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Ever since Nvidia launched Turing, enthusiasts and the press take been grappling with one question above all others: How fast will the RTX 2080 Ti, 2080, and 2070 be when running games that combine Nvidia's new RTX ray tracing applied science with conventional rasterization? Early reports accept not been positive in this regard, with various reviewers noting that the Battlefield V demo was locked to 1080p and struggled to hold that frame rate when running on an RTX 2080 Ti with ray tracing enabled. Merely information technology's besides early days for the applied science, and better commuter and game engine support could make a significant difference in overall performance.

That's yet the example, to be sure, but a demo shown at GTC Europe by Remedy highlighted just how heavy the workload from ray tracing tin be. Golem.de has details on the presentation, while a video of the demo can be seen below:

Notice the heavy shimmering in the first part of the video? That'due south caused past only firing two rays per pixel. It's a type of undersampling mistake that we beginning discussed 6 years ago, in our write-up on ray tracing and its potential hereafter in gaming graphics. When nosotros tested Nvidia's iray software in 3DS Max, there's a marked divergence between rendering a scene with 300 iterations and 3,000 (in this case, the scene is rendered repeatedly to generate the final outcome, but yous can see a like visual effect at work, even though the ray tracing methods are themselves different):

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Click to enlarge.

The talk Remedy gave at GTC Europe appears similar to one they presented earlier this year; the presentation from that demo is here. Those of you with metered data, beware — it's an 890MB file with several embedded videos. Equally you can see from the slide below, increasing the number of rays per pixel removes the grainy effect.

Click to overstate

Unfortunately, even firing two beams per pixel — which is what the Northlight demo uses — carries a heavy performance punishment. Golem.de attended GTC Europe and Remedy's talk, as noted above, and they report the following performance characteristics for the Northlight demo running on an RTX 2080 Ti:

the contact and sun shadows calculated with two beams per pixel, including dissonance rejection, together require 2.3 ms per frame and the reflections a whopping four.four ms. Global denoising lighting extends the rendering process past another 2.5ms. This is a total of ix.2ms per frame.

There's an inverse relationship between a GPU'south frame fourth dimension (the amount of time, in milliseconds, information technology takes to depict a frame) and its frame rate. Maintaining 60fps requires the GPU to render and display one frame every 16.6ms. 30fps requires a new frame every 33.3ms. A nine.2ms functioning penalty for ray tracing is 57.5 per centum of the entire rendering budget. Even with a 30fps target, nine.2ms represents nearly a full tertiary of the GPUs rendering time. And while some parts of the above demo are gorgeous, the shimmering outcome caused past undersampling detracts from the entire scene. Request a programmer to devote 27-57 percentage of their frame time to just RTX could prove a very tough ask, peculiarly considering that's the RTX 2080 Ti's level of operation. A GPU like the RTX 2070, which has barely half the RTX 2080 Ti'due southSEEAMAZON_ET_135 See Amazon ET commerce resources for ray tracing, would notice this a detail slog.

There are some caveats to proceed in mind. This is a demo, non a shipping title, and the demo was designed to show off Nvidia's ray tracing technology, not for maximum performance. But the fact that it opens with an undersampled shimmering scene to start with too suggests that this represented some kind of compromise — if Remedy had been able to remove the outcome without harming functioning farther they surely would've done so, if only to brand the demo that much more impressive. Meanwhile, Battlefield V seems to demonstrate that at least the RTX 2080 Ti is capable of integrating impressive ray traced visual effects without tanking the frame charge per unit, even if 60ish fps at 1080p isn't much to write habitation about by conventional rasterization standards. Clearly, developers have at to the lowest degree some flexibility to tailor their RTX implementations to the frame rates and experiences they wish to target.

At the same time, however, the little evidence we practice have is all stacking up on the wrong side of the equation. Nvidia is the merely player in this game that could clear upward the confusion, but the company has released no performance estimates or clarifying remarks. We don't know how much fine-grained control users will take to utilize ray tracing selectively or fifty-fifty which GPU to recommend to customers who want to have advantage of it.

If you're wondering why many in the tech printing are so lackluster on Turing, it'due south non simply because Nvidia launched a GPU when games that accept reward of its features oasis't been released. It's besides considering the company has denied the press and public any opportunity to objectively evaluate the value of these features. Information technology'due south been two months since the RTX family debuted. Information technology is not unreasonable, at this point, for Nvidia to issue a clarifying statement along the lines of: "We await the RTX 2070 to exist capable of delivering the next-generation visual effects our customers look while maintaining smooth, playable frame rates and will work with developers to ensure all RTX customers tin have advantage of these features." That doesn't lock the company in to a specific frame rate. Information technology doesn't guarantee 60fps. It but says "You're going to get to employ the features we're asking you lot to pay at least $500 for."

Nvidia has asked customers to accept significant price increases because, to hear the company tell information technology, the RTX 2070, 2080, and 2080 Ti will deliver ray traced gaming experiences that justify the premium. Nether the circumstances, it'southward reasonable to inquire the company to demonstrate or pledge that the RTX 2070 volition exist capable of both ray tracing and reasonable frame rates.

At present Read: Nvidia's RTX 2070 Features 2022 Performance, Currently Useless Features, and a Massive Cost Increase, Nvidia RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti Review: Yous Can't Smoothen a Turing, and Investigating ray tracing, the adjacent big affair in gaming graphics