My experience with hands on 2080ti at PAX West

CrazyRob

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Yesterday I had the pleasure of a demo of a 2080ti with an early build of Metro Exodus. It was in a locked room, no recording equipment allowed. We were not allowed to look at settings, tab out, or enable any sort of benchmarking. Basically, just play the game, but they did provide one tool: the ability to turn on/off RTX at will with the F1 key.

The game and hardware was provided with the disclaimer that nothing is final. Preproduction software and hardware, so glitches are to be expected (I did see some rainbow texture shimering on some of the wolves). Otherwise, things looked like you would expect given the franchise.

Initially, the visuals looked much like promised. Volumetric lighting, realistic shadows, reflections, etc. The difference in 90% of the gameplay was obvious. Most of the effects were familiar from the previous RTX demo streams and screenshots online. Volumetric lighting, soft shadows, dynamic light sources, etc. The one thing that caught me offguard and was my "wow" moment, was when I equipped a weapon with a scope, but did not aim down sights. The lens of the scope reflected the environment behind me, acting as a small but noticeable rear-view mirror. Of course, being a round lense, it was distorted, but an effect/feature like this could be useful for a sniper/camper trying to watch their back. That was the moment that I realized RTX has the potential to change not just how games look, but also how they're played.

But I do use the word "potential" literally, because the demo was clearly running at 30hz with heavy motion blur. It was also a lower resolution, likely 1080p. (Again, these are my estimates, because I was not allowed to adjust settings). If these performance numbers remain consistent throughout development, will the pro's be enough to outweigh the performance cons? My guess is, it will take a couple generations of hardware before enthusiast and competitive gamers turn all the settings on. But this is certainly a gorgeous start and a treat for those willing to look past the compromises to see what Future generations of games can look like.
 
Thanks for sharing.

Real-time ray-tracing sounds like it may still be a big performance hit but maybe worth it. Metro may end up being the modern day Crysis, in that max settings could take years to reach, and I'm okay with that.

I pre-ordered 2 RTX 2080 Tis. I'm really hoping that, and with NVLink SLI improvements, I can get to 1440p with these new games. I think that should be possible, but we'll see.
 
Thanks for sharing.

Real-time ray-tracing sounds like it may still be a big performance hit but maybe worth it. Metro may end up being the modern day Crysis, in that max settings could take years to reach, and I'm okay with that.

I pre-ordered 2 RTX 2080 Tis. I'm really hoping that, and with NVLink SLI improvements, I can get to 1440p with these new games. I think that should be possible, but we'll see.

The metro series has always been forward thinking graphically (especially the original), it's what put them on the map the begin with.
 
Your mini review lines up with what the Developers said, that they aim to have 60fps at 1080p by release. So would not be surprised if the your comments about the demo running at 30Hz and 1080p are completely accurate
 
If 1080p 120 Hz/FPS is considered the minimum for "competitive" play, that means GPU's would need to be twice as fast as the 2080 Ti. Considering GPU's increase performance about 30-40% per generation, we could see maybe RTX 1080p 120 FPS by 2021 or so.

4K 120 FPS single GPU ray-tracing by maybe 2025? That's a long time.

The only way to skip years is SLI, but we all know how well that has been working lately...

IMO ray tracing will be used for solo gaming and not anything competitive. At least for half a decade or more.
 
There would be no benefit to using Ray tracing for competitive play. Eye candy is the last consideration for controlled competitions and serious games.
 
There would be no benefit to using Ray tracing for competitive play. Eye candy is the last consideration for controlled competitions and serious games.
Actually, some reviews said it can affect gameplay. For example, looking at the reflection in a car near a corner will give you an advantage cause you can see someone coming.
 
4K 120 FPS single GPU ray-tracing by maybe 2025? That's a long time.

I suspect they had to carefully balance the die area for RT hardware with die area for rasterization for this first generation, probably targeting a minimum area to make RT viable, erring on the side of rasterization so that it could get the expected generational boost in rasterization games. If RT catches on in a big way like they are hoping then the speed progression could be accelerated with the next generation by giving more die area to RT, providing a minimal rasterization gains but huge gains in RT. It'll be interesting to see how this all turns out but I suspect RT features are going to be pretty rare until console GPUs get RT hardware, maybe in the generation coming in 2020.
 
Thanks for sharing.

Real-time ray-tracing sounds like it may still be a big performance hit but maybe worth it. Metro may end up being the modern day Crysis, in that max settings could take years to reach, and I'm okay with that.

I pre-ordered 2 RTX 2080 Tis. I'm really hoping that, and with NVLink SLI improvements, I can get to 1440p with these new games. I think that should be possible, but we'll see.

In fact, I asked specifically about NVLINK SLI considering the lack of information about it. He said he could not answer specifics, but he did say that it is not just traditional SLI over an NVLINK bridge. I'm hoping this means they're using that extra bandwidth for some form of gpu pooling or some new trick.

There would be no benefit to using Ray tracing for competitive play. Eye candy is the last consideration for controlled competitions and serious games.

As I mentioned above, the reflection in the lens of the scope could be used as extra info for what's going on behind you. If performance is not a compromise, then raytracing absolutely could provide some competitive advantages.
 
If you truly wanted the scope reflection feature you could do it many other ways besides ray tracing. I feel like if it was meant to be a feature in the game they'd go about it in a different way that was less taxing.

I'm still excited for ray tracking
 
There would be no benefit to using Ray tracing for competitive play. Eye candy is the last consideration for controlled competitions and serious games.
"Serious" games. I consider Metro to be a serious game.
 
"Serious" games. I consider Metro to be a serious game.

He just means competitive games like OW, dota2, etc. where you turn settings down to get a target fps or to remove bells and whistles that may add to atmosphere in SP games, are just sort of distracting in competitive play. I turn most of the options to max in games like witcher or metro but I certainly don't do that even in OW where I run a mix of med./high.

That said he's right, guys like me don't care about ray tracing right now because the performance cost far outweighs the visual gains.
 
He just means competitive games like OW, dota2, etc. where you turn settings down to get a target fps or to remove bells and whistles that may add to atmosphere in SP games, are just sort of distracting in competitive play. I turn most of the options to max in games like witcher or metro but I certainly don't do that even in OW where I run a mix of med./high.

That said he's right, guys like me don't care about ray tracing right now because the performance cost far outweighs the visual gains.
He should have said "for games used in controlled competitions," then.
 
Why buy 2 of these cards? Devs have been quickly moving away from SLI support in many tier one games for about 2 or 3 years now. IMO that trend will only accelerate. I dropped SLI over 2 years ago because of it. I always buy the fastest single card solution they make now.
 
He should have said "for games used in controlled competitions," then.

Yeah serious was perhaps a poor word choice. For example I don't think anyone (even people who don't particularly like it) would say Witcher 3 was not a serious game. When I first started the game I had a 770 and was forced to turn lots of stuff down. Took so long to beat it that I went through a couple different GPUs and finally when I got the 1080 ti I was able to turn something 'similar' to ray tracing (hairworks) on!
 
Why buy 2 of these cards? Devs have been quickly moving away from SLI support in many tier one games for about 2 or 3 years now. IMO that trend will only accelerate. I dropped SLI over 2 years ago because of it. I always buy the fastest single card solution they make now.

Obviously this gets debated a lot. If one has a lot of games, SLI support isn't exactly rare and there are modern titles that from time to time support it. And there are other reasons to have multiple cards like needing lots of display outputs.
 
If you truly wanted the scope reflection feature you could do it many other ways besides ray tracing. I feel like if it was meant to be a feature in the game they'd go about it in a different way that was less taxing.

I'm still excited for ray tracking

Same here.

Wildlands has reflections like this on sunglasses so there is 0 reason why you couldn't also put this on a scope.

Wildlands and other older games even have reflections. No reason whatsoever to require raytracing for reflections.
 
Same here.

Wildlands has reflections like this on sunglasses so there is 0 reason why you couldn't also put this on a scope.

Wildlands and other older games even have reflections. No reason whatsoever to require raytracing for reflections.

Ray tracing does it realistically. It’ll stretch/skew/distort reflections like they should be and it also requires way less man hours by the devs (probably why they are super excited).

I know with BFV they said the traditional way was difficult and you couldn’t reflect details not already on the screen space. They’d also cut it way down in area to avoid graphical glitches.

I think it’s one of those features that we won’t appreciate until we actually play a game infront of us. Kinda of like the Witcher 3 how youtube videos did it zero justice... they did a great job with immersion and making the environment feel alive (swaying trees, ect.) that just wasn’t conveyed until you picked up the remote.
 
Same here.

Wildlands has reflections like this on sunglasses so there is 0 reason why you couldn't also put this on a scope.

Wildlands and other older games even have reflections. No reason whatsoever to require raytracing for reflections.


Nope. Not required. Devs are probably excited to use it though. I also think it helps the game age as well when they include this kind of shit. Later on when the hardware gets better some people go back to play these. Or even play them for the first time.
 
ARMA 3 has had PiP available for quite some time.
If you can run it, it enables things like mirrors, rear view cams, etc. to give you visibility behind you-this is more a game engine implementation than a graphics implementation, IMO.
 
I'd rather play at 4k/60hz with RTX OFF than 1080p/60hz with RTX ON.
1080Ti offers me 4k/60hz at high settings in pretty much every game currently.
Call me when I can play with RTX @ 4k. Otherwise not impressed at all.
 
I'd rather play at 4k/60hz with RTX OFF than 1080p/60hz with RTX ON.
1080Ti offers me 4k/60hz at high settings in pretty much every game currently.
Call me when I can play with RTX @ 4k. Otherwise not impressed at all.

I think some games will allow 4k/60 with ray tracing but nVidia failed to sell me on it tbh so I don’t even factor it.

RTX also includes DLSS which increases IQ or framerate (and maybe slightly IQ) depending how you have it set. But if the 1080ti gives you what you need that’s great. It is a good card.
 
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