NVIDIA has officially confirmed pricing and SKU availability for its refreshed Turing lineup featuring the SUPER graphics cards we've been talking about for ages now. Primed as a way to steal AMD's Navi release thunder, the new SUPER lineup means previously-released NVIDIA gppahics cards have now hit an EOL-status as soon as their souped-up, SUPER versions are available, come July 2nd.

The RTX 2060 and RTX 2080 Ti will live on, for now, as the cheapest and most powerful entries unto the world of hardware-based raytracing acceleration, respectively. The RTX 2070 and RTX 2080, however, will be superseded by the corresponding 2070 SUPER and 2080 SUPER offerings, with an additional RTX 2060 SUPER being offered so as to compete with AMD's RX 5700 ($399 for NVIDIA's new RTX 2060 SUPER vs $379 for the AMD RX 5700, which is sandwiched in the low-end by the RTX 2060 at $349).

NVIDIA has confirmed that they will be launching a new RTX series of gaming graphics cards, called RTX Super, on July 2nd. According to info from VideoCardz, there will be three models of the new GPUs at launch - RTX 2060 SUPER, RTX 2070 SUPER and RTX 2080 SUPER. The review embargo will lift on the same day as launch day for RTX 2060 SUPER and RTX 2070 SUPER, but the embargo for RTX 2080 SUPER will prevail until "later in July".

The embargo for custom cards based on the new SUPER GPUs will be delayed until July 9th, when we will get the first wave of new cards. There is no apparent reason for the delay, so we will need to find out more about that. Pricing is yet to be announced, but according to the source, it will be "later this week". As a reminder, from previous leaks we have seen that Super series is supposed to bring about 10-13% more CUDA cores to the GPU models, more memory and higher memory speeds.

In another iD Software game supporting ray tracing (we already know Wolfenstein: Young Blood will support it), id Software's Marty Stratton confirmed that DOOM Eternal will also support the graphics technology. In what capacity, it is unclear as of yet; whether for a global illumination solution, like Metro: Exodus, or just for reflections and shadows like most games seem to be using, is unknown at this point. Looking back at how the "original" DOOM looked, and considering changes to graphics technologies under the new iD Tech 7 engine, however, DOOM Eternal really is looking to be one of the best looking games - at least on the PC platform.

As Marty Stratton put it, "RTX makes it look, you know, amazing. There are great benefits but it doesn't necessarily expand our audience or that the way that the way that something like Stadia does so, but absolutely people can look forward to DOOM Eternal and id Tech 7 supporting ray tracing. Absolutely. I mean we love that stuff, the team loves it and I think we'll do it better than anybody honestly."

NVIDIA plans to release their adaptation of Quake, called Quake II RTX, soon on Steam. The Quake II RTX will be free(in some cases) to play, full Quake II game, with additional features such as ray tracing. The game is using Vulkan API for its Ray Tracing capabilities and requires NVIDIA's Turing GPUs in order to play with and use all of the advanced lighting effects.

All the owners of the original Quake II on Steam will get the RTX update free of charge. However, new users will get only 3 levels to play for free and if they want more levels with multiplayer as well, they will have to purchase the original Quake II for $4.99. The game will become available on June 6th, one day from present.

Apple today introduced the all-new Mac Pro, a completely redesigned, breakthrough workstation for pros who push the limits of what a Mac can do, and unveiled Apple Pro Display XDR, the world's best pro display. Designed for maximum performance, expansion and configurability, the all-new Mac Pro features workstation-class Xeon processors up to 28 cores, a high-performance memory system with a massive 1.5TB capacity, eight PCIe expansion slots and a graphics architecture featuring the world's most powerful graphics card. It also introduces Apple Afterburner, a game-changing accelerator card that enables playback of three streams of 8K ProRes RAW video simultaneously.

Pro Display XDR features a massive 32-inch Retina 6K display with gorgeous P3 wide and 10-bit color, an extreme 1,600 nits of peak brightness, an incredible 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio and a superwide viewing angle, all at a breakthrough price point. Together, the new Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR are the most powerful tools Apple has ever put in the hands of pro customers and will change pro workflows forever.

CORSAIR , a world leader in PC gaming peripherals and enthusiast components, today announced the launch of the highly-anticipated CORSAIR Hydro X Series, a complete line of custom cooling parts offering PC enthusiasts a new standard of hardware to build the world's most powerful and stunning systems. From CPU and graphics card water blocks to a pump/reservoir, fittings, tubing, radiators, and coolant, the Hydro X Series offers everything you need to build a spectacular custom cooling loop that lowers system temperatures and improves performance, complete with vivid RGB lighting.

Rigorously tested and validated to ensure the utmost reliability and stability, the Hydro X Series has been meticulously designed to work best alongside the massive range of CORSAIR cases and cooling components, fully integrated with CORSAIR iCUE software for automated fan and pump speed control and complete lighting customization.

NVIDIA Studio Drivers provide artists, creators and developers the best performance and reliability when working with creative applications. To achieve the highest level of reliability, Studio Drivers undergo extensive testing against multi-app creator workflows and multiple revisions of the top creative applications from Adobe to Autodesk and beyond. Available today, the newest NVIDIA Studio Driver provides optimal support for the latest releases of top creative apps, including Autodesk Maya 2019, 3ds Max 2020, Arnold 5.3.1.0, Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve 16, and Daz 3D Daz Studio.

Crytek have updated their development roadmap for CryEngine, adding in some of the features we discussed yesterday on our piece regarding their Neon Noir ray tracing tech demo performance. The new roadmap now places Spring 2020 as the time where both DirectX 12 and Vulkan, lower level APIs than the currently-supported DX11, will be fully integrated into the engine. Ray Tracing will be added at the same time, no doubt taking advantage of the higher performance that can be extracted from hardware through the lower level APIs.

It will be interesting to see the level of performance on CryEngine's hardware agnostic ray tracing, and whether their Spring 2020 implementation will take advantage of specialized RTX hardware - or focus on a software solution ran at varying degrees of rendering resolution according to the scene. Though with AMD's Navi being expected to incorporate some sort of hardware-based ray tracing acceleration, it's very likely software calculations will only be a fallback of the coding.

Considering your reaction, you certainly remember Crytek's Neon noir raytracing scene that we shared with you back in march. At the time, the fact that raytracing was running at such mesmerizing levels on AMD hardware was arguably the biggest part of the news piece: AMD's Vega 56 graphics card with no dedicated raytracing hardware, was pushing the raytraced scene in a confident manner. Now, Crytek have shared some details on how exactly Neon noir was rendered.

The AMD Radeon Vega 56 pushed the demo at 1080p/30 FPS, with full-resolution rendering of raytraced effects. Crytek further shared that raytracing can be rendered at half resolution compared to the rest of the scene, and that if they did so on AMD's Vega 56, they could push a 1440p resolution at 40+ FPS. The raytraced path wasn't running on any modern, lower-level API, such as DX12 or Vulkan, but rather, on a custom branch of Crytek's CryEngine, version 5.5.

We've seen NVIDIA's move to provide RTX effects on older, non-RT capable hardware today being met with what the company was certainly expecting: a cry of dismay from users that now get to see exactly what their non-Turing NVIDIA hardware is capable of. The move from NVIDIA could be framed as a way to democratize access to RTX effects via Windows DXR, enabling users of its GTX 1600 and 1000 series of GPUs to take a look at the benefits of raytracing; but also as an upgrade incentive for those that now see how their performance is lacking without the new specialized Turing cores to handle the added burden.

Whatever your side of the fence on that issue, however, NVIDIA has provided users with one more raytraced joy today. Three of them, in fact, in the form of three previously-shown tech demos. The Star Wars tech demo (download) is the most well known, certainly, with its studies on reflections on Captain Phasma's breastplate. Atomic Heart (download) is another one that makes use of RTX for reflections and shadows, while Justice (download) adds caustics to that equation. If you have a Turing graphics card, you can test these demos in their full glory, with added DLSS for improved performance. If you're on Pascal, you won't have that performance-enhancing mode available, and will have to slog it through software computations. Follow the embedded links for our direct downloads of these tech demos.

Public perception on NVIDIA's new RTX series of graphics cards was sometimes marred by an impression of wrong resource allocation from NVIDIA. The argument went that NVIDIA had greatly increased chip area by adding RTX functionality (in both its Tensor ad RT cores) that could have been better used for increased performance gains in shader-based, non-raytracing workloads. While the merits of ray tracing oas it stands (in terms of uptake from developers) are certainly worthy of discussion, it seems that NVIDIA didn't dedicate that much more die area to their RTX functionality - at least not to the tone of public perception.

After analyzing full, high-res images of NVIDIA's TU106 and TU116 chips, reddit user @Qesa did some analysis on the TPC structure of NVIDIA's Turing chips, and arrived at the conclusion that the difference between NVIDIA's RTX-capable TU106 compared to their RTX-stripped TU116 amounts to a mere 1.95 mm² of additional logic per TPC - a 22% area increase. Of these, 1.25 mm² are reserved for the Tensor logic (which accelerates both DLSS and de-noising on ray-traced workloads), while only 0.7 mm² are being used for the RT cores.

DICE and NVIDIA have been hard at work on their partnership to bring RTX and DLSS to Battlefield V. It seems the tech is a constant work in progress, as this isn't the first time the companies have introduced optimizations to the games' handling of DLSS and RTX since its release. According to the patch notes from the latest update, the Trial by Fire Update #2, there have been further optimizations to RTX on Ultra - with increased ray trace counts to improve quality of reflections, which will definitely hit performance further.

Additionally, DLSS now supports rendering in borderless mode, and DLSS sharpness has also been improved. This likely means that NVIDIA's servers are still hard at work processing their "ground truth" image for the available scenarios in-game, further optimizing image quality. This is one of those rare technologies that will be improving with time, bringing the "fine wine" argument to (likely) its clearest scenario yet.

Update April 4th: This post has been corrected based on new information provided by ASUS, EKWB, as well as other parties. The original story mentioned a silent change to the glue used on the PCB which, as we now believe, is no longer the case in that ASUS is not to blame.

Update April 5th: ASUS has confirmed to us that there has been no PCB change (in terms of components and their heights), it's only a problem of tolerances due to the glue being liquid during production.

ASUS has glued the GPU die to the PCB for many generations, which helps ensure contact and avoids microfractures in the solder balls from physical force or thermal expansion. The nature of this glue, typically an epoxy resin, means that aftermarket cooling solutions, such as full cover or die-only water blocks, have to accommodate for this around the holes around the die. Previous graphics cards had no issue here, because the mounting holes were far away from the GPU die. With RTX 2080 Ti and its super large GPU chip this has changed, and there's only a few millimeters of space left. If a waterblock uses wider standoffs than the design merits, or if the glue spreads out farther than intended, it can result in poor/inconsistent contact between waterblock and the GPU, which in turn can lead to worse thermal performance than ideal.

This time, EK Waterblocks alerted us that the ROG Strix GeForce RTX 2080 Ti had poor contact and fitting issues with their GPU water block for the same, as seen in images below provided by their customer T. Hilal, which interferes with the four standoffs surrounding the package. EK recommends removing these standoffs to ensure a good fit and thermal paste spread, and this does not affect water block performance much in their internal testing. In previous such occasions, EK and others have had to come up with a second version of the block for added compatibility, however it remains to be seen if the ROG Strix GeForce RTX 2080 Ti will merit a similar treatment this time round. As an external reference, Phanteks has separately confirmed to us that their water block remains compatible.

Saying Anthem has had a rough start would be an understatement, but things can only get better with time (hopefully, anyway). This week saw an update to the PC version that brought along with it support for NVIDIA's new DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) technology to be used with their new Turing-microarchitecture GeForce RTX cards. NVIDIA's internal testing shows as much as 40% improvement in average FPS with DLSS on relative to off, as seen in the image below, and there is also a video to help show graphical changes, or lack thereof in this case. DLSS on Anthem is available on all RTX cards at 3840x2160 resolution gameplay, and on the RTX 2060, 2070, and 2080 at 2560x1440. No word on equivalent resolutions at a non-16:9 aspect ratio, and presumably 1080p is a no-go as first discussed by us last month.

Note that we will NOT be able to test DLSS on Anthem, which is a result of the five activations limit as far as hardware configurations go. This prevented us from doing a full graphics card performance test, but our article on the VIP demo is still worth checking into if you were curious. In addition to DLSS, Anthem also has NVIDIA Highlights support for GeForce Experience users to automatically capture and save "best gameplay moments", with a toggle option to enable this setting in the driver. A highlight is generated for an apex kill, boss kill, legendary kill, multi kill, overlook interaction, or a tomb discovery. More on this in the source linked below in the full story.

NVIDIA during its investor day revealed some interesting statistics on its Turing-based graphics cards. The company essentially announced that revenue for Turing graphics cards sales increased 45% over that generated when NVIDIA introduced their Pascal architecture - which does make sense, when you consider how NVIDIA actually positioned its same processor tiers (**60, **70, **80) in higher pricing brackets than previously. NVIDIA's own graphics showcase this better than anyone else could, with a clear indication of higher pricing for the same graphics tier. According to the company, 90% of users are actually buying pricier graphics cards this generation than they were in the previous one -which makes sense, since a user buying a 1060 at launch would only have to pay $249, while the new RTX 2060 goes for $349.

Other interesting tidbits from NVIDIA's presentation at its investor day is that Pascal accounts for around 50% of the installed NVIDIA graphics cards, while Turing, for now, only accounts for 2% of that. This means 48% of users sporting an NVIDIA graphics card are using Maxwell or earlier designs, which NVIDIA says presents an incredible opportunity for increased sales as these users make the jump to the new Turing offerings - and extended RTX feature set. NVIDIA stock valuation grew by 5.82% today, likely on the back of this info.

A new patch has become available for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which updated the game to the latest graphical technologies in the form of RTX and DLSS. The PC port of the game has been handed by developer Nixxes, which partnered with NVIDIA to work on adding ray-tracing enabled shadows to the game (there's a thematic coherence there if I've ever seen one).

Christoph Schied reimagined the 1990s cult-classic "Quake II" with real-time ray-tracing, using the Vulkan API and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20-series hardware exposing the "VK_NV_ray_tracing" extension. Called "Q2VKPT," this game based on id Software's open-source Quake II code, implemented real-time path-tracing to make the lighting more physically accurate. NVIDIA expanded on Schied's work with "Quake II RTX," which is possibly the world's first game that is fully real-time ray-traced.

This NVIDIA rendition of Q2VKPT leverages NVIDIA's RTX for Vulkan to ensure all lighting, shadows, reflections, and other visual effects are ray-traced and denoised using NVIDIA's AI-accelerated denoiser. Unless it somehow scored higher-resolution texture assets from id Software, NVIDIA could also be using a GPU-accelerated upscaler to improve texture resolution. It's also possible that ambient-occlusion methods such as HBAO+ are in play to add apparent geometric detail to some of the surfaces in the game. NVIDIA hasn't made Quake II RTX public yet, although you could take the path-traced Q2VKPT for a spin. You'll need an RTX 20-series graphics card and the latest drivers.

NVIDIA had their customary GTC keynote ending mere minutes ago, and it was one of the longer keynotes clocking in at nearly three hours in length. There were some fascinating demos and features shown off, especially in the realm of robotics and machine learning, as well as new hardware as it pertains to AI and cars with the all-new Jetson Nano. It would be fair to say, however, that the vast majority of the keynote was targeting developers and researchers, as usually is the case at GTC. However, something came up in between which caught us by surprise, and no doubt is a pleasant update to most of us here on TechPowerUp.

Following AMD's claims on software-based real-time ray tracing in games, and Crytek's Neon Noir real-time ray tracing demo for both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, it makes sense in hindsight that NVIDIA would allow rudimentary DXR ray tracing support to older hardware that do not support RT cores. In particular, an upcoming drivers update next month will allow DXR support for 10-series Pascal-microarchitecture graphics cards (GTX 1060 6 GB and higher), as well as the newly announced GTX 16-series Turing-microarchitecture GPUs (GTX 1660, GTX 1660 Ti). The announcement comes with a caveat letting people know to not expect RTX support (think lower number of ray traces, and possibly no secondary/tertiary effects), and this DXR mode will only be supported in Unity and Unreal game engines for now. More to come, with details past the break.

NVIDIA has updated their RTX game bundle, which offers users games whenever they purchase an elligible RTX graphics card. The bundle previously offered wither Anthem or Battlefield V, for gamers who purchased the RTX 2060 or 2070 graphics card; and both games for buyers of the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti. Now, gamers who purchase NVIDIA's highest-performacne graphics cards also get to take Metro Exodus home, and buyers of the RTX 2060 and RTX 2070 can now choose that game over the others.

We saw a glimpse of this at the NVIDIA suite during CES 2019, with a beta version coming out shortly after. NVIDIA and OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) have since brought out the full release of a new OBS Studio, version 23.0.1, that adds improved support for NVIDIA GeForce cards. In particular, their latest and greatest RTX lineup, including the new desktop RTX 2060 as well as the mobile and Max-Q variants, will see an FPS impact drop by as much as 66% according to NVIDIA's internal testing. Some example results are seen below, with games such as Fortnite, PUBG, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 - Blackout, and Apex Legends seeing a frame rate boost by up to 48% compared to x264 Fast, and 27% compared to x264 Very Fast.

Given this is a result of NVENC, NVIDIA's hardware encoder, in place, older GeForce GPUs (GTX 600-series and newer that support NVENC) will also see some benefits. GeForce RTX GPUs just get to enjoy a bit more- up to 15% more, in fact, in efficiency as far as bitrate consumption for the same graphical fidelity. NVIDIA effectively says that "GeForce RTX GPUs can stream with superior image quality compared to x264 Fast, and on par with x264 Medium", thus putting in a strong case for single-PC gaming and streaming, as opposed to having a dedicated streaming PC. They have even put out a video to go over the enhancements, which will no doubt interest game streamers on the PC platform.

NVIDIA, in a blog post/Q&A on its DLSS technology, promised implementation and image quality improvements on its Metro Exodus rendition of the technology. If you'll remember, AMD recently vouched for other, non-proprietary ways of achieving desired quality of AA technology across resolutions such as TAA and SMAA, saying that DLSS introduces "(...) image artefacts caused by the upscaling and harsh sharpening." NVIDIA in its blog post has dissected DLSS in its implementation, also clarifying some lingering questions on the technology and its resolution limitations that some us here at TPU had already wondered about.

The blog post describes some of the limitations in DLSS technology, and why exactly image quality issues might be popping out here and there in titles. As we knew from NVIDIA's initial RTX press briefing, DLSS basically works on top of an NVIDIA neural network. Titled the NGX, it processes millions of frames from a single game at varying resolutions, with DLSS, and compares it to a given "ground truth image" - the highest quality possible output sans any shenanigans, generated from just pure raw processing power. The objective is to train the network towards generating this image without the performance cost. This DLSS model is then made available for NVIDIA's client to download and to be run at your local RTX graphics card level, which is why DLSS image quality can be improved with time. And it also helps explain why closed implementations of the technology, such as 3D Mark's Port Royal benchmark, show such incredible image quality scenarios compared to, say, Metro Exodus - there is a very, very limited number of frames that the neural network needs to process towards achieving the best image quality.Forumites: This is an Editorial

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The carved edges and added texture bring dimension to the clear acrylic block and enables it to catch the lighting lit across the block beautifully to enhance the overall design in a very discrete, elegant fashion. The lighting gets updated to SPECTRA 2.0, bringing with it more powerful Addressable RGB LEDs controllable with the newly designed Firestorm software. Adjust brightness and lighting modes on two independent zones or synchronize them together in unison lighting. With an onboard memory, your preferred lighting settings will stay whether the system restarts or shuts down.

TechPowerUp readers today were greeted to our PC port analysis of Metro Exodus, which also contained a dedicated section on NVIDIA RTX and DLSS technologies. The former brings in real-time ray tracing support to an already graphically-intensive game, and the latter attempts to assuage the performance hit via NVIDIA's new proprietary alternative to more-traditional anti-aliasing. There was definitely a bump in performance from DLSS when enabled, however we also noted some head-scratching limitations on when and how it can even be enabled, depending on the in-game resolution and RTX GPU employed. We then set about testing DLSS on Battlefield V, which was also available from today, and it was then that we noticed a trend.

Take Metro Exodus first, with the relevant notes in the first image below. DLSS can only be turned on for a specific combination of RTX GPUs ranging from the RTX 2060 to the RTX 2080 Ti, but NVIDIA appear to be limiting users to a class-based system. Users with the RTX 2060, for example, can't even use DLSS at 4K and, more egregiously, owners of the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti can not enjoy RTX and DLSS simultaneously at the most popular in-game resolution of 1920x1080, which would be useful to reach high FPS rates on 144 Hz monitors. Battlefield V has a similar, and yet even more divided system wherein the gaming flagship RTX 2080 Ti can not be used with RTX and DLSS at even 1440p, as seen in the second image below. This brought us back to Final Fantasy XV's own DLSS implementation last year, which was all or nothing at 4K resolution only. What could have prompted NVIDIA to carry this out? We speculate further past the break.

Epic Games wants a slice of next-generation NVIDIA GameWorks titles that are bound to leverage the RTX feature-set of its hardware. The latest version of Unreal Engine 4, released as a preview-build, comes with a host of real-time ray-tracing features. In its change-log for Unreal Engine 4.22 Preview, Epic describes its real-time ray-tracing feature to be a "low level layer on top of UE DirectX 12 that provides support for DXR and allows creating and using ray tracing shaders (ray generation shaders, hit shaders, etc) to add ray tracing effects."

The hardware being reference here are the RT cores found in NVIDIA's "Turing RTX" GPUs. At the high-level, Unreal Engine 4 will support close to two dozen features that leverage DXR, including a denoiser for shadows, reflections, and ambient occlusion; rectangular area lights, soft shadows, ray-traced reflections and AO, real-time global illumination, translucency, triangular meshes, and path-tracing. We could see Unreal Engine 4.22 get "stable" towards the end of 2019, to enable DXR-ready games of 2020.

Battlefield V became the first AAA title to support NVIDIA Deep-learning Supersampling or DLSS, a new-generation image-quality enhancement feature exclusive to NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20-series graphics cards, since it requires tensor cores. The feature was introduced as part of its comprehensive Battlefield V Chapter 2: Lightning Strikes Update late Tuesday. To use it, DXR must be enabled in the game. In its release notes for the update, EA-DICE describes DLSS as a feature "which uses deep learning to improve game performance while maintaining visual quality." The developers also improved the way the deploy screen displays on ultrawide monitors on the PC, particularly with the "Rotterdam" map.

Update: We have posted an article, taking a closer look at the DLSS implementation in Battlefield V.