Mmm, I'm a bit skeptical of the long-term success of Nvidia turning their backs on the hardware design that propelled them to greatness in the first place: unified compute engines and nothing else inside their GPUs. It feels like they've contracted IBM's disease, though IBM had Intel selling more efficient and simpler hardware to keep them in their place. On the other hand AMD, though, designed what was possibly their worst GPU ever since buying ATI (and subject to the same "disease", with all of Vega's useless bells and whistles).

This one. I want Netflix and the like locked to the TV and games on the speakers.

You are?. I mean, I'd want to be, but seeing where game desgin goes these days and how it has to run on consoles, I honestly don't see myself caring about tech I'll never be able to see, because it'd make the other closed off boxes look bad if a PC had it designed for them and used for first.

I'd be absolutely down for it if we saw many devs making games with real time ray tracing in mind for PC versions or primarily for PC made games. Just not later or after consoles get it first, because I'm honestly tired of the whole "avoid upsetting the special snowflake in the room" routine we've been having for years and years. 

Mmm, I'm a bit skeptical of the long-term success of Nvidia turning their backs on the hardware design that propelled them to greatness in the first place: unified compute engines and nothing else inside their GPUs. It feels like they've contracted IBM's disease, though IBM had Intel selling more efficient and simpler hardware to keep them in their place. On the other hand AMD, though, designed what was possibly their worst GPU ever since buying ATI (and subject to the same "disease", with all of Vega's useless bells and whistles).

Even if the cards have the same $100 extra that the latest Founder Edition cards had, that's still a lot of money. We need AMD to be competitive again, asap.

Ugh, it's Monday. I guess I have to make the news, right? Oh, great! It turns out that there's a lot of them... >.>

SA_DirectX 2.0 mod makes Grand Theft Auto San Andreas look almost as good as modern-day video games
https://www.dsogaming.com/news/sa_directx-2-0-mod-makes-grand-theft-auto-san-andreas-look-almost-as-good-as-modern-day-video-games/
Modder ‘Makarus’ has released the final version of his graphical overhaul mod for Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, SA_DirectX 2.0. While the modder did not reveal the changes he has made to the change, he did release some screenshots that showcase the new and improved visuals achieved with this mod.
From what we have gathered, SA_DirectX 2.0 has some new shaders that Makarus has implemented via the ENBSeries mod for GTA San Andreas. The result is incredible and almost makes the game look as good as modern-day titles (of course we’re not talking about the current-gen triple-A games, but something you could find in an indie/lowered-budget title).

>>The mod is available from Nexus Mods.

Mmm, I'm a bit skeptical of the long-term success of Nvidia turning their backs on the hardware design that propelled them to greatness in the first place: unified compute engines and nothing else inside their GPUs. It feels like they've contracted IBM's disease, though IBM had Intel selling more efficient and simpler hardware to keep them in their place. On the other hand AMD, though, designed what was possibly their worst GPU ever since buying ATI (and subject to the same "disease", with all of Vega's useless bells and whistles).

Well, with how AMD is steering itself with Sony/Apple and long term plans, we're looking at 2021, maybe 22 for when AMD decide to come back for high end desktop GPU's. Competition at this point is basically dead.

The fact nVidia are willing to reserve so much silicon to propriety features may actually play into AMD's hands in the long run anyway.

If anyone remembers the Geforce FX for example... Allot of that chips issues was due to the fact it retained allot of the older fixed-function hardware which consumed die-space that ATI with the Radeon 9700 Pro pretty much dedicated to improving it's overall performance, especially in SM2 scenarios... End result was that ATI pretty much utterly dominated that era.

The fact nVidia are willing to reserve so much silicon to propriety features may actually play into AMD's hands in the long run anyway.

If anyone remembers the Geforce FX for example... Allot of that chips issues was due to the fact it retained allot of the older fixed-function hardware which consumed die-space that ATI with the Radeon 9700 Pro pretty much dedicated to improving it's overall performance, especially in SM2 scenarios... End result was that ATI pretty much utterly dominated that era.

Yeah, FX series is what immediately popped to mind when i was reading about RTX cards - FX was when I dropped nVidia for ATI (9800 Pro, I had Ti4400 before that) - if AMD has any sense they will release fairly conservative hardware that uses all die space to improve performance in current and near future games and get back in the game.

I think people are overlooking the fact that they didn't actually compromise much space in the chip and instead just made it bigger to compensate. The 2080Ti still has a considerable upgrade in CUDA cores.

Even if AMD puts out a conservative GPU they won't eclipse the rasterization performance by much, if at all.

Even if AMD puts out a conservative GPU they won't eclipse the rasterization performance by much, if at all.

Also, the RT and Tensor cores aren't like PhysX, as in a very niche and proprietary feature. They work together with DX and they are very broadly applicable to games without much special input from the devs. RT is without a doubt the future of gaming and Tensor cores can help with a variety of tasks. For now it's just gimmicks because the hardware behind it is still too weak to actually accomplish properly what it promises but you have to start somewhere. The sooner devs get familiar with these new opportunities, the better.

Now we just have to hope that the RT and AI functionality that will eventually pop up in AMD GPUs are similar enough in framework to that in Nvidia chips.

The point is, they could have had more CUDA cores for the same die space.

The 2080Ti is 18.6 Billion transistors large.
The 1080Ti is 12 Billion transistors large.
That is an increase of 55% in transistor counts.

The 2080Ti has 4352 CUDA cores.
The 1080Ti has 3584 CUDA cores.
That is an increase of 21%.

We should have been looking at closer to 5,500 CUDA cores.

See the problem now?

Combine that with a slight reduction in clocks between the 1080Ti and 2080Ti... I don't expect the performance gains in typical rasterized scenario's to be generationally-ground breaking.

We don't know if the GPU is going to be any good in Ray Traced scenario's anyway. This is essentially the "base line" for next-gen graphics.
Chicken and Egg and all that.
I would prefer hardware that works well in games today, not years later.

So until we actually have games and enough hardware on the market that these features become proven... Then they are all gimmicks at this stage.