 The plastic is still on here. So, RTX pre-orders are apparently going gangbusters. And I get it. Some of you out there have had literally two years to save your pennies and frankly, not a lot of exciting PC hardware to buy in the interim. But come on, giving away your money without seeing any performance data is a bad way to make purchase decisions. Besides, making matters worse is that the marquee feature of the RTX series, real-time ray tracing, it's basically MIA today. So all we're left with is how much the GeForce 20 series improves performance over last gen in traditionally rendered games and some discussion about Nvidia's generally bass-acords approach to this launch. Speaking of bass-acords, not using a VPN. Do you have private internet access VPN yet? If not, go get it at the link below. And if you do, well, go get it anyway. Makes a great gift. Give the gift of internet security. So before we start, there's a term that you need to understand, rasterization. Without getting too deep into it, your graphics card uses this technique to turn a three-dimensional scene into a flat 2D plane of pixels, similar to a photo many times per second. Since the days of wireframe and flat polygons, we've added lighting, textures, post-processing, and more to the pipeline, but they all still only apply to the screen space versus the whole scene's world space. TLDR, rendering a game today isn't fundamentally different from how Star Fox was rendered on the Super Nintendo in 1993. Ray tracing, meanwhile, is fundamentally different. So it's a simulation of light interacting with the world space, acting sort of like an eyeball in reverse. So instead of rays of light coming in, rays are actually cast out from the camera position, where your screen is, and then everything is calculated from there. The more rays you have, and the more times those rays are allowed to interact or bounce around the scene, the more detail you get. And it's a superior method in every way to rasterization, except for one, speed. Up until now, ray tracing has only been available in rendering software that can take hours or even over a day to complete a single frame on a high-end workstation. So how the heck then is Nvidia pumping out many frames per second using this tech? Well, the new enthusiast tier Turing architecture cards, the 2080 and the 2080 Ti, include what they're calling RT cores, which for RTX enabled games, render a simplified ray traced scene in parallel with the standard CUDA cores raster rendering. So the result is a traditionally rendered scene with ray traced lighting, occlusion and reflections. So that hybrid rendering, as Nvidia calls it, gives you a lot of the benefits of ray tracing without the massive computational cost and without game developers needing to completely re-engineer their game engines. And there's more. The Titan V's tensor cores are back as well. For GeForce, these are being leveraged for Nvidia's new deep learning super sample anti-aliasing, which Nvidia claims can achieve near 64X super sampling with less performance impact than traditional AA, which they've achieved by pre-training datasets for each supported game and then pushing those results out via driver updates. There is a catch though. Just like RTX real-time ray tracing, it has to be supported on a game by game basis. So now you know. But knowing is only half of the battle. We also need to see it, which unfortunately is easier said than done because we could have the most epic test benches in the world like this one I have here in front of me right now that I got my finger stuck, ow. Anyway, there are no actual RTX games to test. So we can't very well measure its performance versus non-RTX then, can we? Well, we'll get back to that in a minute. First, let's have a look at some normal gaming results. And you know what? They are pretty good. All across the board, the 2080 Ti averages in the high 50s or higher. And remember guys, this is at 4K Ultra with the 2080 seeming to be content with the traditional, let's meet the performance of the previous generation Ti card level of performance. Frankly, all of this is a massive relief given Nvidia's refusal to talk about traditional gaming performance in their keynote. As for productivity, well, we were a little disappointed when Blender refused to run on the new cards. Compute capability 7.5 doesn't have a kernel yet. But if the rest of these results are anything to go by, it's gonna be good. Cause these numbers just crush the 1000 series cards and the 2080 even manages to match AMD's Vega 64 in Luxray's OpenCL rendering. That was a huge gap to bridge. So Turing GPUs are gonna make really good workstation cards. I can't wait to get my hands on the Quadro versions of these guys. So overall then, the 2080 performs kind of like a 1080 Ti. Cool. And the 2080 Ti performs kind of like a Titan V, a much more expensive niche product. Also cool. Well, sort of cool. All this performance comes at a cost. And I'm not just talking about the much higher price tags than last gen. Now the manufacturing process has shrunk 25% from 16 nanometer to 12 nanometer, but with over 50% more transistors. So that means massive dies with higher overall power draw and thermals. Hence the overbuilt, not to mention extremely, like shockingly heavy twin fan vapor chamber cooler and the beefy power delivery on the founders edition designs this time around. You guys should let us know by the way, if you want us to dive into overclocking these cards in a future video in the comments below. Speaking of future video, surprisingly, NVENC and VNC got an update. So text is now more readable and there's less blocking than the 1080 Ti. To be perfectly honest to us, it looks very similar to, if not better, than X264 on the fast preset. So it looks like game streamers or anyone else who relies on high quality stream capture no longer needs to choose between quality and speed. And there's other cool features baked on board as well, like the new VR link connector that handles both power and high resolution video over a single USB type C cable for VR headsets. All right then. So what about DLSS? And where are the RTX on, RTX off comparisons? Well, that's actually a really good question. So Battlefield 5 was delayed until late November. Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which is out and is an RTX title, is apparently getting the functionality added in a post-release patch. But that's it then, right? Wrong. We weren't gonna give up on you guys that easy. So we reached out to a developer directly with a game in the works that supports both technologies, and they graciously agreed to come over and show off their beta exclusively for you guys. Originally they did anyway. So this is where showing off our shiny new hardware ends and the criticism begins. So they were forced to bail. They couldn't give us any details, but if you wanna know what I think, I think it's that Nvidia, and more accurately RTX, isn't ready yet. I mean, to put the rushed last minute nature of this launch in perspective, we got our card and its driver at around noon on Friday, the 14th of September. This video goes up early in the morning on the 19th. That is at best 2.7 working days to evaluate the biggest graphics card launch in two years. And other publications that we've spoken with have confirmed that they were in a similar boat. So like, what are they doing? Is this someone high up in the chain having an executive moment? Is this them not wanting us to spend much time digging into these things? What purpose is served by rushing this launch? I mean, the thing too to consider is that it's not like AMD has anything to compete with the 1080 Ti, let alone its successor. So I guess this is open letter to Nvidia time. Guys, people ordered this thing on a promise, and yeah, it's early days. Maybe things aren't quite polished yet. I get it. But you're clearly not ready to deliver. And frankly, this is the kind of that gives PC gaming a bad name. Shiny badges on the sides of boxes that at best are supported by a small handful of games, or at worst flat out don't do anything. And that's what RTX is today. It doesn't do anything. So that's what I have to say guys. I can't benchmark goals. I can't review future potential. I mean, honestly, given your track record, RTX will probably be pretty cool. But this whole situation is a ridiculous self-pwn here. Like outside of hopeless fanboys, when they buy something, people expect it to actually do what it says on the tin, or they expect to at least be able to get a glimpse of what they're getting that hasn't been run through your own PR department. As it stands right now, the only tangible things that we can show our viewers, which are your customers, are the very much curated Nvidia special DLSS build of the Final Fantasy 15 benchmark, and then a couple of ray tracing demos that tell us nothing about the real world before and after performance impact. I mean, we can stare at them, which is like, wow, such excite. So like, it looks like it works. And maybe this is what these features will look like in actual games, but who can say for sure when we can only test in a tightly controlled environment? So you're letting us run benchmarks, but you're still making it really hard to recommend this thing for the function that is right in the name of the product, because nobody without a speak about it and we'll cut off your balls NDA, actually knows how well RTX works. So bottom line for you, the viewer then, these cards are strong performers, and that's really good both for them and for the upcoming lower-end Turing cards that won't have RT or tensor cores, but we can't draw a real conclusion because this review is incomplete, just like the RTX 2000 series. But you know what's not incomplete? Thermal takes 20th anniversary. It's like complete, which is why they're celebrating with their level 20 case series. They've got four case styles to choose from, the VT, the XT, the GT, and an updated version of their triple chambered full tower case. They've all got a sleek modern design with rounded front corners and tempered glass. They've all got ample room for cable management and radiator mounts for water cooling, and they also feature USB type C connections. Check out the link to get yours now at the link in the video description. Check out the link to get, whatever, check out the link to get yours, it's down below. You know where it is. So thanks for watching guys. If you disliked this video, then you can hit that button, but if it was awesome, you can hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description, but we're not gonna go full on, go buy it. How much of your life do you wanna look back on and not have had ray tracing? Because the reality of it is, whether you buy it today, or you buy it in two weeks, it's gonna be the same amount of time because you don't have it yet, even if you own the hardware. Anyway, also linked in the description is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum, which you should totally join. It's like infuriating, you know? It's like when you get, it's like when you buy a new CPU, but the motherboard was out of stock and you're just like, eee, this does nothing. This does nothing until I have the rest of the pieces.