Nvidia Geforce RTX 2000 series turns one year old – ray tracing games are still rare

On August 20, 2018, Nvidia took action and officially unveiled the fresh graphics architecture Turing, which in recent months has been frequently featured among rumors. The architecture was presented through a trio of high-performance graphics cards in the Geforce RTX 2000 series.

The new graphics cards were unveiled during the gamescom Gamescom and thus took over the performance throne from the long-lived and Pascal-based Geforce GTX 1000 series from 2016. Now it’s time again for the annual game fair and the Geforce RTX 2000 family has thus become one year old. What has the first year of the series been like, and what can be expected in the future?

Architecture Turing – first with many things

The Geforce RTX 2000 series got a strong starting field consisting of RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and the top model RTX 2080 Ti, all of which were delivered with a decent performance boost over their respective predecessors. Like Pascal, the Turing-based graphics circuits are fabricated on TSMC’s technology 16 nanometers, but now in such a refined design that the companies call it 12 nanometers.

► Read SweClocker’s article on Turing architecture!

Despite the new architecture, circuits with a solid surface apply, where the TU102 of the Geforce RTX 2080 Ti has an area of ​​as much as 754 mm². With the Geforce GTX 1080 Ti, a relatively modest 471 mm² applies instead. Large parts of the circuit are used by the brand new cores, which are the pride of Turing architecture, in the form of RT and Tensor cores – two parts that enable hardware-accelerated ray tracing and machine learning, respectively.

In addition to the new cores, the Geforce RTX 2000 series became the first consumer card with the GDDR6 memory type. Together with the Turing architecture’s ability to calculate integers and floating-point numbers in parallel, the cards can thus strike Pascal variants on the fingers even in more traditional scenarios. However, the Turing cards are clearly superior to just ray tracing real-time gaming, something that Nvidia more or less based its entire graphics card launch on.

At the time of launch, the company displayed a series of comparative images from games ray tracingfunctionality of on- and off, but such games were not available to the general public before launch. However, Nvidia insisted that a number of games and companies were on the train, to implement this holy grail in the computer graphics industry.

Early game selection and the DLSS function

Expensive Battlefield V from Swedish DICE was highlighted as a poster boy for ray tracingconcept. The Turing family became available in stores a few months after the unveiling and some time later the developer updated the said action shooter with the function. Still later came the support for DLSS, another Turing feature Nvidia paid close attention to at launch.

► Read more about the DLSS scaling technology

DLSS is an acronym for Deep Learing Super-Sampling and is an upscaling technology, which is the result of DLSS games being rolled out in Nvidia’s data center for a long time. With machine learning, the goal is then that certain image quality should correspond to a higher resolution than what the player uses, without compromising the frame rate.

This gives a much higher frame rate, but in reality the image quality does not live up to expectations. SweClockers has taken a closer look at DLSS in both Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Metro Exodus and Battlefield V. Only in the former title does the editorial staff consider the feature worth using, while for the others it will be a blurred story. Ray tracing is a nice addition for everyone.

► Read about “Yoshman’s” deep diving ray tracingtechnology and meaning in games!

However, there are a variety of ways to use ray tracing on, which all vary when it comes to performance impact and also how clearly the player can perceive these. In Battlefield V, perhaps the most eye-catching implementation, in the form of reflections, is something that initially cut the image refresh rate (FPS) significantly.

After a few updates, however, DICE got over the problems and for those who are not looking for extra eye candy, this can thus be enjoyed with a clearly playable frame rate even without DLSS. As mentioned, reflections are just one way to create a more realistic gaming environment. To use ray tracing for shadows and global lighting is something that has been done in the big games Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Metro Exodus.

The effects are more subtle than those of Battlefield V, but so far have no game title that offers the whole ray tracingpackage delivered. The strong performance impact of the selected ray tracing parts also gossips that such a game title is likely to be too heavy-duty, even with Nvidia’s most competent graphics hardware.

Thin range of games at present – some new titles on the way

In addition to the three games, there is a relatively small market for games that use the RT cores, but the new edition of Quake II in ray tracing-execution is an example with only a couple of months on the neck. Still closer in time is the month-old Wolfenstein: Youngblood, which earlier in the year was said to be few ray tracingsupport, but shortly before launch it was announced that this would be added at a later time.

Max Payne creator Remedy will soon release a game title with such support from day one, in the form of the physics-heavy Control. The first system requirements recommended a Geforce RTX 2080 to cope ray tracingfunctions, but the company has turned this down to RTX 2060. The reduced system requirements probably mean that a lower update frequency or activated effects apply, but the original requirements suggest that lavish ray tracing can stand the agenda.

A few more early versions and released games are supported ray tracing and is listed on Nvidia’s website for the topic. However, for future game titles, this does not have to guarantee support, as developer Kunos Simulazionis recently announced that they are completely dumping ray tracingsupport for the racing title Assetto Corsa Competizione. This is despite the fact that the function was in early access mode. The explanation is that the development is too resource-intensive and that the impact on performance is too great.