Nvidia: Turing RTX Cards Up to 40 Percent Faster Than Pascal in Some Titles
Nvidia’s Director of Technical Marketing, Tom Peterson, joined HotHardware on its 2.5 Geeks podcast yesterday and revealed details about the upcoming RTX 20-series graphics cards that Nvidia had hitherto kept secret.
He talked about the Turing architecture’s Tensor Cores and RT Cores, he explained more about the Deep Learning Super Sampling technology, and perhaps most importantly, he admitted that Nvidia “could have done a better job” highlighting the performance of the new GPUs. He also talked somewhat candidly about what kind of performance gains that we could expect with the GTX 2080 cards.
Nvidia spent most of its press event discussing ray tracing technology and the performance gains that the Turing-based cards bring to the table for that task. The company spent no time highlighting how well the new cards would handle existing games, though it followed up a few days later with a performance chart that suggests high generation-to-generation performance gains.
During the Q&A with HotHardware, Peterson said that Turing is a “beast” and that “if you are on high-resolution and not CPU limited” you could expect to see between 35 percent and 45 percent performance gains in existing games when you step up from a GTX 1080 to an RTX 2080. And when queried about the RTX 2080 outperforming the GTX 1080 Ti, he said that he thinks there would be cases that would happen but couldn’t say for sure.
On Deep Learning Super Sampling
Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) is a new technology that Nvidia introduced with the Turing architecture. The company didn’t explain the inner workings of the process, but the basic idea is that DLSS uses an AI algorithm to increase the resolution of your video output to improve the image quality. Nvidia said this technology improves performance compared to other super sampling and antialiasing technologies.
HotHardware asked Petersen what DLSS does and how its delivered to gamers. He didn’t go deep into the details, but Petersen explained that there are two methods for developers to implement DLSS. They could create a custom algorithm which runs natively on the Tensor Cores, or Nvidia can pump the game code through a Saturn V supercomputer to allow a neural net to create the algorithm for the developer. For that reason, DLSS will be largely used by AAA studios that have relationships with Nvidia, though Petersen said the company is working on “a lot of games and not everything is AAA titles.”
On NVLink
Nvidia Turing is the first GPU architecture to embrace the company’s NVLink bridge technology, which offers higher bandwidth data transfer than the traditional SLI bridge. At Siggraph, where Nvidia launched Turing and the Quadro RTX lineup, the company revealed that NVLink enables frame buffer scaling. In traditional SLI, each card needs the same data in its memory pool. With Quadro RTX cards, NVLink combines the memory of each card to create a single, larger memory pool.
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Petersen explained that this would not be the case for GeForce RTX cards. The NVLink interface would allow such a use case, but developers would need to build their software around that function. “While it's true this is a memory to memory link; I don't think of it as magically doubling the frame buffer. It's more nuanced than that today,” said Petersen. “It's going to take time for people to understand how people think of mGPU setup and maybe they will look at new techniques. NVLink is laying a foundation for future mGPU setup.”
NVLink’s current implementation offers higher bandwidth, which should improve performance, but it’s not a fix-all solution. Anyone who’s used an SLI setup would be familiar with the dreaded micro-stutter. Unfortunately, it appears the new bridge doesn’t completely solve that problem. Not yet, at least.
Petersen said that the stuttering issue has more to do with alternate frame rendering (AFR), which is the current rendering technique for SLI. Nvidia is working on new mGPU technologies that would improve scaling in the future, but the company isn’t at liberty to discuss those yet.
Overclocking
HotHardware also asked Peterson about overclocking performance, to which he said, “it’s really good!” Nvidia built the power and cooling solutions of the Founder’s Edition cards specifically for overclocking, and Petersen said he'd seen 2.1Ghz on multiple cards, which suggests that at least the FE cards would be strong overclockers.
Petersen also mentioned Nvidia Scanner and GPU Boost 4.0, of which we know nothing about yet.
Kevin Carbotte is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware who primarily covers VR and AR hardware. He has been writing for us for more than four years.
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"And when queried about the RTX 2080 outperforming the GTX 1080 Ti, he said that he thinks there would be cases that would happen but couldn’t say for sure"Reply
So if they're about the same in performance and some of the 1080ti's have been on sale for as low as $526, why would I pay $799 for a 2080? -
none12345 After the "just buy it" article, this is a whole lot of nothing. This is just more of the same garbage, with no benchmarks, no real data. Why do i keep coming to tomshardware, you are wasting our time.Reply -
jimmysmitty Reply21278703 said:"And when queried about the RTX 2080 outperforming the GTX 1080 Ti, he said that he thinks there would be cases that would happen but couldn’t say for sure"
So if they're about the same in performance and some of the 1080ti's have been on sale for as low as $526, why would I pay $799 for a 2080?
The features. Plus as time goes performance will most likely increase with driver and game optimization.
21278723 said:After the "just buy it" article, this is a whole lot of nothing. This is just more of the same garbage, with no benchmarks, no real data. Why do i keep coming to tomshardware, you are wasting our time.
While I was not a fan of the article, this is different. This is just another statement by nVidia. TH has always posted speculative articles with manufactures proposed performance numbers. Normally though its the benchmarks that matter. -
Paul Alcorn Reply21278723 said:After the "just buy it" article, this is a whole lot of nothing. This is just more of the same garbage, with no benchmarks, no real data. Why do i keep coming to tomshardware, you are wasting our time.
This article contains reporting on undisclosed details that Nvidia told another website. It doesn't make any recommendations, etc, and several other sites have covered this same interview in the same manner.
Our job is to inform. This article informs our readers of a few new details that they might not know about. -
Reply
While I understand that, it still would not justify spending an additional $270. Heck, for $270 I could get a really strong 2nd card for my backup PC as well.21278738 said:21278703 said:"And when queried about the RTX 2080 outperforming the GTX 1080 Ti, he said that he thinks there would be cases that would happen but couldn’t say for sure"
So if they're about the same in performance and some of the 1080ti's have been on sale for as low as $526, why would I pay $799 for a 2080?
The features. Plus as time goes performance will most likely increase with driver and game optimization.
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techgeek Here is what is not good for consumers: when nVidia doesn't compare their new card against any of the competitors cards and only against their own previous generation of cards. When you don't feel compelled to highlight how much faster your GPUs are compared to your competition, then you are signalling that you don't have any competition. This leaves nVidia to price their cards however they see fit and we consumers are going to pay it if we "need" to have them.Reply -
jimmysmitty Reply21278835 said:Here is what is not good for consumers: when nVidia doesn't compare their new card against any of the competitors cards and only against their own previous generation of cards. When you don't feel compelled to highlight how much faster your GPUs are compared to your competition, then you are signalling that you don't have any competition. This leaves nVidia to price their cards however they see fit and we consumers are going to pay it if we "need" to have them.
I have noticed that nVidia and Intel do this with their own marketing information. Rarely will they compare to the competition, they typically only compare to their previous generations. Honestly I like that because there is a very good chance that they will cherry pick.
For example when AMD launched the FX 8150 they cherry picked the benchmarks that showed when the 8150 beat only certain CPUs. For example it compared to Intels then 4c/8t CPUs in heavily multithreaded applications because it had more "cores" overall so it won. That is just misleading in my book.
Its betetr that they show performance increases vs the previous generation and leave competitor comparisons to third party sites because otherwise they will just get called out.