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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

Have to wait for benchmarks to say anything definitive, but from the specs table it looks like performance is in the ballpark of the 1070. Same TFLOPS, faster memory clock but not as much memory, TDP is 10W higher.

At $350 that sounds like a tough sell over the 1070, which is finally down to $300 after rebate. Unless you're really excited about the raytracing stuff.

I'm underwhelmed for 2.5 years of progress since the 1070 (mid 2016). Just sticking it out with my 970 until it dies, which will hopefully be until there's something new worth upgrading to.

Maybe AMD has something more impressive up their sleeves in the mainstream price range.

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For games, benchmarks are released. Computerbase for example has their review article online, https://www.computerbase.de/2019-01/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2060-.... For that workload it's at the level of a GTX 1080/RTX 2070 when overclocked, only a bit lower on stock. Pretty good, and clearly faster than the 1070.

Interesting, that does make it look compelling over the 1070.

I wish they'd stop bumping everything further up the price ladder every generation though.

Well, it sits exactly where it has to sit price-wise to counter AMD's Vega 56, which is more expensive, more energy hungry and a bit slower. And the faster Vega 64 eats even more energy and is even more expensive, so it counters that as well.

When or if AMD ever releases a competitive card outside of the mid-performance level Nvidia will adjust prices, until then their only limit is what customers are willing to pay. It's exactly what Intel did pre Ryzen.

to be fair, I thought the Vega cards were only more expensive because crypto-miners found out they worked better for mining than the nvidia cards?

Unless I am mistaken, in which case, ignore this.

That's partly right. Vega was especially expensive during the last crypto bubble, but that is over and the Vega 56 is still rarely under $400.

Yes, Launch MSRPs were $400 and $500 for vega 56 and 64 respectively, and it seems like those cards are just now beginning to sell for around those prices.*

I suppose Nvidia and partners have no reason to compete with their last-gen inventory backlog at a similar price. However, it's nice to see some downward pricing pressure to the high-mid-range. I don't care all that much about gaming, but the chip famine made AMD Vega hardware (and everything else of course) a terrible value, which is sad because it seemed like nice hardware for compute. I also really like how recent AMD hardware Just Works on linux. Who'd have thunk it?

I have been buying used rx480/70 on ebay for $80-100, which is great if you don't mind flashing an original bios back on to a mining card (is the rom I downloaded from that Albanian carding forum really the right one? Grits teeth and hits enter). It would also be great though to just be able to buy a card the normal way, for a fair price.

Anyway, it's hard to imagine AMD doing the same trick they did with the rx590 to vega, like where they release the Vega Turbo OC'd flavor-blasted Thermopile edition. It's already too hot. So maybe they will just have to finally lower the price to less than, or equal to, the price of RTX2060.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processin...

yeah. I really want to get a new AMD card (vega 56), but I just can't justify spending $400 to get one. especially when the 1070 Ti beats it in performance and costs $50 less.

Makes me wonder if it's a deliberate strategy. Cryptocurrencies raised the prices of GPUs across the board due to demand, but maybe Nvidia has decided that the wider market has become accustomed to higher base prices and will still bear it, even with the added demand from miners dying off.

I imagine they are probably reluctant to cut margins when their main competitor in this market segment is similarly priced.

RTX 2060 has Tensor cores on a mainstream, desktop offering, which might be of some interest if you want to play with deep learning at home

Edit: I'm also sticking with a GTX 970 right now, mainly because I game at 1080p. When I can't get a consistent 1080p@30FPS (though I prefer 1080p@60FPS) then I will consider upgrading. Right now I'm CPU bound, not GPU bound, in any title where I get sub-60FPS.

True, and I think these are also used for their Deep Learning Super-Sampling system, which is another potential difference between the 1070 and 2060. Render at lower resolution and upscale with a specially trained neural network for each game.

Is inference fast enough to not have latency issues?

I assume there's some latency since it would need a fully rendered frame to operate on, but other postprocess AA techniques would suffer the same issue. Not a graphics expert, but I think only doing real supersampling would happen during the initial frame render instead of in series afterward, and that's going to tank performance much further than DLSS (in terms of individual frame time rather than latency, but much more significant overall).

The DLSS neural network is trained off of renderings with 64x supersampling and tries to apply that to a low resolution image. In practice I wonder if there will be situations where the neural network screws up and makes strange artifacts, but the demos look impressive.

I'm also sticking to Nvidia GTX 970 for now but would be nice to upgrade at some point. I was hopeful about AMD's offering but after trying Ryzen 2400G APU on my Linux media box I am not going to touch new AMD hardware again with a ten foot pole any time soon. Their Linux drivers are a nightmare, freezing display all the time, requiring power cycling. Nvidia works nicely and I don't really mind the bigger price tag.

This is exactly where I'm at, my 970 handles everything I've needed so far.

I'm interested in exploring VR dev, but am waiting until I have a new GPU, and can't really justify the upgrade yet. I've had my eye on the recent Ryzen cards, but I'm not sold on the reliability yet compared to Nvidia.

I do like that AMD at least seems to be trying to play nice with the open source drivers and kernel infrastructure, but in practice Nvidia still seems to be the most straightforward solution, so... meh.

I'm interested in exploring VR dev, but am waiting until I have a new GPU

Don't wait. Iron out the gameplay with "low" graphics. 970 is just fine for that.

can a 970 even support VR hardware? I was under the impression it could not.

The GTX 970 used to be the minimum card for blue team. I've played all of my VR gaming on one. Perhaps gains in resolution on new equipment have left them behind, but they should still be fine for a 1st generation HTC Vive.

I've also run VR games using Windows Mixed Reality headsets, which have a higher resolution than the 1st generation HTC Vive, and it also seemed just fine. Also, at the time, though it was several months back, the Steam VR test program still gave my GTX 970 a pass.

YouTuber Blunty once ran his 1st gen VR headset off of a GTX1050Ti laptop and said it was just fine "in a pinch." (I wouldn't recommend it for the very VR sickness prone, however.)

it was the minimum recommended by Oculus and may've been for Vive too, can't remember, at one point. But I think what they're saying is you can conceivably work on VR/AR without having world beating hardware (it really only becomes an issue when you want to test, I would imagine).

But maybe after getting some VR development under one's belt with a 970, that may give incentive to do the GPU upgrade if things progress accordingly.

There’s also the option of running a pair of 970s in SLI. That was my solution a couple years ago when it beat the 980Ti in both performance and price.

Yeah but then you're working on VR development with SLIed cards just as Nvidia's newer hardware all drops that capability. I've heard SLI can be a headache to support in rendering, so that might be more trouble than it's worth to develop for.

The 970 also works smoothly on Ubuntu with Nouveau.

Similar for me. I had to get the 1050Ti for VR (vrchat optimization issues) and that should suffice for some time.

I can't speak for linux currently, as I stopped running that in lieu of the Windows Subsystem for Linux, but I havent had any of those problems on either of my AMD-gpu-powered machines on windows. (one running Vega 8 integrated, the other running an RX 580 4G).

it definitely sounds like a driver compatibility issue. AMD cards have had....issues on linux for a long while now. I remember running a laptop with a dedicated AMD card about 10 years ago that wouldn't work on linux without installing a 3rd-party driver because their switchable graphics implementation was god-awful.

While I love Linux Mint and Antergos (for rolling), I'm a Windows-based C# dev, and WSL would be my choice as well. Other than increased hardware compatibility the big win is battery life when mobile. Not really a factor for me as I develop on a Ryzen 2700X, but Windows 10 with Edge (soon to be Chromium based) or macOS with Safari is as good as it gets for battery life. I doubt a primarily server OS like Linux will ever match Windows or macOS in this regard, though I certainly wouldn't mind seeing it happen.

yeah. battery life is a real concern as well when mobile for me on my ryzen laptop. It doesn't have a very large battery. lol

Raven Ridge APUs in particular are terrible, every other piece of AMD hardware has very dramatically better Linux support than NVIDIA's GPUs.

It's probably done enough damage to their reputation in your estimation to not matter, but please note these Linux problems are specific to the Raven Ridge APU [1] - not the case using a discrete AMD GPU, the open source drivers for which are by many accounts absolutely superb these days.

It's a shame, I want a 2400G to replace my ageing A10 Trinity media box, will probably give it a try fairly soon expecting latest kernels have this solved by now...

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-d...

Thanks for this information. I was planning a GPU passthrough setup using this - 2400G APU for the Linux display and an nVidia GTX 970 for passthrough, but this now makes me pause.

One thing of note about the 20xx cards that doesn't get talked up much is that they have an updated version of the NVENC video encoder that produces much better quality than the 10xx cards' at the same bitrate. A big deal if you're aiming to do realtime video capture or live streaming.

How do you take advantage of that while streaming?

They announced that OBS "just works" with NVENC.

Wonder how h.265 compares to x265 in terms of quality... on my 1080 it took about 50% more size to get the same quality (so between x264/x265 sizes respectively), but oh so much faster to encode.

That is the whole point of pricing it so high. They want to move the 1000 series stock of which they are sitting on a huge pile of.

> Have to wait for benchmarks to say anything definitive

ask and ye shall receive https://www.anandtech.com/show/13762/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2060...

Seems like ~10% faster and 10% more expensive. So not completely unreasonable deal imho.

>I'm underwhelmed for 2.5 years of progress since the 1070 (mid 2016).

Cant blame Nvidia or AMD. GPU's performance Scales very well with transistors count. As long as the next node is ready in GPU maker's pricing equation, you will get more transistors and hence more performance. And this is now largely down to TSMC.

At the current schedule it may take up to Mid / late 2021 before a 7nm 2060 drop price by half.

And it’s only 6Gb memory :-(

Well that's only a problem if 6GB isn't enough, and for the time being it's more than plenty.

I’m getting from time to time to limits of training of relatively small models

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