Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.
Most definitely agree! The last two gens have been pathetic launches.. Turing was a rip off and ampere is impossible to get.. Heck even the 1080 Ti bumped up the price though was and still is a great card so can be forgiven.. I miss the days of £550 for a 780 Ti/980 Ti whilst beating the £999 titan of It's time!
Couldn't get a 3080 though, sold out almost immediately and so the only option was paying 2.5k for one on eBay which I refuse to do. I'm not being part of this problem on either side of it, I'm not buying one for inflated prices and I'm not selling my old GPU for an infalted price either. It does bother me a bit that a lot of people who already had 3080s have taken up some of the 3080ti stock and will now sell their 3080's at inflates prices, imo they are just fuelling this whole madness as well as stopping genuine people in need of an upgrade being able to buy one. It's very easy to just blame scalpers but there are a lot of average Joe's who are actually creating/fuelling the exact thing they have been complaining about.
Exactly.
People keep saying that... care to name any such game? Genuinely curious, as such games must be limited to a tiny fraction of gamers with MORE than 10GB vram.
Mm exactly what I saw, refreshed nvidia's site many times of course, No "Add to cart" or buy button appeared at all. Even tried other browsers in case there was a glitch. Then the price went from £1049 (linked from NVidia to another UK company who shall remain nameless) and suddenly said £1379 or similar on that UK site, then the price went down to £1049 again (up and down several times in about 5 minutes). I couldn't see any buy buttons on OC either or anywhere else.
Nvidia's site said coming soon, then the 3080 Ti's vanished from the site completely then came back (repeated a few times) then finally pointed UK users to the unamed UK site, then Nvidia said Out of Stock. No Add to basket buttons in any website seen at all.
Very dodgy, indeed what a shambles for a so called "launch" again from Nvidia.
All good points except for one. There is definitely a big difference between rasterised lighting and ray tracing. Whether you see it depends on a few things.
Skyrim with high res texture mods can hit 10gb too apparently.
All good points except for one. There is definitely a big difference between rasterised lighting and ray tracing. Whether you see it depends on a few things.
Whether you know what you are looking for
Whether the game developer has implemented it well
Whether the scene is conducive to being able to see it
Cyberpunk is a great example of all of these. Sunny, day time, in the desert, even a game developer is going to struggle to point out noticeable ray tracing effects.
Rainy, night time, city scenes, you'd have to be blind not to notice them.
They were noticeable in CoDMW, but only really during the night time city scenes, which should have made anybody realise how poor the fire/shadow effects that they've been living with pre-RT actually are. That said, fast moving FPS/Driving games with RT strike me as pointless most of the time, because unless you are stopping to admire the scenery or show off to a friend, you really shouldn't care if the shadows and reflections are realistic.
From the arguments that I've seen from people who want to try to prove that RT is pointless it's obvious that there's a common misconception about the technology. It's not about light sources! I've seen countless side by side screen shots of raised light sources with very little differences...like we haven't had bloom as a rasterising feature for about a decade...
the whole point about RT isn't where the light rays start it's all about where they end and how they got there. Don't look up, look down
That's an entirely different argument to the effectiveness of the technology
This is why the technologies are needed, there's only so much performance that can be gained from process and architecture improvements. As someone who's been around for a while you'll recognise that, over the years there's been a power push, followed by an efficiency push and now we are back to a power push. But we are hitting a wall, 5% more performance for 30% more power requirements and the beefier, more expensive hardware needed to reign it in. Technology improvements are the only realistic way to push gaming performance forwards at a reasonable level. The exact same argument can be made for CPUs as we've been creeping forwards so slowly for years now.
Neither of us know what sort of cost goes in to developing and producing these cards now vs five years ago. It's obvious on the surface that they are bigger now, they have much more cooling requirements now, they have more power phases now and hence more components are needed now. There's more memory chips now, the PCBs are more complex now and that's before you get to the physically larger GPU with four times the transistors vs just two generations ago. We'd have to be incredibly naive to believe that all of this can be delivered at a similar sort of price point, especially when global inflation over that time is about 12% too.
It's only been in the last couple of years where I've heard numerous representatives from numerous gaming companies referring to the widespread toxicity of their customer base and how it's affecting their decisions. What used to be a bit of "game rage" has flooded out into social media interactions, and then into their every day interactions. Digital existence and the "anonymity buffer" that it provides is rapidly becoming the new base-line for human interaction and as such there's less willingness for people to interact in a reasonable manner. It's safe to say that the vast majority of us now go into every social situation with our guard up as the default.
