The 3 blunders of Nvidia’s RTX 2080 video card event
Nvidia kicked off this excruciatingly long week on Monday morning with an event in Germany to debut its upcoming GeForce RTX 20-series graphics cards. The RTX 2070, 2080, and 2080 Ti start rolling out in September, and I can’t stop thinking about the presentation and the less-than-positive reaction to it from some enthusiasts.
I’m excited about the RTX video cards and ray tracing, even though I’m not preordering one. The event had a lot of problems, but I understand why Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang spent so much time trying to sell the audience on ray tracing.
The company is in a chicken-and-the-egg problem in which ray tracing is going to require developers to support it and hardware that can run it, and you don’t get one without the other. And since ray tracing is pretty expensive computationally, you can’t just sneak the feature into a regular upgrade — it has to justify a price increase.
