RT Ray Tracing Needs a Killer App
We still need a reason to buy RTX graphics cards
THE NVIDIA RTX 2080 TI was officially released on September 20, 2018, but at the time of writing, here we are, four months later, still waiting for a reason to drop money on one. So far, there’s been one game released that makes use of the new technology, and BattlefieldV is hardly the sort of game where you can really appreciate what the new technology is capable of. In our experience, the franchise benefits more from silky smooth frame rates than beautifully rendered puddles.
What we do have is a new benchmark to get our collective heads around: 3DMark’s Port Royal test. This synthetic, non-interactive benchmark does a good job of showing off some of the things that real-time ray tracing is capable of, with the spaceship’s mirrored hull being particularly impressive to behold. It’s also an important step forward for the tech, because it means we have a hardware test that is easily repeatable—something that is tricky when using an actual game, where repeating the exact same sequence of events is effectively impossible.
There are some interesting takeaways here, though, not least of which is the benchmark’s default resolution of 1440p. On the ROG Strix GeForce RTX 2080 Ti OC edition Asus loaned us for testing, we hit 35fps at the default resolution. Up that to 4K, and you’ll be sitting in the low teens, which shows how important resolution is for ray tracing. For reference, the default 1440p test using the more affordable GeForce RTX 2060 has an average frame rate of just 17fps.
Obviously, balancing the visual impact of a game with smoothness is something that developers are going to have to hit perfectly for real-time ray tracing to stand a chance with these firstgeneration cards. However, it does feel as though the odds are stacked against them at this stage.