NVIDIA’s RTX Speed Claims "Fall Short," Ray Tracing Merely "Hype"
At its big RTX event at Gamescom, NVIDIA made some bold claims about its new Turing RTX cards. First and foremost was that the GeForce RTX 2080 offered performance "six times faster" than current 1000-series Pascal-based GTX cards. That's in large part because of new ray-tracing tech that helps the GPUs calculate complex game lighting much more quickly. "This is a new computing model, so there's a new way to think about performance," said CEO Jensen Huang.
The new GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, 2080 and 2070 cards are quicker than ever, but the increase is not nearly as dramatic as the "six times" claim. At this point, we're at a 30 to 40 percent boost, not 600. For NVIDIA's claims to come true, game and app developers must first adopt the RTX ray-tracing and deep learning tech. And as we saw before with GameWorks (remember that?), that's far from a foregone conclusion. Until then, you might want to wait for benchmarks and reviews to see how they work with current games.