its artists have better ways to spend their time than placing lots of fake bounce lights to approximate true GI. It's not that they couldn't get some very good results given enough time and effort, it's that they can get better results leaving that stuff to the renderer and using their time elsewhere.

Re: Nvidia announces RTX 2000 GPU series with ‘6x more performance’ and ray-tracing

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not sure who is the target market for this tech honestly. These are gaming GPUs being announced at a games conference to an audience of gamers and games journalists. The focus of Huang's talk was how accelerated ray tracing will improve the graphical fidelity of games. GPU compute is a spin-off from gaming. Gamers remain the primary market. They generate the volume that allows Nvidia to sell a supercomputer on a car…

Seems like gaming has long since hit an "eternal September" as producers are spewing out ever more impressive tech demos. I have long since taken to killing every graphical effect game devs can think of throwing into a game (if they supplied a toggle for it) simply so i can tell where the enemy is without wearing sunglasses indoors in a dark room.

sure, for games like battlegrounds. but some games don't even have enemies!

Re: Nvidia announces RTX 2000 GPU series with ‘6x more performance’ and ray-tracing

#240
post #230

Is ray-tracing a very large improvement for rendering quality or do you have diminishing returns now that "conventional" rendering techniques already employ such good heuristics and approximations to make the scenes look good? Just curious since I don't know much about the state of the art of rendering and the implication of ray-tracing (other than the fact that it's, somewhat trivially by how it works, the most accu…

Ray tracing replaces parts of the pipeline that are using heuristics and approximations that are at their limits with the "correct" solutions (because ray tracing is physically correct). The problem is that there probably aren't better techniques for these approximations that aren't marginal improvements, we've started to hit a limit of what we can achieve (with physically based rendering being the target; stylized rendering still has plenty to explore) with classical rendering. Ray tracing has always been the future of graphics, we are slowly getting there.

So it should provide a standard "generation" worth of increase in graphical quality.

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