Earlier this week Nvidia unveiled its all-new RTX 20 series of GPUs.
After spending several days an hour talking up ray tracing and how hard the firm has been working to develop this revolutionary tech we saw a few examples of how ray tracing improves games visually.
Truth be told it wasn’t all that impressive and once folks got their hands on demos of games running on an RTX, performance was terrible to put it kindly. Those performance issues have since been explained away as the game (Shadow of the Tomb Raider in this instance) not being properly optimised for the GPU.
But now Nvidia has released performance figures for games running on a GeForce GTX 2080.
In a blog post, global head of marketing for GeForce, Matt Wuebbling detailed what performance buyers can expect from the new line of GPUs.
As you can see above, Nvidia is promising 4K, HDR gaming at – or above – 60fps.
“GeForce RTX GPUs deliver 4K HDR gaming on modern AAA titles at 60 frames per second — a feat even our flagship GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GPU can’t manage,” writes Wuebbling.
The problem with these frame rate numbers and Wuebbling’s statement is that we don’t actually know at what sort of quality the games were running at.
The wonderful folks over at UFD Tech put Nvidia’s claims to the test and found that the GTX 1080 Ti and even the GTX 1070 Ti are able to run games at 4K with 60fps albeit with lower graphics settings. You can check out the video below.
As UFD Tech points out, Nvidia hasn’t given buyers anything to compare RTX 20 and GTX 10 cards against. Right now we are going on what Nvidia says. Sure you could trust Nvidia but then you’d have to ignore things such as the GeForce Partners Program.
Nvidia hasn’t given buyers much reason to trust the firm’s word and giving folks real world performance improvements would have gone a long way to rectifying that.
But lo, Team Green did compare the RTX 2080 to two GTX 1080 GPUs, sorta.
The graph above doesn’t really provide much insight. For instance, what exactly is being compared? Sure the RTX 2080 performs better, but in what aspect exactly? Is that ray tracing or frame rates? We honestly have no idea and the blog doesn’t explain it.
And this is the problem with this latest slew of GPUs – the entire launch has been confusing.
Nvidia’s hour and a half presentation where the cards were revealed was incredibly technical and I for one walked away with more questions than answers. To make matters worse these benchmarks do nothing to answer any of the questions we have about these GPUs
Given the price point of the RTX 2080 (R16 999 here in SA) and the fact that the firm wants folks to pre-order these cards we do wish Nvidia had been more forthcoming with its benchmarks.
We recommend, in fact we insist, that potential buyers wait for independent reviewers to tear into these cards and present accurate real-world benchmarks and comparisons to previous generations of GPUs.
