PRO’S AND CON’S

Nvidia is all set to launch a whole new generation of graphics cards, but while there is a lot of excitement about all the new graphical goodness they look set to offer there are as many reasons to be worried as there are reasons to be cheerful.

We don’t want to get completely doom and gloom about the new hardware; it’s more than two years since Nvidia has released a whole new gaming GeForce GPU architecture, and we’re genuinely excited about what the new cards are going to offer. And the new RTX 2080 et al are going to deliver a new world of real-time ray tracing, general gaming performance, and the possibility to have artificial intelligence making our games look awesome. Living in the future’s great, right?

But these new GPUs haven’t appeared in isolation and there are reasons to be a little sceptical about just what a brave new dawn the new RTX 20-series GPUs will bring. Whether it’s their offensively high prices, or the possibility that all these shiny new features will be essentially ignored by developers focusing on console development first and foremost.

The new cards represent an Nvidia GPU launch that exists in a world where it has precisely zero competition at the high end of PC gaming graphics, and that has fed directly into this new generation. But this line-in-the-sand moment had to come at some point and it’s probably the best time for Nvidia to change stance, jam its ray tracing flag into the dirt, and declare this the dawn of real-time ray tracing in games.

Whether or not many of us are going to have the chance to ray trace anything until the next generation of RTX GPUs…

PRO’s

REAL-TIME RAY TRACING

First off you’ve simply got to be excited about the fact we’re getting real-time ray tracing in gaming hardware released this year and in actual games… this year.

It’s been the holy grail of PC graphics for as long as I can remember, that process of actually simulating the physical properties of light, rather than faking them through rasterization.

Thanks to the new RT Cores, the 20-series cards can accelerate the current industry standard of ray tracing, bounding volume hierarchy. And these accelerators mean the new RTX cards are capable of tracking up to 10 billion rays of light every second.

The GTX 1080 Ti, by comparison, could only track 1 billion. Pathetic.

CON’s

SUPER HIGH-PRICE

Okay, so they may be able to manage this wonderful feat of ray tracing – in a few games, and only in select features like shadows and reflections – but, good lord, are they expensive lumps of silicon.

Nvidia’s RTX 2080 Ti has an MSRP of $999, but because it’s doing its Founder’s Edition shenanigans again the Nvidia version is actually on sale for $1,200. And the board partners are likely to only use that as a starting point for their cards. We’ve even heard rumours that Asus is planning a $1,500 version.

Then you have the RTX 2080 Founder’s at $799 and the third-tier RTX 2070 at $599. Yes, a third-tier GeForce graphics card that costs $600. Even at the lower reference card price of $500 it’s frankly ridiculous. And it’s all because Nvidia has no high-end GPU competition so it can price with impunity.

That’s another thing we can blame on Vega… don’t come at me Radeon fanbois, I am, of course, kidding.