Oh I agree I bought a 9800 GTX to go along with my GTX295 for Physx back in the day and we all know where that ended up. While I don’t think RT will ever take off to the point of necessity I do think it is at least going more mainstream than Physx simply because consoles will have it this gen. Either way AMD I looking to have something worthwhile up their sleeve for the higher end.

Raytracing is a very big leap towards photo-realism in games. Can't be overlooked, holy crap if the modders ever get hold of it! 😕

Fediuld:

6800XT is not "big navi". There is a bigger named 6900XT 😛

6900XT should be called big chungus...

KissSh0t:

6900XT should be called big chungus...

Oh i'd just love big Bertha to come out swinging and say beat nvidia in MS FS2020, it would make the Ampere crapshow all worth it.

ray tracing performance is lacking, however, depending on the price and if these benches go out to real world games (if these benches are even true) and if it's priced correctly, i may buy one. I'm still very skeptical. Waiting for reviews.

Kool64:

It's hard to say what games will be using raytracing but one of the biggest games of the season(perhaps for years to come?) Cyberpunk 2077 will be using it very heavily so even if you can get better frames sans RT on a 6800XT it won't matter much if the 3080 smashes it with RT on. Still if the benches are true big Navi could be the ticket if the price is right.

It doesn't matter what the 3080 can do, if people can't get their hands on one.... Availability of the RTX3000 series is damn near non-existent. It's looking like it's going to be several MONTHS before supply starts to normalize.

Aura89:

ray tracing performance is lacking, however, depending on the price and if these benches go out to real world games (if these benches are even true) and if it's priced correctly, i may buy one. I'm still very skeptical. Waiting for reviews.

Number of ray-traced games is still lacking..... Ray Tracing is still a niche feature and will likely remain that way for the next few years.

sykozis:

Number of ray-traced games is still lacking..... Ray Tracing is still a niche feature and will likely remain that way for the next few years.

Ray tracing is the future so...i don't really care? And given the new consoles being released, i give ray tracing 6-12 months before being fully released in all AAA games. Which is likely less time then the time i'll have whatever GPU i get next will be. I play games that have ray tracing, obviously, i will care what the ray tracing performance will be. You don't have to.

I still consider ray tracing to be a gimmick relegated for those willing to pay a few thousand dollars just for one video card, which I'm sure sounds stupid to the few of you who have played some of the games that tout it as a feature... you aren't wrong though, it is the future for lighting and reflections.

KissSh0t:

relegated for those willing to pay a few thousand dollars just for one video card

I feel that's just not paying attention. An RTX 2060 is not a thousand dollar card, and can do ray tracing, even above 60FPS, depending on what resolution you're playing at, the quality of ray tracing, and other various settings. It sounds to me like you feel if you're going to enable ray tracing you must also be playing at 1440p+, at highest quality both normal settings and ray tracing quality, and that's not reality....that's why they give people the options to change their quality...what quality matters to people is different per person.... DLSS also brings the ability to do ray tracing on lower cards up as well. Too many factors to claim that you have to pay $1000+ for one GPU to do it....

Aura89:

I feel that's just not paying attention. An RTX 2060 is not a thousand dollar card, and can do ray tracing, even above 60FPS, depending on what resolution you're playing at, the quality of ray tracing, and other various settings. It sounds to me like you feel if you're going to enable ray tracing you must also be playing at 1440p+, at highest quality both normal settings and ray tracing quality, and that's not reality....that's why they give people the options to change their quality...what quality matters to people is different per person.... DLSS also brings the ability to do ray tracing on lower cards up as well. Too many factors to claim that you have to pay $1000+ for one GPU to do it....

Now you are touching on the medium range video cards being priced at mid-high end video card bracket, thanks to miners pushing up each bracket of video cards the 2060 is 200 to 300 dollars more than it should be, at least where I am video card prices still haven't gone back to normal in terms of pricing, not sure about other markets... Nvidia don't seem interested in bringing the 60 series back down to where the 60 series historically have been priced at, they are more interested in selling lower end cards in the 60 series spot in their drive to make high end video cards priced higher than they have in the past... if that even makes sense?

sykozis:

It doesn't matter what the 3080 can do, if people can't get their hands on one.... Availability of the RTX3000 series is damn near non-existent. It's looking like it's going to be several MONTHS before supply starts to normalize.

who is to say we’ll even see AMD cards anywhere after launch?

Kool64:

who is to say we’ll even see AMD cards anywhere after launch?

If AMD has the same availability issues, the same statement will still apply. It makes no difference what any product can do, if there's no availability. NVidia has already said that 3080 stock won't normalize for several months. AMD has yet to release the 6800XT, so we have no idea what it's stock is going to look like. NVidia is using Samsung and AMD is using TSMC. It's very likely that AMD will have fewer supply issues than NVidia for that reason alone. If AMD has a similar supply constraint, it's idiotic for them to be launching products at this point, especially after seeing what happened with NVidia's launch.

Aura89:

ray tracing performance is lacking, however, depending on the price and if these benches go out to real world games (if these benches are even true) and if it's priced correctly, i may buy one. I'm still very skeptical. Waiting for reviews.

The only peak we have is from the uniengine benchmark which is Nvidia optimised. We do not know the settings and also we do not know how it would work with the AMD 6000 series because of their unified shaders. Hence on something like RT we shouldn't draw direct comparison between NV and AMD yet until patches/drivers are out and understand how it works. AMD could easily tweak game profiles to use 0% to 100% of the GPU shaders for ray tracing. Nvidia this value is fixed based on the available RT cores.

DannyD:

Raytracing is a very big leap towards photo-realism in games. Can't be overlooked, holy crap if the modders ever get hold of it! 😕

It is not a leap. As DX-R games did not leap. There is huge difference between what raytracing can do even on CPU with enough time and what games are doing. Shadows, lighting is becoming better which will enable more photorealistic environments. (More natural and pleasing to eye even if characters/scenes are cartoonish.) But reflections just work towards dealing with deficiencies of SSR. Both AMD's and nVidia's approach can make very powerful ray-based GPUs with reduced rasterization as time changes. nVidia's changes in Ampere, while improving ray-capabilities, are in a way moving away from it due to more complex shading capability. And that may hint what's on their roadmap for upcoming years. Things in AMD's patents should enable them to deliver balance they believe is best. Depending on transistor cost of Navi21 (Changes to CUs are unknown and IC cost is big unknown), we could guess what number of them we will need to actually double raytracing while reducing shading a bit. For nVidia, future outlook is something like 50~60B transistor GPU which will be hard to manufacture, or MCM which is still not going to be cheap. AMD can simply deliver GPU with CUs arranged in way that there is twice amount of TMUs to SIMD ratio than now. TMUs are rather cheap in terms of transistor budget. And while they are plentiful for rasterization, doubling them will still improve frame times for rasterization. And AMD can even bring CUs made primarily for raytracing. I expect those to be like 1/3rd of size in comparison to those in RDNA1 while having same throughput. And when talking about IC. Does anyone has clue if it runs 1:1 clock to GPU or 1/2? Clock target affects available transistor density. Like having CPU cache which runs 1:1 and needs to reach 4,8GHz requires smaller density than GPU cache targeting 2,5GHz or 1,25GHz. Would IC actually run low clock, density could be pretty high.