Gadgetory

welcome back to the hardware box news corner today's episode is basically going to be about nvidia geforce r-tx graphics cards because since we published our initial thoughts on the RT x series earlier this week there's been a few additional tidbits and revelations to discuss so without further ado let's get the right race ball rolling and talk about some news the thing you guys are probably most interested in is the performance of NVIDIA GeForce r-tx cards and how they stack up against previous gen pascale offerings as you are probably aware and video spent most of their launch event talking about rate racing and other RT X functionality rather than discussing the actual performance of these cards in typical games I think this frustrated a lot of people that just wanted to know how much faster in RTX 20 atti for example was outside of niche use cases like rate racing well we still don't have any independent benchmarks to share it will be at least a few weeks before we can but Nvidia did post an article to their blog that at least showed some charts comparing the artex 2082 gtx 1080 in a selection of games he's the child in question and for just one image there's actually quite a lot to break down here firstly all these games were benchmarked at 4k but you can see six titles where NVIDIA has chosen to include results with DL SS or deep learning super sampling enabled DL SS uses the tensor cores to accelerate a neural network that post processes images to smooth jagged edges and all that usual anti-aliasing stuff at a much lower performance cost than regular anti-aliasing the crucial thing to note about DL SS is it doesn't run the game at the native resolution so in this chart the DL SS results are not really being run at 4k like the rest of the results instead the game is effectively rendered at a lower resolution and then up scaled with AI taking care of upscaling artifacts we'll have to wait and see how DL SS impacts visual quality but like with other sub native rendering techniques including checkerboard rendering temporal rendering and so forth there is usually some negative impact of visual quality that helps give you that uplift in performance so comparing the - the 2080 with DSS enabled isn't a great apples to apples comparison you also notice that Nvidia claims the ITX 2080 provides two times the performance of the 1080 but that's only possible in these DL SS games and even then two of the 6d OSS titles didn't actually reach 2x performance so that 2x number isn't an accurate reflection of the performance difference between the two cards and typical games with identical quality settings when looking at the nandi LSS results you can see the 2080 provides a performance improvement anywhere from roughly 1.6 X down to 1.3 X however there's a few other things to note four of these games to test with HD are enabled likely with g-sync HR enabled on one of the new 4k 144 Hertz monitors it wasn't that long ago that we tested the performance impact of HDR and gsync Asia and discovered that at least with Pascal cards enabling HDR can reduce performance by as much as 15% in titles like shadow of war which Nvidia is showing here with some of the largest performance gains if churring has architectural fixes that cope better with HDR and gsync HDR processing enabling HDR on the r-tx 2080 might not come with the performances this means the testing with HDR enabled in these games will inflate the margin between the 2080 and 1080 imagine that wouldn't be as high when playing the game in the SDR mode which 99.9% of gamers use I'm not saying for sure that shooing has changes that result in no performance impact when enabling HDR but the fact Nvidia here has specifically chosen to test some of these games with HDR enabled throws up a red flag for me it's not going to be a common setting or common use case for these cards and companies always want to portray their products in the best light so it wouldn't be surprising if enabling HDR in these titles skewed things in favor of the RT X 2018 and then of course there's the usual disclaimers about performance numbers provided directly from the company Nvidia has almost certainly cherry-pick the selection of games to make the artex 20/80 seem as good as possible we don't know what settings were used to benchmark these games either and that means further cherry-picking might have occurred with the game settings and then there's this other slide that shows just ten games with random FPS numbers below apparently illustrating the ITX 28 you can play these titles at 4k HDR at above 60fps to be honest this image is completely useless because there is no comparison data and we have no idea what settings were used you can quite easily tune these tiles to run at above 60fps at 4k on something like the GTX 1080 so yeah not all that useful even if invidious performance numbers here are a general reflection of how the r-tx 20/80 performs it still isn't looking all that good for these nutrient cards so the cheapest r-tx 2080s you can pre-order right now are around 750 US dollars compared to just four hundred and fifty dollars for new gtx 1080s which is a 67% increase in price Yemen videos own chart shows most games providing around a 40 percent performance uplift so again it's looking like the ITX cards might not be the best value we strongly suggest you don't pre-order and don't purchase one of these GPUs until full performance reviews are available the other big story from this week concerns the performance of ray-tracing in RTX enabled games particularly shadow of the Tomb Raider and battlefield 5 both of which were demoed on the show floor at Gamescom numerous publications who played these games report a performance that wasn't all that impressed shadow of the Tomb Raider running at just 1080p on an RT x28 ETI with ray tracing enabled didn't hit a consistent 60 FPS often hovering around 40 to 50 FPS with clear dips into the 30s and we're talking about the fastest shirring GPU here for consumers running the game at just a 1080p resolution instead of the Tomb Raider in particular I actually watched IGN's I think it was an extended capture of the game with ray tracing enables and to be honest the lighting didn't look significantly improved compared to traditional non raytrace lighting at least the improvement wasn't really enough to justify running at some 60fps at 1080p on a graphics card that cost more than a thousand told us of course have to play the game for myself and see how ray tracing looks but the general impression from people at the event and from you guys out there that have watched footages that looked pretty underwhelming I should note here of course that the version of the game being demoed was a pre-release version the drivers were pre-launch and there's still plenty of scope for optimisation but I'm not sure optimization will be able to improve things all that much when setting appears so taxing from the start the other game showed was battlefield 5 and again reports suggested the game was running at sub 60fps at 1080p with ray tracing enabled on an RT X 20 atti which is even more dire for a fast paced game like a first-person multiplayer shooter ray tracing does look very impressive in battlefield but again most gamers won't want to run at below 60 FPS on a flagship card just to get some nice looking reflections and shadows this sort of performance we're enabling ray tracing isn't super surprising considering how computationally taxing ray tracing is but when it's the killer new feature of invidious upcoming graphics cards and it's one of the reasons why they're so expensive it's cause for concern to say the least it's probably worth talking about the full list of games confirmed to support RT x functionality and nanotech he has a nicely organized list that shows whether the game supports real time ray tracing DL SS or both the key games to show here are as follows we've got battlefield 5 and Metro Exodus both support ray tracing but not DL SS shadow of the Tomb Raider is shown to support only ray tracing as well but interestingly in videos own performance lights from earlier the game is shown to support DL SS so not sure what's up with that pub G hitman 2 and Final Fantasy 15 support just DL SS so no ray tracing there and there's a couple of others the new version of assetto corsa very popular racing game will support ray tracing as will control the upcoming trial from remedy entertainment the makers of quantum break and Alan Wake neither of those games support DL SS a couple of other quick things to round out this video the GeForce r-tx 2070 does not have an NV link connector as confirmed by photos of the RT X 2070 and also in videos page showing the supported graphics cards for the NV link bridge essentially just the art X 2080 and RT X xx atti will have the connector NV link replaces the SOI connector offering a much higher bandwidth interconnect between multiple GPUs SLR connectors were removed from the gtx 1060 in the previous version restricting the functionality to just the 1070 and above and now with the artex 20 series the connector is gone from the 2070 so that limits sli to just the upper end cards generally we don't recommend anyone use SLI anyway due to its poor scaling and lack of support in a lot of games but it's interesting and Vidya is removing the option from more cards last topic for this Nvidia special edition news corner Nvidia has announced Ansel r-tx an upgraded version of Ansel that makes use of the RT X capabilities of truing GPUs for the few people that use Ansel there are some cool features in here like Ansel ray tracing which injects way more rays than would be suitable for real-time rendering to deliver a much higher quality static image there's also Ansel AI up res which allows you to save Ansel screenshots in up to 8 K through the power of 10 circles and AI there's also a few new filters and a wider range of supported games that's it for this week's news corner as always it's worth subscribing to catch this segment in your inbox every Friday and don't forget to hit the bell icon because you know how his YouTube doesn't work all that well sometimes check out Steve's video as well on our first impressions of the GeForce r-tx use if you missed it consider supporting us on patreon we just did our live stream the other day and it was a blast we reviewed a whole bunch of GeForce rumors that didn't end up being true so you can check out the replay of that as well if you are a patreon member and I'll see you next time you