General Discussions

[black_zion]

As expected there is a big performance hit, but when you look at the actual numbers vs percents, especially in Metro Exodus where the penalty is the highest, dropping to 36fps or less, with minimums under 30fps, even with a Freesync/G-Sync monitor, clearly a TitanXp and GTX 1080Ti are required, and in the other two games tested frames drop under 60 without either of those two cards as well.

So yea, pretty gimmicky.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-pascal-ray_tracing-tested,6085.html

[bearcat22]

Can you show some benchmarks of existing AMD GPU's doing Ray Tracing?

[black_zion]

As only Vega 64 and Vega VII have the power of a GTX 1080 or greater, AMD isn't going to bring ray tracing to pre Navi products. The RX 590 is slower than a 1660, therefore too slow. And given the slaughtered performance ray tracing even on RTX 2080 hardware, ray tracing itself, right now, is still a gimmick.

[elstaci]

True that Ray Tracing may be considered a gimmick since it is not wide spread and most Consumers are not technically aware of the limitations of the new technology.

But it is a great selling advertising point for Nvidia who is taking advantage of the majority of Consumer's lack of knowledge of Ray Tracing except for what Nvidia mentions as selling points on using Ray Tracing.

Nvidia is using most Consumer's naivety to sell their GPU cards at the expense of AMD.  I imagine that Ray Tracing might be a major point in choosing an Nvidia over an AMD GPU card at the present time.

I, myself, am still naive about Ray Tracing except what I have read from Nvidia's Advertising or from here at AMD Forums. To me, personally, Ray Tracing won't be a factor in purchasing a GPU Card in the future since I am not a gamer nor do I have any software that would be using Ray Tracing.

Advertising is an art. As long as it is truthful no laws are being broken. as an example:

I decided to sell a bottle of water filled from my kitchen tap water faucet. I'll call it Elstaci healthy water.

I will advertise it as:

1) Non-Fat

2) No cholesterol

3) Healthy in maintaining your body cells being hydrated

4) Quenches your thirst and refreshes you at the same time

5) Non-toxic

6) Great for using while cooking in recipes

I bet I will be getting a lot of sales inquiries. But if I were to advertise it a Elstaci tap water, I bet I won't get one sales inquiry.

Same goes for Ray Tracing at the moment.

Until the Public becomes more educated in the new Technology then advertising Ray Tracing in the future will probably be quite different then it is at the moment.

My personal view of Ray Tracing as a advertising selling point for Nvidia compared to AMD.

[black_zion]

nVidia doesn't need another selling point against AMD right now, not since they support Freesync displays, until Navi comes along as their cards just outperform AMD's. Plus, as we saw with the Forza benchmark and now with the Metro Exodus benchmark, the slower RX 580 continues to match or exceed the faster Fury X (and RX 480 outperforms the faster 390X, for that matter), which right there is a selling point against AMD, a point which AMD has refused to address and, sadly, reputable review sites haven't pressed them to answer. Someone who will be plopping down $500 or more on a video card doesn't want to see their card perform worse than a slower card, they want to continue seeing their card perform faster than slower cards.

[qwixt]

The 2080 performed better than I thought it would given what was said at release of the 20-series cards. It's still at the tech demo stage.

I thought this was funny,

"The bottom line is that real-time ray tracing is a tremendously expensive operation, even on GPUs with fixed-function RT cores dedicated to its acceleration. Leveraging DXR’s fallback layer to perform those calculations on the CUDA cores hits frame rates significantly harder. But the result isn’t the slide show we might have expected. In fact, in a game like Battlefield V, enthusiasts with high-end Pascal-based cards can enjoy playable performance using the High and Ultra quality presets."

That last sentence. I'm sure the "enthusiasts" will enjoy gaming at 60fps@1080p.

[black_zion]

Nah, "enthusiasts" game at 1280x720 244fps!