A few months back Nvidia announced its new generation of the graphics card lineup that was built on the 12nm Turing architecture. These Graphics cards did not boast the crazy improvements over the Pascal generation of Graphics cards. However, they had technological advantages up the sleeves.
The technology called Ray Tracing was the Holy Grail of Graphics for many years. Nvidia got a way around as the technology is unachievable even for the current hardware. They traced the light rays backward which decreased the horsepower requires to track rays.
Ray Tracing
There was no way to confirm Nvidia’s claims since no game supported RTX at the time of revelation. However, we do have Battlefield V nowadays which supports the use of DXR (It is windows service that allows the Graphics cards to implement Ray Tracing) and RTX.
The results that came out while testing Battlefield V was awful. The framerates were considerably lower even at 1080p. The framerates had huge fluctuations too. Additionally, the Graphical fidelity Ray Tracing was offering did not have much difference. Many people noticed the “software reflections” was a lot similar to the “hardware reflections.”
Nvidia is still releasing patches and software updates so that the users experience better framerates alongside visuals. This is where AMD comes in, earlier this year when Nvidia announced their technology AMD announced that they would not implement the technology anytime soon. They said they are planning to implement the technology in their upcoming devices, but they want to develop the technology.
Lisa Su the CEO of the company commented on the technology and said, “As with all important technologies it takes time to really have the ecosystem adopt [it]. And we’re working very closely with the ecosystem on both hardware and software solutions and expect that ray tracing will be an important element especially as it gets more into the mainstream, frankly, of the market.”
Wccftech highlighted Nvidia’s dedication of developing the Holy Grail of graphics and the RTX technology. She said, “We will be very competitive overall and that includes the high-end of the GPU market. Obviously, there are new products out there from our competition. We will have our set of new products as well and we will be right there in the mix.”
NAVI
At CES January AMD announced that they will produce the 7nm GPUs in the Q4 of 2018 with the expected release date of early 2019. According to current rumors, the new architecture will be called NAVI based on TSMC’s 7nm FinFET process. Many rumors are around the market as the reveal of the new architecture from AMD is only a matter of days.
The most recent rumors include that name of the new Graphics card, the AMD Radeon RX 3080. One must notice that it is not among the VEGA series of Graphics cards. AMD is planning to port VEGA architecture into the workstation oriented computers.
While the NAVI will be the new name of the Radeon series of the Graphics cards. The Radeon RX 3080 will supposedly offer similar performance compared to the RTX 2070 and will be 15% faster than the existing VEGA 64 graphics card. If the leaks are to be trusted AMD is offering a nice set of hardware at half the cost (250 Dollars) of the RTX 2070.
The RX 3070 and the RX 3060 will go head to head against the upcoming mid range series of the Turing architecture. Rumors of the NAVI architecture were around throughout the year with the expected reveal during CES 2019. Lastly, the upcoming PS5 is also rumored to be having a GPU based on the NAVI architecture alongside AMD’s Zen+ architectured CPU.