Nvidia Unveils GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs
blogs.nvidia.com
blogs.nvidia.com
It's long overdue to have widely available metrics for latency in consumer tech. Many hardware/software setups have absurdly long latency for no good reason other than that it's difficult to measure. People underestimate the subconscious effects it has on your usage of technology.
I couldn't be happier that phone and monitor manufacturers are finally starting to compete on refresh rates >60 Hz. It's far more important than wide gamut or 8K.
HDCP runs over DP and Thunderbolt. But derefr's discussion above is accurate.
Because of how it was implemented, you could drag VLC around while the video was playing and the video would stay "behind" everything, with the VLC window acting as a "hole" through which you could see it. (So you could move the window to the left and see half a black square on the left, and the left-most half of the video on the right)
Nowadays with desktop composition AKA DWM, Windows just makes sure to black out DRM content from any frames/video it sends to an app requesting to capture the screen, making sure to send the video-including composed desktop only to the display. (And if you have some GPU recording software like NVIDIA ShadowPlay, it switches off when DRM content starts playing) You can see it in action with the Netflix UWP app. Of course, a bunch of DRM-respecting software -- like Netflix in Google Chrome -- doesn't really follow that spec and can still be screenshot/video captured like any app.
Which is the same as Netflix effectively, Netflix just provides higher to PCs when they can block screen recording entirely. Disney might eventually I guess.
The problem—and it is purely a firmware problem—is that all such monitors make this kind of support "dumb", with hardcoded geometry (i.e. split-screen as exactly halving or quartering the screen; PiP as putting one input in an box that composites over exactly the upper-left quarter of the lower-right quadrant of the screen.)
There's nothing in the scaler ASIC that particularly benefits from these numbers being hardcoded, such that its job would be any more complex if they were controllable via machine-registers POKEable using HDMI-CEC commands.
This is just a matter of opinion. Wide gamut is more important to me, latency is more important to you.
Thankfully, we can just have all three :)
Not at this time. There are some hypothetical options like the LG 27GN950, but it has poor contrast and uses Displayport 1.4 compression, which is only supported in the latest graphics cards. VESA and friends really made DisplayPort 1.4 as close as they possibly could to false advertising without actually committing it (because the only relevant new thing in DP 1.4 -- DSC, display stream compression -- is technically optional and no one claimed they'd support DSC while saying they support DP 1.4, which is pretty much the same as supporting DP 1.3, since nothing of note changed).
And now we're looking at DisplayPort 2.0 which can already barely support uncompressed 8K at 60 Hz and is basically maxed out by 5K/6K 120/144 Hz. And it's unclear if the presently introduced generation of GPUs even supports it, or if we're going to use effectively-2013-Displayport until ~2022.
Note how the marketing material only talks about HDMI 2.1; DisplayPort isn't mentioned once.
OLED is clearly the way forward - accurate colors, excellent contrast, no bleeding, no uniformity issues, proper HDR, excellent response time. Except OLED doesn't come to PCs.
MicroLED is another promising tech that has a lot of OLED upsides, but no burn-in issues.
Unfortunately my desk's dear centerpiece, https://iiyama.com/gl_en/products/prolite-x4071uhsu-b1/ , has been EOL'd about 2 years ago, because I have been unable to find a replacement that's not worse, while staying in the 40~50" range. Any concrete suggestion would be greatly appreciated.
(there is a guy on Youtube who installed an OLED TV as his main monitor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXKhYH3BaIA&t=36s)
I will say that I am excited about 8k video for computational photography. I am studying computer vision for robotics and it is quite clear to me that a simple spherical lens with a very high resolution sensor would be a very good imaging system for a real world robot.
I recently got a Panasonic GH5 and it shoots 18 megapixel “6k” 30fps video, encoded in h265 (important for higher res). I am experimenting with photogrammetry using this photo mode. The initial results are very promising. In four minutes I took a scan of a short street block in Oakland, and after processing the photogrammetry solution I have a very good dense 3D full color map of the street. The model has holes but I am slowly learning how to plan a photogrammetry capture. Currently computation takes hours but I am seeing more and more research on ways that machine learning can improve compute times and data density.
See how low the visual acuity is on 5.6k spherical video here: https://youtu.be/nASvIYq3VkE
However all this is to say that very high resolution sensors are a very good thing for robotics.
So, all free/open multi-view stereo and structure-from-motion software I know of is incapable of handling rolling shutter artifacts.
The problem seems to be that electronic global shutter sensors lack (some) dynamic range compared to otherwise-equal rolling shutter cameras.
If you'd be interested in talking more about this, contact me/let me know (I'll get in touch if requested).
My photogrammetry experiments typically encompass low-effort bulk data collection, though the search for a light-weight camera to use with a prosumer-class drone and some revelations about reconstruction quality issues inherent to older, easily-optimized algorithms for both multi-view stereo and mesh reconstruction stalled progress somewhat.
In general, machine learning doesn't seem to be as much of a benefit as one might guess, when compared to applying the resources in non-ML ways to the data.
Mind teasing some numbers from your street capture?
I did see in this paper that it seems like rolling shutter compensation is possible: https://research.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/An-Integr...
I wonder if a library could be produced for this?
As far as my street capture I am currently using 830 frames from my 4 minute video (2 fps), images are 4992 x 3744 shot with a 12mm lens. The reconstruction is still texturing so I don't have the final result. What kind of numbers are you interested in?
Please contact me yes! My email is in my profile. See also my four wheel drive robot with four 4k cameras, and feel free to actually initiate discussion on that site where others can see it too (or emails is good). Thanks!
I'm aware that global shutter cameras are more expensive, though I haven't even found a self-contained one that's notably below 500 g.
I'd like to know the polygon count, both vertices and faces, if possible.
I'll check the site and write more tomorrow, with the sun coming up shortly I should catch some sleep.
Also, yeah, rolling shutter can be compensated, but the impact goes through all the pipeline steps. All of them.
I don't want to re-write the whole pipeline. Worst case I'll settle for an Apertus Axiom Beta.
Also, a global shutter works nicely with a strobo, and a NIR-enhanced sensor works well with e.g. 808 nm light sources. The reason would be around power conservation when the robot has to bring it's own light source.
My last experiment had about 5k or so depth maps getting reconstructed (15 fps 4k Mavic Pro footage, iirc 100Mbit/s), from barely over 20k captured frames that I did full SfM on. The reconstruction density was adaptive, manually choosen to ensure sufficient scene coverage without spending too long on the depth map reconstruction.
The issue is that you have to assume somewhere between 1/60 and 1/500 exposure time for motion blur, if operating without an electronic global shutter. And I like detail, so I'm more looking for something like a 50 mm lens in front of an academy-sized sensor, yielding about 70~90 mm 35 mm-equivalent for the typical 4k by 2~3k sensor.
Many older (and now inexpensive) Blackmagic models have a global shutter, and shoot RAW at 25 fps / 4k or higher.
Would you reccomend a wide angle lens for this purpose? Intuition tells me a telephoto would capture more detail, though with the caveat of requiring more movement over the surface area to be captured.
But some people are capturing individual rocks to be used for video game assets, or surveying historical sites or something else. There are times when a telephoto would be desired, especially if you cannot get close to the target scene.
4k is 8.5 megapixels so it’s relatively low detail compared to my 18 megapixel video from my Panasonic. I personally do not really know the math behind any of this so I am not sure where the trade offs are between high resolution rolling shutter or lower resolution global shutter.
Because I am doing scene capture for robot simulation, I do not need a perfectly accurate model. I would rather have a machine learning algorithm that places simple polygons where real world objects are in the video and gives them a reasonable texture. That is, I want to go from video directly to a low poly textured 3D model. My problem is complicated by the fact that I am developing an off road robot, and photogrammetry of forests is very hard.
This is why I mentioned machine learning. I care a great deal about the semantics of my scene and less about metric accuracy. What kills me is compute time. Finding feature points in every image and matching them all together is extremely compute intensive. I believe shortcuts can be discovered for problems like mine with creative neural networks. That said, I still need to learn more about existing algorithms.
Those black magic cameras are severely bandwidth bound, compare to e.g. the Pocket Cinema 4k (USB 3 and able to fully load a USB-C SSD), which unfortunately only offers a rolling shutter.
The lens is only slightly relevant, in that an extremely long focal length will cause issues in estimating said focal length, and typically also in depth-of-field if that's relevant for your scene. I suggest no ultra-wide-angle lens and no more than 500 mm (35mm-equivalent). 30-150 mm focal length (35mm-eu) would be the range you want to look at.
In this model, your compositor, input pipeline and (at least the UI latency sensitive part of) your applications would have to be ported to the RTOS, which makes this pretty infeasible. But it works really well if you have a some hard-realtime control loop talking to a bunch of non-realtime network IO or UI code. Would be a fun way to build a wifi controlled quadcopter.
These days you probably want to use Xenomai, or possibly RTAI.
Thanks for the great writeup correcting me!
There used to be a one-floppy installer with the desktop on it, I'm sure you could get that to work in a VM.
Lots of screenshots:
https://www.operating-system.org/betriebssystem/_english/bs-...
Docs:
https://www.mikecramer.com/qnx/qnx_6.1_docs/sysadmin/intro.h...
Unfortunately I can't seem to locate any disk images, rumor has it there was a VMWare image floating around.
Grr.
Unfortunately QNX 6.5 is pretty old and not too well-supported (QNX is fully POSIX-compliant so you can sometimes get things working on it without too much trouble however) but it's damn fantastic to play around with in a VM. It's actually so fun.
One really neat demo was 250 windows running the size of poststamps with a little bouncing line demo inside them. All still received their 'fair share' of time, all could still be moved around and expanded as though the machine was otherwise idle.
That's the scheduler. There are a lot of moving parts to running this code, I may make a little project out of restoring it to life under a VM at some point.
Happy reading.
Edit: reading it myself, wow, my English was cringe worthy back then. Moving to Canada certainly fixed that.
Mouse, keyboard, screen. Those are the things that should run at high priority. Everything else can - quite literally - wait.
I might add audio to this list.
Listening to music, on the other hand, does not require low latency except in response to user input.
More to read here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5452371/why-isnt-every-o...
RTOSes are often found in autopilot and vehicle management systems controlling critical peripherals or safety critical software. More mundanely there are also sensors that will get upset if you don't give them undivided attention for fixed periods of time (or if you interrupt them, they will terminate the transfer). Image sensors are particularly picky about this.
I've run a plasma cutter under Linux on a run-of-the-mill VIA SBC, it was actually pretty easy: just make a program setuid root, use that to disable interrupts after you've read all your data in and then just go wild on polled and precision timed IO until you're done. Re-enable interrupts and return as if nothing ever happened.
It's a good lesson to play with polling versus interrupts on a micro. Susprising just how many cycles it takes to jump into the ISR.
Did you forget to run the OpenGL teapot?
BeOS was magical. I wish I could use Haiku in my desktop today.
Worse with cooperative multitasking any running application could mess things up.
For its era, System 7 was good, but later, it was worse than even Windows 98.
Be tried to do things right, it was ~1995 after all.
I’d hope this is much better now given things like Wayland and the increased use of parallelism.
But I also remember not having background processes. It's a trade of.
Finder browsing files is much faster in macOS, Windows scans the entire directory with defender every time you click on it before it allows you to sort it or interact with it. That can take several minutes on some of my directories.
The mouse tracking model in Windows is somewhat different, and a bit more responsive, but there are multiple third party extensions to macOS the make its model exactly the same as the Windows model.
You can tell the execs that approved that were probably impressed watching someone else demo it but probably never used it themselves.
Jobs would have spotted it was rubbish immediately.
It has a dial on the front to choose settings. Potentially a great idea to skip quick to the one I want - BUT the damn thing can only detect 1 step of change about every half second. So if you fast-turn it 4 clicks, it still only moves one step. So you have to stand there, slowly turning it, click, click, click, click....
The dial is the biggest design feature on there. Massive. Right in the middle. Bright lights all around it. But they couldn't even be bothered to make it solve the one problem it was there to do.
It's the kind of thing that'd make you reject purchasing it if only you'd thought to have tested that specific bit of it before buying it.
Honestly, I wish that they would make appliances with physical controls as opposed to digital. At least those are easier to fix/mod on your own.
I think if someone did a kickstarter for a very simple physical buttoned digital camera it would do very well.
Caveat: said Arduino may need to sit between the rest of the buttons as well, in case inputs must be given in sequence.
Possible benefit: switch the Arduino for something from the ESP family, and you could feed instructions to the machine over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. (Which could take the form of a dedicated wireless button panel above the machine with macros for frequently-used options.)
(Hmm. I can tell there's some over-optimization in here, but I'm not sure _where_.)
On Arch Linux this is available as linux-zen
There is also realtime-linux - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Realtime_kernel_patchse...
This looks super fun to play with, thanks!
I was taken aback by how slow Windows 95 felt after I finally jumped the wagon and retired my beloved Amiga in favor of a PC, circa 1995. Just moving the cursor was incredibly jerky in comparison and things would randomly freeze for seconds for no apparent reason. Windows NT 4 was much smoother though.
Even today, in Visual Studio, I regularly have multi-second pauses between a key press and the character showing-up on the screen, though this probably has more to do with Resharper than either Visual Studio or Windows.
Considering how FireWire worked in comparison to USB that's not particularly surprising. The host machine was more or less out of the way while the FW interfaces did their thing instead of requiring constant hand-holding.
Citation needed. Do you have any numbers on that?
I'm skeptical that BeOS has better latency than modern OSes on modern hardware.
IIUC input is still driven at 60Hz but changing this is in discussion [2].
[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1285 [2] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/168
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutter_(window_manager)
Edit: I missed the part where you were asking specifically about GNOME. Removed everything unrelated to that.
Why are inputs synchronized to the frame in Wayland? What the f---? That's just... wow.
The logic isn't perfect and the implementation is flawed but I see where the decision originated.
Since the compositor is already using vsync, it's generally pointless to run graphical applications under a compositor with vsync as well, since that only adds latency. [2] Hypothetically that can result in tearing, however in practice that doesn't matter, because the scanout of the compositor is basically a copy in GPU memory, so you'd have to be rather unlucky to see tearing, let alone consistent tearing. [1]
Of course, OpenGL doesn't support triple buffering (since it has fixed definitions of exactly one GL_FRONT and exactly one GL_BACK buffer per framebuffer/output surface), and it seems like at least nVidia on Linux doesn't support it for Vulkan, either (no mailbox present mode, only FIFO).
In any case, on X11 there is a huge difference between running a 3D UI on a compositor with (A) VSync enabled, (B) running without VSync (which introduces unncessarily high GPU loads, since UIs are generally super-quick to render and if your app architecture is correct, you should be seeing thousands of frames per second), (C) running with a frame limiter (careful choice of limiting FPS to avoid common multiples of 30), (D) rendering a frame as soon as at least one event has been posted, which requires some explicit synchronization work and thought (worker threads have to post events to wake the UI, animations need a timer). (D) is what QML does and what I'm implementing currently. It works well, latency seems to be indistinguishable from B) and C), without the unnecessary power use. X11 only seems to deliver events at a rate of somewhere around 250-400 per second, so an explicit FPS limiter is unnecessary.
[1] If you are rendering to a monitor, scanout happens approx 95 % of the time, so tearing is very likely. Let's say your app's window is 1451x1400 pixels big, then its framebuffer will be about 8 MB. The "scanout" will take something like 15 µs, so at 60 Hz scanout happens about 0.1 % of the time.
[2] My angle here is primarily applications that happen to use <insert 3D API here> as their UI rendering backend. Games have slightly different considerations and should generally just run full-tilt with triple buffering.
When I scroll in MS Word, there is this insane black tearing across the white surface when I scroll, but only on the laptop monitor.
It's A WORD PROCESSOR! It's just a word processor... It's.... weeps
Or the graphics card isn't being used for some reason? E.g., if your laptop has NVidia's Optimus[1], the graphics card may be inactive while Word's running. There's usually a way to force applications to use the GPU with Optimus.
[1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/technologies/optimus/
And does the mouse being a ps/2 input vs USB make a difference?
This would be one way in which the Rust crowd could really make a difference.
On the developer side, documentation was also amazing. There are tens of full, working example applications. BB10 used QT behind the scenes (Cascades UI). It had also a Python (2.x) binary on the device among other typical UNIX programs.
[0]: https://developer.blackberry.com/devzone/files/design/bb10/i...
[1]: https://developer.blackberry.com/devzone/design/bb10/10_3_vi...
[2]: https://developer.blackberry.com/devzone/design/bb10/keyboar...
The BB10 UI was built on something like QML (the language and runtime) from Qt 4 with their own UI elements and an OpenGL based backend from the acquired company The Astonishing Tribe. They had animations e.g. for slider switches running in the render thread, perfect 60 fps. Qt Quick (the UI framework based on QML, colloquially called "QML") only got an OpenGL backend in Qt 5.
Another very good Qt-based phone OS (after the Nokia N9, got one of these at a conference as well) that failed :(
By the way, the Ford Sync 3 IVI ("in-vehicle infotainment system") is also based on QNX and Qt and it received fairly good reviews. I think I made some tiny contribution to it, if only helping a coworker with something.
The difference used to be very noticeable. Nowadays my PC doesn't have a PS/2 port.
- USB works by polling for changes at fixed intervals
- ps/2 works with interrupts, so the OS will know immediately when hw does something.
A kid who asks you 1000 times a second whether you are there yet is going to know within 1ms of when you get there, but I imagine we’d all like being the driver much more if there were no “are we there yet”s and all the kid needed was one “We’re here” exactly when you arrive.
That all being true, having a publish/subscribe model is still not the same as having a true interrupt (and I’d have to do some digging to figure out whether there wasn’t still polling somewhere in the pub/sub pipeline)
The difference is real time control of stepper motors with crazy speeds when microstepping at 300K steps / second or more interpolating across 5 axis vs moving them at a snails pace of maybe 10K steps / second (on really nice and otherwise idle hardware, miss a single step and your goose is cooked, now you have a cumulative error).
This intuitively makes sense especially with SSDs and especially with NVMe SSDs: you're not going to have to wait that long, especially compared to the overhead of an interrupt. Also, if you're reading sequentially, once you get one I/O completion you're going to get a lot more in a short timeframe—it makes sense to just poll for those instead of handling every one as an interrupt. Interrupts are pretty expensive (I honestly don't have a good grasp of how Linux interrupt handling works but it can easily be on the order of microseconds.)
It also has some side benefits like preventing the CPU from going into a lower power state for only a short period of time.
If it’s possible to interrupt on a serial port, are there existing examples of how to configure a mouse or keyboard to interrupt over a serial port?
Typically a serial port would contain a small buffer which would fill up, upon completion of the first byte an interrupt would be generated and you'd respond to that and read out the register freeing up room for more bytes to be received. Transmit the same but reversed, as soon as a byte had left the shifter in the chip it would generate an interrupt so you could re-use that space for more bytes to send.
This works quite well. Hardware flow control can help in case the OS doesn't respond fast enough to the interrupts, so you don't lose characters.
(And a real-time scheduler isn't enough by itself, the many layers of architecture around handling input events can still be bad even if you're meeting every deadline there.)
Which one?
"""In an interactive software application, any user action SHOULD result in a noticeable change within 16ms, actionable information within 32ms, and at least one full screen of content within 64ms."""
click About - Not Found
to be fair, the empty white not found page did open probably under 64ms...
</subjective_opinion>
Please expand on your reasoning here. Maybe hard realtime is optimal for a kiosk or appliance, but a general purpose OS treating "user input" as a hard interrupt seems problematic. I see merit in your position if we had a sub-category of "interactive OS" for general purpose end-user devices.
Is Fuchsia hard real time?
edit: looks like Fuchsia is based on the Wikipedia Overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia#Overview
If the processor is rendering a frame and a network packet comes in, now it needs to respond to the network first, and render the frame after processing the packet. That is a very simplified example on one processor, but there are trade-offs depending on workload/inputs/context-switching is what I'm saying, and measuring latency is step one in trying to optimize for it.
The human is still faster than the computer!
Sounds interesting enough to try. Which operating system is this ?
People put up with slow responses today because many programmers are simply unaware that instantaneous response architectures are possible.
Was this a QNX variant?
I'm wondering how you'd rate iOS, especiallly with the ProMotion displays on the iPad Pro. Do they come close in terms of responsiveness?
They have a lot of popular models and super in depth reviews.
Related, "Your mouse is a terrible webcam", 2014: https://hackaday.com/2014/01/14/your-mouse-is-a-terrible-web...
The latency in the hardware before the signal makes it to the usb (for most keyboards, even specialised gaming keyboards this is like 30ms, which is 2 frames).
There is also the latency from when the monitor gets a signal to when the pixels have perceptually finished transitioning. This can be 10s of ms too.
So even if the OS has 0 latency, and the monitor measures that, you could still easily observe a latency of say 60ms.
The video mentions that they get 15 ms end-to-end latency on a 360 Hz monitor in Fortnite. So that's what it takes for a modern system to finally beat the latency that you used to get on, say, an NES connected to a CRT. Still an order of magnitude above the limits of perception though [2].
I often wonder at what cost, could we get it down to Sub Ms. Where everything from Input, Video and Audio are sync to the precision of 1ms. There used to be very little incentive to do so. Now that Gaming has taken over I hope it will develop some market perception and value so we could finally move into that direction.
The age of Instantaneous Computing.
Worth noting that unlike some of the other sources being discussed, this source of latency is more due to physical constraints than bad engineering or bloated software. Keyboards are limited by the physical travel time & de-bounce of the mechanical switches themselves.
So this is more a tradeoff of using mechanical keyboards at all rather than "gah bloated electron" or whatever.
The other common peripheral, mice, don't have this mechanical constraint. They can even achieve sub-10ms for clicks due to the difference in switch expectations ( https://www.rtings.com/mouse/tests/control/latency )
EDIT: Also 30+ms seems to be quite far off. Cherry MX's specs are around 5ms, and I'm getting 8ms playing around with this tool: http://blog.seethis.link/scan-rate-estimator/
I mean, yes but not really? There's very real speed limits to the human finger, after all.
But the times given above are also quite far off - the actual keyboard numbers seem to be more in the 5-15ms range, not 30+ms. At least, my mechanical gaming keyboard is hitting 8ms on this test: http://blog.seethis.link/scan-rate-estimator/
If you only have to worry about false deactivation and there's no line noise, and your keys always stay down long enough to be caught by your scan interval (or they trigger an interrupt), then probably yes. If you have to worry about false activation, then probably no.
You certainly don't want to low-pass filter the whole thing, or otherwise wait for the contact to settle before reporting the keystroke or mouse click.
In general, you can make a denouncer with zero latency: the receiver still triggers on the first logic change for idle to active, but then gates any further changes for a while.
(At least, that’s how I design all my debouncers.)
There may be aspects that are specific to a matrix keyboard configuration that prevent this...
It seemed a reasonable number for a goodish keyboard on that list
An interesting set of numbers, but doesn't tell you all that much about the hardware quality itself. The actuation point and travel distance of mechanical switches is itself an endless source of user opinions & discussions.
Yes. The industry has been optimising for throughput in the past decades. It is time to bring latency back to the table. I want super low latency Computing. Street Fighter or The King of Fighters in CRT Arcade Era just felt so much more responsive.
(Melee on a CRT has 3 frames of input lag)
They should start measuring the time it takes for monitors to recognize the signal when you press the "Source" button.
Even on recent monitors, it's often 5 seconds or more.
Basically, the device has to sweep through several different EQ settings until it achieves the combination with the best signal eye.
You'd think this would be lightning fast, but as it turns out, this is often handled in firmware (with hardware support for measuring the eye). I've seen this process take upwards of two seconds.
A lot of these displays probably only have one RX core, so it's not like it can remain locked to all inputs at the same time.
My day job is primarily ML as well, so I might just go for the 3090. 24 GB of memory is a game changer for what I can do locally. I really just wish Nvidia would get its shit together with Linux drivers. Ubuntu has done some great work making things easier and just work, but having them directly in the kernel would be so much nicer.
One thing I'm curious about is the RTX IO feature. The slide said it supports DirectStorage for Windows, but is there an equivalent to this for Linux? I'm hoping someone with a little more insight or an Nvidia employee may have some more information.
> 10496 CUDA cores
Not quite. 5248 cores, each supporting double fp32.
And 10496 for 3090.
Seems it is half the cores but double the fp instructions.
The spec talks cuda cores which is their inventive unit of measure.
But i must say 3070 is really tempting for $500 for someone who is not looking to upgrade.
At the end of the day it doesn't really matter, you're paying a FE premium for early access mostly.
On the plus side, this time the FE card might have a top tier cooling solution, which is why I'll probably be caving to their FE tax (and probably plenty of others, focusing on cooling was a smart move)
In this case, it means they're reserving the best chips for the founders cards. In other cases, there have been instances where a company has two products, a high end and a low end (or medium, etc). In some of those cases, people have investigated and the chips are actually exactly the same, but the lower end product will have a core disabled or similar, depending on the exact product. That'll happen a lot of the time when the company has yield issues where too many of the chips don't have acceptable performance or one part of the chip is just broken. They'll disable the broken portion and boom, the lower end product is born. That's still a net win for them because the alternate is either to throw the entire thing away or spend more time improving the yield.
Any temps below 80C at load are perfectly safe and shouldn't result in throttling -- the same is true for CPUs. If you aim for lower temps than 80C, you aren't going to get better performance, although lower temps are a good way to get your computer to run more quietly.
You're not directly going to get better performance, but you can run higher clocks for longer before throttling, leading to higher performance.
Up to now, OEM/AIC/AIB cards had quieter cooling systems, but they also make you pay for the silly graphics, the RGB, etc. I don't think the overclocking ability is really that much better. A quiet reference design with a non-blower cooler and a good warranty is what I've always wanted.
My last gaming computer took me 9 years along with only an SSD addition, RAM upgrade, and video card change halfway through. It was only Microsoft Flight Simulator that made me jump up and damn... my timing was a just a little too early on the beefy video card.
Me too, but for a different reason: I wonder if it can work with BitLocker if you're using software encryption (as hardware encryption is transparent enough that the drive basically locks and unlocks).
It would still save the CPU cost of decompression but it'd have to go through RAM for (AES-NI accelerated) CPU decryption either way. Maybe at that point RAM speed and latencies start to matter more. Or the feature turns off altogether. Definitely something to test.
Like I said, I'm cautiously optimistic and I'm also lucky enough that losing out on my $100 deposit isn't a financial issue for me.
In addition to that they seem to have some issues with their firmware trampling over its own memory, causing glitch artifacts and such. I suspect they'll fix that through a firmware update.
This has been my experience. Ubuntu "just works". What would get better with what you propose? (speaking from ignorance)
(Nvidia cards have two drivers on Linux, nouveau, the open-source, slow, and incompatible-with-Quadro ones, and NV, the binary blob shipped by Nvidia that people take religious exception to.)
The other key benefit would be driver management. Updating your drivers right now can be a nightmare. If the drivers are open sourced and upstreamed into the kernel this becomes a non-issue. I do understand why Nvidia doesn't want to do that though. A lot of their lead right now is not just hardware based, but software based. They have a choke-hold on the ML ecosystem and it's a huge cash cow for them. Giving away that secret sauce in their drivers, so that AMD could make their cards seamlessly compatible would probably be a huge mistake from a business perspective for Nvidia.
I've seen this argument a lot but never from the ML perspective - and I don't think it makes sense with ML.
Nivida's advantage is ML is CUDA and cuDNN, and the huge set of tools built on them. These aren't the driver, but a layer above it.
I don't really understand the "secret sauce" argument for the drivers at all, but I assumed it applied to gaming somehow. I can't think of how it applies to ML though.
Intel and AMD despite their FOSS support, actually only do open what they feel like.
What is your ML dev environment like?
This has always confused me. They are pushing ML hard, yet we often use Linux for that kind of work. And these cards are the ones expected to be used in universities and home labs. Linux drivers that "just work" would be a big push forward to really show that they are trying to push for ML development.
IF you are using a server with a DE then it answers the question about how yes it does affect you because you are using a DE.
In either case, it isn't "just for gaming"
I don't doubt that they work for you, but not everyone is so lucky. I have encountered serious reliability issues with their drivers.
I tried to get Ubuntu/Pop_OS! 20.04 running on a dual-GPU laptop that has an RTX-2060 and AMD Renoir integrated. Had to modify kernel boot params to disable nouveau modeset and then run script for mainline kernel upgrade + drivers to get it to run. Was not a fun Saturday =/
But prior to this, yeah Nvidia non-open source drivers have mostly "just worked" for me on the older models.
On Acer Nitro 5 with Nvidia GTX-1060Ti and i5, stock Ubuntu 20.04 loaded no problems, and even DisplayLink driver for dual monitor, one through regular HDMI + other through USB -> HDMI adapter worked (though I couldn't get it to rotate display vertically).
The bugs I did have were with it constantly re-disovering network printers that I had to disable, and changing the default wifi power-saving settings because something was funky with it.
On Asus TUF A15 with Nvidia RTX-2060/AMD Renoir + AMD Ryzen 7 4800h absolutely no distro worked out-of-the-box and I needed mainline kernel + latest Nvidia drivers. But after fixing that myself Pop_OS picks up everything perfectly and no problems.
Both of them have CUDA working IIRC (at least running "nvidia-smi" says it does).
I have heard great things about Pop and I am going to be building a new machine with these new cards and giving pop a try.
Honestly, to me that's not a big sell lol. And probably not to the type of people that like distros like Arch. We just want nivida to work like AMD and mesa drivers do. (Having done some testing, I am able to squeeze more performance out of a distro that builds up, such as Arch, vs a distro that you take down, like Ubuntu).
Not sure how easy it is to actually game on it though, haven't tried yet. For everything else however, Manjaro is an extremely solid choice, with a very recent kernel too.
Seems unnecessary to have dual-GPUs, and crazy to have both Nvidia and AMD in the one laptop.
It's probably beter nowadays, but I will never consider it again.
That's asking for trouble with driver issues.
As good as the performance of mobile GPUs is these days, they still suck up a lot of power. I don't think you'll get much work done on the go with a laptop that only has a dedicated AMD/Nvidia GPU.
I mean, the constraints of a laptop and a desktop are as different as that of a car and a plane.
Laptops with dual-GPUs are as efficient as both as those car-plane convertibles.
Nvidia works if you add their repo and install the blobs, maybe. If your distro is mainstream enough.
- Ubuntu 18 I had hit or miss with the hdmi connection on my laptop (1060Q). 20% of the time it would work if I plugged it in. 50% of the time it would work if I had it plugged in and rebooted. This makes giving presentations difficult.
- Arch/Manjaro/Fedora/Ubuntu 16 I could never get the hdmi connection working for a laptop.
- All distros, difficulty getting cuda running AND using the display. Intel drivers for display + nvidia for cuda works, but this means I can't use my GPU when I want to do some of the limited linux gaming.
Laptops seem to have more problems than desktops. On desktops I have many more hits than misses (if I have the graphics card installed when I install the OS). Laptops have just been terrible.
Most of the people driving server gpu purchases are used to sucking it up and doing their work over ssh, instead of locally.
What's more surprising is that ATI doesn't take this opening.
https://hackaday.com/2013/03/18/hack-removes-firmware-crippl...
When I install them myself by running the scripts that nvidia gives you, I've never had a problem with the drivers. I've always suspected that was the problem, the way the distro's package the drivers, rather than being a problem with the drivers themselves.
I don't have too many problems now, but just recently I ran into trouble with any application that used OpenGL not working, and it went away when I rebooted.
In general I'd say they've done an okay job, but still I've seen enough bugs to say they have room for improvement.
I don't know how many of those bugs are Nvidia's fault explicitly; Linux is a bit of a wild west when it comes to software configuration, and they can't test everything or fix every buggy application.
This is real frustrating when I want to play older games that only support 4:3 and 5:4 resolutions, because I have to knock them all the way down to 1024x768.
There's a roundabout way to manually add custom resolutions, but I've never gotten it to work with X. Maybe it would play nicer with Wayland, if Nvidia made any real effort to actually support it.
i'm using google chrome, vscode insiders and alacritty and vlc, and that's pretty much it, with very little problems, after i boot into wayland and launch chrome i get some stuttering on the shadows which goes away after a couple of seconds, but that's pretty much the only hassle
I've just switched to manjaro kde and I'm having a blast using it every day for work, any tips on the nvidia drivers is appreciated. I have managed to brick my distro a few times trying to get it set up (and by brick, I mean getting it into a state that I can't figure out how to recover it from).
Looking forward to some benchmarks that evaluate the difference between PCIe 3.0 and 4.0. Getting a new motherboard with PCIe 4.0 along with a CPU will up the cost considerably, so hopefully that can be avoided.
Also considering an upgrade to the Corsair RM1000x PSU which should be able to be totally silent even with the RTX 3080 according to https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/7376/corsair-rm1000x-1000w....
UPDATE:
According to this answer, using PCIe 3.0 should not make a huge difference: https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/iko4u7/geforce_rtx_...
This assumes, of course, that the PCIe lanes in question actually exist† and are dedicated to the card, and are not shared with another in-use device via a switch or similar chipset shenanigans.
Case in point: the only time I ever had performance problems with my eGPU setup was when attempting to do 4K HDMI output through a Blackmagic Decklink card while simultaneously using the 1070Ti for compute over the same (shared) Thunderbolt bus in DaVinci Resolve.
As far as I know, this would not typically be a problem with a single-GPU, non-Thunderbolt-connected desktop system, as desktop motherboards typically have at least one full-bandwidth x16 slot, which you'd almost always use for the GPU.
† Physical x16 slots can have fewer than sixteen connected PCIe lanes. For example, while my HP Z820 has four "x16" slots, only three have full bandwidth; the fourth slot supports x16 cards, but only at the speed of an x8 slot, because only eight of the slot's sixteen PCIe lanes are actually connected.
If you have a spare core not being used when playing a video game, it can be used which should make the difference between 3.0 and 4.0 somewhat indistinguishable.
There are also some sites that explains why large capacity power suppliers are a waste of money. Ex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_wtoCBahhM
About the PSU, for me the only reason to go with a 1000W PSU is that the fan will remain quiet with a GTX 1080 when idle and gaming as well. At least thats what I hope.
If the same is possible with the 3080 is more questionable, especially if the card draws 320W at all times.
PSU efficiency is low at the ends of the curve, underutilized (<20%) the efficiency can drop as low as 70%. The top (not peak) efficiency is somewhere in the 30-80% load zone, that is where you want to be.
Based on that info and that the system will draw about 430W for CPU+GPU, it seems that the fanless Seasonic TX-700 is better suited.
It is quite expensive, but as someone who really hate unnecessary noise, it looks like a good choice.
Changing all the existing cables to a new PSU sucks though :p
That's something I've never had a problem with when it comes to NV. And I've been using their cards for years for combined compute/display purposes.
a little confused here, I see Dell offering machines with cards up to 48 GB, so 24 GB seems quite nice, but not game changing.
You can buy two of the 3090’s for almost half the price of the Quadro and have 4x the processing power.
EDIT: looks like I'm not fully correct here - nvidia changed how they measure cores: https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/ikok1b/explaining...
Still great for the price, but not double the power necessarily.
Do they round-off 32-bit floats at 24-bits or something?
I haven't been able to find any real technical details about what DirectStorage really is, but my expectations are that it will consist of:
1. An asynchronous IO API allowing for low-overhead submission of IO requests from the application to the kernel, including batch submissions and reaping of completion events.
2. Some provision for transparent compression offload, either to the GPU or to a CPU-based fallback
3. Optional support for peer-to-peer DMA transfers of data from SSD to the GPU's VRAM
Linux is already the gold standard for (1) with the relatively recent io_uring API, and has support for (3) to some extent (P2P DMA has been a fairly obscure feature until recently).
There are still some pretty big unanswered questions about DirectStorage. How well will it reduce the IO overhead that currently allows antivirus and other programs to hook into the IO stack? Will it be compatible with non-Microsoft NVMe drivers, including Intel's RST drivers that are commonly used for their software RAID? Microsoft doesn't seem to want to make that kind of information public this year.
Essentially, it's about streaming game textures directly into the GPU memory.
The idea is that this is highly asynchronous and parallel from the perspective of the CPU, so trying to do this through the "main game loop" would be an absolute nightmare to code at the scale we're talking about here. Think 50K IOPS sustained at 8GB/s with pretty hard real time guarantees.
Windows NT 3.5 (1994) would beg to differ with its support for IO completion ports (IOCP). I think io_uring is more general and more flexible for the sort of M:N scheduling systems now commonly used in programming languages, but IOCP predates io_uring by 25 years!
The rest of your comment sounds right to me, there are unanswered questions about how DirectStorage interacts with filesystem filter drivers.
io_uring does have a more ergonomic and POSIX API, but that's because it's on Linux! Fundamentally they're both completion port based replacements to polling for IO events and they're both capable of high throughput and horizontal scaling.
Personally, looking at the RTX 3070, for 1440p, but I'm not doing anything other than some casual gaming.
Kind of works in kernel, update breaks it, switch distros to supported distro, load official driver package, update breaks it... switch to beta/bleeding kernel, graphics work, but kvm/virtualbox completely borked. I may do a clean install with PopOS 20.10 when it drops, which should be well supported in kernel and get virtualization support back in the box.
Since January it's been pretty stable, I've been on the beta kernel releases though.. when say 20.10 ubuntu and derivatives drop, should be using a kernel that's stable for the 5700xt.
I've been working more on my Windows drive, using WSL2 + Docker Desktop (wsl2 option) for the past few months though, which I've been surprisingly happy with.
I'd also love to read a guide about WSL2 + Docker.
If you install docker desktop with WSL2 installed, there's a configuration setting to "use wsl2" it may still be labelled beta as a feature. But it does work better.
I'm using the new Windows Terminal, and my default is set to WSL2 Ubuntu... for all intent and purpose, I launch VS Code from a wsl2 prompt/directory and it's connected into "linux" ... my terminal and code terminal/directory are in linux, and I use it like any linux distro from that pov. The desktop is windows, but almost everything I work in is via Linux under WSL2.
You might be better off waiting for Quadro.
GeForce, from NVIDIA's perspective, is the consumer line. The drivers are focused on getting the best possible performance for gamers (on Windows you'll see a big deal made of "Game-ready" drivers) and the hardware is intended for desktop usage, i.e. a couple of hours of gaming. GeForce hardware isn't intended for long-running jobs like ML and the drivers aren't stability-focused.
That's not to say that you can't train ML models on a GeForce card or that the GeForce drivers will lead to constant crashing or anything, just that NVIDIA isn't focused on this for GeForce.
Quadro and Tesla on the other hand are all about reliability. They're intended for use in servers and workstations where they're subject to all-day (Quadro) or 24/7 (Tesla) load. The drivers are focused on making sure things don't break.
Though I think the 3090 is intended to be the successor to the previous-generation Titan, so it could be that NVIDIA has different ideas about what goes where these days.
You are more or less buying into their marketing, and paying 100-250% price premiums for a "Quadro" or "Tesla".
Tons of people have been flooring previous generation of cards 24/7 for months with compute workloads, and not nearly all of them were using watercooling. Those cards are still fine.
ECC memory might be an argument though, for CAD/CAE type of work. Doubt ML cares about a few bitflips.
[1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/rtx-30-series-av1-...
> Makes me wonder - what are we "not" seeing right now that will make us think this way 10-20 years from now?
Yes - well said. That's what I was trying to convey in my comment.
Then there’s the more obvious stuff that isn’t done well even today: skeletal animation is still lacking and feels unnatural, physics systems are still very approximate and constrained - often times most things are indestructible in games, fluid dynamics are still very slow/limited. Human models still don’t look real though, and the voice acting never quite matches the mouth movement or body language.
I do really feel like we’ve crossed the uncanny valley when it comes to natural scenery rendering. But a lot of what makes things feel real are still missing from games.
It's very cool tech. But it doesn't look real.
Take a look at The Mandalorian series, almost all of the outdoor scenes were shot using the video wall technology.
I've worked in computer graphics and I didn't realise the sets were fake until after I finished the whole series.
http://www.retroadv.it/images/03082019/Home_Computer_Magazin...
It was so noticeable because it was such a huge increase in quality compared to what passed for water in games before - usually some kind of blue-grey translucent texture. For the first time, pixel shaders produced water that was clearly an attempt to imitate water IRL, not the cartoonish representation of it.
Apart from graphics most stuff in games is pretty rough. Animations are generally bad and ways before reaching the uncanny valley of "getting close"; they're still in the "abstract representation of concept" detail level. AI is dumb (largely for [perceived] player-acceptance reasons). Sound is generally poor; some games still don't use 3D sound. Physics are "abstract representation" level again, some games still have fly-through walls and vibrating items. etc. etc.
For example, I can clearly see that ray tracing produces better results. But it's a bit harder to tell how better it is, to find the words that describes how better it is. Of course, one can say that, for example, photon tracing is more physically accurate. But still, what words can we use to describe how real (or not real) a still image is ("more realistic" doesn't count :-))
But also, the design often adapts to the capabilities. Games like GTA3 used to have thick fog just to hide the fact that they couldn't render stuff far away in time. You can say that's an artistic choice to give a smoggy big city atmosphere, but clearly it was a practical choice as well. Even today, game designers like to make things dark, blurry and rainy, so that the un-realism becomes less obvious.
The rest, not so much, sure.
It’s basically using the same technique as hand drawn animation where as long as you realize what’s being represented you can automatically fill in missing details. However, this fails as soon as you focus on any one detail.
Honestly, it’s not bad for what it is. I mean the physics engine was probably the worst part, but as a visual demo that’s fine.
This hasn't changed. New "realistic" games still range from horrible to boring-looking. I don't know if it's collective delusion or if I'm missing something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isvWpUXgKgM
Take this as a compliment, not a criticism when I say you've rigged your proposition by holding up Nintendo first party games, and Shigeru Miyamoto for comparison. If you were to look back at he average Nintendo game, not made by Nintendo, they are mostly unremarkable.
Which is something really obvious with the PS5 UE 5 tech demo [0]. The environment looks great and very realistic, while the character is very stylized and looks more like a comic than realistic.
ML creative tools stand to automate a lot of this imo.
[1] random example: https://snapperstech.com/
Why not? With procedural generation and LOD rendering it's not impossible. Not that it's easy, but not impossible?
Also, some games are intentionally cartoonish as an artistic choice so photorealism isn't always the goal.
We've probably reached the point where human cost exceeds computational cost, which is to say that developing and QA testing such a feature would probably cost more money than it's worth. How many users of software would gain from such minutiae?
Sounds like a fun project for the next generations. Something to play when I am older.
Now suppose I want to take some fruit from the trees. And I want to slice and dice the different fruits. Peeling the skins when appropriate.
Or I want to plant a new tree. Or I want to remove it, with say, a lightsaber.
That's a couple generators more. Now add birds, dogs, insects, moss, moist surfaces, and so on. Hence, my point on needing several generators.
There are lots of things to be improved in games, but what you're describing are improvements to a real life simulation.
We are getting better. Like snow deformation in RDR2, for instance(works even in a PS4).
But random bits of debris that can get kicked around - and subsequently inspected - no. That's a problem.
> No video game will let you inspect the leaves of plants to look for little bugs, the way reality will
That's an easier problem than tracking all the debris. Before you inspect, you have no idea what will be there - the computer also doesn't have to and it can be optimized away until there's an observer.
Think heisenberg uncertainty principle but for virtual worlds.
You could implement little bugs without all that much trouble, true. Maybe a better way for me to think about it is more like, the real world has an incredible diversity of appearances at a small scale, that's hard to reproduce in a video game. The bug isn't the part that causes trouble, it's the fact that every leaf looks different, some leaves are oddly discolored, some leaves have bug bites on them, some got a little torn up, et cetera.
How about ray tracing?. If we get real-time 60fps+ ray-traced computer graphics in games, that would blow what we have now out of the water
- Hair. Up until very recently hair was downright awful. Nowadays it’s acceptable-ish, but there’s still lots of room for improvement, in particular in natural motion of long hair.
- Water. I spend a big chunk of my time on the water, so I’m probably more attuned to how it moves than most. Games just don’t have it down. In particular, I think a lot could be gained by embracing it’s fractal nature: in my experience, at every human scale (mm to dam and everything in between) very similar wave patterns exist, but games tend to have just a small fixed number of “wave-layers” at various scales stacked together.
- Clouds. I can easily spend hours just observing clouds, looking at things like their shape, overall motion, internal motion, composition, edge behaviors, etc, and how they change over time. Game clouds are lacking in all these regards, particularly the time-sensitive nature of a cloud.
- Foliage. In games I’ve seen, individual plants/etc. in isolation generally look really quite decent. But the second an physical object interacts with them, they very clearly don’t respond in the right ways. There’s a lot about how branches bend and leaves rustle and more that is lost. Additionally, in groups of plants it’s often clear that some small number of models are being reused, possibly with some generated randomness added. But the variety doesn’t come close to matching what one would really see.
- Human faces and expressions. These are generally really bad, especially in normal gameplay (cut-scenes are sometimes better)
Again, this is probably all just really weird stuff I notice because I spend the vast majority of my time outdoors and only see “HiFi” games being played very infrequently. I don’t think games are worse for not implementing these, but I am very interested in what they’ll look like 10-20 years down the road.
What I think will be a huge boost is proper raytracing. You can see animated movies and blender renders look stunning but they take minutes per frame.
Foliage seems like something that will be difficult to get realistic for any close inspect, at least from a layperson's point of view.
My vote would be cloth simulation and clothing clipping. I've yet to see a game that comes even close to doing this realistically. Imagine what happens to your sleeves when you lift your arms above your head for example, or how the plates of a suit of armor naturally slide over each other. In every game I can think of, clothing is rigidly attached to the underlying skeleton and it just stretches/clips as the character moves.
I guess fidelity of everything else has gotten much better, because I recently started noticing this and now I find it very distracting in any game that has in-engine cut scenes involving character closeups.
One interesting point of reference is the initial switch to HD in the 2000s; I remember there was a bit of panic in the beginning because news studios had to adjust studio lighting and makeup; flaws that were not perceptible on a CRT were all of a sudden extremely noticeable blown up on a 48" flatscreen.
Nowadays people open up koi pond videos on phones and let their cats play with it. But like you mentioned, it would be interesting to see a study on it.
Occasionally things will be slightly out of focus, but it wasn’t apparent on a SD CRT so they shot the scene. On an HD screen you can see it and it’s kind of distracting.
My point is: CRT did show a lot more colours, had much lower latency, and did not have a grid where you could see individual pixels.
No colour banding, no lag and no screen door effect. That really enhanced the content you saw when you had a CRT.
During that era, 640x480 video was the common high end.
Higher resolution, better color replication, and frame rate make very obvious the fact that there seems to be a magical glowing orb following around the characters right behind the camera. Immersion breaking because you can get away with it with less quality, it's more difficult to notice.
Something that I've also found more and more irritating is the foley artists doing ridiculous things for sound effects, especially in nature documentaries, but all over the place really.
ex: Farscape - all the CG was rendered in low res, so even when you view a 1080p copy it looks silly. Imagine all the content that would have to be re-done and upscaled to make it watchable in 4k.
When people are saying something is photo-realistic, they aren’t comparing to reality, they’re comparing to photos or videos as viewed on the same display.
By some metrics, even extremely expensive modern hardware is very far from reality. Pretty much all games show Sun occasionally, to reproduce same luminosity at 1m distance you need kilowatts of light (assuming 180 degree viewing angle; the surface of 1m half sphere is about 2 m^2 and the flux of visible spectrum is about 550w/m^2), these levels are simply unsafe for home use. For example, such display is going to ignite or at least melt a keyboard if it’s too close.
Similar for dynamic range. Reality has extreme dynamic ranges, i.e. both very light and very dark areas on the same scene.
At least modern hardware generally delivers realistic resolutions, and color accuracy.
I don't know, look at some flowers... most screens can't show their colors. Stuff like the intense, super-saturated reds and purples are basically impossible to get right in sRGB, with very obvious artefacts, yet in real life there are no artefacts, there is texture, detail and color, where the picture only has a smear of four different reds. P-3 and Rec.2020 might reduce the issues there, as would 10 bit color.
I agree, but professional monitors are close to Adobe RGB, and have been for decades. Adobe RGB is close to DCI-P3, and not much worse than BT.2020.
P.S. Doesn’t help with red/purple though, Adobe RGB extends sRGB mostly in green direction.
My naive questions.
I thought Rec.2020 was already insanely good? I am reading this as it meant Rec.2020 is good, but far from perfect ?
I had opportunity to test Varjo VR-2 Pro ($5,995.00) https://store.varjo.com/varjo-vr-2-pro and now all consumer VR products feel like total crap.
Graphics — even movie quality graphics — don’t look anything like what a camera produces. The sole exception is when you’re mixing in real video with CG elements. But try to synthesize an entire frame from scratch, then put it next to a video camera’s output, and people can tell the difference.
Also, screenshots are misleading. You have to test video, not screencaps. Video is processed differently by the brain.
10 out of 10 times, all the graphics engineers come out of the woodwork going “but actually we do know how! It’s a matter of using so and so calculations and measuring BDRF and” none of those equations work.
Plop a nature video next to your forest rendering and it’ll become apparent just how unsolved trees are. And everything else, for that matter.
The precise claim is this: viewers should be able to identify a rendered video no better than random chance. If you conduct this experiment, you’ll see that real videos from actual video cameras wipe the floor.
To be fair: have you run such an experiment yourself, or are you just assuming that this conclusion will always result?
(But note this is only replicating video, not reality. Truly realistic motion blur requires ultra-high displayed frame rates beyond the capabilities of current hardware.)
If you're driving at 200 mph, and there's a car next to you also going 200 mph, it shouldn't be blurry.
Also, the length of the blur should not exceed the distance an object travels on your screen in 1 frame. In other words, if an object moves 30 pixels from one frame to the next, then the blurred image shouldn't be more than 30 pixels wide.
What CG videos are you considering, what specifically have you looked at? Can you show some good faith examples of the best CG forests ever made, compared to some specific nature videos? Are you talking about attempts to match a nature video, and saying it's not possible regardless of what's in the shot?
Are you looking at the best examples of CG forests lately? There are some CG full frame video examples of forests I don't believe people would reliably identify as CG, if they didn't know before hand and you left out the explosions & spaceships.
The problem is that we can't do that in 1/60 second on consumer-priced hardware, and also both scanning real objects and manually modelling are expensive.
If you think the answer is obvious, then CGI definitely has more work to do. If not ... ??
If this is CGI, then I'm impressed and want to see more from where this came from.
Agreed with you that I'd be super impressed if anyone could render at that quality, but I haven't seen it yet.
But in the full version[0], it's clearly a photo. But it has been HDR'd which can sometimes create shading that gives a somewhat rendered look.
(Although, maybe you could argue that if the challenge is to make photorealistic renders rather than realistic renders, nailing the camera artifacts is part of the challenge.)
The point is, currently it only works for simple scenes and needs tons of manual work otherwise. Reality is realistic effortlessly.
"The Dress" illustrates how easy it is to fool people with still images. Movement gives crucial context. Our visual system has evolved for millions of years specifically to exploit that context.
That were capable of getting pretty close isn't that surprising, because most photos have already had N layers of digital effects applied, moving them closer to renders, rather than the other way around.
Making graphics that look real is almost equivalent to the Turing Test, I think plenty of people are willing to acknowledge that it's unsolved.
Amusingly relevant yet slightly off-topic: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/357
The reverse-problem is a pet-peeve of mine: It seems many people have been accidentally brainwashed by Hollywood into thinking that film-camera effects are signs of "realism."
So then the first-person game introduces something like lens-flares, and everyone goes: "OMG it's so realistic now", even though the truth is the exact opposite. If you were "really there" as Hero Protagonist, you wouldn't have camera-lenses for eyeballs except in a cyber-punk genre.
> we do not understand how to make graphics look real > none of those equations work
Why do you claim this, and what do you mean exactly? Surely you aren’t claiming we can’t make any graphics look real at all. Some people are getting pretty good at understanding how to make some graphics look real, even if we aren’t. The math for approximating materials and lighting is getting pretty good these days, and the equations have been changing over time. It’ll continue to improve, but it’s certainly not the main thing holding CG back today. IMO less realistic CG comes much more from low resolution or low fidelity sampling / geometry / textures / animation / input data in general. Most of that is due to lack of time & money.
I’d say we understand how to make graphics look real in many cases, but not in all cases. We understand how to make good looking graphics, but how to do it quickly and efficiently enough to be practical and done with limited time and effort is an open problem.
I remember as a kid my younger sister watching cartoons and realising she couldn’t tell the difference between them and live action.
I think as graphics get more complex our ability to distinguish increases. But we’ll probably hit a limit in our ability to keep up sooner or later.
Imagination. Same as the people who grew up with the original Atari and Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64.
Sadly, now when I look at a DVD, it's unbearably blurry.
I suppose part of that is that we're now viewing on a much larger/higher resolution screen.
Then down the road came 3dfx with Voodoo and that to me was the next great leap forward. Each iteration has been leading to ray tracing which is the next great leap.
Now just for screen tech to become as affordable as the cards that can drive them, the LG OLED we have is stunning but that is "just" 4K.
just for fun, the story of 3dfx voodoo https://fabiensanglard.net/3dfx_sst1/index.html
I remember playing Final Fantasy 9 entirely on an emulator and how much better it looked compared to a "Real" PlayStation.
* RTX 3080, 699$, 2x faster than RTX 2080
* RTX 3090 (Titan), 1500$, 1.5x faster than RTX Titan, 8k resolution @ 60 FPS with RTX on Control.
---
I hope that if somebody bought an RTX 2080 or similar in the last 2-4 weeks, that they bought it over Amazon, and can return it.
You likely meant something else; Titan can't be faster than Titan.
There is also a previous gen HPC "Titan V" with HBM memory, but AFAICT no Ampere Titan card with HBM2 was announced.
You can see this because the chip name is GA102, the 2 at the end indicates that this is a cut-down chip.
With one exception: the Titan V card that I mentioned which comes with the GV100 chip. But as I mentioned, that one targets a very different market segment with HBM memory, which the "RTX 3090" obviously doesn't target, since otherwise it would come with HBM2 memory like all the GA100 products.
>With one exception:
This is simply wrong. The majority of Titans have been full chips: Titan, Titan Z and Titan Black as well as the Titan V and Titan X.
The other Titans were about as fast as manufacturer-overclocked 80Ti models.
The naming is super confusing. The 100 versions are essentially HPC chips on a PCI-express board, while 10x are completely different products.
8N manufacturing process is presumably Samsung, which will probably be beat by TSMC 7nm.
I'm holding out for RDNA2.
> To that end, our engineers designed a much smaller PCB, shrank the NVLink and power connectors, and still managed to pack in 18-phases for improved power delivery. Don’t worry, we included an adapter that allows Founders Edition cards to work with users’ existing power supplies.
[1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/introducing-rtx-30...
Why would you keep a 1200$ RTX 2080 Ti or a 2500$ Titan when you can get at least the same perf for 50-75% of the price with the new products, and much better RTX perf ?
This assumes that with RTX off the new gen won't be slower than the old one, but I think that's a fair assumption, and if it isn't, you can always return the 30xx card in 2 weeks, and buy an used 2080 Ti or Titan on ebay for pennies, once the market overflows from people upgrading for the 30xx series.
People were still asking for 900$ for a used 2080 Ti on ebay this morning, and the 3080 700$ price just destroys that offer. Many owners are going to try and dump these cards for as much as they can get in the next two weeks. I wouldn't buy a used 2080 Ti for more than 250$ today. In one month, these cards are going to sell used for 100-200$. If AMD can only match the 2080 Ti perf, they are going to have a very hard time pricing against the used 2080 Ti market.
> And let's not forget the huge power draw, requiring a new power connector and a 3 slot cooler.
That's only for the 3090 IIUC. All other cards were announced as being actually much smaller than the 20xx series ones.
Do note that the 3080 is still 2 weeks away (17 sept), 3090 24 sept, 3070 in October.
I would consider getting a non-founders edition though, in the past other brands have had better/more silent cooling for pretty much identical pricing.
Edit: While the 3090 (350W) is the only one requiring a 3 slot cooler, all 3 use the new 12 pin power connector. The 3080 founder edition power draw is still 320W, vs 220W for the 2080.
That's not that difficult considering the RTX cards had terrible price/perf.
Certainly the market for them will take a beating compared to new prices now. But I can't imagine it collapsing like that purely based on the supply. How many people are really going to drop their 2080 just because a new thing is out there?
I'd love to be wrong, as an original 2070 owner ;)
Pretty much everyone who paid for a 2080 Ti on launch and always need to have the latests bestest thing.
Well for one, keeping a card you already bought is free, buying a new one costs money.
Why are you all getting so excited about the prices given in a paper launch? Wait until you can actually buy one at that price, which I'm guessing isn't going to be until well into 2021.
Also if find a 2080ti for 200 before the year 2022 let me know I'll buy you a beer.
They explicitly noted that it was Samsung.
[1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/introducing-rtx-30...
I still don't understand the raytracing craze when it comes to games. Years ago when I wrote my first raytracer I might have got excited about it. But we have advanced so much with rasterization that I don't really understand why this is something we need.
Raytracing complexity is tricky and it is likely to prove challenging to do in a game with consistent frame rates. Soft shadows are expensive even for hardware.
I would be more excited about some other global illumination improvements, like photon mapping.
"Need" is a strong word, but I'm sure someone will make a game where the shadows _matter_ for telling the story, or solving puzzles, or even just making the game world look more realistic and believable.
Or selling GFX cards..
RTX cards don't render everything with ray tracing. They use it for light calculations, for example it can be used exactly for global illumination.
> why this is something we need.
The answer is simple. Because there is a limit to how realistic we can make the lighting and shadowing using the old models. We are almost at that limit. Using ray tracing removes that limit.
> challenging to do in a game with consistent frame rates
Try Quake II RTX. It is very consistent right off the bat, and if you turn on the resolution scaling, you can get completely consistent framerates (within 2-3 fps continuously). While it might not be a game with the most advanced graphics, it does have variety of scenes, and there is no issue with the framerates being "inconsistent".
- Ray tracing only is not 200% but 195% in real world tests.
- In modern games like Tomb Raider the fps increase is between 165 and 180%, averaging 175%.
This is comparing the 2080 to 3080 playing real world games.
It looks pretty impressive.
Regarding the new power connector: All the partner cards showcased by Gamers Nexus have the regular two or three 8-pin connectors and the FE cards seem to include an adapter. Nvidia states that a 750W power supply is required, so depending on the CPU even a 650W should be fine.
Anyway, thank you AMD for the competition.
https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=GTX1070
https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=RTX2070
People are going to get a massive jump in performance for just $500. I don't think we've ever seen this before.
It looks pretty impressive.
If this pricing holds up though, I need to get a large NVDA position, because they'll sell at TON of 3090. I'll buy 8.
This is like the anime hero/villain (depending on your perspective) equivalent of fighting at half power.
They just couldn't get enough wafers. They tried to force TSMC to lower the prices and it backfired.
Some of the comments in this thread are about things people saw in the video (spatulas?), so keep that context in mind.
EDIT: I am an idiot. It does say it's faster, though the chart makes it look pretty close.
I think its wise to be skeptical until independant benchmarks are available but I would be surprised if this didn't end up being the biggest performance increase in Nvidia's history for a single generation, just like they say it is.
probably because of, oh I don't know, the text right next to the 3070 dot saying "faster than 2080 Ti"...
(and I'm really only speculating here)
It probably won't be like, night and day faster than a 2080 Ti of course, it's going to be the same bracket judging by the chart, but I'd expect it to usually edge out the 2080 Ti by a couple percent based on the text there.
But as a lighting nerd, I do want the raytracing...
So they have doubled in price since then? wtf?
https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007709%20601341487%20601341...
Still, less than $300 for this card has been a great bargain. I've since picked up a 1440p screen and it's happily chugging along. Been most of a year and they're still selling for substantially more than this.
Anyway, ain't no $200 RX 5700.
The launch prices were $350 for the 5700 and $400 for the 5700 XT (after the pre-release price drop response to Nvidia), so $260 was $90 under list price, or 25% off.
And really, even finding a GPU for list price instead of being marked up for mining ethereum (or whatever else) was a bit of a miracle compared to the last few years of GPU price insanity.
But the cost of a 2080ti was ridiculous especially considering the open secret of its impending obsolescence.
AMD really need to up their marketing budget. From the zeitgeist I've no idea where their lineup sits comparatively. No wonder they only have 20% market share
AMD got on top of Intel by creating hardware that delivers. Just a few years ago AMD CPUs were economical, but the performance was abysmal, especially in single-threaded applications by comparison. They didn't make a product for the high-end.
I am eagerly awaiting what the next series of AMD cards are going to be able to do. They're talking a big game for sure. But Nvidia has a big software advantage as well as a hardware advantage on AMD and that's likely to be a sticking point for me personally on my next purchase. Nvidia spends a lot of resources on working closely with developers and providing them support they need to take better advantage of the hardware with nvidia-specific features. AMD doesn't seem to do the same, and has had much higher profile issues with their drivers in my experience.
All that said, I hope AMD can provide a product to truly compete at the high-end with Nvidia, to hopefully drive prices down as GPU prices have gone up dramatically on the high end.
The main reason my 2012 build of a PC is holding up ok was PCIE 3.0 support, so for me PCIE 4.0 is a must. The only thing I ever upgraded was the GPU and HDD. Went from 670 -> 980 -> 2060 Super. The i7-3370k (OC to about 4.3Ghz) has held up ok. The 16GB DD3-1866Mhz is slow however. Switching from a 2TB 5200 RPM drive to a 2TB NVMe SSD (Samsung EVO 860) for which I had to get a riser card since the ASROCK z77 Extreme 4 doesn't have m.2 made a huge difference also. When I upgraded to the RTX 2060 Super I ran out of PCI 3.0 lanes, and as a result my SSD is running slower, but that's ok.
Suprisingly, I can play the new Microsoft Flight simulator just fine in 3440x1440 resolution on High Settings. Assassin's Creed Odyssey runs well in 1440p Ultra at ~60 FPS.
What I did find interesting is that it does seem like the $1499 on the slide could have been mistakenly shown. They didn't verbally announce it and other than that one second avoided talking about the price.
The 3080 TI will probably be out next year if they follow typical patterns and it will have slightly better gaming performance than the 3090 at a much lower price.
Since its a Titan model (for machine learning work, not for gamers), and the last gen "RTX Titan" costs 2500$ today, its actually a big jump, but in the opposite direction. Almost half the price...
Probably a better trade-off for gaming and worse for ML training.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/rtx-io-gpu-acceler...
It can't both bypass the CPU and have decompression unless it is decompression on the GPU. I'm not sure it is dedicated decompression hardware, or if it is using the normal GPU compute.
> Specifically, NVIDIA RTX IO brings GPU-based lossless decompression, allowing reads through DirectStorage to remain compressed while being delivered to the GPU for decompression.
Still not sure if it'll use fixed-function decompression units on the GPU or if it's just compute shaders, but it's decompressing on the GPU.
Not sure what their competition now in each vertical, but apparently they believe that they need a lower price point.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/30-serie...
Competition is great!
I very much assume Nvidia slices price, to not only compete but also crush the AMD GPU market. Nvidia's innovation is crazy huge, but they probably don't want to be in the same situation as Intel where people regard the big dog as slow, profit-extracting. Nvidia will do it's best to eat as much market share with better products over AMD('s GPU.)
0: https://www.techradar.com/news/amd-big-navi-isnt-coming-unti...
But NVIDIA pegged the 3070(which is faster than the 2080 TI) at $499.
That's pretty hard to beat!
Not even close. 1080 ti's are still going for twice that and it was $300 cheaper at launch.
Like, really, if you know somebody, let me know. I have a 1080 that I want to sell.
People don't see graphics cards like they're brake pads. They don't wear down the same way. $150 (no tax) is still $150 less for what is essentially the same thing.
That's the important bit and what we all need to find out. Very few people are playing just RTX games.
Even if you don't value ray tracing, DLSS is the difference between playing at 1080p ultra settings, and doing the same thing at 4k.
Now, if you say you don't value Ray Tracing and DLSS, then I'd agree that it makes little sense to upgrade from a 2080 Ti to a 3070 or up. But DLSS is quite useful for any 3D application (CAD, 3D modelling, gaming, ...), and the tensor cores it uses are useful for ML, so if someone is not doing either of these with a GFX, I wonder what do they use the GFX for where DLSS makes no difference. Maybe as a heating stove :D
I think the thing is though - how many people use DLSS and how many people use ray tracing? I'm going to guess very few. This is all the games that support ray tracing and/or DLSS. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2020/09/01/confirmed-ray-tr... That list is horribly short. I don't even play any of the games on that list!
Again, the amount of people using the tensor cores and what not is trivially small. I'll be excited if the benchmarks come out and show a 50%+ gain across the board with all games. Until then - I remain skeptical. This just seems like a price cut on a ridiculously overpriced amount of cards. The fact that the 2080 Ti is still $1200 after 2 years of being out is atrocious. Nvidia went ultra-capitalist with their last generation.
Here's hoping that they'll outdo the rumours.
What are you talking about? The i7-3770K (top of the line 4-core chip in 2012) sold for ~$330.
Isn't the "value" of a GPU simply what the market is willing to pay for it? I bought a 1080 in May of 2016 for $599. According to the BLS CPI inflation calculator, that's approximately $647 in 2020. $499 for a card that is double the performance of a 1080 seems like a great value to me, personally.
However, I also play around with deep learning stuff, expect to do so more in the future, but don't currently follow it so closely.
Would someone care to ponder on what difference they think a 24GB gpu vs a 10GB gpu will have as a tool for deep learning dev over the next 3 years?
For what it's worth, I'm a computer vision guy, but I did have a play with DeepSpeech earlier this year.
That said, rumor has it that they will announce a 20Gb 3080 later.
Even a billion parameters is a huge model, and a factor of 2.4x increase is not going to make a tremendous difference in your performance. In particular the data-heavy nature of vision stuff means that you'll be bottlenecked by training more than memory, AFAIK (again, lay).
Two 3080s = $1500 + number of hours times electricity cost (for me, this would be about $0.14/hour)
A K80 from AWS (close enough to the same RAM) = $0.45/hour (spot pricing) or $0.9 (on demand)
I've been able to use spot instances for basically all of my AWS hobby work, so I'll use that.
The crossover point where it's worth buying is where 1500 + 0.14h = 0.45h, about 5000 hours or 30 weeks of training.
For hobby work, do you expect to have it training for 20% of the next 3 years? That's all without considering the fact that you might want to upgrade to a newer card, AWS's prices will likely fall, and you might want a card with more RAM sometimes, but not others, or even a multi-GPU setup sometimes.
I used to spend money on fancy cards and machines and justify it with my hobby learning. Now I just let somebody else do the heavy lifting and pay them rent. It's spoiled me. You go from spending a few nights trying to get a thing performant to throwing a burrito worth of money at amazon to just parallelize the dumb thing on a massive machine and having it done by bed time.
I also used to justify buying the fancy card with my gaming hobby, but then when I actually did have a long running training job, it'd be super frustrating because now I can't use the desktop for anything else for a few days until training finishes.
1500 + 0.14h should be equal to 0.45h * 4. A 3080 will at the least be 2x faster for general training than one k80.
SLI is specific to rendering. Depending on the workload, it’s sometimes makes perfect sense to split GPGPU jobs into multiple GPUs. An extreme example of that approach is crypto-currency miners who sometimes use a dozen of GPUs in a single computer.
The only limitation, the working set used by each GPU needs to fit in VRAM of that GPU, otherwise GPUs gonna bottleneck on I/O as opposed to compute, will be very slow. For ML, this means the setup of two 3080 GPUs will be limited to 10GB model sizes.
Sure it's being marketed as 70-90% better performance at the same price but the value proposition is mainly in comparison to the Turing generation (20XX series) versus the Pascal generation (10XX series). For example of 3070, Nvidia moved the price anchor for the XX70 series from $379 to $499 so consumers are essentially paying for a XX80 card - and should expect XX80 performance. Nonetheless still impressive for the 70-90% performance gain, just perhaps not as much when price-adjusted.
On a separate note, I'm curious about how much of the performance gains is attributable to the node shrink (12nm to 8nm) vs. micro architecture vs. software optimization (e.g. DLSS 2.0 vs. 1.0).
Depends upon how you measure value.
If you can get something better for the same money or a little more, then sure they are good value.
Even if you want something not as powerful or new, these will just send all the older card values down, so for that - these are great value.
Now if you was a TITAN buying type, the GTX3090 is definitely good value.
As for node shrink and how much is it a factor; Would need to factor in clock speeds and memory bandwidth, then need to compare exact comparable features. It's a muddy path. More so with the bigger gotcha that the 12nm node was TMSC and this 8nm node is Samsung, so hard to say, but over the months, reviews will have a good stab at it. Though for me, GamersNexus on YT would be the review I'd be looking for in the weeks ahead.
Does that really matter? Integer scaling isn't really a thing AFAIK, and game devs are more likely to test their HUD layouts in 4k than 5k these days.
I expect to reach this we will probably have to start using foverted rendering.
I was surprised over the difference 320 Hz monitors make according to them.
That makes it worthwhile. That's personally what I was waiting for before upgrading my 1080 GTX TI and my monitor.
Think DOTA 2 or Civilization 5. They both look amazing at 4K and I bet would look noticeably better at 8K.
Especially in those two, the games assets have enough detail to allow zooming in all the way from a bird's eye view to a first person view. As you crank up the rendering resolution, there's plenty of "real" detail available in the models and textures. You could push these games to 16K and still get more quality out of them.
So far. As customers of TSMC, in the long term it behooves them for TSMC to have competition.
Further, "leadership matters" is a somewhat ironic complaint given that Intel ran face-first into a brick wall precisely because they were leading. TSMC placed conservative bets on the next node and Intel placed risky bets because they needed the extra risk/reward to maintain leadership. Intel's bets failed (in particular, cobalt wires and COAG). They chose "leadership or bust" and went "bust," at least for now.
The whole reason AMD are able to crank out 128 core CPUs is the CCX architecture - the one people laughed at. No TSMC there. Not to mention other innovations like Infinity Fabric.
In ampere for instance, there are so many innovations, like PAM signalling, 2x shader instructions per clock, DLSS, RTX Voice.
TSMC beat Intel, sure, but that is not the main reason for why Nvidia and even AMD are leading the industry. In fact, ampere is on Samsung 8n.
Just fyi, steer clear of the ad hominems. You can disagree with someone without calling them a simpleton.
If the fab was all that mattered, AMD GPUs would be dominating Nvidia, since they have been shipping GPUs using TSMC 7nm (a superior process to Samsung 8nm) for over a year.
Sure, but it is not like Intel is going to fab AMD and nvidia chips, so they need other competitors, like Samsung, and that's what they are using.
I hope AMD can pull it off, as I am really hoping to make my first red box build. That being said, the performance:cost ratio of 30xx is mindbogglingly attractive (assuming the reviews back up NVIDIA's claims).
Guess the benchmarks will show us.
They found FPS increases of between 160-190% for a bunch of recent games featuring both RTX/traditional rendering, and about a fixed 190% in Quake RTX (which is exclusively RTX rendering).
On top of that - if you only care about 4K gaming then fine - but what if you're more of a 1080-1440p with higher refresh rate person?
Personally, I have a 1440p display that goes to 144hz. I'd much rather have 1440p @ 100+ FPS than 4K at 60 - but we don't know what these new GPUs will do.
They can't make it too much faster or have too much more RAM or it will threaten 3090 sales.
However, Wikipedia says it’s capable of 8k with a proprietary lossy video codec called Display Stream Compression:
DSC is a "visually lossless" encoding technique with up to a 3:1 compression ratio. Using DSC with HBR3 transmission rates, DisplayPort 1.4 can support 8K UHD (7680 × 4320) at 60 Hz
The quote is from there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayPort#1.4
The devices I've bought recently have tended to support HDMI more than DP. So I got the impression that HDMI was "winning" and DP would fade away.
But now it seems like vendors are moving towards video-over-USB-C cables. And the "Alternate Mode protocol support matrix for USB-C cables and adapters" table in this article [0] seems to indicate that USB-C cables have broader support for DP than HDMI. Which makes me wonder if vendors will converge on DP-protocol-over-USB-C-cable?
This makes me nostalgic for the relative simplicity of DVI.
30 <- represents the generation, previously it was 20,eg RTX 2080
80 <- represents power within the generation, an 80 is near the top
Higher generation means newer. Higher number means more powerful within that generation. To compare across generations, you need benchmarks.
Sure beats AMD. Is an RX Vega better than an RX 570? What about an RX 5700?
I mean, I get that the primary market runs Windows. But some people like to dual-boot.
Looks really great in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4wlEbD5vxk
For H.265 their encoder is fast, yes, but the quality per bitrate is complete rubbish, requiring higher bitrate than a good H.264 encode yet still contrives the gruesome trick of looking far worse, which entirely offsets all and any point with H.265.
I'm sure this will really push those 4k/120Hz displays, but I doubt the average/causal gamer will really care about this series for a few years.
Expect the games demoed in the event due to come out soon (cyperpunk, cod, etc) to not play as well when maxed out as those that were released while the 2080 Ti was the flagship.
It always felt to me that something similar to the car's gas emissions scandal is just waiting to happen in this industry.
3 Generations newer with only a 2x speedup feels like a much smaller leap than the prior generations.
There were also the 16xx cards.
I'm being downvoted for this.
10xx
16xx
20xx
30xx
That's 3 gens difference.
But that does leave the 16xx generation which was released wholly on its own, in its own year.
Plus for me, Nvidia is simply DOA on Linux, due them refusing to upstream their driver and hindering Nouveau to reclock properly. So even if AMD won't outdo them, I still won't touch Nvidia.
I’m just glad that we’ve finally gotten past that ceiling at ~13 TFLOPs. Nvidia has been hobbling along for a few years, so a breakthrough is nice.
If nvidia's performance claims are real then that is a massive challenge for AMD to meet.
Same. The best this announcement does for me is force AMD to reduce the price of their GPUs. Which is appreciated, because I am due to upgrade.
I know, I know, it would be nice to have a proper FOSS driver, and better for integration, updates etc. But it does work fine, IMHO.
I'm probably pretty easy to please :)
Though my 13 year old self eeking out 20-30 fps playing bf2142 would probably disagree.
I have never had a PSU fail, but supposedly unlike pretty much every other component if it fails its possible it will destroy your GPU/CPU/MB so it makes sense to spend a little extra on a good PSU.
Probably my best component purchase ever was a 1050W Modular PSU in 2014. It was an old model even then and apparently no one wanted 1000W+ power supplies back then because it was on clearance. It should still be good for a 3090 and probably even a 5090 when I upgrade again in the future.
I paid far less than a 1000w PSU costs now.
The two things to watch out for here are
1) Cheaper PSUs can't always actually hit their claimed wattage, particularly not in real-world heat scenarios
2) CPU & GPU both use the 12V rail for their power, and not all PSUs can deliver all the rated wattage on the 12V rail.
Any decent to good PSU won't have either of those issues, most list their rated wattage entirely on the 12V rails these days.
So for example let's assume 250w for the GPU average and 120w for the CPU average (turbo & boost & all that). A 400w PSU could technically do that, particularly since if your only drive is an SSD your "accessories" are basically a rounding error. But if we take this 400W PSU for example: https://www.newegg.com/coolmax-i-400-400w/p/N82E16817159140 it can only deliver 300W on the 12V rail. Not enough. By comparison this EVGA 450W PSU can do a full 450W on the 12V rail alone: https://www.evga.com/products/product.aspx?pn=100-BR-0450-K1
That's a 150W useful difference in this scenario even though the "rated" power only differs by 50W.
A 2080 Ti + 8700k system used 450W (nvidia recommended a 650w psu). While high end CPUs have gotten a bit more power hungry with higher core counts on the 10900k/10700k/3900x/3950x, I'd be shocked if a 650W PSU couldn't handle a mainstream CPU + 3080.
https://www.techspot.com/review/1701-geforce-rtx-2080/page4....
nVidia's recommendation is based on "we don't want people pissed off because they put it in a system with a 3990wx at the recommended PSU capacity and it didn't work"
Having some headroom might result in a quieter system
A character model can look decent in 1080p, but the edges of the model in front of the background will be jaggy. Various anti-aliasing techniques can only do so much.
Besides, I know I'm more interested in higher frame rates. I'd rather do 1440p @ 144 hz than 4K @ 60 hz.
And I don't think there are even any 8K monitors out yet.
EDIT: For people comparing this to the Titan RTX, no. This GA102, not GA100. It's the cut-down version of Ampere. GA100 will come out, and it will be even more expensive.
Back in Kepler, a 780Ti was 800$, and it had the GK110 chip, which was the full-fat chip. Now, the cut-down chip costs twice as much.
I'm tempted to get one just to avoid having to think about upgrading a graphics card for another 10 years. Plus I can do some ML messing about as well for resume-driven development.
That statement is absolutely true regarding me. Honestly, I don't need a gaming system at all, let alone one with such a powerful GPU. But even in terms of my leisure-time gaming, I could never justify the price difference over a much cheaper card.
Still, I could imagine it making a lot more sense for other people. E.g., pro gamers, people with big entertainment budgets, or people using CUDA for number-crunching.
Whether the chip number is right is pretty irrelevant.
That doesn't mean it's not the Titan equivalent for this generation. Titan X(pascal) and Titan XP were both GP102, and Titan RTX was TU102. AFAIK, only Titan V used the "100" chip, and that was sorta a fluke because there was no smaller volta chip. (and 3090 was explicitly introduced as the Titan RTX replacement)
It's not the Titan, because it's not the biggest chip, and also, it's not called "Titan". It fits the motif of the 2080Ti almost to a T.
Not to mention that it still has NVLink support! The 3-slot design is a bit challenging and for 4-card workstation, I need to rework my radiator mount to make space for another PSU.
If you're happy paying 40% more for a 50% faster card, that's okay. I just don't think it's very good for the industry.
For example, RDR2 runs at around 50-60fps on ultra on my rig. Very disappointing.
Interestingly enough, it looks like the $379 in 2015 dollars worth $415 in today's dollars which makes the $500 for the 3070 seem slightly less shitty. I didn't expect the cumulative inflation to be 9% since then..