If you are waiting for a powerful and somewhat affordable Turing-based GPU that focuses mainly on graphics rather than the RTX and Tensor bells and whistles, Nvidia has a product for that.
This card can reportedly outperform a GTX 1070 in some cases and roughly matches the Titan X, meaning you get at least a 50 percent performance boost over the GTX 1060. This could be the perfect card for those who like Nvidia, but want a card that sticks to being a traditional GPU without all of the extra complexity that comes with new core types.
That said, I could actually see myself getting this as there is always a notable risk in investing in first-gen variants of new tech (ie. RTX series).
This is somewhat good news if it turns out to be as good as the benchmarks seem to indicate. Nvidia is facing some big issues because their newest whiz bang cards aren’t selling well and their last generation cards are becoming harder and harder to find at a decent price since they aren’t making them any more.
If they hit the rumored $279 price then two or three of these could be a really nice solution for GPU rendering.
I imagine these going to just be underclocked 2080 Turing chips that failed QA on the RTX/Tensor units? If so then they may have a large stock of those built up.
I’ve just read an article about this GPU and it says: “There isn’t a single mention of ray tracing, so that would support the theory that these graphics cards won’t pack this feature.” Does this mean that you won’t be able to use Cycles ray tracing as an option with this GPU?
For perspective: I’m looking at setting up an external GPU box for use with my Macbook pro.
nah, they talking about raytracing as NVidias technology - dedicated chips for that application. Only RTX cards has that at the moment and Cycles itself doesn’t support them, so it would be fine for classical CUDA rendering.
The good news, these new cards are able to match the GTX 1070 with a amazingly efficient power profile. You can expect decent FPS bumps in some cases.
The bad, the cards surprisingly have a bit less horsepower than the RTX 2060, so the tradeoff may extend beyond just not having RT and tensor cores. As a result, these cards can struggle to reach the level of any of AMD’s Vega models (but are preferable if efficiency is what you’re after).
Not something I’d call surprising. It fits the naming and pricing scheme.
Also, NVIDIA isn’t really known for belittling one of their recent series products in favor of an “alternative - for” product.
