Nvidia held its annual GeForce event to talk about its presence across the PC gaming community and upgrades coming for existing RTX drivers, including tools for streaming and deeper RTX integrations for titles such as Fortnite. Hosted by CEO Jensen Huang, he also delivered a full presentation from his kitchen with a few hidden RTX 30 surprises over his counter and oven.
Kicking things off with an eSports announcement, the company announced RTX and DLSS were coming to battle royale game Fortnite, allowing PC players to turn on advanced ray tracing and additional graphical details. In Valorant, Nvidia claimed online connections caused significant latency while a future update will bring further stats and live information tools for G-Sync monitors. To help streamers, Nvidia Broadcast gives players a new way to put their webcam selves in the game while tweaking different settings on their devices with AI. Through additional hardware acceleration with RTX GPUs, streamers can even use Broadcast to remove background sounds (including a blow dryer) in close proximity. Without bad keying, streamers can also blur and add new backgrounds, including a green screen effect without needing to purchase a panel. An auto-frame feature also follows streamers, keeping them mid-frame while they’re moving.
Nvidia unveiled their Omniverse Machinima app to create 3D designs for animations and photorealistic path tracing, while using light to reflect gorgeous details off assets. This also lets real actors put 3D characters over themselves through AI to use in their animations. A demo video made over several days was show, showing off a medieval battle with fireball trails, light reflecting off soldiers and an actor with motion capture (without the dots or mocap suit).
Real-time ray tracing was also focused as Nvidia’s main architecture, mising algorithms and engine tech towards hundreds of PC games. The company explained its programmable shading, ray tracing and AI were mixed for smart processing of information. Nvidia claims the same kind of data is used to power their in-house robots and AI characters which can speak multiple languages. The RTX technology could also mimic any living thing, including a bird which was digitally recreated in real-time. According to the company, the upgraded Nvidia DLSS 2.0 uses surface detailing on games such as Death Stranding to boost frame rates and resolution at 4K without further compromises. While RTX dedicates resources, it also takes a few frames away. But its mix of shaders and RT cores set games back more by up to 15 frames, while adding a Tensor core on the two boost performance instead of losing it.
Its Ampere architecture essentially gives a “triple-double” to the amount of Tensorflops (TFlops) made by shaders, RT Core and Tensor Core for maximum performance in GPU processors. An animation, called Marbles at Night was able to render a realistic arts-and-crafts course using higher TFlops included in Nvidia’s upcoming GPUs. Different colours were shown reflecting light-generated textures which shined under light. They also changed their lights while moving, while it was completely path-driven by different light sources in the room. Objects carrying their own light would also reflect off stationary surfaces, with little to no noise across the floors (think headlights dissipating on a wall). Ampere ran the short film at 4K at 30 frames per second, painting a smoother picture for games including CyberPunk 2077 which can run on Ampere-powered RTX GPUs without 4K dips below 30fps.
Nvidia also announced improvements for running games from SSD to GPU, collaborating with Microsoft to reduce the latency and load times for games. This would give the PC more breathing room for rendering shadows and ambient occlusion with DLSS.
These improvements would also make it to Nvidia’s flagship RTX 3080, which would be followed with a brand new line of graphics cards. Running at second gen RTX cores and two-way cooling, the RTX 3080 also features a push and pull system for airflow within a PCs airflow. Featuring a new G6X, Nvidia claims it’s the world’s fastest graphics memory boosted by GPU hardware. The GPU is also “three times quieter” than its predecessors while it churns out the most demanding PC games ever made. 3080 is twice the speed as the leading 2080, while its Ampere technology generates 30 shader tFlops, 58 TFlops and up to 238 Tensor TFLOPS. The founder’s edition will also contain 10GB 6GX Vram. The 3080 will release on September 17, 2020 at $699 USD.
The GeForce RTX 3070 provides a friendlier price for enthusiasts, sporting an upgraded 20 Shader-TFLOPS and up to 40 RT-TFLOPS and 163 Tensor TFLOPS. Though significantly smaller with 8GB G6 Vram, it’s priced lower at $499 and releases in October 2020. Over the 1080 Ti, the 3070 blows past its performance above 1440p gaming at 60fps, while RTX is activated on an i9 CPU. Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War releases on November 13, 2020 with RTX integration for its settings. A new gameplay footage shows off light bounding from leather jackets, weapons and radios in an intelligence warehouse. Light sources also created shadows and depth PC can expect to see in the campaign.
But Nvidia also announced one more surprise in the form of an 8K RTX 3090 GPU. As the size of a thanksgiving turkey, the “BFGPU” sports over 36 shader-TFLOPS, 69 RT-TFLOPS and 285 Tensor-TFLOPS for future-proof performance. A “silencer” keeps the GPU from creating noise in its fans, while keeping the unit 30 per cent cooler than its Titan RTX counterparts. Its massive size also packs RTX capabilities to render up to 8K with DLSS technology. As the world’s first “8K Gaming GPU,” it also sports 8K HDR with ShadowPlay, Av1 decoding for fast content creation and the new HDMI 2.1 format feeding the beast with future 8K monitors. It includes a 24GB G6X Vram, pushing the overall price to $1499 USD (the price of a full PC build). The GPU can be accessed from Nvidia and Partners starting on September 24, 2020.