10 Reasons To Consider The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 Series On Linux

[Khrundel]

Sorry but WTF?
This driver still can't show normal console resolution (KMS). Also Wayland...

Nobody needs either of them, especially Wayland.

And stability... Vulkan hahaha DXVK developers can say about that more.

DXVK works like a charm with nvidia blob.

[dungeon]

Something tells me you don't remember how long the full length PCI cards were (312 mm). There used to be slots at the front for mechanical support as well. Where did we go wrong...

Things changing you know, i don't care about such long cards anymore same as nowdays none have these models of phones in pockets
I mean really, who cares what was standard so long ago

[the_scx]

I think the hype around RTX 20 has obscured another important thing. Rumors say that NVIDIA plans to release the GeForce GTX 2030. I emphasize: GTX 2030! This means that you can expect slim, passively cooled, low-power cards/chips with NVENC SIP. Today, you have to choose between a slim GT 1030 without decent video encoding/decoding module, and a thick/noisy GTX 1050, or even larger fanless GTX 1050. Moreover, the GTX 2030 should reach the GeForce GTX 1050 performance level. If that happens, it would be awesome. Only Intel will suffer, because their discreet GPUs will lose the main advantage... again. :P

GeForce GT 1030

GeForce GTX 1050

[riklaunim]

Yet, installing Linux in mamy cases will give nouveau by default and that will ruin the first impression to little contributions, to little consumer needs to blindly follow 10 not-your-own-reasons to buy something quite expensive.

[L_A_G]

To me, the Turing architecture, just like Vega, seems to have been made first and foremost for jobs other than games.

The tensor cores are, if they are what they're advertised as, pretty interesting hardware for machine learning applications and we know machine learning has for the last few years been a pretty damn hot topic. I found myself reading a textbook on the general subject of machine learning and data mining and looking into it earlier this year when I was between jobs for about a month. I'd go as far as to say that if Nvidia doesn't cripple the tensor hardware like how they've previously crippled FP64 performance on consumer cards (which could be reversed by loading Quadro card BIOSes), then these cards could be a very interesting tool for hobbyists interested in high performance machine learning. Most professional users however will be using the Quadro versions of these cards.

As for the ray tracing hardware, which if I've understood correctly is the same hardware as the tensor cores, is also most useful to non-gamers. The number of rays per frame at 30, and particularly 60 FPS, is so low that the heavily interpolated results really don't look any better than more approximate raster-effects like screen space reflections. I'd argue that they actually look worse than those raster-effects and they in fact remind me of ray tracing demos from the demoscene, i.e cool tech demos, but actually pretty terrible looking. As for people doing still image and 3D video rendering, i.e non-realtime jobs, however this could speed up their workflow significantly, allowing them to iterate on designs faster or just get more work done in a day. However, like the people doing high performance machine learning, they're probably going to be using the Quadro versions of these cards.

Maybe next gen the ray-tracing will actually be worth it for games and other realtime applications when they move to a 7nm lithography process and can make the ray-tracing hardware block much bigger (in terms of transistor count), thus increasing rays per frame to the point where the end result actually looks better than traditional raster-based lighting.

[Djhg2000]

coder

dungeon
The "where did we go wrong" part was supposed to be a joke.

That said I think those full length brackets we had for mechanical support of shorter cards are needed now more than ever. Seriously, the industry has invented far more mechanically stable sockets than what should be needed. If most cases had front support slots for either half, 3/4 or full length cards then that would hopefully end the classic "graphics card sag" that is plaguing us today.

[birdie]

My side of the fence is RTX 3060 because the 20 series is just too expensive, will not offer enough performance boost in non-RTX games and its power efficiency will be negligibly better to justify the purchase.

[Guest]

Kudos to Michael for not being one sided. nVidia might be a scumbag capitalist monster but its GPUs are damn fine pieces of hardware.

[Weasel]

Don't forget refraction, reflection, caustics, depth-of-field, motion blur, etc. You can approximate these by hacks, with conventional rasterizers, but nothing beats the fidelity and elegance of ray tracing.

Nothing beats ray tracing in slideshow FPS alright.

Anything below 60 fps cannot be considered "real time" and frankly that's pushing it already.

[creative]

At first I was skeptical, now I am fully convinced NVIDIA has gone full blown wtf.