Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 392 posts

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

#251

Post by saltcured »

h4b4n3r0 wrote: post #179
bitL wrote: 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…

Whether it's substantially better for deep learning depends on whether they chose to neuter fp16 like they did in all other consumer GPUs. The main bottleneck is not actually the size of the model per se (sizes of the models have been mostly going _down_ as of late), it's the size of the batch during training. Both batch size and model size determine the size of the main memory hog: activations that you need to keep…

If it's data size in GPU RAM you are concerned about, couldn't you store fp16 and cast into fp32 just in the kernel? In OpenCL, you would do this with vload_halfN and vstore_halfN to convert during load and store.

You won't get double throughput compared to fp32, but you shouldn't fall back to some terribly slow path either.

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

#252

Post by namibj »

johnvanommen wrote: post #234
vbezhenar wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Ehm, if your server runs a reasonable modern x264, you should get significantly lower bandwidth at "transparent" quality compared to what the GPU's hardware encoders is even capable of reaching. The reason there being that the hardware encoder can't use some features x264 implements sufficiently fast to make them worthwhile to use at that sort of time investment.

Please don't try to measure lossy-anything-calculation by speed alone, always make sure that the required quality can even be reached, and even if, that it still exhibits the performance benefits, even after you tune these features up far enough.

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

#253

Post by sscotth »

ErneX wrote: post #228
djsumdog wrote: post #79

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…

next-gen consoles are likely releasing 2020

Also it will likely marketed around the new Ray Tracing tech making it mainstream.

It will take another generation or two of speed enhancements so it can fit in a <$500 console.

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

#254

Post by floatboth »

bitL wrote: post #156
eanzenberg wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm gaming at 4k60fps ultra everything modern games on a single 1080ti right now.

Lucky you! Head over to /r/nvidia and read which games just can't cut it on 4k@60 Ultra.

Ultra is ridiculous and unnecessary. I play 4K60 on an RX 480 with "smart" settings — max textures/meshes, min shader effects, no ambient occlusion, no dynamic reflections, etc.

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

#256

Post by voxadam »

h4b4n3r0 wrote: post #179
bitL wrote: 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…

Whether it's substantially better for deep learning depends on whether they chose to neuter fp16 like they did in all other consumer GPUs. The main bottleneck is not actually the size of the model per se (sizes of the models have been mostly going _down_ as of late), it's the size of the batch during training. Both batch size and model size determine the size of the main memory hog: activations that you need to keep…

I wasn't aware that the Jetson TX1 and TX2 supported fp16; that's interesting and good to know. Thanks for the heads up.

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

#257

Post by MikeLui »

outworlder wrote: post #244

Why would we want raytracing as for 'gaming' as opposed to the rasterizers we have now? Is this a gimmick or are there algorithms for post processing and the like that could take advantage of this?

I believe there are a lot of “tricks” engineers have developed to accomplish rendering goals that would be more natural with ray tracing. The added simplicity would lower the barrier of entry for more complex effects.

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

#258

Post by sscotth »

bearjaws wrote: post #31
gabcoh wrote: post #16

Does anyone know how they are offering better raytracing performance? Are there new api’s or something?

This is exactly what im wondering, with the next gen consoles confirmed for AMD CPU/GPU I doubt there will be much Ray Tracing tech in the next generation, which means we're looking at 3-5 years before this tech can be mainstream. These GPUs will be antiquated by the time Ray Tracing can gain any real traction...

I agree. It won't become mainstream until the next gen of consoles are able to take advantage, because developers will still be required handle the current generation. However, the demand from from developers themselves could be enough for console manufacturers to make sure it is available in their next iteration.

Where have you seen that next gen consoles are confirmed for AMD?

Also, if there is Nvidia tech here that AMD can't replicate, it doesn't mean that AMD can't license it.

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

#259

Post by shaklee3 »

bitL wrote: post #197
endorphone wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tensor cores (e.g. SIMD matrix FMAs) are extremely useful for training. There is nothing shaky about it. I do not get why you're being so bizarrely negative about this card. Yes, there are an enormous number of applications, for both training and inference, where an 11GB ridiculously powerful card (both in OPS and in memory speed) can be enormously useful.

Yes, I agree, tensor cores are awesome, if your framework of choice doesn't have some rough edges you inevitably hit when you try to do advanced models on e.g. V100, but which work just fine on TPU. I think the presented Turing card is a masterpiece, just given I was hitting 11GB limit with some semantic segmentation and multi-object detection a year ago, I am obviously disappointed that this wasn't increased, and I…

Tensors cores were built for training. For inference they added the int8 instructions (dp4a) which have lower precision. The Turing also has int4, and for inference this card blows the Volta out of the water since the v100 was only ~TOPS for int8. The Turing is 250 TOPS for int8 and 500 TOPS for int4.

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

#260

Post by shaklee3 »

TomVDB wrote: post #135
dragontamer wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rumor is that AMD's Navi is but a minor update next year. "Next Generation" is 2020 and beyond for AMD. So unfortunately, NVidia can bet on a lack of competition for the near future. NVidia can always drop prices when Navi comes out (if it happens to be competitive). But it seems like they're betting that Navi won't be competitive, at least with this pricing structure.

It’s very strange how AMD reveals so much of their roadmap.

About 4 years ago Nvidia also used to publish a "roadmap" that showed a somewhat fake performance versus architecture plot. They stopped doing that after Volta.
Post reply on HN