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Turing goes 2060 and Titan; record fine for ISP; newspapers held ransom; no slacking in chip war; more….
NVIDIA’S INNOVATIVE raytracing RTX series has grown, with a new entry-level RTX 2060, and a top-end Titan RTX. It has also launched new GTX cards that use the new Turing silicon. It has effectively made two brands: the RTX series with ray tracing enabled, and the GTX series without.
The RTX 2060 is the card many have been waiting for. Nvidia’s 60-series cards usually provide the best bang for your buck, useful given RTX pricing. The 2060 has 1,920 CUDA cores, 240 AI Tensor cores, and 30 ray-tracing cores. All down on figures for the RTX 2070, which has 36 ray-tracing cores. It’ll have 6GB of GDDR6, a base clock of 1,365MHZ, and you’ll need a spare eight-pin power plug.
First reports say that if you run BattlefieldV with ray tracing enabled at 1080p, you’ll see 65fps with DLSS turned on, and 88fps without it. Not too shabby. In general performance, it’ll top a GTX 1070, and, depending on the game, just beat a GTX 1070 Ti. A GTX 1080 will outshine it a little, most of the time, though. The RTX 2060 should be available by the time you read this, at $349—a welcome drop from the RTX 2070’s $499.
After much speculation about a possible 11-series, we now know we will get one, and the top models will use Turing chips, with the ray-tracing cores missing or disabled. It’s not clear whether we’ll still get the Tensor cores. It’s these that are responsible for the clever upscaling using DLSS, and noise reduction. Leaving these running would give the 11-series a nice edge.
Unconfirmed, but pretty solid, rumor has it that the GTX 1160 will use the same Turing core as the RTX 2060, with the same basic specifications, which at least means the model numbers make sense. Assuming the same clock speed, we can expect the same performance without ray tracing, too. It’s expected to launch with 6GB or 3GB of memory, as did the GTX 1060. More 11-series cards will follow soon—watch out for a GTX 1150 and GTX 1130.
Meanwhile, at the high end we have the mighty Titan RTX, which Nvidia claims is the fastest PC graphics card ever. This carries 4,608 CUDA cores, 72 RT cores, and 576 Tensor cores. These are paired to a whopping 24GB of memory, a big bonus for heavyweight productivity. Before you get too excited, it costs $2,499— $500 less than the old Titan V, but still. Performance is, as you might expect, tasty.
It’s not marketed as a gaming card, but don’t let that stop you—although gains over an RTX 2080 are not significant. You might like to consider overclocking a much cheaper RTX 2080 Ti instead, which will beat it. If you really want to chase those frame rates, double up with a GTX 1080 Ti SLI or NVLink RTX 2080 Ti. A pair of RTX 2080s will be a lot faster, as will a pair of 1080 Ti cards—and far less painful on your wallet. How about an NVLink Titan RTX rig? $5,000 of graphics cards will beat a pair of 2080s, but not by much, and whether you can actually see any difference when frame rates top 200fps is another matter. Even at 4K, this configuration can easily reach 150fps on some titles. You’ll also start to hit serious CPU bottlenecks, and frame rate caps in game engines.
Nvidia has seen some push back over its RTX series. The technology is amazing, but the prices have been, too. It also needs decent game support, and software always lags behind hardware. Pushing RTX has had an impact on plain old rasterization performance. Nvidia’s stock slide hasn’t helped confidence, although there’s a multitude of reasons for this, not least of which is the crash in demand for cryptomining hardware.
Things are going to get heated soon. AMD is preparing its Navi architecture, a new 7nm GPU. This follows a familiar pattern, offering an attractive price to performance ratio. Three new cards are expected: a Radeon RX 3080, 3070, and 3060. The 3080 uses a Navi 10 chip, with 8GB of memory, for $249. The 3070 uses a Navi 12 GPU, and should cost about $199, while the lessor 3060 makes do with just 4GB of memory, and it’ll cost only $129. The new Radeon cards are due this summer.
How these cards perform running traditional rasterized games will be interesting. The competition they are aimed at is clear by the model numbers. If they can give Nvidia’s expensive RTX series trouble, then at these prices, it could get ugly. In a good way.