nVidia hype event near Gamescom 20-21aug


They need to release something to stem the beating they're getting from AMD at the moment, although I don't know how much of that it down to cheap-arsed coin miners.
 
I'm super hyped for GeForce Now!!

I've tried it, works quite well. Apparently you get some kind of virtual machine setup. Starting one of the games on offer will give you a new window with a login prompt pertaining to the service your game is available on: Steam, Uplay etc.

For Heroes of the Storm I got the battle.net launcher login. The launcher lets you select the location of the game installation, offering a possibility to get to Windows Explorer with limited permissions - you can have a look around the FS.

Installing a game from steam is near-instant, e.g. Dark Souls was ready to play in about a minute. The notoriously crappy P2P installation routine of War Thunder was done equally quickly.

I went with standard settings concerning streaming quality. Lag was minimal. Visual quality on Heroes of the Storm is alright. Dark Souls didn't look too good, somewhat lower resolution and poor anti-aliasing.
 
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The way it's explained there it's only for raytracing, and therefore of no use to coin miners, but I guess we need a less biased and informed discussion about that to know if that's true or not. But I guess these cards will still have greater CUDA execution blocks and things too. And one correction; ray-tracing's never been hard; we've been doing it since the mid 90s, it just always used to be too slow to do in real time (which is why movie studios had CGI render farms in the main, well that and hair simulation I guess).
 
nVidia was never the best at coin mining if I remember correctly, AMD cards have more (simpler) compute units. These newer cards (2080ti) are faster and have more compute units so I assume they do mining better then previous cards like the 1080ti.
And if I understand correctly it's still to hard to do real-time (on resolutions like Full-HD+). The only ray-tracing done is to calculate some specific lighting in games (that's real-time) but not everything like you would see in a movie.

What I got from the presentation is that there are 3 parts to this new card: the regular part but more/faster/etc, the dedicated ray-tracing part and the AI part (which I assume are just simple compute units, but you get a bunch).
The new parts aren't used by games by default, so you wouldn't see any speed/feature increase from that. If the ray-tracing is used for some lighting and the AI part is used for anti-aliasing you have more computing power left in the 'regular' part, boosting your performance with the added value of nicer lighting and faster/arguably-better anti-aliasing.

You can see some part of the ray-tracing in the nvidia demo:
 
Yes, if it's only about tracing shadows or reflections in specifically labelled reflective surfaces, or general yellow lighting then you can limit the surfaces and interactions you need to consider. That covers most bases, and I don't know if movie studios actually do full general ray tracing any more to be honest.
 
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