It’s interesting that the 3090 is a replacement for the Titan. The $1500 price tag is a bit higher than expected but considering the Titan cost $2500 it doesn’t seem too unreasonable.
tbh he pricing is much better than I expected. I'll get one for my new build, but probably a 3rd party as I'm not convinced by the cooling on the FE as of yet.
People are speculating that the 2x numbers come from RTX and/or DLSS, but they also doubled the number of CUDA cores so its possible its going to be an actual raw performance gain.
I think its wise to be skeptical until independant benchmarks are available but I would be surprised if this didn't end up being the biggest performance increase in Nvidia's history for a single generation, just like they say it is.
probably because of, oh I don't know, the text right next to the 3070 dot saying "faster than 2080 Ti"...
(and I'm really only speculating here)
It probably won't be like, night and day faster than a 2080 Ti of course, it's going to be the same bracket judging by the chart, but I'd expect it to usually edge out the 2080 Ti by a couple percent based on the text there.
I just went and checked my RX 5700 receipt and I paid $212 after tax last November. After selling the included Borderlands 3 license because I'd already bought it, net price under $200. GPU value of the century right there.
But as a lighting nerd, I do want the raytracing...
Ah, you're right. It was a good sale but not quite that crazy - still under $300 total. Combo deal from Newegg and for some reason they invoiced the two parts separately, so when I searched by "5700" it only found the first one. Went back by order number and found both invoices.
Still, less than $300 for this card has been a great bargain. I've since picked up a 1440p screen and it's happily chugging along. Been most of a year and they're still selling for substantially more than this.
Yeah, the price inflation on midrange cards was pretty crazy. My GTX 970 was around $375, and the 1000/2000 cards were way more expensive. The RX 5700 was the first worthwhile upgrade in a similar price range. Lack of competition paired with cryptocurrency miners.
I see a bunch of both cards and they're both around 400 bucks, give or take... but I kinda figured putting a link to a view into a selection of newegg inventory would end confusing at best :facepalm:
There's been significant stocking issues on PC components since the pandemic began and thus prices have gone all sorts of crazy. You absolutely shouldn't spend that much on an RX 5700; the performance isn't remotely there to justify that price.
$290 + tax, and $30 back for reselling Borderlands, so effectively $260. BL3 was only a few months old but I think the value was tanked a bit by being an Epic Store key, it was free so I can't complain.
The launch prices were $350 for the 5700 and $400 for the 5700 XT (after the pre-release price drop response to Nvidia), so $260 was $90 under list price, or 25% off.
And really, even finding a GPU for list price instead of being marked up for mining ethereum (or whatever else) was a bit of a miracle compared to the last few years of GPU price insanity.
I recently got a 2070 super OC. It really struggles with, say, COD:MW at near 4k Res (3440x1440). Indeed the campaign with RT on doesn't get more than ~50fps. Kinda disappointed really. Get about 100fps in multiplayer with everything turned off/low.
But the cost of a 2080ti was ridiculous especially considering the open secret of its impending obsolescence.
AMD really need to up their marketing budget. From the zeitgeist I've no idea where their lineup sits comparatively. No wonder they only have 20% market share
AMD still don't offer a compelling product for the high-end, which Nvidia is taking full advantage of. AMD cards are the most economical on the market and have their own advantages but they're niche (Linux support is much better for example).
AMD got on top of Intel by creating hardware that delivers. Just a few years ago AMD CPUs were economical, but the performance was abysmal, especially in single-threaded applications by comparison. They didn't make a product for the high-end.
I am eagerly awaiting what the next series of AMD cards are going to be able to do. They're talking a big game for sure. But Nvidia has a big software advantage as well as a hardware advantage on AMD and that's likely to be a sticking point for me personally on my next purchase. Nvidia spends a lot of resources on working closely with developers and providing them support they need to take better advantage of the hardware with nvidia-specific features. AMD doesn't seem to do the same, and has had much higher profile issues with their drivers in my experience.
All that said, I hope AMD can provide a product to truly compete at the high-end with Nvidia, to hopefully drive prices down as GPU prices have gone up dramatically on the high end.
About 4 months ago I picked up a 2060 Super for my ancient gaming desktop while I am waiting for the 3080 or 3090 to finally build a new gaming PC. Ideally I'd have a 4th gen Ryzen equivalent of the 3900X.
The main reason my 2012 build of a PC is holding up ok was PCIE 3.0 support, so for me PCIE 4.0 is a must. The only thing I ever upgraded was the GPU and HDD. Went from 670 -> 980 -> 2060 Super. The i7-3370k (OC to about 4.3Ghz) has held up ok. The 16GB DD3-1866Mhz is slow however. Switching from a 2TB 5200 RPM drive to a 2TB NVMe SSD (Samsung EVO 860) for which I had to get a riser card since the ASROCK z77 Extreme 4 doesn't have m.2 made a huge difference also. When I upgraded to the RTX 2060 Super I ran out of PCI 3.0 lanes, and as a result my SSD is running slower, but that's ok.
Suprisingly, I can play the new Microsoft Flight simulator just fine in 3440x1440 resolution on High Settings. Assassin's Creed Odyssey runs well in 1440p Ultra at ~60 FPS.
I bought a 2060 two weeks ago for $280. I don’t want to drop $499 on a 3070, very psyched about the 3060. Just seems like that won’t be until late this year.
Seems like the expectation on Reddit is that the 3090 is more of a Titan replacement rather than a 2080Ti replacement and that a Ti variant will come later with 20gb of mem.
From what I heard, nvidia wants to simplify naming, having Ti and Super along side the numbers makes it confusing for the consumer (in their opinion), so they want to go away from it. I wouldn't be surprised that the rumor is true and that they will ditch the Ti/Super suffixes.
That is fair. It is a bigger jump from the Ti. Though most of the rumor sites were suggesting $1400. The 20Gb 2080 variant seems to be a really recent rumor though.
What I did find interesting is that it does seem like the $1499 on the slide could have been mistakenly shown. They didn't verbally announce it and other than that one second avoided talking about the price.
It's not an expectation from Reddit, this was said explicitly in the presentation - that they used to make the Titan for people who wanted the best of the best, so here's 3090 for that market.
3080 ti comes later. They said at the presentation the 3090 is the new Titan so its actually a massive price drop.
The 3080 TI will probably be out next year if they follow typical patterns and it will have slightly better gaming performance than the 3090 at a much lower price.
> Everything was awesome except the 3090. $1500?!?!?!?! That's a big jump from the 2080Ti pricing of $1200.
Since its a Titan model (for machine learning work, not for gamers), and the last gen "RTX Titan" costs 2500$ today, its actually a big jump, but in the opposite direction. Almost half the price...
I don't know about last gen, but that was the same as the generation before it - the 1070 beat the 980ti. It's the cycle they do, and as a gamer why I'll never buy more than the x70 card.
I'd wait for in-game benchmarks on high end monitors before I believe that comparison from NVIDIA. Even if the specs are better games are still optimized for older gen cards.
Yes, but we've all been burned by GPU marketing in the past. Notice that they're only remarking on RTX performance. It's entirely possible that this card has a lower geekbench score or FLOPS output.
I'm still sitting on a GTX 970 and was waiting for the RTX 30 release so I could buy a used RTX 20 at under $500. This pricing means that it's worth it for me to just jump straight to the 30 series.
>Leveraging the advanced architecture of our new GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics cards, we’ve created NVIDIA RTX IO, a suite of technologies that enable rapid GPU-based loading and game asset decompression
It can't both bypass the CPU and have decompression unless it is decompression on the GPU. I'm not sure it is dedicated decompression hardware, or if it is using the normal GPU compute.
> Specifically, NVIDIA RTX IO brings GPU-based lossless decompression, allowing reads through DirectStorage to remain compressed while being delivered to the GPU for decompression.
Still not sure if it'll use fixed-function decompression units on the GPU or if it's just compute shaders, but it's decompressing on the GPU.
All of the performance claims are extremely hand-wavey.
They are using the deep learning and compute features to equivocate about resolutions and framerates. 8K@60 isn't real, but with DLSS activated it is.
I'm going to assume that's because it has twice the raytracing power so it's with all the eyecandy turned up (Until I see something that says otherwise).
It was the 20xx series that had insane pricing (in a bad way). nVidia had no competition and priced things at the highest markup the market could take, segmenting it by ML, cloud, mining, gaming etc.
Not sure what their competition now in each vertical, but apparently they believe that they need a lower price point.
I'm glad the 3080 is launching first so I can try getting one of those and if they are sold out I have time to think about whether I want to try dropping more than twice as much on a 3090 instead.
I wonder what the price would've been without AMD dipping their toes into the GPU market again.
I very much assume Nvidia slices price, to not only compete but also crush the AMD GPU market. Nvidia's innovation is crazy huge, but they probably don't want to be in the same situation as Intel where people regard the big dog as slow, profit-extracting. Nvidia will do it's best to eat as much market share with better products over AMD('s GPU.)
It's targeted for a November 2020 unveil[0] so we'll have to wait to see what they're coming out with, but I doubt it'll stack up to the 30xx series on both price and performance (at least, based on these marketing slides).
It has to be out before the new consoles, which are reportedly coming the first two weeks of November. I think the consoles are being kept secretive on AMD’s request as well.
The 2080 TI are going to overflow the used market, at 100-200$ at best, so... if AMD can't top that significantly, a used 2080 TI might be much better value than anything AMD can offer.
That's overly aggressive. If a 3070 is really the same performance as a 2080 TI then the 2080 TI will likely go used for $400.
People don't see graphics cards like they're brake pads. They don't wear down the same way. $150 (no tax) is still $150 less for what is essentially the same thing.
many things is: ray tracing, tensor cores (for DLSS), and normal shaders (which is essentially everything).
Even if you don't value ray tracing, DLSS is the difference between playing at 1080p ultra settings, and doing the same thing at 4k.
Now, if you say you don't value Ray Tracing and DLSS, then I'd agree that it makes little sense to upgrade from a 2080 Ti to a 3070 or up. But DLSS is quite useful for any 3D application (CAD, 3D modelling, gaming, ...), and the tensor cores it uses are useful for ML, so if someone is not doing either of these with a GFX, I wonder what do they use the GFX for where DLSS makes no difference. Maybe as a heating stove :D
> Now, if you say you don't value Ray Tracing and DLSS, then I'd agree that it makes little sense to upgrade from a 2080 Ti to a 3070 or up.
I think the thing is though - how many people use DLSS and how many people use ray tracing? I'm going to guess very few. This is all the games that support ray tracing and/or DLSS. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2020/09/01/confirmed-ray-tr... That list is horribly short. I don't even play any of the games on that list!
Again, the amount of people using the tensor cores and what not is trivially small. I'll be excited if the benchmarks come out and show a 50%+ gain across the board with all games. Until then - I remain skeptical. This just seems like a price cut on a ridiculously overpriced amount of cards. The fact that the 2080 Ti is still $1200 after 2 years of being out is atrocious. Nvidia went ultra-capitalist with their last generation.
Based on performance claims from AMD, as well as PS5 and Xbox, I would expect to see an AMD card which matches the 3070 in rasterization for around the same price, maybe a little less, but with less of the fancy software features. If you look past the marketing, you can see that Nvidia's improvement from a performance/watt perspective has only increased by ~20-30%.
The rumour mill has the top end big navi at 2080 ti levels of perf. If those rumours and nvidia's claims here are accurate, they're out of the high end segment. again.
GPUs are still overpriced because of Nvidia's monopoly on high-end cards. The fact that we're so normalized to this after the 2xxx series is kind of sad. It's like praising Apple for a phone that's "only" $999.
How are you defining value? Sales for the 20XX were "disappointing" and so obviously the market considered these cards to be overpriced. However, the reaction to the 30XX announcement seems to be extremely positive.
Isn't the "value" of a GPU simply what the market is willing to pay for it? I bought a 1080 in May of 2016 for $599. According to the BLS CPI inflation calculator, that's approximately $647 in 2020. $499 for a card that is double the performance of a 1080 seems like a great value to me, personally.
These look great! It’s amazing how much better hardware gets annually. The only thing I was hoping for that wasn’t mentioned was hardware-accelerated VP9 encoding, but we can’t get everything we want in life.
If we were to imagine that VP9 hardware encoding by Nvidia would hold the same standard as their H.265 hardware encoding then we can stop holding our breaths, as we have not missed out on anything of any value what so ever.
For H.265 their encoder is fast, yes, but the quality per bitrate is complete rubbish, requiring higher bitrate than a good H.264 encode yet still contrives the gruesome trick of looking far worse, which entirely offsets all and any point with H.265.
Oh interesting, I didn't know the Nvidia encoder was regarded as trash. What tools can one I use to evaluate visual quality of a video file? My proxy for quality has always been bitrate, but I know that bitrate is just chasing visuak quality anyways...
No. Turing's NVEnc for H.265 is great for speed (as usual) and good for quality with Bframes support when compared to other HW encoders. (Ice Lake's encoder is also good but it's released later). It shouldn't be complete rubbish. IMO it's usable not only for streaming but also for archiving. Don't compare quality with x265, that should be good quality and slow.
The video[1] mentions that it (3090) was made for users in the Titan product segment, and it's introduced as a Titan replacement. The Ti models will probably come later as usual.
Extremely confusingly the Ti stands/stood for titan as well, while at the same time Nvidia also released cards with the name "Titan", like the Titan X, Titan Xp, Titan V, Titan RTX etc. When people say "the titans" they may refer to either the "something Ti" cards or the "Titan something" cards.
Yeah, naming is confusing, the RTX 3090 is the non-HPC "Titan" model of this gen, and, if I understood correctly, is 1.5x faster than the previous gen RTX Titan, which costed this morning 2500$.
There is also a previous gen HPC "Titan V" with HBM memory, but AFAICT no Ampere Titan card with HBM2 was announced.
It's 50% in ray-tracing performance, not raw performance, and it doesn't have big memory bandwidth improvements. It's not the Titan successor, it's the 2080Ti.
You can see this because the chip name is GA102, the 2 at the end indicates that this is a cut-down chip.
All previous generation Titan models have been cut down chips as well TU102, GV102, etc.
With one exception: the Titan V card that I mentioned which comes with the GV100 chip. But as I mentioned, that one targets a very different market segment with HBM memory, which the "RTX 3090" obviously doesn't target, since otherwise it would come with HBM2 memory like all the GA100 products.
There is a rumor about 48GB version of RTX3090 replacing the original Titan RTX with a similar price. That would make sense for Deep Learning workloads as 24GB is already too small for attention-based models.
As always, wait for the benchmarks before deciding to buy (or return). My guess is the performance improvements are the biggest for raytracing, which I personally don't care for. And let's not forget the huge power draw, requiring a new power connector and a 3 slot cooler.
8N manufacturing process is presumably Samsung, which will probably be beat by TSMC 7nm.
The product page linked elsewhere in the thread[1] has photos of the 3070 with the 12-pin connector and mentions that all Founder Edition cards include an adapter:
> To that end, our engineers designed a much smaller PCB, shrank the NVLink and power connectors, and still managed to pack in 18-phases for improved power delivery. Don’t worry, we included an adapter that allows Founders Edition cards to work with users’ existing power supplies.
> As always, wait for the benchmarks before deciding to buy (or return).
Why would you keep a 1200$ RTX 2080 Ti or a 2500$ Titan when you can get at least the same perf for 50-75% of the price with the new products, and much better RTX perf ?
This assumes that with RTX off the new gen won't be slower than the old one, but I think that's a fair assumption, and if it isn't, you can always return the 30xx card in 2 weeks, and buy an used 2080 Ti or Titan on ebay for pennies, once the market overflows from people upgrading for the 30xx series.
People were still asking for 900$ for a used 2080 Ti on ebay this morning, and the 3080 700$ price just destroys that offer. Many owners are going to try and dump these cards for as much as they can get in the next two weeks. I wouldn't buy a used 2080 Ti for more than 250$ today. In one month, these cards are going to sell used for 100-200$. If AMD can only match the 2080 Ti perf, they are going to have a very hard time pricing against the used 2080 Ti market.
> And let's not forget the huge power draw, requiring a new power connector and a 3 slot cooler.
That's only for the 3090 IIUC. All other cards were announced as being actually much smaller than the 20xx series ones.
True, the new generation offers better price/performance vs the previous generation.
Do note that the 3080 is still 2 weeks away (17 sept), 3090 24 sept, 3070 in October.
I would consider getting a non-founders edition though, in the past other brands have had better/more silent cooling for pretty much identical pricing.
Edit:
While the 3090 (350W) is the only one requiring a 3 slot cooler, all 3 use the new 12 pin power connector. The 3080 founder edition power draw is still 320W, vs 220W for the 2080.
Pretty bold claim that 2080TIs are going to sell for $250 in a month, lol.
Certainly the market for them will take a beating compared to new prices now. But I can't imagine it collapsing like that purely based on the supply. How many people are really going to drop their 2080 just because a new thing is out there?
I'd love to be wrong, as an original 2070 owner ;)
>Why would you keep a 1200$ RTX 2080 Ti or a 2500$ Titan when you can get at least the same perf for 50-75% of the price with the new products, and much better RTX perf
Well for one, keeping a card you already bought is free, buying a new one costs money.
Why are you all getting so excited about the prices given in a paper launch? Wait until you can actually buy one at that price, which I'm guessing isn't going to be until well into 2021.
I'm not sure if I'm missing some context but I'm assuming you are outside the return period. But anyway, I'd be really beyond surprised if these cards are actually available at these prices anytime soon.
Also if find a 2080ti for 200 before the year 2022 let me know I'll buy you a beer.
Yeah there is no way they sell a card that does 200% the fps of a 2080ti in "normal" (non raytracing, ultra quality) averaged over multiple titles. If a 2080ti does 100fps without raytracing and 30fps with, this might do 110fps without raytracing and 60fps with, for they'll a "100%" increase but most would consider that 10%.
I was wondering if all benchmarks use the OptiX features or only the CUDA features. In software like Blender this makes a huge difference. OptiX can be twice as fast as CUDA.
So of benchmarks don't use the OptiX capabilities then they will miss a lot of available speed.
> My guess is the performance improvements are the biggest for raytracing, which I personally don't care for.
I still don't understand the raytracing craze when it comes to games. Years ago when I wrote my first raytracer I might have got excited about it. But we have advanced so much with rasterization that I don't really understand why this is something we need.
Raytracing complexity is tricky and it is likely to prove challenging to do in a game with consistent frame rates. Soft shadows are expensive even for hardware.
I would be more excited about some other global illumination improvements, like photon mapping.
Many newer games are designed to show off raytracing effects. Cyberpunk 2077 has lots of neon lights, shiny things, rain puddles, etc for light to bounce around, and raytracing makes it look a lot nicer than when the shadows are approximated in traditional ways. Minecraft ... ye gods. The videos I've seen look amazing. The other nice thing these cards have is the DLSS 2.0 tech, which is supposed to let it render at higher resolutions by _making things up_ (?) based on ... something buzzword-laden. The effect, though, is that you get similar or better quality at much higher framerates, because lossy techniques are still nice to look at.
"Need" is a strong word, but I'm sure someone will make a game where the shadows _matter_ for telling the story, or solving puzzles, or even just making the game world look more realistic and believable.
> "Need" is a strong word, but I'm sure someone will make a game where the shadows _matter_ for telling the story, or solving puzzles, or even just making the game world look more realistic and believable.
DLSS renders the game at a lower resolution then upscales it to a higher resolution using AI to modify the final image. The models are trained from super-resolution renders and used to be trained per-game but are now generalized. They're designed to upscale textures, denoise, fix aliasing and overall increase quality based on that high-end source data so you get the same output without having to actually run at those settings.
RTX cards don't render everything with ray tracing. They use it for light calculations, for example it can be used exactly for global illumination.
> why this is something we need.
The answer is simple. Because there is a limit to how realistic we can make the lighting and shadowing using the old models. We are almost at that limit. Using ray tracing removes that limit.
> challenging to do in a game with consistent frame rates
Try Quake II RTX. It is very consistent right off the bat, and if you turn on the resolution scaling, you can get completely consistent framerates (within 2-3 fps continuously). While it might not be a game with the most advanced graphics, it does have variety of scenes, and there is no issue with the framerates being "inconsistent".
Hardware Unboxed tested an RTX 3080 and it seems like the performance improvements are not just in ray tracing: https://youtu.be/cWD01yUQdVA
It looks pretty impressive.
Regarding the new power connector: All the partner cards showcased by Gamers Nexus have the regular two or three 8-pin connectors and the FE cards seem to include an adapter. Nvidia states that a 750W power supply is required, so depending on the CPU even a 650W should be fine.
Well, 2 generations ago the MSRP of the 1070 was $379 and the 1080 was $599, so I'd say we've just gotten used to the higher prices which they successfully normalized.
That's sorta fair - we're assuming that these cards won't be marked up like crazy either - I imagine the MSRP will be wrong here too. I bought a Gigabyte 1070 for ~$450 USD at launch.
Agreed, seems like Nvidia is preemptively trying to fend off AMD with an extreme show of force. This level of performance/pricing is much higher than even AMD's most optimistic estimates for performance/efficiency gains for their next generation.
I couldn't find pricing for 3090. I seriously doubt it's less than the current version of Titan. It'd also make sense - lots of DL research is currently done on 2080Ti. Take that away and people will buy a more expensive SKU just to get more VRAM.
If this pricing holds up though, I need to get a large NVDA position, because they'll sell at TON of 3090. I'll buy 8.
So it seems that the 3090 will be priced at 1499$. This is kind of insane.
EDIT: For people comparing this to the Titan RTX, no. This GA102, not GA100. It's the cut-down version of Ampere. GA100 will come out, and it will be even more expensive.
Virtually nobody needs a 3090, much less a gamer (let's be honest, though, many will buy one regardless). For the people that actually do need that horsepower, it's unbelievably cheap for what you are getting. You could have easily paid twice that a year ago for less.
Well yeah, that's just how it is because of progress. It's still more expensive than last year's XX102 chip. That said, it's only about 50% faster than a 2080Ti at everything except ray-tracing. 50% faster, 40% more expensive.
Back in Kepler, a 780Ti was 800$, and it had the GK110 chip, which was the full-fat chip. Now, the cut-down chip costs twice as much.
> Virtually nobody needs a 3090, much less a gamer
I'm tempted to get one just to avoid having to think about upgrading a graphics card for another 10 years. Plus I can do some ML messing about as well for resume-driven development.
Best I can get for $500 now (~£377) is an 8GB GTX2060 - 5x fewer cores, 1/3rd the RAM, 2/3rd the memory bandwidth of the GTX3090 which is £1399. Plus I really don't want to upgrade my PC again for at least 5 years - just done that and been reminded of why I hate it.
> Virtually nobody needs a 3090, much less a gamer (let's be honest, though, many will buy one regardless).
That statement is absolutely true regarding me. Honestly, I don't need a gaming system at all, let alone one with such a powerful GPU. But even in terms of my leisure-time gaming, I could never justify the price difference over a much cheaper card.
Still, I could imagine it making a lot more sense for other people. E.g., pro gamers, people with big entertainment budgets, or people using CUDA for number-crunching.
> EDIT: For people comparing this to the Titan RTX, no. This GA102, not GA100. It's the cut-down version of Ampere. GA100 will come out, and it will be even more expensive.
That doesn't mean it's not the Titan equivalent for this generation. Titan X(pascal) and Titan XP were both GP102, and Titan RTX was TU102. AFAIK, only Titan V used the "100" chip, and that was sorta a fluke because there was no smaller volta chip. (and 3090 was explicitly introduced as the Titan RTX replacement)
Actually, the Titan, Titan Z and Titan Black as well as the Titan V and Titan X. Titans XP, Xp and RTX were basically just overclocked 80Ti chips, sometimes slightly unlocked. They are the outliers, and widely regarded as a scam, locking away 60$ of memory behind 1500$, with a bit more CUs yet about as fast or slower in aggregate than aftermarket 80Ti models.
It's not the Titan, because it's not the biggest chip, and also, it's not called "Titan". It fits the motif of the 2080Ti almost to a T.
Yeah. Even if it is not a Titan, it is at a price that I am glad to pay for the performance (if the 1.5x faster than Titan claim holds true). Bert / Transformer models are incredibly memory hungry, and a sub-2k graphics card with 24GB memory is great to have. Also, its number of CUDA cores seems to be slightly more than A100, would be interesting to see benchmarks once it comes out.
Not to mention that it still has NVLink support! The 3-slot design is a bit challenging and for 4-card workstation, I need to rework my radiator mount to make space for another PSU.
Well, it's not just 1.5x faster than the Titan, it really is 1.5x faster than the aftermarket 2080Tis too since they basically are the same chip anyways.
If you're happy paying 40% more for a 50% faster card, that's okay. I just don't think it's very good for the industry.
If their performance claims are accurate, AMD has a huge hurdle ahead of it, as the rumour mill only had them drawing even with the 2080 ti with big navi.
I hope AMD can pull it off, as I am really hoping to make my first red box build. That being said, the performance:cost ratio of 30xx is mindbogglingly attractive (assuming the reviews back up NVIDIA's claims).
Digital Foundry's initial analysis mostly bears this claim out.
They found FPS increases of between 160-190% for a bunch of recent games featuring both RTX/traditional rendering, and about a fixed 190% in Quake RTX (which is exclusively RTX rendering).
Those titles were all cherry-picked by Nvidia though. I would be very hesitant about the data used. A lot of DLSS used too - so, not even true 4K.
On top of that - if you only care about 4K gaming then fine - but what if you're more of a 1080-1440p with higher refresh rate person?
Personally, I have a 1440p display that goes to 144hz. I'd much rather have 1440p @ 100+ FPS than 4K at 60 - but we don't know what these new GPUs will do.
The rumours I've heard have them beating the 2080Ti, but not enough to be competitive with the top Nvidia cards if these performance claims are accurate. Plus I'd guess Nvidia will launch a 3080Ti at ~$1000 sometime around the release of Big Navi.
I've heard they don't have enough production reserved at TSMC to make consumer GPUs on TSMC 7nm and they are only going to use TSMC for Quadro. Plus Samsung is cheaper than TSMC.
Just compare how much Nvidia is pushing the limits as the industry of leader of GPU’s, to how Intel seems to be playing catch-up reluctantly as the industry leader of CPU’s. Leadership matters.
Nvidia isn't a fab. AMD isn't a fab. TSMC is the fab that beat Intel. TSMC's customers, like AMD and NVidia, are beneficiaries.
So far. As customers of TSMC, in the long term it behooves them for TSMC to have competition.
Further, "leadership matters" is a somewhat ironic complaint given that Intel ran face-first into a brick wall precisely because they were leading. TSMC placed conservative bets on the next node and Intel placed risky bets because they needed the extra risk/reward to maintain leadership. Intel's bets failed (in particular, cobalt wires and COAG). They chose "leadership or bust" and went "bust," at least for now.
The whole reason AMD are able to crank out 128 core CPUs is the CCX architecture - the one people laughed at. No TSMC there. Not to mention other innovations like Infinity Fabric.
In ampere for instance, there are so many innovations, like PAM signalling, 2x shader instructions per clock, DLSS, RTX Voice.
TSMC beat Intel, sure, but that is not the main reason for why Nvidia and even AMD are leading the industry. In fact, ampere is on Samsung 8n.
'gallerdude didn't mention anything about fabs. Also, these GPUs are fabricated at Samsung, so your comments about TSMC are mostly irrelevant.
If the fab was all that mattered, AMD GPUs would be dominating Nvidia, since they have been shipping GPUs using TSMC 7nm (a superior process to Samsung 8nm) for over a year.
as someone who put failing green IGPs on notebook pcbs into the oven in 2013 for a reball reanimation I feel some irony when the chef himself is at the old trick.
backsplash! That's a word I did not know. Anyway, I couldn't help to notice the backsplash too and the kitchen enclosing, it looks optimized to collect grease and make it hard to clean :-/
The 20xx series was very obviously the "tech development" release and was a terrible value. It was first gen ray tracing and thus actually unequipped to fulfill its promises. The 30xx series looks to be much better and is probably finally worth the upgrade from 9xx and 10xx equipment.
Sure, if the bold 2x performance increase claim is to be believed. I'd wait for benchmarks to validate that.
Plus for me, Nvidia is simply DOA on Linux, due them refusing to upstream their driver and hindering Nouveau to reclock properly. So even if AMD won't outdo them, I still won't touch Nvidia.
Ditto. But it’s pretty much certain that even if the new AMD cards don’t match the top Nvidia performance, they’re still going to be competitive or better on cost/performance. So you don’t have to worry about missing anything if you go AMD for Linux.
I’m just glad that we’ve finally gotten past that ceiling at ~13 TFLOPs. Nvidia has been hobbling along for a few years, so a breakthrough is nice.
Depends, it works for cases Nvidia care about. But what you call integration means all other cases :) And there it simply falls apart or takes decades to be fixed.
These numbers never meant anything. I run a 1050Ti on a 200W PSU - nvidia recommends 450W minimum. Add the TDP of your GPU, CPU and add about 100W for accessories = what you actually need. Nvidia recommends a much more powerful PSU than needed just in case.
Yea I think if you run the calculations and you have room you should be good if your PSU is just slightly above the power requirements. If you run an unusual amount of memory or HDDs/etc, you might want to calculate everything manually rather than just assume its 100 watts though.
I have never had a PSU fail, but supposedly unlike pretty much every other component if it fails its possible it will destroy your GPU/CPU/MB so it makes sense to spend a little extra on a good PSU.
Probably my best component purchase ever was a 1050W Modular PSU in 2014. It was an old model even then and apparently no one wanted 1000W+ power supplies back then because it was on clearance. It should still be good for a 3090 and probably even a 5090 when I upgrade again in the future.
> Nvidia recommends a much more powerful PSU than needed just in case.
The two things to watch out for here are
1) Cheaper PSUs can't always actually hit their claimed wattage, particularly not in real-world heat scenarios
2) CPU & GPU both use the 12V rail for their power, and not all PSUs can deliver all the rated wattage on the 12V rail.
Any decent to good PSU won't have either of those issues, most list their rated wattage entirely on the 12V rails these days.
So for example let's assume 250w for the GPU average and 120w for the CPU average (turbo & boost & all that). A 400w PSU could technically do that, particularly since if your only drive is an SSD your "accessories" are basically a rounding error. But if we take this 400W PSU for example: https://www.newegg.com/coolmax-i-400-400w/p/N82E16817159140 it can only deliver 300W on the 12V rail. Not enough. By comparison this EVGA 450W PSU can do a full 450W on the 12V rail alone: https://www.evga.com/products/product.aspx?pn=100-BR-0450-K1
That's a 150W useful difference in this scenario even though the "rated" power only differs by 50W.
I feel like this used to be more true in the past. These days CPUs can exceed their official TDP by quite a large margin, and while in theory they should only do so temporarily, many motherboards default to unlimited boost clocks. (Then again, perhaps you're never going to fully utilize both CPU and GPU at the same time...)
That is correct. Nowadays a 75W TDP Intel CPU can use as much as 200W for short bursts. That wasn't the case in the past. However, it should still be possible to find out that maximum draw value for many motherboards and pick a PSU accordingly.
This is likely a cautious recommendation on nVidia's part.
A 2080 Ti + 8700k system used 450W (nvidia recommended a 650w psu). While high end CPUs have gotten a bit more power hungry with higher core counts on the 10900k/10700k/3900x/3950x, I'd be shocked if a 650W PSU couldn't handle a mainstream CPU + 3080.
nVidia's recommendation is based on "we don't want people pissed off because they put it in a system with a 3990wx at the recommended PSU capacity and it didn't work"
You can see on Nvidias product page they are calculating based on a 125W processor. My 3700X is 65W so I'll have enough room for a 3070 easily on a 600W PSU.
Just to clarify: Of course a 65W CPU will still consume more power due to bursts and boosts but as far as I know AMD has a hard limit of about 90W for their 65W-rated CPUs, which is reassuring. I‘m glad I opted for the 3700X during my last upgrade - very efficient CPU indeed.
I have some CUDA code that I need to run as fast as possible, so if I was going to blow $1500, my use case would imply that I should go with two 3080s.
However, I also play around with deep learning stuff, expect to do so more in the future, but don't currently follow it so closely.
Would someone care to ponder on what difference they think a 24GB gpu vs a 10GB gpu will have as a tool for deep learning dev over the next 3 years?
For what it's worth, I'm a computer vision guy, but I did have a play with DeepSpeech earlier this year.
Well, they can be 40 GB fp32 models technically, but translating a model trained in fp32 to fp16 is not trivial (trust me, we’re working on this right now for a model). But remember that training the model requires a lot more memory than just the model parameters, because you need to store the gradients as well.
I'm fairly lay but imo GPT-3 demonstrates pretty soundly that huge models are no magic bullet- it's got >2x as many parameters as the human brain has neurons and it can't do long division. Dogs and other animals get by just fine having less than 1% as many neurons as humans.
Even a billion parameters is a huge model, and a factor of 2.4x increase is not going to make a tremendous difference in your performance. In particular the data-heavy nature of vision stuff means that you'll be bottlenecked by training more than memory, AFAIK (again, lay).
This is a misleading comparison. You are comparing a massive model with huge models. What you should be comparing are big models vs medium models that a single consumer GPU will fit. And - you don't need to take my word for it, there's tons of papers - the bigger models definitely perform better.
It can't do long division because it literally can't read the number inputs, due to the way text is encoded (BPE). That it manages to learn any sort of arithmetic despite that is pretty impressive to me.
It's not impossible to distribute training across multiple GPUs, but it's certainly not straightforward. And if you want activations for an entire 4K image in the same model, having a lot of memory on one card is your friend.
Two 3080s = $1500 + number of hours times electricity cost (for me, this would be about $0.14/hour)
A K80 from AWS (close enough to the same RAM) = $0.45/hour (spot pricing) or $0.9 (on demand)
I've been able to use spot instances for basically all of my AWS hobby work, so I'll use that.
The crossover point where it's worth buying is where 1500 + 0.14h = 0.45h, about 5000 hours or 30 weeks of training.
For hobby work, do you expect to have it training for 20% of the next 3 years? That's all without considering the fact that you might want to upgrade to a newer card, AWS's prices will likely fall, and you might want a card with more RAM sometimes, but not others, or even a multi-GPU setup sometimes.
I used to spend money on fancy cards and machines and justify it with my hobby learning. Now I just let somebody else do the heavy lifting and pay them rent. It's spoiled me. You go from spending a few nights trying to get a thing performant to throwing a burrito worth of money at amazon to just parallelize the dumb thing on a massive machine and having it done by bed time.
I also used to justify buying the fancy card with my gaming hobby, but then when I actually did have a long running training job, it'd be super frustrating because now I can't use the desktop for anything else for a few days until training finishes.
I have to admit you're right. My case is a little different, where my jobs are about 1h long and it would take me longer to copy all the data to AWS than running it locally.
If you transition your workflow to AWS, and do preprocessing and storage and training in AWS, it avoids the issue. As a benefit, storage in s3 is dirt cheap compared something like dropbox, and archival is easy and cheap enough to just forget about. I feel weird like I'm evangelizing amazon, but it's a workflow i'm very happy with and trying to streamline to take even more advantage of.
What the other commenter said is absolutely true, but what's even more important is that 3080 doesn't seem to support SLI so you're "stuck" with one 3090 with that budget (which seems to be the only card supporting SLI this gen).
Not an expert in ML, but I don’t think CUDA uses SLI at all.
SLI is specific to rendering. Depending on the workload, it’s sometimes makes perfect sense to split GPGPU jobs into multiple GPUs. An extreme example of that approach is crypto-currency miners who sometimes use a dozen of GPUs in a single computer.
The only limitation, the working set used by each GPU needs to fit in VRAM of that GPU, otherwise GPUs gonna bottleneck on I/O as opposed to compute, will be very slow. For ML, this means the setup of two 3080 GPUs will be limited to 10GB model sizes.
As much as I like to hate Nvidia for all of the right reasons, this is pretty big and might make me compromise my morals until AMD comes out with something that can compete.
I am curious how quickly Nvidia will add these to their GeForce Now streaming servers. As of right now, they only stream in 1080p and it seems this could allow them to stream 4k for about the same hardware cost. I'm personally not in the market for a gaming desktop, but happily subscribe to GPU as a service.
GFN has been a bear, very hit or miss. Current generation of hardware is either 1080 or 2060. If they start adding 30xx (which they have hinted at in this past) that would be great.
8K gaming is the ultimate gimmick. Even in the ideal conditions they set up for that demo, I'm doubtful those gamers have the ability to detect a significant improvement over 4K.
Agree that 8K is a bit overkill, but it'll be nice for 60FPS+ 5k since 5k doubles 2560x1440 exactly and makes for a better multipurpose use resolution than 4k does at 27".
Doesn't matter much in games, but it makes a difference on the desktop. Don't know about Windows but under macOS and Linux integer scaling generally works more cleanly and predictably than fractional scaling does.
There already exist 1/2 8K VR headsets though (full 16:9 4K per eye), and you can keep seeing a difference there up through around 16K per eye and higher refresh rates than they showed.
We are at the stage where nothing is enough for either fps or resolution. I use a vive original and its painfully blurry and thats 1080p per eye and a very low fov. For a high fov lens we will probably need 16k per eye at 144hz before people will consider it good enough like 4k for monitors is now. We don't even have the cables to push that much data currently, let alone render it.
I expect to reach this we will probably have to start using foverted rendering.
I was surprised and disappointed to see no mention of VR. Seems like a key area where significantly increased GPU performance can make a big difference, but it doesn't seem to be in sharp focus for nVidia. It may accentuate the direction Facebook is already taking to move more and more to mobile chipsets but that should be something nVidia would want to minimise if they were really smart about it.
That's fine. Its really hard to get good frame rate in 4k today. A lot of that isn't just the GPU (eg: poorly optimized games, CPU, I/O, etc), but if it can do 8k 60fps reasonably consistantly on paper, then it can do 4k@60fps+ consistently for real (assuming nothing else is the bottleneck).
That makes it worthwhile. That's personally what I was waiting for before upgrading my 1080 GTX TI and my monitor.
In my experience, high resolution is only relevant to games where the camera isn't constantly moving.
Think DOTA 2 or Civilization 5. They both look amazing at 4K and I bet would look noticeably better at 8K.
Especially in those two, the games assets have enough detail to allow zooming in all the way from a bird's eye view to a first person view. As you crank up the rendering resolution, there's plenty of "real" detail available in the models and textures. You could push these games to 16K and still get more quality out of them.
Agreed. and in high movement games (mostly first person shooters), you want higher framerate over higher resolution any day. 120+ fps is a night and day advantage over 60fps.
8k on a normal sized monitor is a gimmick, but 8k gaming on a 98"+ tv is not. These TVs are mega expensive right now, but they might not be in 2 years. Nvidia is ahead of the curve.
It's interesting the effect new graphics have on how old graphics are seen. I remember when Resident Evil came out on the first Playstation, at the time, I considered certain game elements like fire and water indistinguishable from reality. Now it looks like pixelated garbage and I ask myself how I could have ever thought that.
Oh man - the same here with me - when I first got Morrowind there was an option you could enable in ATI (now AMD) cards at the time that made water look "real". I was able to enable that and was blown away - I was like "well that's it - doesn't get any more real than this". Having loaded Morrowind recently I could not believe had bad it looked lol. Makes me wonder - what are we "not" seeing right now that will make us think this way 10-20 years from now?
I think Epic’s UE5 demo is really really close to reality in terms of lighting and geometry. Next 10-20 years will probably see the same technology being brought into larger and larger environments with more moving parts.
Then there’s the more obvious stuff that isn’t done well even today: skeletal animation is still lacking and feels unnatural, physics systems are still very approximate and constrained - often times most things are indestructible in games, fluid dynamics are still very slow/limited. Human models still don’t look real though, and the voice acting never quite matches the mouth movement or body language.
I do really feel like we’ve crossed the uncanny valley when it comes to natural scenery rendering. But a lot of what makes things feel real are still missing from games.
I agree, it's so close that it's actually being used as an interactive movie background with a big-ass 360-degree screen for dynamic scene and lighting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjb-AqMD-a4
IMHO it looks fake. The lighting is way off, it quite literally looks like they're standing directly below a big diffuser - which they are. The background looks like a poster with one of these diffraction parallax effects.
Maybe the water stood out since Morrowind was an ugly game even in its day. All the Elder Scrolls games have a well-earned reputation of looking like they're populated by cardboard mutants. Reminds me a bit of the old Infocom ad:
Morrowind was complicated. The characters were ugly, and animations especially horrible. But the landscapes were considered very beautiful by the standards of the day.
It was one of the first prominent uses of pixel shaders in the game, coinciding with NVidia (not ATI) releasing GeForce models that supported them.
It was so noticeable because it was such a huge increase in quality compared to what passed for water in games before - usually some kind of blue-grey translucent texture. For the first time, pixel shaders produced water that was clearly an attempt to imitate water IRL, not the cartoonish representation of it.
Hm. Many people here share their sentiments of perceiving older games (or current games) as being close to photorealistic. Personally it never felt that way to me. All games have obvious problems where they don't behave/look anywhere close to reality. If you remove the interactive element and only use somewhat massaged screenshots, then, sure certain elements are basically photorealistic and have been for a while. For example, landscapes look pretty darn realistic. Anything alive or even most man-made artefacts, not so much.
Apart from graphics most stuff in games is pretty rough. Animations are generally bad and ways before reaching the uncanny valley of "getting close"; they're still in the "abstract representation of concept" detail level. AI is dumb (largely for [perceived] player-acceptance reasons). Sound is generally poor; some games still don't use 3D sound. Physics are "abstract representation" level again, some games still have fly-through walls and vibrating items. etc. etc.
Yeah... these comments are kinda weird. Hate to say it but maybe they should go outside more lol, computer graphics always looked pretty bad at me, even the clips in today's nvidia presentation looks really unnatural. That's not to take anything away from the technology and the massive advances it represents, just compared to reality it's still really far from fooling a human brain.
interestingly many of us feel that there's a huge gap between the past and now. But how many of us can actually verbalize what will change in the rendering of pictures in, say 3 years.
For example, I can clearly see that ray tracing produces better results. But it's a bit harder to tell how better it is, to find the words that describes how better it is. Of course, one can say that, for example, photon tracing is more physically accurate. But still, what words can we use to describe how real (or not real) a still image is ("more realistic" doesn't count :-))
Game graphics look sterile, too clean, sharp, plasticky. The real world is messier with less clear separation between objects, things blend together more, subtle shadows, surfaces are less uniform, there is more clutter, dirt, wrinkles, details.
Is that an artifact of the graphics capability? Or the art style? I think the two often get confused and many games are specifically designed for a sterile/clean look.
Not sure. It's hard to analyze as it's more of a visceral impression. It could be in part the way natural environments tend to structure themselves over time, like how we throw our stuff around in natural ways.
But also, the design often adapts to the capabilities. Games like GTA3 used to have thick fog just to hide the fact that they couldn't render stuff far away in time. You can say that's an artistic choice to give a smoggy big city atmosphere, but clearly it was a practical choice as well. Even today, game designers like to make things dark, blurry and rainy, so that the un-realism becomes less obvious.
Just watched the RT demo video and the paintbrushes for example look amazingly bad. All surfaces look flat for a better word, most noticeable it’s sterile without dust. The steam blasts are terrible as they miss all the internal swirling you get from actual vapor. They cover most of this up by moving stuff around and adding clutter which tries to keep you from really focusing on anything.
It’s basically using the same technique as hand drawn animation where as long as you realize what’s being represented you can automatically fill in missing details. However, this fails as soon as you focus on any one detail.
Honestly, it’s not bad for what it is. I mean the physics engine was probably the worst part, but as a visual demo that’s fine.
Yeah, I never understood these comments. I went from the 8-bit generation on up and never thought PSX/Saturn/n64 games looked “real”; just better and more options than before. I don’t think I ever considered a game “realistic” until the mid-late 00’s.
I was always so confused by people saying the latest games were realistic. They looked so horrible. Maybe it's because my point of comparison was Nintendo games where they focused more on art direction than polygon count. I read an interview with someone who worked with Shigeru Miyamoto and they talked about how he would come back with changes to specific leaves and rocks after spending time exploring a cave or forest. The attention to detail, no matter how low-poly and simply-textured, made all the difference.
This hasn't changed. New "realistic" games still range from horrible to boring-looking. I don't know if it's collective delusion or if I'm missing something.
Take this as a compliment, not a criticism when I say you've rigged your proposition by holding up Nintendo first party games, and Shigeru Miyamoto for comparison. If you were to look back at he average Nintendo game, not made by Nintendo, they are mostly unremarkable.
I should have specified first party. There were some third party games I liked, but few paid as much attention to style and detail. It's hard and expensive to get both realism and style right. I don't think it's a coincidence that most games I like for the art direction come from small indie studios who never had a shot at competing on realism.
> For example, landscapes look pretty darn realistic. Anything alive or even most man-made artefacts, not so much.
Which is something really obvious with the PS5 UE 5 tech demo [0]. The environment looks great and very realistic, while the character is very stylized and looks more like a comic than realistic.
For me, it's fidelity of human facial animation that has a long way to come. There are teams doing a great job of it [1], but the labor/skill required to bring one high hyperreal facial rig to a game or movie seems insane. I think companies pursuing AR/VR applications will lead here.
ML creative tools stand to automate a lot of this imo.
The biggest thing to me is that video games do not have very many independent objects, compared to reality. Go outside and look at the real world and you will see the ground has little pebbles and bits of mud and all this stuff that gets kicked around. No video game will let you inspect the leaves of plants to look for little bugs, the way reality will. Or for indoor scenes, there is no video game that accurately captures the experience of "picking up a living room with a bunch of toys strewn about".
Presumably you're not a native English speaker. "will" here does not refer to the future, this is a subtle grammatical thing that I can't explain well, but it refers to presently existing games.
Everything has a cost, either computational or human.
We've probably reached the point where human cost exceeds computational cost, which is to say that developing and QA testing such a feature would probably cost more money than it's worth. How many users of software would gain from such minutiae?
I mean, fine if you want to make an actual virtual world. But when it comes down to it, it's a video game. Why in the world would any of this be in COD or Battlefield or Fallout? It would take more time than making the actual game part of it to do this pointless garbage that nobody would care about and consume the majority of computer resources. Not to mention a lot of video games remove realistic aspects that would otherwise make it a chore to play.
There are lots of things to be improved in games, but what you're describing are improvements to a real life simulation.
> Go outside and look at the real world and you will see the ground has little pebbles and bits of mud and all this stuff that gets kicked around
We are getting better. Like snow deformation in RDR2, for instance(works even in a PS4).
But random bits of debris that can get kicked around - and subsequently inspected - no. That's a problem.
> No video game will let you inspect the leaves of plants to look for little bugs, the way reality will
That's an easier problem than tracking all the debris. Before you inspect, you have no idea what will be there - the computer also doesn't have to and it can be optimized away until there's an observer.
Think heisenberg uncertainty principle but for virtual worlds.
Yes, I actually thought of the snow in RDR2 as I wrote that comment! The beginning of RDR2 with the deep snow is one of the most impressive visual scenes in a video games so far, visually, to me.
You could implement little bugs without all that much trouble, true. Maybe a better way for me to think about it is more like, the real world has an incredible diversity of appearances at a small scale, that's hard to reproduce in a video game. The bug isn't the part that causes trouble, it's the fact that every leaf looks different, some leaves are oddly discolored, some leaves have bug bites on them, some got a little torn up, et cetera.
As someone who is most definitely not a gamer but with coworkers and friends that get big into high cost gaming systems, here’s where I see the biggest deltas between real life and the screen:
- Hair. Up until very recently hair was downright awful. Nowadays it’s acceptable-ish, but there’s still lots of room for improvement, in particular in natural motion of long hair.
- Water. I spend a big chunk of my time on the water, so I’m probably more attuned to how it moves than most. Games just don’t have it down. In particular, I think a lot could be gained by embracing it’s fractal nature: in my experience, at every human scale (mm to dam and everything in between) very similar wave patterns exist, but games tend to have just a small fixed number of “wave-layers” at various scales stacked together.
- Clouds. I can easily spend hours just observing clouds, looking at things like their shape, overall motion, internal motion, composition, edge behaviors, etc, and how they change over time. Game clouds are lacking in all these regards, particularly the time-sensitive nature of a cloud.
- Foliage. In games I’ve seen, individual plants/etc. in isolation generally look really quite decent. But the second an physical object interacts with them, they very clearly don’t respond in the right ways. There’s a lot about how branches bend and leaves rustle and more that is lost. Additionally, in groups of plants it’s often clear that some small number of models are being reused, possibly with some generated randomness added. But the variety doesn’t come close to matching what one would really see.
- Human faces and expressions. These are generally really bad, especially in normal gameplay (cut-scenes are sometimes better)
Again, this is probably all just really weird stuff I notice because I spend the vast majority of my time outdoors and only see “HiFi” games being played very infrequently. I don’t think games are worse for not implementing these, but I am very interested in what they’ll look like 10-20 years down the road.
I think these days it mostly comes down to human effort in development and not hardware limitations. You could spend hundreds of hours modelling faces or putting accurate physics on a fern but it doesn't add too much to the game and costs too much to develop.
What I think will be a huge boost is proper raytracing. You can see animated movies and blender renders look stunning but they take minutes per frame.
A good list, though I think human faces and general animation are okay when you compare with foliage, which is downright awful. A lot of the improvement in human features has to do with motion capture and 3D scanning, but getting transitions between movements is where progress needs to be made.
Foliage seems like something that will be difficult to get realistic for any close inspect, at least from a layperson's point of view.
>Makes me wonder - what are we "not" seeing right now that will make us think this way 10-20 years from now?
My vote would be cloth simulation and clothing clipping. I've yet to see a game that comes even close to doing this realistically. Imagine what happens to your sleeves when you lift your arms above your head for example, or how the plates of a suit of armor naturally slide over each other. In every game I can think of, clothing is rigidly attached to the underlying skeleton and it just stretches/clips as the character moves.
I guess fidelity of everything else has gotten much better, because I recently started noticing this and now I find it very distracting in any game that has in-engine cut scenes involving character closeups.
Part of it is also that modern TVs and monitors are much higher resolution than their predecessors.
One interesting point of reference is the initial switch to HD in the 2000s; I remember there was a bit of panic in the beginning because news studios had to adjust studio lighting and makeup; flaws that were not perceptible on a CRT were all of a sudden extremely noticeable blown up on a 48" flatscreen.
Based on anecdotes it seems like it. Older generations always seemed to think pets had no idea what was going on when viewing a TV to the point of ignoring it. I'm assuming their body language suggested so.
Nowadays people open up koi pond videos on phones and let their cats play with it. But like you mentioned, it would be interesting to see a study on it.
The framerate didn't increase. It was still 60 or 50 Hz. The resolution did increase, but so did the size. The typical angular resolution stayed pretty much constant, I think.
Most video content has been at 25-30fps which is incredibly visible to most people when compared to 60fps. Those videos of cats playing with phones are rendered at 60fps.
60fps annoys me, I prefer cinematic 30fps :) High framerate us good for games, eye candy videos, but for stuff with narrative. The soap opera effect is killing me, especially when source is converted.
When you watch TV shows from the SD era that has been scanned into HD from film, you can sometimes see this. For example Seinfeld.
Occasionally things will be slightly out of focus, but it wasn’t apparent on a SD CRT so they shot the scene. On an HD screen you can see it and it’s kind of distracting.
IMO watching a few sci-fi movies in 4k+ looks ridiculous - I start noticing the difference between CGI environment and actors and it kills the immersion completely, it goes from "that character is really there" to "this guy is larping in front of a green screen"
Higher resolution, better color replication, and frame rate make very obvious the fact that there seems to be a magical glowing orb following around the characters right behind the camera. Immersion breaking because you can get away with it with less quality, it's more difficult to notice.
Something that I've also found more and more irritating is the foley artists doing ridiculous things for sound effects, especially in nature documentaries, but all over the place really.
that's not the point - they were saying that retroactively going back and viewing old content on 4k, you can easily spot the CG/issues etc.
ex: Farscape - all the CG was rendered in low res, so even when you view a 1080p copy it looks silly. Imagine all the content that would have to be re-done and upscaled to make it watchable in 4k.
When people are saying something is photo-realistic, they aren’t comparing to reality, they’re comparing to photos or videos as viewed on the same display.
By some metrics, even extremely expensive modern hardware is very far from reality. Pretty much all games show Sun occasionally, to reproduce same luminosity at 1m distance you need kilowatts of light (assuming 180 degree viewing angle; the surface of 1m half sphere is about 2 m^2 and the flux of visible spectrum is about 550w/m^2), these levels are simply unsafe for home use. For example, such display is going to ignite or at least melt a keyboard if it’s too close.
Similar for dynamic range. Reality has extreme dynamic ranges, i.e. both very light and very dark areas on the same scene.
At least modern hardware generally delivers realistic resolutions, and color accuracy.
> At least modern hardware generally delivers realistic resolutions, and color accuracy.
I don't know, look at some flowers... most screens can't show their colors. Stuff like the intense, super-saturated reds and purples are basically impossible to get right in sRGB, with very obvious artefacts, yet in real life there are no artefacts, there is texture, detail and color, where the picture only has a smear of four different reds. P-3 and Rec.2020 might reduce the issues there, as would 10 bit color.
That’s interesting. Even if I look at current state of the art graphics today I don’t think for a second that it’s anything close to indistinguishable from reality (not to say it’s not good or impressive).
I guess he means how reality looked displayed on the TV screen. I think we did go backwards in that regard, at least for a while because resolution went up in some sudden jumps leaving the level of detail in the scenes lagging behind. But we're almost there now. I recently saw a dashcam video of a racecar on the news and wondered why they were showing a video game. It took ages for me to realize it was actually real but with some HUD overlays.
It’s even harder to convince other people. Once you realize that we do not understand how to make graphics look real, the pattern appears everywhere. Yet no one will acknowledge it.
Graphics — even movie quality graphics — don’t look anything like what a camera produces. The sole exception is when you’re mixing in real video with CG elements. But try to synthesize an entire frame from scratch, then put it next to a video camera’s output, and people can tell the difference.
Also, screenshots are misleading. You have to test video, not screencaps. Video is processed differently by the brain.
10 out of 10 times, all the graphics engineers come out of the woodwork going “but actually we do know how! It’s a matter of using so and so calculations and measuring BDRF and” none of those equations work.
I think it depends on context. There are a lot of sim games where the environment is very controlled and forums are littered with people who can't tell whether the occasional picture is real or in-game. A forest is hard to render accurately but a plane in flight is pretty trivial
Forests have pretty much been solved. Look at games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, forest looks amazing. The difficulty now is limited to finer details, like hair. Hair is still pretty much unsolved.
See? It’s almost deterministic. People really can’t accept that we don’t know how to do something.
Plop a nature video next to your forest rendering and it’ll become apparent just how unsolved trees are. And everything else, for that matter.
The precise claim is this: viewers should be able to identify a rendered video no better than random chance. If you conduct this experiment, you’ll see that real videos from actual video cameras wipe the floor.
The motion blur will probably give it away. Accurate video motion blur is computationally expensive but conceptually simple. Just render at about 100 times your target frame rate and average batches of frames together in linear colorspace. You can speed this up by rendering at a lower frame rate (e.g. 10 times your target frame rate), estimating motion, and blurring along the motion vectors before averaging the frames. You can further speed it up by using an adaptive frame rate depending on motion speed and contrast. But a lot of rendered video doesn't even try. Look at a fast-moving bright point of light and you'll easily see the difference.
(But note this is only replicating video, not reality. Truly realistic motion blur requires ultra-high displayed frame rates beyond the capabilities of current hardware.)
A lot of games fake the motion blur so badly. Racing games are often especially guilty.
If you're driving at 200 mph, and there's a car next to you also going 200 mph, it shouldn't be blurry.
Also, the length of the blur should not exceed the distance an object travels on your screen in 1 frame. In other words, if an object moves 30 pixels from one frame to the next, then the blurred image shouldn't be more than 30 pixels wide.
This feel like multiple logical fallacies. It seems funny to me to claim in advance that people are going to argue with something that was intentionally non-specific, vague, controversial, unproven, and at least partly wrong, and then when someone argues with you, claim you were proven right. It's easy to predict that someone will argue with something misleading or wrong, and that doesn't give your CG argument any credibility.
What CG videos are you considering, what specifically have you looked at? Can you show some good faith examples of the best CG forests ever made, compared to some specific nature videos? Are you talking about attempts to match a nature video, and saying it's not possible regardless of what's in the shot?
Are you looking at the best examples of CG forests lately? There are some CG full frame video examples of forests I don't believe people would reliably identify as CG, if they didn't know before hand and you left out the explosions & spaceships.
The problem is that we can't do that in 1/60 second on consumer-priced hardware, and also both scanning real objects and manually modelling are expensive.
Which of those images look real to you? To me, pretty much all of them look strictly like rendered images or have some aspect of them which gives away the fact that they are rendered.
With a caveat: the real images should not be cherry picked to look as close to cgi as possible but the other way around. Real and render can look indistinguishable that way too, but we want real looking cgi, not carefully arranged cgi-looking reality. The biggest giveaway is the simplicity and pristine sterility of the rendered scenes, no mess, clutter, irregularity. Just look at photos that people haphazardly snap in the real world.pick those for a blind study and cgi is nowhere near. Pick carefully lit and arranged artificial scenes with heavy post-processing, like studio shoots or hotel brochures or car ads and the difference will be less obvious.
In the version that is shrunk down to fit my browser, it kind of looks rendered, because you can't see the subtle details that another user mentioned. Dust, the curling of book pages, etc.
But in the full version[0], it's clearly a photo. But it has been HDR'd which can sometimes create shading that gives a somewhat rendered look.
The full version also has artifacts from the camera that ironically give it away as a real photo. At full resolution you see this characteristic noise plus noise-smoothing effect that cameras apply.
That effect would be much easier to fake with a digital filter than rendering the entire complicated scene from scratch, though. Adding noise and noise-smoothing is simple. So if that's your heuristic, then you're gonna be fooled by digital renders that just incorporate that simple to implement effect.
Yeah, absolutely. It also shows though how you can easily accidentally bias a blind test. If an artist did manage to create a perfectly realistic render but forgot to add in one of the subtle unrealistic effects that cameras cause, people would be able to tell which images were photos.
(Although, maybe you could argue that if the challenge is to make photorealistic renders rather than realistic renders, nailing the camera artifacts is part of the challenge.)
Yeah, the goal has to be photorealistic renders, because what would the control data for the test be if not photos? You can't test one image on a screen vs "what real life looks like". The one on the screen is obviously the rendered one then every time.
It's not real multiple exposure HDR, it's just whatever default faux single exposure digital HDR the Pixel phone does. If it were real HDR the photo wouldn't be so blown out and over-exposed from the sunlight on the left side, particularly on the leaf.
It seems like your point is not so much that we can't technically render photorealistic scenes, but that artists don't put in the work to recreate the incredible level of detail we have in reality.
Yes. But in principle, tech could be advanced enough that it doesn't require so much manual effort. Like, if someone takes the time an works long hours on modeling a worn book with all its wrinkles and curls and crookedness, you can probably ray trace it realistically. But you could also say that artists can digitally paint a whole scene without any 3d engine or rendering tech.
The point is, currently it only works for simple scenes and needs tons of manual work otherwise. Reality is realistic effortlessly.
This isn't a big distinction to me? Either way, it's still true that it's nigh impossible to generate a realistic rendered every day scene. Whether that's because the environment modeling isn't there yet or the ray tracing isn't there yet doesn't make a big difference to me. Maybe the super detailed modeling will be the "last stand" prior to achieving general photorealistic renders, and the final breakthrough will be some kind of improved ML procedural generation algorithm for everyday lifelike objects.
I think Instagram is actually helping this from the other direction. My brain processes the two Jeep pictures as real but with a heavy-handed Instagram filter applied.
Again, it's important to focus on video, not screenshots. Video is processed differently by the brain.
"The Dress" illustrates how easy it is to fool people with still images. Movement gives crucial context. Our visual system has evolved for millions of years specifically to exploit that context.
also, the style of photos most of us are used to seeing are so processed digitally before publication, there's a real question of what it means to have a 'real photo' to approach in the first place.
That were capable of getting pretty close isn't that surprising, because most photos have already had N layers of digital effects applied, moving them closer to renders, rather than the other way around.
Do any of those actually look real to you? I'm not saying that a convincingly realistic render is impossible, but those are all obviously synthetic to me. Maybe that's just a lifetime of photography at play.
Meh...all of those are obviously renders. There's not enough contrast in the lighting in most of the interior shots, and overall surfaces just look too smooth.
So I've dabbled a bit in graphics, and it feels like a content problem. Sure, you can have an artist pump out some models and textures. But for every level of detail increase, the artist must spend ~3x the time of the previous level. So for example, even making just a simple a dirt road look _really_ good and photo-realistic would involve much more time (a week? a month?) than one can reasonably spend on a commercial project (where you have bajillions of assets to worry about).
The reverse-problem is a pet-peeve of mine: It seems many people have been accidentally brainwashed by Hollywood into thinking that film-camera effects are signs of "realism."
So then the first-person game introduces something like lens-flares, and everyone goes: "OMG it's so realistic now", even though the truth is the exact opposite. If you were "really there" as Hero Protagonist, you wouldn't have camera-lenses for eyeballs except in a cyber-punk genre.
I didn't study this movie frame by frame, but I feel the new lion king movie was photo realistic. It seems like that given enough time, human and computer, you can achieve a great result.
Your comment seems to be ignoring the fact that today’s graphics look better than yesterday’s, i.e. the main point of the comment you replied to. The monotonic trend toward realism has continued ever since computer graphics was invented 40ish / 50ish years ago. VFX and games from 10 and 20 years ago look much less realistic that today. In addition to stills, there is an increasing number of videos and film scenes that are getting harder to distinguish from shot on film. Are you saying the trend will stop? If so, why?
> we do not understand how to make graphics look real
> none of those equations work
Why do you claim this, and what do you mean exactly? Surely you aren’t claiming we can’t make any graphics look real at all. Some people are getting pretty good at understanding how to make some graphics look real, even if we aren’t. The math for approximating materials and lighting is getting pretty good these days, and the equations have been changing over time. It’ll continue to improve, but it’s certainly not the main thing holding CG back today. IMO less realistic CG comes much more from low resolution or low fidelity sampling / geometry / textures / animation / input data in general. Most of that is due to lack of time & money.
I’d say we understand how to make graphics look real in many cases, but not in all cases. We understand how to make good looking graphics, but how to do it quickly and efficiently enough to be practical and done with limited time and effort is an open problem.
> I considered certain game elements like fire and water indistinguishable from reality. Now it looks like pixelated garbage and I ask myself how I could have ever thought that.
Imagination. Same as the people who grew up with the original Atari and Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64.
I remember when I first saw a DVD on a good screen. It was the first Matrix movie in a friends basement. I was so blown away by the quality jump from VHS.
I remember the progress from CGA to EGA; there was that odd bridge of Tandy 16 color; and then, boom, VGA, which looked so magical compared to what came before. Even when I did gray scale VGA on my IBM PS/2 50z it all just felt like a big jump had been finally taken.
Then down the road came 3dfx with Voodoo and that to me was the next great leap forward. Each iteration has been leading to ray tracing which is the next great leap.
Now just for screen tech to become as affordable as the cards that can drive them, the LG OLED we have is stunning but that is "just" 4K.
Weeeeell...the first 'great leap forward' was the Verite V1000 and vQuake a couple of months before the Voodoo 1. Real 3D looking Quake with good frame rates! A bunch of us jumped on that bandwagon...and prolly shouldn't have. The V1000 was great for vQuake, much less so for anything else. By the next Xmas, we all had Voodoos.
The nice thing about 3D graphics is you can play those old PS games on an emulator on a modern machine at a higher resolution. There's a law of diminishing returns of course, and the older textures will look blocky even after being upscaled, but it still looks better than the original hardware.
I remember playing Final Fantasy 9 entirely on an emulator and how much better it looked compared to a "Real" PlayStation.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 441 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NCmDvrECS8
EDIT: I am an idiot. It does say it's faster, though the chart makes it look pretty close.
I think its wise to be skeptical until independant benchmarks are available but I would be surprised if this didn't end up being the biggest performance increase in Nvidia's history for a single generation, just like they say it is.
probably because of, oh I don't know, the text right next to the 3070 dot saying "faster than 2080 Ti"...
(and I'm really only speculating here)
It probably won't be like, night and day faster than a 2080 Ti of course, it's going to be the same bracket judging by the chart, but I'd expect it to usually edge out the 2080 Ti by a couple percent based on the text there.
But as a lighting nerd, I do want the raytracing...
So they have doubled in price since then? wtf?
https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007709%20601341487%20601341...
Still, less than $300 for this card has been a great bargain. I've since picked up a 1440p screen and it's happily chugging along. Been most of a year and they're still selling for substantially more than this.
Anyway, ain't no $200 RX 5700.
The launch prices were $350 for the 5700 and $400 for the 5700 XT (after the pre-release price drop response to Nvidia), so $260 was $90 under list price, or 25% off.
And really, even finding a GPU for list price instead of being marked up for mining ethereum (or whatever else) was a bit of a miracle compared to the last few years of GPU price insanity.
But the cost of a 2080ti was ridiculous especially considering the open secret of its impending obsolescence.
AMD really need to up their marketing budget. From the zeitgeist I've no idea where their lineup sits comparatively. No wonder they only have 20% market share
AMD got on top of Intel by creating hardware that delivers. Just a few years ago AMD CPUs were economical, but the performance was abysmal, especially in single-threaded applications by comparison. They didn't make a product for the high-end.
I am eagerly awaiting what the next series of AMD cards are going to be able to do. They're talking a big game for sure. But Nvidia has a big software advantage as well as a hardware advantage on AMD and that's likely to be a sticking point for me personally on my next purchase. Nvidia spends a lot of resources on working closely with developers and providing them support they need to take better advantage of the hardware with nvidia-specific features. AMD doesn't seem to do the same, and has had much higher profile issues with their drivers in my experience.
All that said, I hope AMD can provide a product to truly compete at the high-end with Nvidia, to hopefully drive prices down as GPU prices have gone up dramatically on the high end.
The main reason my 2012 build of a PC is holding up ok was PCIE 3.0 support, so for me PCIE 4.0 is a must. The only thing I ever upgraded was the GPU and HDD. Went from 670 -> 980 -> 2060 Super. The i7-3370k (OC to about 4.3Ghz) has held up ok. The 16GB DD3-1866Mhz is slow however. Switching from a 2TB 5200 RPM drive to a 2TB NVMe SSD (Samsung EVO 860) for which I had to get a riser card since the ASROCK z77 Extreme 4 doesn't have m.2 made a huge difference also. When I upgraded to the RTX 2060 Super I ran out of PCI 3.0 lanes, and as a result my SSD is running slower, but that's ok.
Suprisingly, I can play the new Microsoft Flight simulator just fine in 3440x1440 resolution on High Settings. Assassin's Creed Odyssey runs well in 1440p Ultra at ~60 FPS.
What I did find interesting is that it does seem like the $1499 on the slide could have been mistakenly shown. They didn't verbally announce it and other than that one second avoided talking about the price.
The 3080 TI will probably be out next year if they follow typical patterns and it will have slightly better gaming performance than the 3090 at a much lower price.
Since its a Titan model (for machine learning work, not for gamers), and the last gen "RTX Titan" costs 2500$ today, its actually a big jump, but in the opposite direction. Almost half the price...
Probably a better trade-off for gaming and worse for ML training.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/rtx-io-gpu-acceler...
It can't both bypass the CPU and have decompression unless it is decompression on the GPU. I'm not sure it is dedicated decompression hardware, or if it is using the normal GPU compute.
> Specifically, NVIDIA RTX IO brings GPU-based lossless decompression, allowing reads through DirectStorage to remain compressed while being delivered to the GPU for decompression.
Still not sure if it'll use fixed-function decompression units on the GPU or if it's just compute shaders, but it's decompressing on the GPU.
Not sure what their competition now in each vertical, but apparently they believe that they need a lower price point.
Competition is great!
I very much assume Nvidia slices price, to not only compete but also crush the AMD GPU market. Nvidia's innovation is crazy huge, but they probably don't want to be in the same situation as Intel where people regard the big dog as slow, profit-extracting. Nvidia will do it's best to eat as much market share with better products over AMD('s GPU.)
0: https://www.techradar.com/news/amd-big-navi-isnt-coming-unti...
But NVIDIA pegged the 3070(which is faster than the 2080 TI) at $499.
That's pretty hard to beat!
Not even close. 1080 ti's are still going for twice that and it was $300 cheaper at launch.
Like, really, if you know somebody, let me know. I have a 1080 that I want to sell.
People don't see graphics cards like they're brake pads. They don't wear down the same way. $150 (no tax) is still $150 less for what is essentially the same thing.
That's the important bit and what we all need to find out. Very few people are playing just RTX games.
Even if you don't value ray tracing, DLSS is the difference between playing at 1080p ultra settings, and doing the same thing at 4k.
Now, if you say you don't value Ray Tracing and DLSS, then I'd agree that it makes little sense to upgrade from a 2080 Ti to a 3070 or up. But DLSS is quite useful for any 3D application (CAD, 3D modelling, gaming, ...), and the tensor cores it uses are useful for ML, so if someone is not doing either of these with a GFX, I wonder what do they use the GFX for where DLSS makes no difference. Maybe as a heating stove :D
I think the thing is though - how many people use DLSS and how many people use ray tracing? I'm going to guess very few. This is all the games that support ray tracing and/or DLSS. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2020/09/01/confirmed-ray-tr... That list is horribly short. I don't even play any of the games on that list!
Again, the amount of people using the tensor cores and what not is trivially small. I'll be excited if the benchmarks come out and show a 50%+ gain across the board with all games. Until then - I remain skeptical. This just seems like a price cut on a ridiculously overpriced amount of cards. The fact that the 2080 Ti is still $1200 after 2 years of being out is atrocious. Nvidia went ultra-capitalist with their last generation.
Here's hoping that they'll outdo the rumours.
What are you talking about? The i7-3770K (top of the line 4-core chip in 2012) sold for ~$330.
Isn't the "value" of a GPU simply what the market is willing to pay for it? I bought a 1080 in May of 2016 for $599. According to the BLS CPI inflation calculator, that's approximately $647 in 2020. $499 for a card that is double the performance of a 1080 seems like a great value to me, personally.
For H.265 their encoder is fast, yes, but the quality per bitrate is complete rubbish, requiring higher bitrate than a good H.264 encode yet still contrives the gruesome trick of looking far worse, which entirely offsets all and any point with H.265.
* RTX 3080, 699$, 2x faster than RTX 2080
* RTX 3090 (Titan), 1500$, 1.5x faster than RTX Titan, 8k resolution @ 60 FPS with RTX on Control.
---
I hope that if somebody bought an RTX 2080 or similar in the last 2-4 weeks, that they bought it over Amazon, and can return it.
You likely meant something else; Titan can't be faster than Titan.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E98hC9e__Xs&t=34m14s
There is also a previous gen HPC "Titan V" with HBM memory, but AFAICT no Ampere Titan card with HBM2 was announced.
You can see this because the chip name is GA102, the 2 at the end indicates that this is a cut-down chip.
With one exception: the Titan V card that I mentioned which comes with the GV100 chip. But as I mentioned, that one targets a very different market segment with HBM memory, which the "RTX 3090" obviously doesn't target, since otherwise it would come with HBM2 memory like all the GA100 products.
>With one exception:
This is simply wrong. The majority of Titans have been full chips: Titan, Titan Z and Titan Black as well as the Titan V and Titan X.
The other Titans were about as fast as manufacturer-overclocked 80Ti models.
The naming is super confusing. The 100 versions are essentially HPC chips on a PCI-express board, while 10x are completely different products.
8N manufacturing process is presumably Samsung, which will probably be beat by TSMC 7nm.
I'm holding out for RDNA2.
> To that end, our engineers designed a much smaller PCB, shrank the NVLink and power connectors, and still managed to pack in 18-phases for improved power delivery. Don’t worry, we included an adapter that allows Founders Edition cards to work with users’ existing power supplies.
[1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/introducing-rtx-30...
Why would you keep a 1200$ RTX 2080 Ti or a 2500$ Titan when you can get at least the same perf for 50-75% of the price with the new products, and much better RTX perf ?
This assumes that with RTX off the new gen won't be slower than the old one, but I think that's a fair assumption, and if it isn't, you can always return the 30xx card in 2 weeks, and buy an used 2080 Ti or Titan on ebay for pennies, once the market overflows from people upgrading for the 30xx series.
People were still asking for 900$ for a used 2080 Ti on ebay this morning, and the 3080 700$ price just destroys that offer. Many owners are going to try and dump these cards for as much as they can get in the next two weeks. I wouldn't buy a used 2080 Ti for more than 250$ today. In one month, these cards are going to sell used for 100-200$. If AMD can only match the 2080 Ti perf, they are going to have a very hard time pricing against the used 2080 Ti market.
> And let's not forget the huge power draw, requiring a new power connector and a 3 slot cooler.
That's only for the 3090 IIUC. All other cards were announced as being actually much smaller than the 20xx series ones.
Do note that the 3080 is still 2 weeks away (17 sept), 3090 24 sept, 3070 in October.
I would consider getting a non-founders edition though, in the past other brands have had better/more silent cooling for pretty much identical pricing.
Edit: While the 3090 (350W) is the only one requiring a 3 slot cooler, all 3 use the new 12 pin power connector. The 3080 founder edition power draw is still 320W, vs 220W for the 2080.
That's not that difficult considering the RTX cards had terrible price/perf.
Certainly the market for them will take a beating compared to new prices now. But I can't imagine it collapsing like that purely based on the supply. How many people are really going to drop their 2080 just because a new thing is out there?
I'd love to be wrong, as an original 2070 owner ;)
Pretty much everyone who paid for a 2080 Ti on launch and always need to have the latests bestest thing.
Well for one, keeping a card you already bought is free, buying a new one costs money.
Why are you all getting so excited about the prices given in a paper launch? Wait until you can actually buy one at that price, which I'm guessing isn't going to be until well into 2021.
Also if find a 2080ti for 200 before the year 2022 let me know I'll buy you a beer.
They explicitly noted that it was Samsung.
[1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/introducing-rtx-30...
I still don't understand the raytracing craze when it comes to games. Years ago when I wrote my first raytracer I might have got excited about it. But we have advanced so much with rasterization that I don't really understand why this is something we need.
Raytracing complexity is tricky and it is likely to prove challenging to do in a game with consistent frame rates. Soft shadows are expensive even for hardware.
I would be more excited about some other global illumination improvements, like photon mapping.
"Need" is a strong word, but I'm sure someone will make a game where the shadows _matter_ for telling the story, or solving puzzles, or even just making the game world look more realistic and believable.
Or selling GFX cards..
RTX cards don't render everything with ray tracing. They use it for light calculations, for example it can be used exactly for global illumination.
> why this is something we need.
The answer is simple. Because there is a limit to how realistic we can make the lighting and shadowing using the old models. We are almost at that limit. Using ray tracing removes that limit.
> challenging to do in a game with consistent frame rates
Try Quake II RTX. It is very consistent right off the bat, and if you turn on the resolution scaling, you can get completely consistent framerates (within 2-3 fps continuously). While it might not be a game with the most advanced graphics, it does have variety of scenes, and there is no issue with the framerates being "inconsistent".
- Ray tracing only is not 200% but 195% in real world tests.
- In modern games like Tomb Raider the fps increase is between 165 and 180%, averaging 175%.
This is comparing the 2080 to 3080 playing real world games.
It looks pretty impressive.
Regarding the new power connector: All the partner cards showcased by Gamers Nexus have the regular two or three 8-pin connectors and the FE cards seem to include an adapter. Nvidia states that a 750W power supply is required, so depending on the CPU even a 650W should be fine.
Anyway, thank you AMD for the competition.
https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=GTX1070
https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=GTX1070
https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=RTX2070
People are going to get a massive jump in performance for just $500. I don't think we've ever seen this before.
It looks pretty impressive.
If this pricing holds up though, I need to get a large NVDA position, because they'll sell at TON of 3090. I'll buy 8.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/30-serie...
EDIT: For people comparing this to the Titan RTX, no. This GA102, not GA100. It's the cut-down version of Ampere. GA100 will come out, and it will be even more expensive.
Back in Kepler, a 780Ti was 800$, and it had the GK110 chip, which was the full-fat chip. Now, the cut-down chip costs twice as much.
I'm tempted to get one just to avoid having to think about upgrading a graphics card for another 10 years. Plus I can do some ML messing about as well for resume-driven development.
That statement is absolutely true regarding me. Honestly, I don't need a gaming system at all, let alone one with such a powerful GPU. But even in terms of my leisure-time gaming, I could never justify the price difference over a much cheaper card.
Still, I could imagine it making a lot more sense for other people. E.g., pro gamers, people with big entertainment budgets, or people using CUDA for number-crunching.
Whether the chip number is right is pretty irrelevant.
That doesn't mean it's not the Titan equivalent for this generation. Titan X(pascal) and Titan XP were both GP102, and Titan RTX was TU102. AFAIK, only Titan V used the "100" chip, and that was sorta a fluke because there was no smaller volta chip. (and 3090 was explicitly introduced as the Titan RTX replacement)
It's not the Titan, because it's not the biggest chip, and also, it's not called "Titan". It fits the motif of the 2080Ti almost to a T.
Not to mention that it still has NVLink support! The 3-slot design is a bit challenging and for 4-card workstation, I need to rework my radiator mount to make space for another PSU.
If you're happy paying 40% more for a 50% faster card, that's okay. I just don't think it's very good for the industry.
I hope AMD can pull it off, as I am really hoping to make my first red box build. That being said, the performance:cost ratio of 30xx is mindbogglingly attractive (assuming the reviews back up NVIDIA's claims).
Guess the benchmarks will show us.
They found FPS increases of between 160-190% for a bunch of recent games featuring both RTX/traditional rendering, and about a fixed 190% in Quake RTX (which is exclusively RTX rendering).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWD01yUQdVA
On top of that - if you only care about 4K gaming then fine - but what if you're more of a 1080-1440p with higher refresh rate person?
Personally, I have a 1440p display that goes to 144hz. I'd much rather have 1440p @ 100+ FPS than 4K at 60 - but we don't know what these new GPUs will do.
They can't make it too much faster or have too much more RAM or it will threaten 3090 sales.
So far. As customers of TSMC, in the long term it behooves them for TSMC to have competition.
Further, "leadership matters" is a somewhat ironic complaint given that Intel ran face-first into a brick wall precisely because they were leading. TSMC placed conservative bets on the next node and Intel placed risky bets because they needed the extra risk/reward to maintain leadership. Intel's bets failed (in particular, cobalt wires and COAG). They chose "leadership or bust" and went "bust," at least for now.
The whole reason AMD are able to crank out 128 core CPUs is the CCX architecture - the one people laughed at. No TSMC there. Not to mention other innovations like Infinity Fabric.
In ampere for instance, there are so many innovations, like PAM signalling, 2x shader instructions per clock, DLSS, RTX Voice.
TSMC beat Intel, sure, but that is not the main reason for why Nvidia and even AMD are leading the industry. In fact, ampere is on Samsung 8n.
Just fyi, steer clear of the ad hominems. You can disagree with someone without calling them a simpleton.
If the fab was all that mattered, AMD GPUs would be dominating Nvidia, since they have been shipping GPUs using TSMC 7nm (a superior process to Samsung 8nm) for over a year.
Sure, but it is not like Intel is going to fab AMD and nvidia chips, so they need other competitors, like Samsung, and that's what they are using.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustaf_Dal%C3%A9n
Plus for me, Nvidia is simply DOA on Linux, due them refusing to upstream their driver and hindering Nouveau to reclock properly. So even if AMD won't outdo them, I still won't touch Nvidia.
I’m just glad that we’ve finally gotten past that ceiling at ~13 TFLOPs. Nvidia has been hobbling along for a few years, so a breakthrough is nice.
If nvidia's performance claims are real then that is a massive challenge for AMD to meet.
Same. The best this announcement does for me is force AMD to reduce the price of their GPUs. Which is appreciated, because I am due to upgrade.
I know, I know, it would be nice to have a proper FOSS driver, and better for integration, updates etc. But it does work fine, IMHO.
I'm probably pretty easy to please :)
I have never had a PSU fail, but supposedly unlike pretty much every other component if it fails its possible it will destroy your GPU/CPU/MB so it makes sense to spend a little extra on a good PSU.
Probably my best component purchase ever was a 1050W Modular PSU in 2014. It was an old model even then and apparently no one wanted 1000W+ power supplies back then because it was on clearance. It should still be good for a 3090 and probably even a 5090 when I upgrade again in the future.
I paid far less than a 1000w PSU costs now.
The two things to watch out for here are
1) Cheaper PSUs can't always actually hit their claimed wattage, particularly not in real-world heat scenarios
2) CPU & GPU both use the 12V rail for their power, and not all PSUs can deliver all the rated wattage on the 12V rail.
Any decent to good PSU won't have either of those issues, most list their rated wattage entirely on the 12V rails these days.
So for example let's assume 250w for the GPU average and 120w for the CPU average (turbo & boost & all that). A 400w PSU could technically do that, particularly since if your only drive is an SSD your "accessories" are basically a rounding error. But if we take this 400W PSU for example: https://www.newegg.com/coolmax-i-400-400w/p/N82E16817159140 it can only deliver 300W on the 12V rail. Not enough. By comparison this EVGA 450W PSU can do a full 450W on the 12V rail alone: https://www.evga.com/products/product.aspx?pn=100-BR-0450-K1
That's a 150W useful difference in this scenario even though the "rated" power only differs by 50W.
A 2080 Ti + 8700k system used 450W (nvidia recommended a 650w psu). While high end CPUs have gotten a bit more power hungry with higher core counts on the 10900k/10700k/3900x/3950x, I'd be shocked if a 650W PSU couldn't handle a mainstream CPU + 3080.
https://www.techspot.com/review/1701-geforce-rtx-2080/page4....
nVidia's recommendation is based on "we don't want people pissed off because they put it in a system with a 3990wx at the recommended PSU capacity and it didn't work"
Having some headroom might result in a quieter system
However, I also play around with deep learning stuff, expect to do so more in the future, but don't currently follow it so closely.
Would someone care to ponder on what difference they think a 24GB gpu vs a 10GB gpu will have as a tool for deep learning dev over the next 3 years?
For what it's worth, I'm a computer vision guy, but I did have a play with DeepSpeech earlier this year.
That said, rumor has it that they will announce a 20Gb 3080 later.
Even a billion parameters is a huge model, and a factor of 2.4x increase is not going to make a tremendous difference in your performance. In particular the data-heavy nature of vision stuff means that you'll be bottlenecked by training more than memory, AFAIK (again, lay).
Two 3080s = $1500 + number of hours times electricity cost (for me, this would be about $0.14/hour)
A K80 from AWS (close enough to the same RAM) = $0.45/hour (spot pricing) or $0.9 (on demand)
I've been able to use spot instances for basically all of my AWS hobby work, so I'll use that.
The crossover point where it's worth buying is where 1500 + 0.14h = 0.45h, about 5000 hours or 30 weeks of training.
For hobby work, do you expect to have it training for 20% of the next 3 years? That's all without considering the fact that you might want to upgrade to a newer card, AWS's prices will likely fall, and you might want a card with more RAM sometimes, but not others, or even a multi-GPU setup sometimes.
I used to spend money on fancy cards and machines and justify it with my hobby learning. Now I just let somebody else do the heavy lifting and pay them rent. It's spoiled me. You go from spending a few nights trying to get a thing performant to throwing a burrito worth of money at amazon to just parallelize the dumb thing on a massive machine and having it done by bed time.
I also used to justify buying the fancy card with my gaming hobby, but then when I actually did have a long running training job, it'd be super frustrating because now I can't use the desktop for anything else for a few days until training finishes.
1500 + 0.14h should be equal to 0.45h * 4. A 3080 will at the least be 2x faster for general training than one k80.
SLI is specific to rendering. Depending on the workload, it’s sometimes makes perfect sense to split GPGPU jobs into multiple GPUs. An extreme example of that approach is crypto-currency miners who sometimes use a dozen of GPUs in a single computer.
The only limitation, the working set used by each GPU needs to fit in VRAM of that GPU, otherwise GPUs gonna bottleneck on I/O as opposed to compute, will be very slow. For ML, this means the setup of two 3080 GPUs will be limited to 10GB model sizes.
Does that really matter? Integer scaling isn't really a thing AFAIK, and game devs are more likely to test their HUD layouts in 4k than 5k these days.
I expect to reach this we will probably have to start using foverted rendering.
I was surprised over the difference 320 Hz monitors make according to them.
That makes it worthwhile. That's personally what I was waiting for before upgrading my 1080 GTX TI and my monitor.
Think DOTA 2 or Civilization 5. They both look amazing at 4K and I bet would look noticeably better at 8K.
Especially in those two, the games assets have enough detail to allow zooming in all the way from a bird's eye view to a first person view. As you crank up the rendering resolution, there's plenty of "real" detail available in the models and textures. You could push these games to 16K and still get more quality out of them.
> Makes me wonder - what are we "not" seeing right now that will make us think this way 10-20 years from now?
Yes - well said. That's what I was trying to convey in my comment.
Then there’s the more obvious stuff that isn’t done well even today: skeletal animation is still lacking and feels unnatural, physics systems are still very approximate and constrained - often times most things are indestructible in games, fluid dynamics are still very slow/limited. Human models still don’t look real though, and the voice acting never quite matches the mouth movement or body language.
I do really feel like we’ve crossed the uncanny valley when it comes to natural scenery rendering. But a lot of what makes things feel real are still missing from games.
It's very cool tech. But it doesn't look real.
Take a look at The Mandalorian series, almost all of the outdoor scenes were shot using the video wall technology.
I've worked in computer graphics and I didn't realise the sets were fake until after I finished the whole series.
http://www.retroadv.it/images/03082019/Home_Computer_Magazin...
It was so noticeable because it was such a huge increase in quality compared to what passed for water in games before - usually some kind of blue-grey translucent texture. For the first time, pixel shaders produced water that was clearly an attempt to imitate water IRL, not the cartoonish representation of it.
Apart from graphics most stuff in games is pretty rough. Animations are generally bad and ways before reaching the uncanny valley of "getting close"; they're still in the "abstract representation of concept" detail level. AI is dumb (largely for [perceived] player-acceptance reasons). Sound is generally poor; some games still don't use 3D sound. Physics are "abstract representation" level again, some games still have fly-through walls and vibrating items. etc. etc.
For example, I can clearly see that ray tracing produces better results. But it's a bit harder to tell how better it is, to find the words that describes how better it is. Of course, one can say that, for example, photon tracing is more physically accurate. But still, what words can we use to describe how real (or not real) a still image is ("more realistic" doesn't count :-))
But also, the design often adapts to the capabilities. Games like GTA3 used to have thick fog just to hide the fact that they couldn't render stuff far away in time. You can say that's an artistic choice to give a smoggy big city atmosphere, but clearly it was a practical choice as well. Even today, game designers like to make things dark, blurry and rainy, so that the un-realism becomes less obvious.
The rest, not so much, sure.
It’s basically using the same technique as hand drawn animation where as long as you realize what’s being represented you can automatically fill in missing details. However, this fails as soon as you focus on any one detail.
Honestly, it’s not bad for what it is. I mean the physics engine was probably the worst part, but as a visual demo that’s fine.
This hasn't changed. New "realistic" games still range from horrible to boring-looking. I don't know if it's collective delusion or if I'm missing something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isvWpUXgKgM
Take this as a compliment, not a criticism when I say you've rigged your proposition by holding up Nintendo first party games, and Shigeru Miyamoto for comparison. If you were to look back at he average Nintendo game, not made by Nintendo, they are mostly unremarkable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7ymWKnkAxM
Which is something really obvious with the PS5 UE 5 tech demo [0]. The environment looks great and very realistic, while the character is very stylized and looks more like a comic than realistic.
[0] https://youtu.be/d8B1LNrBpqc
ML creative tools stand to automate a lot of this imo.
[1] random example: https://snapperstech.com/
Why not? With procedural generation and LOD rendering it's not impossible. Not that it's easy, but not impossible?
Also, some games are intentionally cartoonish as an artistic choice so photorealism isn't always the goal.
We've probably reached the point where human cost exceeds computational cost, which is to say that developing and QA testing such a feature would probably cost more money than it's worth. How many users of software would gain from such minutiae?
Sounds like a fun project for the next generations. Something to play when I am older.
Now suppose I want to take some fruit from the trees. And I want to slice and dice the different fruits. Peeling the skins when appropriate.
Or I want to plant a new tree. Or I want to remove it, with say, a lightsaber.
That's a couple generators more. Now add birds, dogs, insects, moss, moist surfaces, and so on. Hence, my point on needing several generators.
There are lots of things to be improved in games, but what you're describing are improvements to a real life simulation.
We are getting better. Like snow deformation in RDR2, for instance(works even in a PS4).
But random bits of debris that can get kicked around - and subsequently inspected - no. That's a problem.
> No video game will let you inspect the leaves of plants to look for little bugs, the way reality will
That's an easier problem than tracking all the debris. Before you inspect, you have no idea what will be there - the computer also doesn't have to and it can be optimized away until there's an observer.
Think heisenberg uncertainty principle but for virtual worlds.
You could implement little bugs without all that much trouble, true. Maybe a better way for me to think about it is more like, the real world has an incredible diversity of appearances at a small scale, that's hard to reproduce in a video game. The bug isn't the part that causes trouble, it's the fact that every leaf looks different, some leaves are oddly discolored, some leaves have bug bites on them, some got a little torn up, et cetera.
How about ray tracing?. If we get real-time 60fps+ ray-traced computer graphics in games, that would blow what we have now out of the water
- Hair. Up until very recently hair was downright awful. Nowadays it’s acceptable-ish, but there’s still lots of room for improvement, in particular in natural motion of long hair.
- Water. I spend a big chunk of my time on the water, so I’m probably more attuned to how it moves than most. Games just don’t have it down. In particular, I think a lot could be gained by embracing it’s fractal nature: in my experience, at every human scale (mm to dam and everything in between) very similar wave patterns exist, but games tend to have just a small fixed number of “wave-layers” at various scales stacked together.
- Clouds. I can easily spend hours just observing clouds, looking at things like their shape, overall motion, internal motion, composition, edge behaviors, etc, and how they change over time. Game clouds are lacking in all these regards, particularly the time-sensitive nature of a cloud.
- Foliage. In games I’ve seen, individual plants/etc. in isolation generally look really quite decent. But the second an physical object interacts with them, they very clearly don’t respond in the right ways. There’s a lot about how branches bend and leaves rustle and more that is lost. Additionally, in groups of plants it’s often clear that some small number of models are being reused, possibly with some generated randomness added. But the variety doesn’t come close to matching what one would really see.
- Human faces and expressions. These are generally really bad, especially in normal gameplay (cut-scenes are sometimes better)
Again, this is probably all just really weird stuff I notice because I spend the vast majority of my time outdoors and only see “HiFi” games being played very infrequently. I don’t think games are worse for not implementing these, but I am very interested in what they’ll look like 10-20 years down the road.
What I think will be a huge boost is proper raytracing. You can see animated movies and blender renders look stunning but they take minutes per frame.
Foliage seems like something that will be difficult to get realistic for any close inspect, at least from a layperson's point of view.
My vote would be cloth simulation and clothing clipping. I've yet to see a game that comes even close to doing this realistically. Imagine what happens to your sleeves when you lift your arms above your head for example, or how the plates of a suit of armor naturally slide over each other. In every game I can think of, clothing is rigidly attached to the underlying skeleton and it just stretches/clips as the character moves.
I guess fidelity of everything else has gotten much better, because I recently started noticing this and now I find it very distracting in any game that has in-engine cut scenes involving character closeups.
One interesting point of reference is the initial switch to HD in the 2000s; I remember there was a bit of panic in the beginning because news studios had to adjust studio lighting and makeup; flaws that were not perceptible on a CRT were all of a sudden extremely noticeable blown up on a 48" flatscreen.
Nowadays people open up koi pond videos on phones and let their cats play with it. But like you mentioned, it would be interesting to see a study on it.
Occasionally things will be slightly out of focus, but it wasn’t apparent on a SD CRT so they shot the scene. On an HD screen you can see it and it’s kind of distracting.
My point is: CRT did show a lot more colours, had much lower latency, and did not have a grid where you could see individual pixels.
No colour banding, no lag and no screen door effect. That really enhanced the content you saw when you had a CRT.
During that era, 640x480 video was the common high end.
Higher resolution, better color replication, and frame rate make very obvious the fact that there seems to be a magical glowing orb following around the characters right behind the camera. Immersion breaking because you can get away with it with less quality, it's more difficult to notice.
Something that I've also found more and more irritating is the foley artists doing ridiculous things for sound effects, especially in nature documentaries, but all over the place really.
ex: Farscape - all the CG was rendered in low res, so even when you view a 1080p copy it looks silly. Imagine all the content that would have to be re-done and upscaled to make it watchable in 4k.
When people are saying something is photo-realistic, they aren’t comparing to reality, they’re comparing to photos or videos as viewed on the same display.
By some metrics, even extremely expensive modern hardware is very far from reality. Pretty much all games show Sun occasionally, to reproduce same luminosity at 1m distance you need kilowatts of light (assuming 180 degree viewing angle; the surface of 1m half sphere is about 2 m^2 and the flux of visible spectrum is about 550w/m^2), these levels are simply unsafe for home use. For example, such display is going to ignite or at least melt a keyboard if it’s too close.
Similar for dynamic range. Reality has extreme dynamic ranges, i.e. both very light and very dark areas on the same scene.
At least modern hardware generally delivers realistic resolutions, and color accuracy.
I don't know, look at some flowers... most screens can't show their colors. Stuff like the intense, super-saturated reds and purples are basically impossible to get right in sRGB, with very obvious artefacts, yet in real life there are no artefacts, there is texture, detail and color, where the picture only has a smear of four different reds. P-3 and Rec.2020 might reduce the issues there, as would 10 bit color.
I agree, but professional monitors are close to Adobe RGB, and have been for decades. Adobe RGB is close to DCI-P3, and not much worse than BT.2020.
P.S. Doesn’t help with red/purple though, Adobe RGB extends sRGB mostly in green direction.
My naive questions.
I thought Rec.2020 was already insanely good? I am reading this as it meant Rec.2020 is good, but far from perfect ?
I had opportunity to test Varjo VR-2 Pro ($5,995.00) https://store.varjo.com/varjo-vr-2-pro and now all consumer VR products feel like total crap.
Graphics — even movie quality graphics — don’t look anything like what a camera produces. The sole exception is when you’re mixing in real video with CG elements. But try to synthesize an entire frame from scratch, then put it next to a video camera’s output, and people can tell the difference.
Also, screenshots are misleading. You have to test video, not screencaps. Video is processed differently by the brain.
10 out of 10 times, all the graphics engineers come out of the woodwork going “but actually we do know how! It’s a matter of using so and so calculations and measuring BDRF and” none of those equations work.
Plop a nature video next to your forest rendering and it’ll become apparent just how unsolved trees are. And everything else, for that matter.
The precise claim is this: viewers should be able to identify a rendered video no better than random chance. If you conduct this experiment, you’ll see that real videos from actual video cameras wipe the floor.
To be fair: have you run such an experiment yourself, or are you just assuming that this conclusion will always result?
(But note this is only replicating video, not reality. Truly realistic motion blur requires ultra-high displayed frame rates beyond the capabilities of current hardware.)
If you're driving at 200 mph, and there's a car next to you also going 200 mph, it shouldn't be blurry.
Also, the length of the blur should not exceed the distance an object travels on your screen in 1 frame. In other words, if an object moves 30 pixels from one frame to the next, then the blurred image shouldn't be more than 30 pixels wide.
What CG videos are you considering, what specifically have you looked at? Can you show some good faith examples of the best CG forests ever made, compared to some specific nature videos? Are you talking about attempts to match a nature video, and saying it's not possible regardless of what's in the shot?
Are you looking at the best examples of CG forests lately? There are some CG full frame video examples of forests I don't believe people would reliably identify as CG, if they didn't know before hand and you left out the explosions & spaceships.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOpuDhWzV1I
The problem is that we can't do that in 1/60 second on consumer-priced hardware, and also both scanning real objects and manually modelling are expensive.
If you think the answer is obvious, then CGI definitely has more work to do. If not ... ??
If this is CGI, then I'm impressed and want to see more from where this came from.
Agreed with you that I'd be super impressed if anyone could render at that quality, but I haven't seen it yet.
But in the full version[0], it's clearly a photo. But it has been HDR'd which can sometimes create shading that gives a somewhat rendered look.
[0]https://i.imgur.com/Wn2XgFg.jpg
(Although, maybe you could argue that if the challenge is to make photorealistic renders rather than realistic renders, nailing the camera artifacts is part of the challenge.)
The point is, currently it only works for simple scenes and needs tons of manual work otherwise. Reality is realistic effortlessly.
"The Dress" illustrates how easy it is to fool people with still images. Movement gives crucial context. Our visual system has evolved for millions of years specifically to exploit that context.
That were capable of getting pretty close isn't that surprising, because most photos have already had N layers of digital effects applied, moving them closer to renders, rather than the other way around.
Making graphics that look real is almost equivalent to the Turing Test, I think plenty of people are willing to acknowledge that it's unsolved.
Amusingly relevant yet slightly off-topic: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/357
The reverse-problem is a pet-peeve of mine: It seems many people have been accidentally brainwashed by Hollywood into thinking that film-camera effects are signs of "realism."
So then the first-person game introduces something like lens-flares, and everyone goes: "OMG it's so realistic now", even though the truth is the exact opposite. If you were "really there" as Hero Protagonist, you wouldn't have camera-lenses for eyeballs except in a cyber-punk genre.
> we do not understand how to make graphics look real > none of those equations work
Why do you claim this, and what do you mean exactly? Surely you aren’t claiming we can’t make any graphics look real at all. Some people are getting pretty good at understanding how to make some graphics look real, even if we aren’t. The math for approximating materials and lighting is getting pretty good these days, and the equations have been changing over time. It’ll continue to improve, but it’s certainly not the main thing holding CG back today. IMO less realistic CG comes much more from low resolution or low fidelity sampling / geometry / textures / animation / input data in general. Most of that is due to lack of time & money.
I’d say we understand how to make graphics look real in many cases, but not in all cases. We understand how to make good looking graphics, but how to do it quickly and efficiently enough to be practical and done with limited time and effort is an open problem.
I remember as a kid my younger sister watching cartoons and realising she couldn’t tell the difference between them and live action.
I think as graphics get more complex our ability to distinguish increases. But we’ll probably hit a limit in our ability to keep up sooner or later.
Imagination. Same as the people who grew up with the original Atari and Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64.
Sadly, now when I look at a DVD, it's unbearably blurry.
I suppose part of that is that we're now viewing on a much larger/higher resolution screen.
Then down the road came 3dfx with Voodoo and that to me was the next great leap forward. Each iteration has been leading to ray tracing which is the next great leap.
Now just for screen tech to become as affordable as the cards that can drive them, the LG OLED we have is stunning but that is "just" 4K.
just for fun, the story of 3dfx voodoo https://fabiensanglard.net/3dfx_sst1/index.html
I remember playing Final Fantasy 9 entirely on an emulator and how much better it looked compared to a "Real" PlayStation.