New Gadgets

When Nvidia launched the RTX family, it did so with a promise of future ray tracing support in games. That ray tracing support has been slow to materialize — we’re now nearly three months past the GPU family’s launch event, two months past commercial availability, and there’s no support in shipping games. That state of affairs is likely to continue for at least a little while post-launch, with DICE confirming that Battlefield V won’t ship with Day 1 RTX support.

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I'd love to see how newer games will look like once this technology becomes more popular.

Normally, we don’t greet news of a sharp decline in GPU shipments with any enthusiasm, but recent data from Jon Peddie Research on the current state of the GPU market may be better-received than most. Year-on-year desktop GPU sales fell 16 percent in Q3 2018 compared with the same period in 2017, thanks to a decline in crypto-related GPU sales.

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Intel’s Architecture Day 2018 this past Tuesday wasn’t just a CPU show. The graphics market is poised to be a significant component of Intel’s strategy going forward, and the company’s Gen 11 solution looks like it’ll be a potent improvement over Skylake. These improvements are long overdue.

For most of the past twenty years, the phrase “Intel graphics” was a contradiction in terms if you cared about gaming. Starting in 2011, with Sandy Bridge, that began to change. There was a period of roughly five years where Intel’s own solutions were improving at a solid pace. From 2011-2015, IGP performance improved in real terms, meaning Intel’s GPUs got faster more quickly than games demanded additional GPU resources. There were still only a relative handful of titles that could be coaxed into running well, but the situation was improving by the year. And then it stopped. Neither Kaby nor Coffee Lake contained any additional 3D optimizations. After 3.5 years in the proverbial wilderness, Intel wants to change that.

The new Gen 11 GPU is Intel’s first TFLOP-class GPU hardware. It implements a tile-based renderer, presumably to take advantage of tiled rendering’s lower power consumption and increased efficiency. The GPU will contain 24-64 execution units and it packs a 4x larger L3 cache.

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There’s been a lot of reporting on the idea that Nvidia is preparing to launch a set of GPUs without ray tracing support over the past few months, including new rumors that broke before Christmas making the same claims. It’s a good time to round them up and look at the possibilities.

As always, rumors and speculation should be taken with a grain of salt. Speculation about rumors and speculation should be taken with several more.

The primary new rumor is from Videocardz, which claims that Nvidia is either preparing to launch a GTX 1160 or possibly a 1660 Ti (Expreview reports 1660 Ti behind a password-locked article, while Videocardz has heard 1160 itself). The rumor is straightforward enough: Nvidia will split the RTX branding into GTX and RTX flavors, with GTX cards lacking ray tracing support. The new GPUs would still be based on the Turing architecture but would carry new model numbers. It is not clear if they would be Turing-class GPUs with the RTX capabilities fused off or whether they’d use entirely different die. It also isn’t clear if Nvidia would maintain a GTX alternative entirely up the stack. Which strategies make the most sense depends on the starting assumptions you make for why Nvidia would do such a thing. One thing we will say is that it probably makes good sense for Nvidia to split the cards by model number and abbreviation rather than just abbreviation. Either “GTX 1160” or “GTX 1660 Ti” is much less likely to be confused with a hypothetical RTX 2060 than a GTX 2060 / RTX 2060 co-branding effort.

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CES is always a hectic time for reviewers and companies — I’d argue it’s one of the busiest weeks of the year if you’re a tech reporter. Because of this, it’s not unheard of for incorrect information to leak into the channel, despite the best efforts of all involved.

In this case, there’s a correction we have to issue regarding AMD and its just-announced Radeon VII. Earlier today, ExtremeTech ran a story claiming that this GPU would have a core configuration of 3840:240:128 (GPU cores:texture units:render outputs). This information was based on reporting from other sites who have attended the show and attested to the accuracy of this information. The data was reported in the context of AMD disclosing further details about the GPU while at the show, not as rumor or unverified reporting, which is why we didn’t present the usual caveats when we gave this data.

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A few weeks ago, we covered rumors that Nvidia would launch either a GTX 1160 or a GTX 1660 Ti as a non-RTX, Turing-based follow-up to its current high-end family of GPUs. We’re hearing more rumors about the 1660 Ti version of that part, with new data suggesting it’ll drop into space below the RTX 2060, possibly as a GTX 1060 direct replacement.

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Nvidia’s stock was hammered today after it warned on Q4 earnings. The slump has been particularly bad — at this writing, it’s fallen 13.68 percent — because Nvidia’s Q4 2018 already wasn’t going to be as good as analysts were hoping back in Q3. When Nvidia made its Q3 2018 earnings announcement, it declared that the collapse in GPU demand for crypto mining had left it with a glut of Pascal GPUs to sell. As a result, it would not manufacture additional midrange cards in Q4 and would instead focus on moving its existing inventory. This led to Q4 earnings would be lower than what investors might expect.

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Metro Exodus drops on Friday, and early previews of the game have begun to appear on various websites. This is an important launch for Nvidia and its RTX GPU family. Metro Exodus is the second title to support Nvidia’s RTX technology and the first game to launch with support for both DLSS and ray tracing.

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This year’s Game Developers Conference (GDC) will include a new keynote presenter that could signal a shift in how people play games. Google has sent out invites to its GDC press event, during which it’s expected to unveil a new game streaming product. This could be the next step for the recent Project Stream test.

There have been rumors about a Google game stream product or service for several years. Initially, leaks pointed to a hardware platform called Yeti that would stream games to a connected display. In late 2018, Google rolled out a game streaming test called Project Stream. To publicize the demo, it worked with Ubisoft to give everyone free access to the new Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.

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