Despite all of those dedicated RT cores inside the new Nvidia 2000-series graphics cards and a promise of near 10-times performance increase for ray tracing in this new generation of cards over the last, early testing has found that the new cards can barely keep up. During a hands-on demo of Shadow of the Tomb Raider at Gamescom, even a 2080Ti couldn't output a steady 60 FPS at 1080P resolution with the new lighting technology enabled.
IGN's footage (above) was the first to surface and shows that the new ray tracing technology is pretty, offering much more dynamic lighting than we've ever seen in a game of this calibre before, but that it really does come at a huge cost. While most would expect a 2080 Ti to achieve at least a steady 60 FPS at 4K resolution, in this demo it doesn't even approach those sort of steady frames at 1080P.
Although there's no onscreen readout, you can see where the game really stutters and slows down, the footage turns choppy. It's a damning indictment of the 2000-series cards' capabilities if the 2080 Ti can't even make things look slick.
PCGames Hardware managed even better footage to demonstrate this problem. Although shot off-screen, it does have a frame rate counter which shows you just how far it falls at times. In some scenes it drops into the 30s, which seems inexcusable for a system with a graphics card that costs $1,200 at launch.
Some developers are already getting ahead of this though and claiming that new drivers and better optimization will lead to much more favorable frame rates.
Do you think some software tweaks can deliver the "it just works" ray tracing that Nvidia touted so much during Gamescom?
