On Monday, Nvidia took the unusual step of offering a revised Q4 2019 financial estimate ahead of its scheduled disclosure on February 14. The reason: Nvidia had already predicted low revenue numbers, and the hardware producer is already confident that its low estimate was still too high.
The original quarterly revenue estimate of $2.7 billion has since dropped to $2.2 billion, a change of roughly 19 percent. A few new data points factor into that revision. The biggest consumer-facing issue, according to Nvidia, is “lower than expected” sales of its RTX line of new graphics cards. This series, full of proprietary technologies like a dedicated raytracing processor, kicked off in September 2018 with the $1,199 RTX 2080 Ti and the $799 RTX 2080.
The RTX launch was bungled, and the cryptocurrency hype is way past its prime. It’s not a surprise Nvidia is going to experience a rough year.
And there is also the fact that only TWO games uses RTX proprietary RayTracing features so, there is no much of a need from gamers to buy those cards…
Risthel,
As I understand it there aren’t enough raytracing units to enable them across the board, they have to be used selectively on special surfaces to estimate effects and this means that it’s more work for artists to create content for games that use them. It’s not an option that can simply be turned on…though some day we may have that option.
Apparently raytrace support is supposed to be coming to vulkan soon, though I haven’t seen anything that supports it.
http://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2018/video/S8521/
I wish that I could enable these raytrace units from opencl because that’s the interface I use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLW7g8_r7Mc
To be fair to the RTX cards, I think they shouldn’t be thought of as gaming cards (as far as the Ray Tracing goes). They should be thought of as a boost to the previous generation, with some cool preview tech in Ray Tracing and the AA tech. But then their later driver releases certainly boosted the performance a lot for me (well according to 3dmark, whatever that’s worth).
I bought one because my 1080GTX didn’t have enough ports for me… But it’s a decent amount faster than the 1080GTX, I didn’t particularly buy it for the Ray Tracing since until drivers are optimized and more things support it, it’s not a particularly useful feature for gaming. Now on the other hand, it’s probably quite awesome for things like Blender, Maya, 3d Studio, etc.
leech,
I bought one for compute purposes.
I vaguely remember a realtime quake2 raytracer from many years ago, it might even be the same one since Q2VKPT’s history goes back to 2007. I wonder if anything’s improved beyond a larger resolution. Anyways I don’t know if it’s because of the shortcuts they took or insufficient rays, but did you notice how the highly reflective water scenes had very bad artifacting? (0:52). I appreciate that their technique replaces quake’s static illumination with dynamic illumination, but I don’t think quake2’s maps really do raytracing justice. The colors are low contrast and dreary, which is inline with quake’s artistic theme, but high contrast would demonstrate ray-tracing more clearly. Also since the map and objects lack reflection metadata, the metal surfaces appear dull and flat despite raytracing.
I’m definitely curious what new games will do with it though. Since the rtx raytrace units are not likely to be added to opencl, I probably won’t be making use of them.
Yes but I had a look at those two games and they look beautiful. For the first time, glass windows look like glass windows, doing reflections properly, and dark areas in rooms look properly illuminated.
If Ray tracing eliminates cubemaps, dome-oclussion and fake baked-in light sources it will be the biggest advantage in fidelity since proper shaders were introduced (replacing painted-on-the-textures shadows).
kurkosdr,
I’d really like to see it for myself on my machine, but nvidia hasn’t put out a demo for it as far as I know. Usually the tech demos are great because you can instantly toggle the new features to see what they do to a scene. I’m on linux too, so I don’t know if/when any rtx raytraced content will become available for us.
There are demos on Nvidia’s page.
Does Linux have full GTX support yet? Not that it matters because if Desktop Linux users cared about Desktop graphics they wouldn’t be running Desktop Linux
kurkosdr,
If you’re talking about these, then their demos are ancient and not up to date in terms of RTX. It’s not even an option.
https://www.nvidia.com/coolstuff/demos
They have a raytracing demo called apollo, but it’s a static scene that uses cuda compute from four years ago not RTX’s new raytrace units. So as far as I know they have no (public) demos for RTX and I’ve even heard that they considered the 3rd party games were going to be the demos, although I hope that’s wrong.
Yes linux supports GTX fully with nvidia’s drivers and most of the major benchmark suites support it and run fine. RTX works but it’s missing the raytrace support, vulkan support is supposed to be in the works as discussed in my first post.
I was never one to claim that linux is for everyone, however it’s graphics capabilities are generally in line with windows:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=rtx2080ti-windows10-ubuntu&num=2
It’s admittedly niche and native software availability could be much better, however it isn’t to say desktop linux users don’t care about graphics. I don’t know what you are talking about with that.
Osnews recently had an article about wine. I’ve found direct-x support is actually pretty good through wine on linux. These are programs that were built for windows running on linux.
https://www.osnews.com/story/129293/wine-4-0-released/
https://appdb.winehq.org/
They really went off the rails with the pricing of their current generation. Their de facto monopoly got to their head, I’m glad the market corrected them. It’s ridiculous to expect people to pay twice as much for little improvement over the previous generation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4
Sounds a little like what Apple are experiencing right now. I got the 1080 Ti when it was announced and that was £699 – if I wanted the RTX 2080 Ti it would be £1099, an extra £400! I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who’s thinking “screw that”. The tech’ companies are getting too greedy, trying to inflate their margins. I’m going to be sticking with my 1080 Ti for a while longer yet. If Nvidia don’t change their pricing then I guess I’ll be changing to AMD or dropping down a tier – or two – in Nvidia’s line-up.
Don’t game so doesn’t affect me much but I’m glad Nvidia’s attempt to increase margins isn’t working as well as they’d thought it would, Which is good for us all.