With Hurricanes Florence and Michael devastating the east coast, I have been busy with helping with recovery efforts and unable to keep up with game dev work and tech news. NVidia’s RTX GPU release has been a topic I have wanted to do an article on since its announcement. By now most of you have read or watched multiple reviews about how the RTX 2080 and 2080 TI are a bad buy when looking at the dollars to performance comparisons and that is without Realtime Raytracing turned on. Currently the only thing available that support Realtime Raytracing is FFXV benchmarks commissioned by NVidia.
While I have seen plenty of reasons on why you should not buy an RTX GPU, I have yet to see anyone address the elephant in the room. No matter how much better performance you get on a gaming PC, consoles drive game development. We rather ignore an ugly truth. Developers always target the widest reach audience with least amount of required work. In the case of video games, it is the console gamer. Having only two hardware configurations to develop and optimize for saves time and money. GTV was launched on PC 17 months after the console launch. While Red Dead Redemption has yet to make it to PC and no word if the much anticipate sequel will come.
Now what does any of this have to so with the success or failure of RTX GPUs? In essence, everything. With the next gen of consoles already in development and the premium cost of cost of Tensor cores, I find it highly unlike we will be see Realtime Raytracing on a console anytime soon. On top of that, NVidia have already confirmed the RTX 2070 as the lowest card capable of supporting Realtime Raytracing. Now, according to Steam’s Hardware and software survey for September 2018, majority of pc gamers are using a GTX 1060. Therefore, it is possible that Realtime Raytracing is a feature that only a small subsection of gamers can use. As a developer spending additional and resources to integrate and optimized for feature that only 10% of the market can use does not sound like rational business choice. With this in mind, I predict that support for Realtime Raytracing will be a post launch release.
I know that rebuttal on Developers using RTX will be marketing point that Realtime Raytracing is easy to implement in games and engine. To that I say, where are the RTX On patches?
The second is I see with RTX GPU is that, even If hypothetically we get 60 fps at a respectable 1440p, will anyone actually notice? Follow is a list of all the game to support RTX on in the near future.
- Assetto Corsa Competizione from Kunos Simulazioni/505 Games
- Atomic Heart from Mundfish
- Battlefield V from EA/DICE
- Control from Remedy Entertainment/505 Games
- Enlisted from Gaijin Entertainment/Darkflow Software
- Justice from NetEase
- JX3 from Kingsoft
- MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries from Piranha Games
- Metro Exodus from 4A Games
- ProjectDH from Nexon’s devCAT Studio
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider from Square Enix/Eidos-Montréal/Crystal Dynamics/Nixxes
Six shooters, four RPG/MMORPG, and one racing simulator are list games. Eight out of eleven game seem to be fast pace games. I only wonder noticeable will real reflections be when actually playing these games. In the mid of a firefight, who is the person who will notice flames reflecting off the car?