On Monday, Nvidia announced a new set of GPUs in a presentation focused on ray tracing and the advent of ray tracing in today’s games. Nvidia has built an entirely new capability around ray tracing and announced an all-new SM (Streaming Multiprocessor) architecture around it. But Nvidia also debuted GPUs at substantially higher prices than its previous generation, and it showed no straight benchmark data that didn’t revolve around ray tracing.
Buying CPUs and GPUs for a first-generation feature is almost always a bad idea. If you bought an Nvidia Maxwell or Pascal video card because you thought DX12 and Vulkan were the future, do you feel like you got what you paid for as far as that feature is concerned? Probably not. AMD doesn’t get to take a bow on this either. True, DX12 has been kinder to Team Red than Team Green, but if you bought a 2013 Radeon thinking Mantle was going to take over the gaming industry, you didn’t get a lot of shipping titles before it was retired in favor of other APIs. If you bought a Radeon in 2013 thinking you were getting in on the dawn of a new age of gaming, well, you were wrong.
The list goes on. The first DX10 cards weren’t particularly fast, including models like Nvidia’s GTX 8800 Ultra. The first AMD GPUs to support tessellation in DX11 weren’t all that good at it. If you bought a VR headset and a top-end Pascal, Maxwell, or AMD GPU to drive it, guess what? By the time VR is well-established, if it ever is, you’ll be playing it on very different and vastly improved hardware. The first strike against buying into RTX specifically is that by the time ray tracing is well-established, practically useful, and driving modern games, the RTX 2080 will be a garbage GPU. That’s not an indictment of Nvidia, it’s a consequence of the substantial lead time between when a new GPU feature is released and when enough games take advantage of that feature to make it a serious perk.
But there’s also some reason to ask just how much performance these GPUs are going to deliver, period, and Nvidia left substantial questions on the table on that point. The company showed no benchmarks that didn’t involve ray tracing. To try and predict what we might see from this new generation, let’s take a look at what past cards delivered. We’re helped in this by
[H]ardOCP, which recently published a massive generational comparison of the GTX 780 versus the GTX 980 and 1080. They tested a suite of 14 games from Crysis 3 to Far Cry 5. Let’s compare the GPUs to the rate of performance improvement and see what we can tease out:
Click to enlarge
There’s a lot going on in this chart, so let’s break it down. When Nvidia moved from Kepler to Maxwell, we see evidence that they made the core far less dependent on raw memory bandwidth (the GTX 980 has markedly less than the 780), but that this lost Nvidia nothing in overall performance. Maxwell was a better-balanced architecture than Kepler, and Nvidia successfully delivered huge performance improvements without a node shift. But while Maxwell used less bandwidth than Kepler did, it still benefited from a huge increase in fill rate, and the overall improvement across 14 games tracks that fill-rate boost. Clock speeds also increased substantially. The percentage comparison data from [H]ardOCP reflects the 14 game improvement for the GTX 980 compared with the GTX 780, and then from the GTX 1080 compared with the GTX 980.
Maxwell to Kepler duplicates this improvement. Fill rate increases a monstrous 1.6x, thanks to the increased clocks (ROPs were identical). Bandwidth surged on the adoption of GDDR5X, and the overall improvement to gaming performance is directly in line with these gains. The point here is this: While any given game may gain more or less depending on the specifics of the engine and the peculiarities of its design, the average trend shows a strong relationship between throwing more bandwidth and fill rate at games and the performance of those titles.
Now we come to RTX 2080
. Its fill rate is actually slightly less than the GTX 1080
. Its core count increase is smaller than either of the previous two generations. Its bandwidth increase is smaller. And those facts alone suggest that unless Nvidia managed to deliver the mother of all IPC improvements via rearchitecting its GPU core, the RTX 2080 family is unlikely to deliver a huge improvement in current games. This tentative conclusion is further strengthened by the company’s refusal to show any game data that didn’t focus on ray tracing this week.
