Gadgetory

welcome back to hard Rome box it's been almost a month since invidious new g-force r-tx graphics cards were officially released the actual month-aversary is in a few days but that's when we will be talking about Intel's nitrogen processes so I guess now is as good a time as any anyway I thought it would be a good idea to look at the current state of invidious RT X lineup and see how things have progressed since the very massive launch back in September let's start with the RT X 2080 the first card you could actually buy and the only one that actually launched on September 20th this GPU has been well fairly easy to buy at most major retailers it seems there's plenty of stock lb @ at higher prices in fact stock levels are so good it appears that 2080s aren't exactly flying off the shelves which shouldn't come as a surprise considering our review and many others criticized the card for being poor value 2080 sales have been so lackluster that we didn't see a single RT X 2080 sail through our Amazon affiliate links since the card was announced on August 21st in that same time period seventeen people bought a GTX 10 ATT I most of which came after our review of the 28 he went live again that's not a surprise because the 1080 is much better value right now and delivers roughly the same performance as the 2080 despite an abundance of 2080s on the market in plentiful stock not a single variant is being sold at the AIB MSRP nearly a month after launch as we expected and talked about in our initial review even though the card does have a 699 US dollar MSRP for board partners basically every card on the market is being solid the founders edition price of $7.99 or even higher than that and it's not like prices have been coming down what you see at Amazon or Newegg are basically the same prices as at launch what's crazy about this is that instead of cutting the price of the 2080 to the aib MSRP a price nvidia specifically announced at launch and which actually makes the card competitive with the 1080 TI o EMS are choosing to bundle hardware with the 2080 instead browsing you au can quite easy they get a free power supply free motherboard or free hard drive with your 2080 purchase but you can't find a single card priced at $700 some of the bundles are actually completely ridiculous is anyone really spending more than $900 on an RTX 2080 and 2 terabyte hard drive bundle when a 2 terabyte fire CUDA is only worth $90 making the bundle actually worse value than buying the GPU and hard drive separately not to mention you'd be better off buying the hard drive and a 1080 TI instead and no one is bundling this free hardware with 1080 T eyes and this raises the question if companies are so desperate to move RTX 2080s that they're bundling in all sorts of very hardware when will we actually see these GPUs at the AIB MSRP or is the AIB MSRP just a complete load of crap we saw pretty much the same thing happen with NVIDIA GeForce 10 Series launches with the split between AIB and founders Edition pricing and quite frankly if there are no cards available at the lower of the two prices at launch announcing that pricing is pretty deceptive behavior particularly if it takes half a year for pricing to filter down to that lower MSRP because in that sort of timeframe you'd normally expect to see a price reduction as for the RT x28 ETI well this graphics card is in a similar position to the RT x 2080 in that not a single car is listed at its $999 AIB MSRP whereas all listings for board partner cards are at the $1,200 founders Edition price but then you can't even buy it when ATI anyway because they're all out of stock and on top of that the card was delayed from its original September 20th release to early October this is another bizarre one because surely Nvidia should have known that the 2080 ti was the card most people would have been interested in buying even at its exorbitantly high price the 2080 ti does offer a new level of performance you previously couldn't get from a non workstation cheaper you but it seems Nvidia simply didn't make enough of these GPUs to satisfy demand even though they are likely selling the GPU at a pretty hefty margin so with these two cards a month after launch we're in a position where the card people actually want to buy the r-tx 20 le TI isn't in stocke meanwhile the card no one wants to buy the ITX 20 and he is in plentiful stock and even bundled with hardware though no one is willing to sell the card at the AIB MSRP that's a pretty pathetic state of affairs a month after the release and then there's the r-tx 2070 we're only a day post launch but again we seem to be in a situation where very few cards are available at the for $99 a IB MSRP a few have been listed at some retailers but most out of stock or on backorder instead most kinds of priced at least $50 over the MSRP if not more this is despite plenty of stock for all but the cheapest cards and Nvidia going out of their way to ensure some reviewers had $500 board partner cards for their review another very sloppy release from Nvidia and a poor one for consumers now let's talk about the elephant in the room RTX features nvidia has basically completely punched this one even though the first RTX cards launched about a month ago there is still zero game is available today that support either RT x ray tracing or dl SS in fact we've really been waiting longer than that because RT x was shown off in shadow of the tomb raider in a playable state at the GeForce 20 series launched in August since then the launch of the RT x 2080 and 2080 TI has come and then we've seen a second launch for the RT x 2070 and yet we still don't even have a release date for just one of the games that uses either feature when you dial down on the list of games there are plenty that haven't been released at all yet with or with that ray tracing but there are a few games that are currently available that haven't yet been updated to include RT x features on the ray tracing side shadow of the Tomb Raider and assetto corsa competence journey have both been out for more than a month now and for DLS s games like pub G shadow of the Tomb Raider we happy for you final fantasy 15 Ark survival evolved scum and hell-blade send you a sacrifice are available to play right now none featured ELSS and it's even stranger than that because NVIDIA has a working functional demo for DL SS in final fantasy 15 s benchmark yet no signs of the game is set to receive a DL SS update anytime soon we've seen all the jokes about how RT X ray tracing and D LSS is supposed to just work but it seems the reality is far from that because NVIDIA hasn't managed to get it working in any actual games you can play right now a month after the race of the first RT X cards and longer than that since the announcement now of course one of the main limitations to getting ray tracing in games was on Microsoft's end they needed to update Windows 10 with new version of DirectX that included support for DX r the layer that sits atop RT X and provides games with a ray tracing API that update was first released earlier this month then pulled due to a bug announced back on track for a release shortly but even with Microsoft announcing and launching their update not a peep about RT X games not to mention of course the DL SS doesn't even require the update and we haven't heard anything about that quite frankly the lack of RT x enabled games isn't a massive loss to consumers from what we've seen in in videos owned DLS s demos the technology doesn't seem all that impressive compared to running at lower than native resolutions as for ray tracing it looks cool but all the reports were hearing suggests it's a massive performance hog and games Nexus also has a great video on why the visual effects themselves aren't a significant step up from techniques we already have for lighting you should check that out if you're interested but not having either of these features ready or announced to be ready a month after launch is embarrassing for NVIDIA these are the features that was supposed to justify the high price of the RT X cards relative to the GeForce 10 series not only have review has been unable to test these features properly and see whether they actually add value to RTX cards but consumers buying these cards today or any time since September 20th have also been unable to use features Nvidia heavily promoted on announcement day now a lot of these are TX complaints you've probably heard before not just from us in our reviews of the RT X cards but from many others however we kind of thought there might at least be something we could test or play by now fine it wasn't available on launch but surely working demos on announcement day should have translated to games consumers can play at this point if the technology is supposed to just work this entire launch has been a complete mess and points to Nvidia attempting to get these cards out before they were ready nvidia wasn't ready with r-tx games to back up their technology architecture and asking price of their new GPUs they weren't ready with enough RTX 20 80 TI stock and weren't ready to release the card on its initial launch date they weren't ready to get our TX 2080 cards out at the AIB MSRP they announced in August and they weren't ready at all with the r TX 2070 launch sending out samples at the last second and scrambling to get cards priced at the MSRP and I guess all of this once again points to Nvidia trying to rush out the GeForce 20 series on 12 nanometer before seven nanometer production gets into full swing at the start of 2019 AMD is set to show the world what they've been working on with 7 nanometer Navi GPUs at CES 2019 in January and you can bet that in video also has been working on a new line of seven nanometer GPUs for release next year that puts pressure on the company to get their current products out as soon as possible before they're truly ready so they don't become irrelevant when seven nanometer comes in to town I also think the disappointment with this launch has been compounded by the complete lack of decent high-end GP releases for well over a year we finally get a new series of GPUs and what do we end up with a massively overpriced new flagship GPU with an actual performance gain at the top end plus two other high-end cards that offer worse value than existing Pascal cars that have been on the market for nearly two years for the most part so yeah this is pretty much we're at roughly a month after the r-tx launch I'm interested to hear your thoughts on how Nvidia handled this launch as well let us know in the comments below because these are supporting us on patreon to get access to our exclusive discord chat and I'll catch you in the next one