Yeah, too many of those these days. The very people that got us these prices we have now.

Had a more serious think about it and some more analysis on where the performance gain are and arn't coming from.  I am going to pretty much skip this 20 series as I have with 10 series.

The prices are just too much and as the architectural changes that allows some good gains in some games are mostly coming from the design leveraging async compute and SE using OpenGL I am pretty sure can't do that. As far as I have looked into it OpenGL doesn't support it although I hope I am wrong on that.  So if that is right then the gains in SE over 10 series is going to be mediocre.

Many of the DX11 games that don't support this or multi processing well showed little gains and even went backwards on 2080 vs 1080Ti.   The high gain games are all dx12/vulkan titles with particular async compute features, most AMD sponsored titles. Known fact AMD pushed async hard so it makes total sense that Turing is benefiting from those.

A lot of people are speculating the 20 series is a stop gap as it seems nvidia got their 7nm allocation pushed out by TSMC for priority for zen2 and even intel, and apple taking up most of the production.   They are looking at Samsung 10nm as the alternative so I suspect we might see a shrink some time next year of these and performance should be better, prices? no idea when that will stop, if ever.

Not sure how good Titan Xp overclocks but I found a few new ones for 1300-1400 AUD mark on ebay, only slightly more than the 1080Ti prices here which would make it the same price per performance but with more performance overall and should pull away a bit more at higher res due to having 3840 FPUs, and 12GB of ram is nice too.

So if that is right then the gains in SE over 10 series is going to be mediocre.

The 1080 Ti is pretty good at just having brute force on SE, best GPU I have used for SE and on standard SE settings has no problems at greater than 100 fps.

There is a possibility of switching over to Vulkan in the future for SE so async compute should maybe be possible too.

A lot of people are speculating the 20 series is a stop gap

It most definitely is. it reminds me of when NVIDIA bought Ageia and crammed PhysX into their cards ASAP and the first couple generations were just terrible.

This could have changed gaming, but NVIDIA ruined it and made it into a gimmick
[youtube]ZiIfSCuwiQw[/youtube]

nvidia got their 7nm allocation pushed out by TSMC for priority for zen2 and even intel, and apple taking up most of the production.

This is because GlobalFoundries pushed out its 7nm plan and many places are finding it extremely difficult to push into the 7nm mark. End of Moore's law is coming up quick.

Not sure how good Titan Xp overclocks

With the standard reference cooler it doesn't overclock super well. There are a lot of OC guides online, tbh I would say get an aftermarket cooler on a 1080Ti and crank it up to a 2ghz OC and you should be good if you can find it for a good price. The extra 1GB of VRAM won't get you very far

Cooling is never an issue. I have been water cooled on my main PCs since 2004.  The reference Ti full blocks fit the Xp, it's the same PCB just with one memory module not missing.

I researched last night and it seems even with stock cooling the Xp OCs better than the Ti, should do so even more with decent cooling since pascal scales with cooling and not voltage.  The Xp is a higher binned bit of silicon so it is no surprise it OCs better reference to reference comparison.  The stock Xp typically do 1950Mhz on stock cooling which is bad cooling.   They should do bit over 2Ghz on water.  (edit, yes they do, and it does pull ahead of OC Ti by a respectable amount)


GoSlow not moving forward with plans is only part of the reason AMD had gone TSMC, Main reason is the stakes for AMD are so high they can not afford another botch the GoSlow is infamous for.  AMD are going for the superior performing fab. With GoSlow not showing much promise in performance and yield AMD have chosen to abandon them and as a result GoSlow have canned all further development as they no longer have a customer for it.  Any outsiders wanting 7nm will just go TSMC anyway so they have little choice other than to move on to what they can already do well in.  

Even their 14nm was a complete failure and they had to license out iirc IBMs? or was it Samsung's? 14nm process and that was very lucky as zen depended on it on that time critical decision to do so.  AMD can't afford anymore letdowns from fabrication so TSMC was the right choice for them and looks very well they got first dibs on it along with apple.

I hate nvidia's physx, most useless thing ever, just gimped performance in most cases.

I remember those physx cards very well, they were a popular item for a short while back around 2005-2006, at least for the games that supported it.

I hate nvidia's physx, most useless thing ever, just gimped performance in most cases.

They locked it down to GPU only when even Ageia back in the day said it could be offloaded to the CPU.  PhysX really could have changed a lot in terms of gameplay and presentation.  Another case of what could have been in rendering really.  At least the same won't happen with ray tracing.

In actual fact, performance issues in games sometimes come from the limitations of the game engine, not the hardware. Every game you install on your computer does NOT use all your machine's available memory, but only allocates a small percentage of if as directed by its code, usually 10 or less gigabytes (usually less). This is especially true for older games, where people running them on i7-8700K CPUs and the latest and greatest of graphic cards notice performances dropping left and right like electrocuted flies.

Obviously better hardware and VRAM mitigates this with increasing sophistication and gets through with pure processing power, like the 1080Ti seems to. A lot of games that face this problem also have patches (made by developers or modders) that add more memory access, but in the end, this is a little-known blight to gamers.

 performance issues in games sometimes come from the limitations of the game engine, not the hardware. Every game you install on your computer does NOT use all your machine's available memory

Unless they are poorly coded or badly optimized. I have seen games and programs eat up 30GBs in a few minutes, it's unpleasant to say the least.

This is especially true for older games, where people running them on i7-8700K CPUs and the latest and greatest of graphic cards notice performances dropping left and right like electrocuted flies.

This mostly has to do with games being made when 100Mhz was top of the line and changes in architecture over the last couple decades. You need new software to make those translations properly and utilize the new system. Not really something you should be surprised by.

That's like trying to run UT99 via directX or OpenGL  on a modern system, runs like a pig.


Run it on glide and then wrapping over vulkan using ngllde fixes the slow laggy performance even though the whole wrapping has many overheads and introduces visual problems.  

Sorry to steer the conversation here, but I have a question:

Does anyone here have any advice on buying external portable hard-drives? I need to buy one, but I've been looking at the consumer reviews on Amazon for those made by Seagate and Western Digital, and everyone seems to say that they break after a few weeks, sometimes after only a few uses! By break I mean they do not connect to the computer properly, have system-wide corrupted files or data just disappears completely.

I know the people making these reviews on the websites may not be computer-savvy and could have broken the hard drive themselves, but still, I'd like a bit of recommendations before I dump my money in a 1tb hard drive for 60 bucks.

Most of the 'official' reviews I've read or watched on them seem to be overly optimistic and only test for sort of superficial stuff like USB speed (not that it's not important of course), not longevity or system stability.

Are there any hard drive manufacturers that have a good track record?

For a mechanical drive I would only now consider HGST as they are far more reliable than the other 2 brands even though WD do own HGST.

There is lots of data coming out of data centers that use consumer grade drives (on the cheap) and the MTBF the HGST drives are only in the single low % failures after 12 months of continuous use where the other 2 are much higher. I recall seagate was high single % and WD in double digit failures.


I personally had seagate drives most of my life and only recently got an original Hitachi (before it became HGST) for my retro PC and I am impressed! it's 500GB IDE and is faster than my 1TB sata 2 seagate that is a few years newer.

My newest seagate is a 1TB from 2010 and all have been rock solid. I know that later seagates were not quite as good though, with failure rates not a thing that was common when in those days I got mine but more common now.

I had a few WD drives many many years ago, garbage, some died almost immediately lol  I got one 80GB WB and it seems fine though but it literally is the only good one of that brand I have ever had.  So my personal luck with them had been bad.

If you can find one that uses HGST you should have great reliability, especially their enterprise grade drives.

There is some nice data here.

Looks as of late the seagates are not so good and few WD models.  HGST have some issues with the 8TB but all else are rock solid.

Another I had not considered that is doing exceptionally well is Toshiba.

Worth looking at their other year stats to see how various brands do as I see year to year they change a fair bit.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-dri ... r-q1-2018/

Yeah, the WD reviews were dismal. So your advice would be to get an older model Toshiba or HGST? I'm not really looking for great USB speed or anything, just pure reliability. Between 500Gb to 1Tb would work.

What are some of the best online shops to get those for shipping in N. America? Amazon and the other companies I looked into don't seem to sell good ol' stuff  (the link was great BTW).

Yeah either make would be good. Toshiba specialize more in laptop drives so they should be the ideal make for portable drives as many portable are 2.5" laptop drives anyway and I know for a fact 500GB laptop drives were commonly Toshiba too.   I have never seen a HGST one, but have seen original Hitachi from the 200GB or less laptop ones from back then.

Seems HGST are more of a NAS and enterprise brand there days as it's hard to get (at least in Australia) non NAS desktop versions not that it matters much anyway.   For a desktop I say the more enterprise the better.


My old Toshiba laptop from 2004 still going great with it's Toshiba drive so there is that.

As for where to buy, no idea, I don't live in the US you might of guessed by now.




Back on the 20 series subject.  I had to laugh at this.  How?  actually who would be dumb enough is the question.
 
Mind you this is just filtered to the evga brand, but similar story with the other well known brands.

Wow this is a great video.

[youtube]SrF4k6wJ-do[/youtube]

Yeah it is, I was going to post it earlier and forgot to.

It would be interesting to know what type of future rig you would need to optimally use those new ray-tracing techniques.