Nvidia 2080 series announced

Didnt expect much for VR but Huang did say it was also used for foveated rendering. We’ll see. Need headsets with eye tracking first.

If you have the money, the StarVR One has eye tracking

Edit: They are gone.
Edit: They are available again.

Don’t know how many will be interested at $1349, but the EVGA 2080Ti FTW3 Ultra - the current Mac Daddy of the EVGA line - just came available:

https://www.evga.com/products/product.aspx?pn=11G-P4-2487-KR

EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FTW3 ULTRA GAMING, 11G-P4-2487-KR, 11GB GDDR6, iCX2 & RGB LED

Looks to be around $1900 AUD for the Founders Edition in OZ. ...

Hmm. Upgraded 970 --> 1080 couple of months ago (reasonably priced fortunately), already trounced by latest'n'greatest. Hopefully crypto won't cause history to repeat.

seems gtx and rtx coexits until q1 2019:
https://www.techpowerup.com/247479/...-rtx-to-coexist-in-product-stack-till-q1-2019

Jensen said the 2080s would shine in high resolution applications. Even though VR isn’t high resolution per se, the two screens put it up there in pixel counts. Still not 4k but high enough that VR may see some real advantages from the 2000 series.

The detailed benchmarks should be interesting.

They are a little confusing in their statement though. It sounded a bit like it may only impact Nvidia. Not sure if other partners will be affected but they could be if it’s something common to all of the Ti line and all boards like a driver. We'll find out...

Some VR benchmarks as well as overclock numbers: https://hothardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-rtx-performance-and-overclocking?page=4

Looks really good for VR especially if you get a "premium" card that allows higher power limits and has better cooling since both of those can limit the overclock.

Do you think a 4790k@4.5 Gh could be a bottleneck?

Looks like price increases on most video cards incoming for US buyers thanks to the new tariffs on goods from China: https://wccftech.com/exclusive-nvidia-rtx-msrp-tariffs/

Not just video cards. Motherboards, RAM, etc. Some companies can move manufacturing to other countries to sidestep the trade war but not all can.

We’ll need to see how it all shakes out but January 1, the tariffs increase to 25%. 10% hits Monday and manufacturers and retailers seem to be working to absorb some of that. 25% will be much more noticeable.

Just a first report - got a 2080Ti and have been setting it up. I’ve only tried it with P3D so far but in SteamVR it only dropped frame times from 11-12 ms to 10-11 ms. Not enough just barely to make reprojection unnecessary. It’s CPU bound for the most part I believe but I was hoping the extra GPU performance might put it over the top.

P3D is possibly getting a graphics engine overhaul this quarter so this could change. I’ve only seen that rumor once so may or may not have any basis.

Haven’t tried anything else yet though. At least right now, for me and with P3D, it hasn’t made a big difference. I think it’s going to be a much different story with PCars2 and DCS.

8086k delidded with all cores at 5GHz. Memory is running at 3.2 GHz.

@noorbeast - I’ve been experimenting with DCS, Aerofly FS2, and PCars2 and the difference is definitely there but in VR it’s not earth shattering. I turned on the frame rate / performance monitor in the headset and have been able to turn some settings up, but the only sim I can max everything out (except the supersampling) is Aerofly with supersampling at 1.2. I’m running 1.2 in everything from inside SteamVR. First time I’ve turned shadow quality up to "insane" and that is so nice to not have the edge shimmers.

But in PC2 and DCS it’s just been incremental stuff like extending out draw distances, increasing tree and grass density, etc. And I’m still able to throw PC2 into reprojection with rapid head rotation. DCS pretty much always stays on the edge anyway unless things get turned way down. It seems less impacted by graphics settings in that respect. PC2 seems to have more headroom now but same thing there - rapid head rotation can put it into reprojection but so can the effects filters.

Not a comprehensive review but the frame rates really depend a lot on what you are doing and what you are looking at. Not really a good way to get a consistent, comparable, bench. In Aerofly, if I stood up and moved my head out of the airplane, frame times would fall from 9-11 ms down into the 7's. Looking around I’d get spikes depending on if I was looking at open terrain or areas with lots of buildings. PC2 was similar but all had that new car smell and seemed to look a bit better. Some could be placebo effect though.

Overall, definitely an improvement but not a huge improvment. What I think may be the real payoff is when sims start doing DLSS and maybe even ray tracing depending on the latency for VR. I hate saying that because I want to see the installed base to drive devs to implement the tech in their sims and apps, but for now I don’t see it as a must have upgrade.

On the other hand, it is extra power and does help frames and detail right now. Assetto Corsa is adding ray tracing already. I’d bet PCars and Aerofly maybe won’t be too far behind. DCS? Hard to say. P3D is a wildcard if they upgrade the graphics engine or not. I’d bet things will be similar for DLSS.

It just may be we don’t really crack the performance nut until we get new headsets with eye tracking and foveated rendering. Who knows when that will be, but it would be awesome to only be rendering at high res in a very small portion of the field of view and the rest at low res.

I’d also really be interested in other people’s take on the upgrade and what performance increases they see.