Concluding their Gamescom festivities for their newly-introduced GeForce RTX 20-series, NVIDIA has revealed a bit more about the hardware, its features, and its expected performance this evening. Tonight NVIDIA is announcing the new Ansel RTX features in GeForce Experience, as well as some game performance metrics for the GeForce RTX 2080 up against the GeForce GTX 1080. After recent hands-on demos featuring real-time raytracing, NVIDIA is offering some numbers for out-of-the-box and Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) performance in traditionally rendered games.

NVIDIA RTX Support for Games
As of August 20, 2018
Game Real-Time Raytracing Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS)
Ark: Survival Evolved - Yes
Assetto Corsa Competizione Yes -
Atomic Heart Yes
Battlefield V Yes -
Control Yes -
Dauntless - Yes
Enlisted Yes -
Final Fantasy XV - Yes
Fractured Lands - Yes
Hitman 2 - Yes
Islands of Nyne - Yes
Justice Yes
JX3 Yes
MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries Yes
Metro Exodus Yes -
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds - Yes
ProjectDH Yes -
Remnant: From the Ashes - Yes
Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass - Yes
Shadow of the Tomb Raider Yes -
The Forge Arena - Yes
We Happy Few - Yes

Starting with NVIDIA’s DLSS – and real-time raytracing for that matter – we already know of the supported games list. What they are disclosing today are some face-value 4K performance comparisons and results. For DLSS, for now we can only say that it uses tensor core-accelerated neural network inferencing to generate what NVIDIA is saying will be high-quality super sampling-like anti aliasing. Though for further technical information, this is a project NVIDIA has been working on for a while, and they have published some blogs and papers with some more information on some of the processes used. At any rate, the provided metrics are sparse on settings or details, and notably measurements include several games rendered in HDR (though HDR shouldn't have a performance impact).

Otherwise, NVIDIA presented a non-interactive Epic Infiltrator 4K demo that was later displayed on the floor, comparing Temporal Anti Aliasing (TAA) to DLSS, where the latter provided on-average near-identical-or-better image quality but at a lower performance cost. In this case, directly improving framerates. To be perfectly honest, I spent the entire floor time talking with NVIDIA engineers and driver/software developers, so I have no pictures of the floor demo (not that anything less than a direct screenshot will really do it justice). Ultimately, the matter of DLSS is somewhat nuanced and there isn’t much we can add at the moment.

Overall, the idea is that even in traditionally rasterized games without DLSS, the GeForce RTX 2080 brings around 50% higher performance than the GeForce GTX 1080 under 4K HDR 60Hz conditions. Because this excludes real-time raytracing or DLSS, this would be tantamount to ‘out of the box’ performance. Though there were no graphics settings or driver details to go with these disclosed framerates, so I'm not sure I'd suggest reading into these numbers and bar charts one way or another.

Lastly, NVIDIA announced several new features, filters, and supported games for GeForce Experience’s Ansel screenshot feature. Relating to GeForce RTX, one of the features is Ansel RT for supported ray-traced games, where a screenshot can be taken with a very high number of rays, unsuitable for real-time but not an issue for static image rendering.

Ansel RTX also leverages a similar concept to the tensor core accelerated DLSS with ‘AI Up-Res’ super resolution, which also works for games not integrated with Ansel SDK.

In terms of the GeForce RTX performance, this is more-or-less a teaser of things to come. But as always with unreleased hardware, judgement should be reserved until objective measurements and further details. We will have much more to say when the time comes.

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  • Socius - Thursday, August 23, 2018 - link

    I play on a 27” 4K monitor and I can’t stand games that don’t offer TAA. This idea that you don’t need AA at 4K is complete hogwash.
  • PeachNCream - Thursday, August 23, 2018 - link

    There is a difference between "need" and "want" so the claim that AA isn't needed is valid. Though, it's a short walk down a slippery slope to argue that games in general aren't a need either so there is that. I guess where you draw the line in the sand for what constitutes a need is different for everyone, but still -- no hogwash there.
  • Icehawk - Thursday, August 23, 2018 - link

    I use a 4k 32" and I'd say AA is still nice for some games but it isn't quite as necessary as when I played at 1080 on a 27". Aside from shadows it's the first thing I'm willing to turn down.
  • Peeling - Thursday, August 23, 2018 - link

    2080 is a lot closer in core count to a 1080 than a 1080ti, though, so if you're trying to compare architectures it's reasonable. Bang-for-buck is definitely another reasonable way to compare cards; it's just not what they're going for here.
  • Alistair - Wednesday, August 22, 2018 - link

    I've bought every single 10 series card over the last 2 years for various computers, as they were great. Let's try to understand what the comparison slide actually means.

    After taxes, the 2080 right now is $1231 CAD, and the 1080 is $660 CAD. So yeah, I'm still pissed about the pricing. 87 percent more expensive for probably 40 percent faster at 1440p? For me, I never doubted it would be faster, that was never the problem.

    This is the first time in history instead of nVidia delivering 20-50 percent faster per dollar performance, the frames per dollar actually DECLINED. That has never happened before. Worse launch ever, and I'll be skipping these cards.
  • Alistair - Wednesday, August 22, 2018 - link

    Excuse my language, I wish I could edit that out. I am also interested in seeing an Anandtech analysis of DLSS. Could be very interesting.
  • wyatterp - Thursday, August 23, 2018 - link

    So I take it you have no care about the move towards real time Ray-Tracing as an alternate way to render? If you were NVidia - how would you shift the industry if you could (i.e., towards a better way to render)? It's clear they've taken a big gamble here in a lot of ways - trying to force a paradigm shift. This is an Apple move - and it may fail. I still give them credit because they ARE giving you a performance jump of 50% - and it looks like the 2080 beats the current $750 US dollar 1080TI.
  • Alistair - Thursday, August 23, 2018 - link

    They're not giving you a 50 percent performance jump. They sold the 1060 and the 1070 before, you could have just bought a 1070 instead of a 1060, but you didn't because they were more expensive. Companies aren't giving you anything unless it performs better per dollar. Twice as fast for twice as much money isn't giving you anything.
  • Alistair - Thursday, August 23, 2018 - link

    Also it isn't ray tracing for games. It is hybrid ray tracing (a long way from complete ray tracing). I think actually maybe an add-in card like a a second card for phys-x would maybe have worked better.
  • evilpaul666 - Wednesday, August 22, 2018 - link

    So DLSS is AI-powered checkerboard rendering, basically? Using AI training done on the dev-side and inferencing on the GPU at runtime?

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