This thread is a great example of how terrible these forums have become.
We finally get real time global illumination in gaming with the hardware to push it- something we have been begging for since the dawn of real time 3D, it's finally here- and people are dropping into their hive mind fanboy idiocy to champion/vilify their respective party. Pathetic.
First off- everyone bashing the expected performance- please make sure you go on record right now stating how much slower the 2070 is going to be compared to the Vega 56- or even the Vega 64 if we want to use the inflated FE pricing. Please make sure to state for the record, clearly, how these cards are vastly inferior in terms of price versus performance compared to the competition.
Very important- if you are bashing these parts for their cost versus performance, go on record stating how much slower it is going to be compared to the competition.
Now this forum for many months turned into a cesspool of gushing over async compute and how it was going to change the industry- something that offers a very small performance improvement in certain situations with driver overhead. Months and months we saw people going off over this. Something nobody even tried to claim would give us any visual benefit whatsoever.
If we have people in this thread that believe that performance, only performance, and always performance is the only thing that matters I'm going to go ahead and save you a ton of cash. 1024x768 all settings on lowest- if you have anything over a 270 you should be good to go for almost every game for years to come. What's more- it isn't like we are seeing big improvements in gameplay lately, so just go ahead and play through all the best games of the last twenty years and stop even coming to threads discussing PC graphics hardware. You save money and people interested in technology advancing can actually have a reasonable discussion without wading through the ignorant crap being spewed by the insane Luddite mentality.
OK, so now we should have everyone complaining about the performance, which we haven't seen yet, on record with how much slower the 2070 is going to be compared to a Vega, and we have people who hate improved IQ being content so which groups do we have left?
The team green boys- these new features are taking up huge chunks of the die. These inflated costs are entirely due to the fact that they are offering real time global illumination. The fact they are doing it in as small of a space as they are is mind blowing- but it is a *huge* chunk of space. These parts are going to offer a very small performance increase over the prior generation compared to what you are used to seeing. If you people are going to try and defend it from that angle- make your calls now on performance and be prepared to be *very* disappointed.
"PC gaming is going to die because people are getting priced out" idiots- seriously, put the crack pipe down. Pull up the Steam user charts and look at what games people are playing and on what monitors- a 1050 is going to keep the masses happy for years- the people who are even thinking about these new parts are a minuscule subset of the market and for us, is the price really going to push us out? 1998 V2 SLI was all the rage, adjusted for inflation that would ring in between $900 and $1000. Really all that different? Really?
This won't see broad scale adoption...... if anyone is actually claiming this, you don't understand what is being discussed. All of the other options people are comparing this to, GameWorks, PhysX, Tesselation- all of those require extra work from developers. Some of it is cut and paste from libraries, some of it is quite a bit more involved but it is extra work. Global illumination isn't. If your engine is set up to utilize it(which all of the major engines will be) you literally just turn it on. That's it. This is *LESS* complex than supporting multiple resolutions. Seriously. If you don't have to worry about legacy parts this is *SIGNIFICANTLY* less work than *CURRENT* solutions. Looks much better- much less work. Devs won't support this..... why?
The 'this has been done before' crowd- not even remotely close to being the league of being true. All of the prior attempts were for a Ray Traced render engine setup. That is handling all of your rendering through ray tracing. That has some huge drawbacks and is simply way too slow and limited to work properly given computational limits. This is adding ray traced lighting to a rasterized rendering pipeline. Gives you the benefits of global illumination without removing the massive benefits of rasterization. No, nothing like this has ever been done in hardware before- and it isn't quite 'as done' as some of you all are thinking. Yes, their have been engines that used shaders to ray trace certain elements, this is full global illumination using ray tracing, a very, very different thing.
The AI hardware on these parts are used to calculate out the actual lighting based on very loose approximations that the actual ray calculations are doing. The effectiveness of this method is actually shockingly good for real time purposes, and the only way it could be reasonably done.
This is a big point some people may not want to here- if AMD doesn't follow within the next couple of years they are out of the graphics business.
In computer graphics this is the biggest game changer we have seen since the Voodoo 1.
That isn't hyperbolic. Pull yourself out of fanboy team red/green muck for an hour and go check out what people who work with visualization are saying. This is *HUGE* and AMD is going to follow suit or cease to be a factor. Does anyone really think Microsoft is going to launch their next console without this? We saw it with the last generation, Sony forcing AMD to change some hardware around that worked out very well for all involved- it will happen again with the next gen of consoles. They aren't shipping without this technology.
The question is when are we going to see AMD's response, to which I think we know probably not until 7nm. No matter which 'side' you are on, trust me when I say you want to see this technology succeed. For those truly rabid for team red- push them to pull a stunt like nVidia did with tessellation. They were late to the game and then smoked AMD, that is the best option for them going forward.
This *IS* the future so many of us have been waiting for for decades. The idiocy involved in this thread would be hysterical to read through if it wasn't so sad.
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