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Turing-Feature

Nvidia has released a list of games with upcoming support for its new RTX ray-tracing feature, likewise as a cursory word of how that characteristic will exist deployed in a shipping title. With a wide range of games promising support, these new features accept a skillful initial showing for debut, though there are questions about the size of the visual fidelity improvement and the functioning hit from enabling. We'll discuss those shortly.

Nvidia'south default listing is rather hard to parse because it contains duplicates. Nosotros've reorganized it to show the list of PC gamesSEEAMAZON_ET_135 See Amazon ET commerce that support real-time ray tracing, the games that'll support Nvidia's new DLSS (Deep Learning Super-Sampling), and those titles that'll implement both capabilities:

RTX-Features
Ray tracing is a minority feature thus far, though support for it is being integrated into 3 major titles (Metro Exodus, Battlefield V, Shadow of the Tomb Raider). Support for DLSS, on the other manus, is stronger, with an announced 10 games planning to implement the adequacy. (Six games support ray tracing, 10 volition implement DLSS, and five will have both features.) At that place'due south besides a larger number of AAA / heavy pop titles implementing DLSS, with FFXV, Hitman two, PUBG, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider all using the feature. Thus far, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the only AAA title to denote support for both features, and images from PCGamesN raise the question of how far along SotTR's implementation actually is.

RTX disabled on the left, enabled on the correct. Paradigm past PCGamesN.

Merely PCGamesN raised some serious concerns about but how much of a performance impact these features are going to have, writing:

[I]t'due south tough non to be a little concerned when the ultra-expensive, ultra-enthusiast RTX 2080 Ti isn't able to hit 60fps at 1080p in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. We weren't able to see what settings the game was running at as the options screens were cut down in the build we were capturing, but GeForce Experience was capturing at the game resolution and the RTX footage nosotros have is 1080p.

With the FPS counter on in GFE nosotros could see the game batting between 33fps and 48fps equally standard throughout our playthrough and that highlights merely how intensive real-time ray tracing can be on the new GeForce hardware… While the shadows in my play-time did expect pretty good, in that brightly lit instance it's hard to see where they look that much improve than the traditional way that shadows are faked in-game. And to enable the ray traced shadows you're obviously having to pay a huge performance punishment for the privilege.

As PCGamesN notes, this an early game build running on early drivers on hardware that isn't launched yet. Given this, it'south entirely reasonable to extend Nvidia some rails room to amend terminal performance. But even allowing for this, 33-48fps on a $1,200 GPU running at 1080p is not reasonable by any objective measure. Performance doesn't just need to improve — it needs to double or triple at 1080p for the game to have a prayer of running well in 4K at the same frame rate.

PCGamesN writes that while Battlefield V looks impressive as hell with ray tracing enabled, again, in that location's a huge performance hit for doing so. The game was nevertheless running in 1080p, and while no frame rate counter was shown, they claim they'd bet BF5 isn't striking 60fps, either. Again, for a $1200 GPU to struggle to maintain a 60fps polish frame rate in 1080p is at least mildly surprising — even when we permit for the early on land of adoption. And it's more important that BFV deliver high frame rates than pretty pictures, given the priority competitive gamers put on robust performance.

We're explicitly not recommending that gamers look at these early results and conclude that Nvidia's ray tracing applied science is DOA. The cards won't ship for a month, and all footage is early, with early drivers. But past the same token, the basic purpose of a GPU launch is to establish that your GPUsSEEAMAZON_ET_135 See Amazon ET commerce will deliver improve performance and more than features in next-generation titles. Nvidia has definitely demonstrated some visual milestones, but its own $1,200 GPUs are gasping to deliver them. Its performance in current games isn't known, but the math doesn't look good.

In short, instead of writing virtually how the math behind Pascal virtually guarantees a huge performance uplift over Maxwell (which is the state of affairs we were in dorsum in 2022), we're telling you that the bones math doesn't point in Turing's favor at all. In order to deliver the kind of proportional uplift it offered in 2022, Nvidia will demand to take sharply increased GPU IPC or found other methods of boosting efficiency. And no matter what, yous're going to pay more than for these GPUs than you lot did concluding generation (assuming you bought at MSRP).

We won't know if Nvidia actually pulled this off for a few weeks yet, and ExtremeTech recommends refraining from preorders until these questions are settled, even if that means waiting for the cards to launch. Nvidia may have delivered substantial performance improvements in addition to its new ray tracing technology, simply the company has shown no benchmarks to demonstrate that it has washed and so.

Now Read: Don't Buy The Ray-Traced Hype Around the Nvidia RTX 2080, How Nvidia's RTX Ray Tracing Works, and Nvidia Announces RTX GPU Family