Nvidia rethinks the graphics card with the RTX 2080

Nvidia unveiled last month its new Turing architecture and its new RTX 2080 graphics cards with a great promise of "six times better performance" than the previous generation and a new ability to support real-time ray tracing in modern games. We've seen performance claims, some details on Turing's technical architecture and many PC players trying to calculate the actual performance of these new maps, but I spoke with Nvidia last month to look in detail the new Turing architecture. that's what's feeding this next generation of cards. It is fair to say that a lot of things are happening.

The great novelty of Nvidia's Turing architecture is the ability to support real-time ray tracing in games. Ray Tracing is a rendering technique used by movie studios to generate light reflections and cinematic effects. Cars, released in 2006, was the first striped ray movie, and many studios now use ray tracing in modern movies. Even rendering tools such as Adobe AfterEffects, Maya, and 3ds Max all support some forms of ray tracing, and this technique is considered the "Holy Grail" of video games.

Nvidia has spent 10 years working on ray tracing for her Turing architecture, and it's clear from the demos that it's not just marketing jargon. Nvidia is starting to introduce ray tracing with the RTX 2080, and some of the first demonstrations have been impressive but limited to some games. Nvidia's Battlefield V demo showed real examples of how the game will be made more like a movie, with reflections from explosions on nearby cars and flames that will also be reflected on the old weapons' pieces. guns. These are awesome things when you see it up close in a particular part of the game or compare it to a scene that is not traced.

Turing sees Nvidia introduce new Tensor nuclei and RT nuclei. The nuclei of RT are dedicated to ray tracing, while the tensor nuclei will be used for Nvidia's AI work in games. Turing also includes big changes in the operation of GPU caches. Nvidia migrated to a unified memory structure with larger unified L1 caches and twice as much L2 cache. This is essentially a rewrite of the memory architecture, and the company says the result is a 50% improvement in performance per core. Nvidia has also migrated to GDDR6 with its RTX 2080, which means that the effective bandwidth of the games is up to 50% higher.

All of these big platform changes make it a bit difficult to determine performance gains for regular players. "This is a new IT model, so there is a new way of thinking about performance," said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during the company's presentation in Germany last month. This new way of thinking about performance underscores many of the changes that Nvidia brings to RTX, at a time when Moore's Law is over. It's not just the speed at which a processor or graphics processor is more important, nor the number of cores it has. It is now the big architectural changes that will make the difference for the quality and performance of the images for years to come. Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Samsung, Apple and many more will increasingly need to do more with existing chipset transistors instead of continuing to reduce their size. Nvidia has clearly realized this fatality and it is time to change the pace.

Nvidia is offloading some of the work that would normally be handled by the company's CUDA cores on these separate Tensor and RT cores. Nvidia also introduces new texture rendering and shading techniques that will allow game developers to avoid having to constantly shadow every part of a scene as the player moves. This will help improve performance, but Nvidia goes even further with the help of supercomputers.

Nvidia Deep Learning (DLSS) super sampling could be the most important part of improving the company's performance. DLSS is a method that uses Nvidia supercomputers and a neutral game analysis network to find the most effective way to perform AI-based antialiasing. Supercomputers will do this by using fast access copies of the game, which are then used by Nvidia GPUs. Think of it as the supercomputer that is developing the best way to render graphics, and then pass that hard-earned knowledge to users' PCs. It's a complex process, but the end result should be an improvement in the quality and performance of the image, whether you play online or offline.

The real test for DLSS will be to improve the performance of 4K games. While the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti struggled to reach 60 frames per second in 4K for modern games, Nvidia promises impressive performance gains at 4K with DLSS enabled on the RTX 2080. We recently received cards for the test. how well some of these DLSS games are performing in the coming weeks.

Nvidia really revises all its architecture here and the way it thinks about graphics cards with Turing and RTX. In the past, Nvidia would be happy to sell you a graphics card because it is faster, more powerful and has more memory. This remains true today, but the conversation is evolving towards new capabilities and optimizations for graphics cards versus raw specifications. Whether it's launching shelves, DLSS or many other Nvidia changes and enhancements, you are buying into this new complex architecture with the promise of what's going to happen.

Only 11 games support full ray tracing and 21 games in total (for now) will implement ray tracing, DLSS or other RTX platform enhancements. Some will obviously implement all three, offering the best performance gains. Nvidia is also working with Microsoft to bring a lot of its RTX components into DirectX, but its main competitor, AMD, will also have to contribute to this new era of ray tracing. AMD provides graphics cards for both the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One, and a new generation of consoles is planned for 2020. The hardware inside will determine the imminent future of the games. and even mobile devices. If the following consoles can not support real-time ray tracing, it is unlikely to be widely adopted in all games in the near future.

That will not stop Nvidia, though. The company is taking a big gamble on the future of the graphics card. As we enter an era where the speed of raw chips does not tell the whole story, it is the major revisions of the architecture and the intelligent use of hardware and software that will advance the video game industry. Nvidia has made his bet and the dice are rolling.