Who needs to pay rent?
By now you’ve read all about the new RTX cards from Nvidia, so I’m not going to wax on about technical specifications and instead give some initial impressions of the new card. Right off the bat– the card is exorbitantly expensive. Trying to evaluate worth is subjective, but there is no getting around the fact that we are looking at over twice the price of the RTX 3080 for a marginal 10-15% performance improvement when it comes to the RTX 3090. Is it worth it? Probably not, but as I told my partner, I will never have the most expensive car or biggest house, but for about six months I (we!) have the fastest video card available.
Ray Tracing, show me the light
The new 30 series GPUs from Nvidia are my first taste of Ray Tracing, and seeing that technology in person I can see what all the fuss is about once I knew what to look for. If you need a primer on the effects of Ray Tracing and whether or not the tax on your GPU performance is worth it, I recommend watching Digital Foundry’s video on Cyberpunk 2077 here. As usual, DF does a fantastic job of breaking down exactly what is happening behind the scenes and what settings to turn down to nab all of the sweet, sweet frames available to you. In fact, using their “optimized settings,” netted a solid 30 FPS gain on my gameplay while minimally reducing the fidelity of the game. The real highlight with their settings is a reduction in latency, an improvement that was immediately noticeable even on the world’s fastest GPU.
As stated, once you know what to look for, you begin to develop and eye for more realistically lit scenes. The most apparent of these changes are going to be the real time reflections. As seen in the countertop above and in the floor reflection below, seeing the world reflected around you begins to draw the eye in which helps create a more immersive feeling. While the reflections are nice, the real star of the show has to be the way actual light is depicted in the game.
Ray tracing calculates the color of pixels by tracing the path that light would take if it were to travel from the eye of the viewer through the virtual 3D scene. As it traverses the scene, the light may reflect from one object to another (causing reflections), be blocked by objects (causing shadows), or pass through transparent or semi-transparent objects (causing refractions). All of these interactions are combined to produce the final color of a pixel that then displayed on the screen.
https://developer.nvidia.com/rtx/raytracing
In terms of a realistic image, Ray Tracing is the path forward. While the cost of enabling RT is heavy, Nvidia DLSS (Deep learning super sampling) is helping games run well with graphical effects cranked to 11. DLSS uses RTX Tensor Cores to output a sharp image and native resolution while rendering a game internally at a lower resolution. Think PlayStation 4 Pro 4k checkerboard rendering on steroids. Now that RT is enabled on the newest generation of consoles, we should hopefully begin to see a stronger focus on the technology moving forward. Overall, I am pretty damn happy with the new card.
Good night, sweet prince
When it comes to graphics cards, or any component in a PC build, it doesn’t make much sense to upgrade every generation unless you need the latest and greatest. I’m jumping in from an MSI GTX 1080 ti, which punched above its weight class for the last three years. The old card still works perfectly, and hit over 60 frames in most games with a setting (or three) turned down.
| 1080 Ti Gaming X 11g | EVGA RTX 3090 Ultra Gaming | |
| Cores | 3584 | 10496 |
| Clocks | ~1680 MHz (OC Mode) | ~1800 MHz |
| Memory | 11GB GDDR5X | 24GB GDDR6x |
| Mem. Bandwidth | 484 GB/s | 936 GB/s |
| Rec. PSU | 600 W | 750 W |
| $$$ (paid) | $780 | $1800 |
| Release | Feb. 2017 | Sept. 2020 |
The 1080 Ti is one of those cards that provides a lot of value for a reasonable price. In fact, it might be one of the last high end Ti cards to offer such value. If you are sitting on a 1080 Ti and don’t care about RT, DLSS, or any of the advances the newest generation has made, there really isn’t a pressing reason to upgrade. If you’re gaming at a sub-4K resolution, the 1080 Ti will serve for another few years at the very least. Now, as of February 2021, used prices on GPUs are astronomical due to demand and a lack of supply. I was able to sell my card off of Craigslist for $450 in about thirty minutes! Checking eBay, the sold listings for this card just a month after I sold mine shows the card selling for $550 on average. That is an insane resale value on some technology several years old at this point. If you have the opportunity to sell and wait for the newest cards to be available closer to MSRP, it sounds like a solid move.
The MSI’s red didn’t fit my color scheme anyway.
