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While the RTX veil will be lifted in just a few weeks, skepticism from both mainstream and enthusiast outlets appear to be growing regarding the actual worth of NVIDIA’s new cards. Engadget published a piece yesterday attempting to cut through the marketing, citing the omission of key figures and how ray tracing will take time to blossom, being relegated to future titles. ExtremeTech was a little more blunt about the latter, calling it a “bad idea” to buy into any first-generation feature. With information gleaned from our NVIDIA GPU Generational Performance article, that author also concluded the RTX 2080 family was “unlikely to deliver a huge improvement in current games.”
Simple math suggests the gains here are not particularly strong. When you combine that with the real-but-less-than-awe-inspiring gains from the incremental addition of ray tracing into shipping engines and the significant price increases NVIDIA has tacked on, there’s good reason to keep your wallet in your pocket and wait and see how this plays out. But the only way the RTX 2080 is going to deliver substantial performance improvements above Pascal, over and above the 1.2x to 1.3x suggested by core counts and bandwidth gains, is if NVIDIA has pulled off a huge efficiency gain in terms of how much work can be done per SM.
Simple math suggests the gains here are not particularly strong. When you combine that with the real-but-less-than-awe-inspiring gains from the incremental addition of ray tracing into shipping engines and the significant price increases NVIDIA has tacked on, there’s good reason to keep your wallet in your pocket and wait and see how this plays out. But the only way the RTX 2080 is going to deliver substantial performance improvements above Pascal, over and above the 1.2x to 1.3x suggested by core counts and bandwidth gains, is if NVIDIA has pulled off a huge efficiency gain in terms of how much work can be done per SM.