Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition Review | MMORPG.com
System
Member UncommonPosts: 12,599
Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition Review | MMORPG.com
With AMD and NVIDIA trading blows at the upper reaches of the GPU market, could NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3060 Ti be right onramp into the RTX 30-series at a fraction of the cost? We are about to find out.
Comments
AMD will have eventually have something new in this price range, too. But the real question is when you'll actually be able to buy the cards, not when the launch day will be. I'd bet that Nvidia gets there first, as AMD still has Zen 3 chiplets eating up much of their TSMC wafer capacity, and on a per wafer basis, Zen 3 is several times as profitable as consumer GPUs.
Probably sometime around early Spring of 2021.
A $100 price difference is a significant reason. If you ignore that, then you might as well ask why anyone would ever buy anything other than the top of the line.
The problem is that by the time real-time ray-tracing is common enough for most gamers to actually care about it, neither a GeForce RTX 3090 nor a Radeon RX 6900 XT is likely to be powerful enough to handle the ray-tracing that you want to use in newer games. Now, if you want to be on the bleeding edge and get excited about a handful of games doing a little bit of ray-tracing, then go ahead. But I don't think that's a very large niche.
For comparison, the first game I played that relied heavily on rasterization was StarFox, in 1993. The first game I played a lot (as opposed to briefly) that relied heavily on rasterization was A Tale in the Desert, in 2003. That's quite a gap, and hardware was advancing much faster then than it is today. Depending on how long the fabs can continue advancing, it's quite possible that the heavy ray-tracing future that people imagine will never arrive.
That's not to say that GPU vendors shouldn't be pushing ray-tracing. It has to start somewhere, and if you don't start with immature implementations and work on improving them, that ray-tracing future will never arrive. But for now, it's a small niche.
It doesn't need to replace other techniques. Current games with ray-tracing have already shown that it works well enough in combination with them.
I think it's very important to distinguish between a game that uses a little bit of ray-tracing as one graphical feature among many and a game that relies so heavily on ray-tracing that the game can't even be played without it. The former is incremental changes, and could reasonably be called a novelty. The latter is a revolution.
Real-time ray-tracing in games was almost non-existent in the past, but now we've got working tech, and with its support by the new console generation it looks like it's becoming common. Also it's not getting used just by some marginal games, but we're getting big-name mainstream games like Battlefield, Call of Duty, Cyberpunk and World of Warcraft with ray-tracing support.
The few fully ray-traced games at the moment are just a novelty (even if their tech is kind of revolutionary). Whereas using ray-tracing in combination with other techniques is becoming too commonplace to be called a novelty.
Proshop ordered total of 5 637 RTX 3060 Ti cards from manufacturers, and yesterday before launch 195 of them were delivered - only 3% of the cards they had ordered.
Source: https://www.proshop.de/RTX-30series-overview
It's yet another launch with so low inventory that getting a card is almost impossible.
The Ryzen 5000 series has had considerable stock, in contrast. I've seen it appear in stock, albeit well above MSRP, several times on New Egg. The Ryzen 7 5800X is in stock at New Egg from two different suppliers right now, even, albeit at $660 or $581 (as compared to a $450 MSRP). I've never seen any of the new generation video cards in stock on New Egg at any price.
There's no confirmed info, but there are rumors that NVidia is selling a lot of the new GPUs directly to crypto farms.
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
First is that it would imply that Nvidia has had $175 million worth of RTX 3000 series cards. That's hundreds of thousands of cards, and would massively dwarf the amounts that have actually reached retail. That's not impossible, but I do think it's improbable.
Second is that it would imply that Nvidia preferred to sell cards to miners rather than gamers. That would be true if the miners were willing to pay professional card prices (formerly branded Tesla or Quadro), but the miners aren't. If it's GeForce cards, they prefer to sell to gamers if they can. They might prefer miners for GPU dies that can't be sold to gamers (e.g., if the video decode block is defective, miners don't care), or happily sell additional cards to miners once gamers have bought all that they want.
Third is that miners might not even want the cards. Remember that gaming doesn't scale well to many GPUs, but mining sure does. The RTX 3090 and Radeon RX 6900 are priced such that getting you more, cheaper cards will probably get you better performance for the same money as getting fewer, higher end cards.
At least in its original incarnation, Ethereum was very memory heavy, and by design. It actually used very little compute, but mostly leaned on memory bandwidth. Assuming that's still the case, a Radeon RX 570 8 GB should offer more than half of the performance of a GeForce RTX 3070, and for less than half of the price. With the former readily available for $200, I'd think that the latter shouldn't be that interesting to miners at $500.
Ethereum was specifically designed to be memory hard rather than compute heavy, as the latter will inevitably be dominated by ASICs. They wanted Ethereum to be mined by many people with ordinary consumer hardware, not just a handful of people who buy a zillion ASICs.
You can make an algorithm require at least some amount of memory, so that cards with less memory than that basically can't do it, or at least, not in a competitive manner. But the RX 570 8 GB has the same amount of memory as the RTX 3070, so if the latter can do the algorithm, the former should, too. And if they designed the algorithm such that 8 GB isn't enough, then the RTX 3070 shouldn't be interesting to miners.
And it's not like wccftech is scrupulous about caring whether a rumor is true before they publish it. They're probably just quoting some random person who is guessing.