Plastic is still on here.
So, RTX pre-orders are apparently going gangbusters.
And I get it.
Some of you out there have had literally two years
to save your pennies and frankly,
not a lot of exciting PC hardware to buy in the interim.
But come on, giving away your money
without seeing any performance data
is a bad way to make purchase decisions.
Besides, making matters worse
is that the marquee feature of the RTX series,
real-time ray tracing, is basically MIA today.
So, all we're left with is how much the GeForce 20 series
improves performance over last gen
in traditionally rendered games
and some discussion about NVIDIA's
generally bass-ackwards approach to this launch.
Speaking of bass-ackwards, not using a VPN.
Do you have privacy?
Do you have an internet access VPN yet?
If not, go get it at the link below.
And if you do, well, go get it anyway.
Makes a great gift.
Give the gift of internet security.
So, before we start,
there's a term that you need to understand, rasterization.
Without getting too deep into it,
your graphics card uses this technique
to turn a three-dimensional scene
into a flat 2D plane of pixels,
similar to a photo, many times per second.
Since the days of wireframe and flat polygons,
we've added lighting, textures, post-processing,
and more to the pipeline,
but they all still only apply to the screen space
versus the whole scene's world space.
TLDR, rendering a game today isn't fundamentally different
from how Star Fox was rendered on the Super Nintendo in 1993.
Ray tracing, meanwhile, is fundamentally different.
So, it's a simulation of light interacting,
with the world space,
acting sort of like an eyeball in reverse.
So, instead of rays of light coming in,
rays are actually cast out from the camera position,
where your screen is,
and then everything is calculated from there.
The more rays you have,
and the more times those rays are allowed to interact
or bounce around the scene,
the more detail you get.
And it's a superior method in every way to rasterization,
except for one, speed.
Up until now, ray tracing has only been available
in rendering software that can take hours
or even over a day to complete a single frame
on a high-end workstation.
So, how the heck, then, is NVIDIA pumping out
many frames per second using this tech?
Well, the new enthusiast-tier Turing architecture cards,
the 2080 and the 2080 Ti,
include what they're calling RT cores,
which, for RTX-enabled games,
render a simplified ray-traced scene in parallel
with the standard CUDA cores raster rendering.
So, the result is a traditionally rendered scene
with ray-traced lighting, occlusion, and reflections.
So, that hybrid rendering, as NVIDIA calls it,
gives you a lot of the benefits of ray tracing
without the massive computational cost.
So, you can use a lot of the benefits of ray tracing, without the massive computational cost.
So, that's the way it's done.
and without game developers needing
to completely re-engineer their game engines.
And there's more.
The Titan V's Tensor cores are back as well.
For GeForce, these are being leveraged
for NVIDIA's new deep learning super sample anti-aliasing,
which NVIDIA claims can achieve near 64X super sampling
with less performance impact than traditional AA,
which they've achieved by pre-training data sets
for each supported game,
and then pushing those results out via driver updates.
There is a catch though.
Just like RTX real-time ray tracing,
it has to be supported on a game by game basis.
So now you know.
But knowing is only half of the battle.
We also need to see it,
which unfortunately is easier said than done
because we could have the most epic test benches
in the world,
like this one I have here in front of me right now.
Then I got my finger stuck, ow.
Anyway, there are no actual RTX games to test.
So we can't very well measure its performance
versus non-RTX then, can we?
Well, we'll get back to that in a minute.
First, let's have a look at some normal gaming results.
And you know what?
They are pretty good.
All across the board,
the 2080 Ti averages in the high 50s or higher.
And remember guys,
the 4K Ultra with the 2080 seeming to be content
with the traditional,
let's meet the performance
of the previous generation Ti card level of performance.
Frankly, all of this is a massive relief
given NVIDIA's refusal to talk
about traditional gaming performance in their keynote.
As for productivity,
well, we were a little disappointed
when Blender refused to run on the new cards.
Compute capability 7.5 doesn't have a kernel yet,
but if the rest of these results are anything to go by,
it's gonna be good.
Cause these numbers just crush the 1000 series cards.
And the 2080 even manages to match AMD's Vega 64
in Luxray's OpenCL rendering.
That was a huge gap to bridge.
So Turing GPUs are gonna make really good workstation cards.
I can't wait to get my hands
on the Quadro versions of these guys.
So overall then,
the 2080 performs kind of like a 1080 Ti, cool.
And the 2080 Ti performs kind of
like a Titan V, a much more expensive niche product.
Also cool, well, sort of cool.
All this performance comes at a cost.
And I'm not just talking
about the much higher price tags than last gen.
Now the manufacturing process has shrunk 25%
from 16 nanometer to 12 nanometer,
but with over 50% more transistors.
So that means massive dies
with higher overall power draw and thermals.
Hence,
the 2080 Ti is gonna be a great product,
not to mention extremely like shockingly heavy,
twin fan vapor chamber cooler and the beefy power delivery
on the Founders Edition designs this time around.
You guys should let us know, by the way,
if you want us to dive into overclocking these cards
in a future video in the comments below.
Speaking of future video,
surprisingly, NVENC got an update.
So text is now more readable
and there's less blocking than the 1080 Ti.
It looks very similar to,
if not better than X264 on the fast preset.
So it looks like game streamers
or anyone else who relies on high quality stream capture,
no longer needs to choose between quality and speed.
And there's other cool features baked on board as well.
Like the new VR link connector that handles both power
and high resolution video over a single USB type C cable
for VR headsets.
All right then.
So what about DLSS?
And where are the RTX on, RTX off comparisons?
Well, that's actually a really good question.
So Battlefield V was delayed until late November.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider,
which is out and is an RTX title,
is apparently getting the functionality added
in a post-release patch.
But that's it then, right?
Wrong.
We weren't gonna give up on you guys that easy.
So we reached out to a developer directly
with a game in the works,
that supports both technologies.
And they graciously agreed to come over
and show off their beta exclusively for you guys.
Originally they did anyway.
So this is where showing off our shiny new hardware ends
and the criticism begins.
So they were forced to bail.
They couldn't give us any details,
but if you wanna know what I think,
I think it's that NVIDIA and more accurately RTX,
they're not ready yet.
I mean, to put the rushed last minute nature
of this launch in perspective,
we got our card and its driver at around noon on Friday,
the 14th of September.
This video goes up early in the morning on the 19th.
That is at best 2.7 working days
to evaluate the biggest graphics card launch in two years.
And other publications that we've spoken with have confirmed
that they were in a similar boat.
So like, what are they doing?
Is this someone high up in the chain
having an executive moment?
Is this them not wanting us to spend much time
digging into these things?
What purpose is served by rushing this launch?
I mean, the thing too to consider is that it's not like AMD
has anything to compete with the 1080 TI,
let alone its successor.
So I guess this is open letter to NVIDIA time.
Guys, people ordered this thing
on a promise and yeah, it's early days.
Maybe things aren't quite polished yet.
I get it, but you're clearly not ready to deliver.
And frankly, this is the kind of
that gives PC gaming a bad name.
Shiny badges on the sides of boxes that at best
are supported by a small handful of games
or at worst flat out don't do anything.
And that's what RTX is today.
It doesn't do anything.
So that's what I have to say, guys.
I can't benchmark goals.
I can't review future potential.
I mean, honestly, given your track record,
RTX will probably be pretty cool,
but this whole situation is a ridiculous self-pwn here.
Like outside of hopeless fan boys, when they buy something,
people expect it to actually do what it says on the tin,
or they expect to...
at least be able to get a glimpse of what they're getting
that hasn't been run through your own PR department.
As it stands right now,
the only tangible things that we can show our viewers,
which are your customers,
are the very much curated NVIDIA special DLSS build
of the Final Fantasy 15 benchmark,
and then a couple of ray tracing demos
that tell us nothing about the real world
before and after performance impact.
I mean, we can stare at them,
which is like, wow, such excite.
So like, it looks like it works,
and maybe this is what these features will look like
in actual games, but who can say for sure
when we can only test in a tightly controlled environment?
So you're letting us run benchmarks,
but you're still making it really hard
to recommend this thing for the function
that is right in the name of the product,
because nobody without a speak about it
and we'll cut off your balls NDA,
actually knows how well RTX works.
So bottom line for you, the viewer then,
these cards are strong performers,
and that's really good both for them
and for the upcoming lower end Turing cards
that won't have RT or tensor cores,
but we can't draw a real conclusion
because this review is incomplete,
just like the RTX 2000 series.
But you know what's not incomplete?
Thermaltake.
Thermaltake's 20th anniversary.
It's like complete, which is why they're celebrating
with their level 20 case series.
They've got four case styles to choose from,
the VT, the XT, the GT,
and an updated version
of their triple chambered full tower case.
They've all got a sleek modern design
with rounded front corners and tempered glass.
They've all got ample room for cable management
and radiator mounts for water cooling,
and they also feature USB type C connections.
Check out the link to get yours now
at the link in the video description.
Check out the link to get, whatever.
Check out the link to get yours.
It's down below.
You know where it is.
So thanks for watching, guys.
If you disliked this video, then you can hit that button.
But if it was awesome, you can hit like, get subscribed,
or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff
we featured at the link in the video description.
But we're not gonna go full on go buy it.
How much of your life do you wanna look back on
and not have had ray tracing?
Because the reality of it is, whether you buy it today
or you buy it in two weeks,
it's gonna be the same amount of time
because you don't have it yet,
even if you own the hardware.
Anyway, also linked in the description is our merch store,
which has cool shirts like this one
and our community forum, which you should totally join.
It's like infuriating, you know?
It's like when you get like,
it's like when you buy a new CPU,
but the motherboard was out of stock
and you're just like, this does nothing.
This does nothing until I have the rest of the pieces.