Edit: According to Anandtech, "NVIDIA has been surprisingly candid in admitting that unless compute customers need the last 1GB of VRAM offered by the Titan, they’re likely going to buy the GTX 1080 Ti instead."

I would suggest changing the article link to Anandtech, as it's really a much more informative and better written article. Jen-Hsun Huang seems to have bottled his cringe-inducing presentation style and fed it to whoever wrote that PR piece on the Nvidia site. http://www.anandtech.com/show/11172/nvidia-unveils-geforce-g...

It's weird, but that's human nature I guess.

I have a GTX 1070 mostly for deep learning, but I have to admit that piece of hardware was pleasing the casual gamer in me as well. It's only about 20% behind a GTX 1080 for gaming, a $500 GPU. Twice more than I had ever spent for leisure as a gamer.

Well on my 4K display, I can push most pre-2014 games to 60 fps, but that's it. After that, for most AAA games, I have to resort to 1440p + some AA. And if I was really into gaming I'd have bought an ultrawide 1440p/144Hz monitor, no doubt about it, knowing pretty well I'd need a Titan XP or at least 1080 to see these framerates on newer titles.

It's a space that's moving fast, both on the interface (monitor, VR...) and processing side (Nvidia makes a 20-30% leap each gen, kind of insane compared to Intel CPU gens for instance). We're only beginning to touch low-level APIs once again after a two-decades hiatus on the PC (DirectX being both great to make it easy to create 3D apps but at the cost of much performance/overhead, which DX12 is trying to address).

I'm jaded about CPUs, honestly Ryzen is much welcome economically but nothing to be enthused as a nerd/engineer, however GPUs and display technology is where it's at these days. Can't wait for proper AR too (HoloLens-like technology, still a few gens away from a commercially viable product).

For an example, take the latest Deus Ex: http://www.techspot.com/review/1235-deus-ex-mankind-divided-.... It is also a good example for the next statement: The heaviest games don't even get 60 FPS on 1440p, on Ultra the average with a GTX 1080 is 43. 4K is at 24, basically unplayable. Even if you were to use SLI, which is by now pretty much agreed upon to be more a hassle than worth it, it wouldn't be at 60 FPS. And that disregards that 2x1080 are/were 200% the price of a single GTX 1080 Ti, and won't be close to getting 200% the performance.

You can see that as you want, but I can pretty much guarantee that gamers, at least the segment of gamers that would even consider investing hat much into a gpu, will absolutely sprint to get a GTX 1080 Ti, if the performance increase is real. They need it for VR + 4K, or at the very least believe so.

The best part is, in two years (or four) when you buy a better card, all the titles that are currently new will tend to look about as good as 2-year-old titles look now. ;)

I've crunched the numbers and the 1080TI will essentially offer the 980 SLI performance at its best - and that's before the extra RAM and Pascal features come into play - as well as the reduced heat levels etc.

So count me in, especially when Vega comes out and presses the prices further south. (Alas my monitor uses GSync, so that won't be an option for me.)

FWIW I'd like to mention that the 34" screen is completely brilliant for programming (Visual Studio), which is what I use the setup for most of the time.

You can't get any games above like 30 fps on 4K monitors even without maxing out graphics options on a $350 card today. Add multiple monitors... slows to a crawl. You can hear the fans working to keep up with non-gaming tasks...

While I do feel like noticeable CPU performance enhancements have mostly plateaued, I think we are 4-5 years away from affordable and good 4K graphics cards. The choices on the market at present aren't all that amazing. You either pay a lot for meh, or a fortune for acceptable.

Nothing on the market today is like, "OMG it handles anything we throw at it without breaking a sweat..." And that's fine... it's usually 2-3 years after a game comes out that I can run it at max settings.

4k@60 gaming on a single card is an excellent goal. I'm running a single 1080 for this purpose at the moment and on many games it struggles and I have to reduce options significantly.

The 1080Ti should be performant enough to run 4k@60FPS on most games on a single card. The 1080 was close, running ~45-50 FPS, but this should push it over that edge.

Then there are the people who want 4k@144 and stuff who'll be running 2 of these in no time and still not getting the numbers they want...

Hopefully within a few iterations 4k@60 will get down to an affordable level. I just really want to go back to buying $300-500 cards instead of $1k cards and this means we're on the way.

Second, it's all about pixel count. While 4k is still miles ahead of even the 3440x1440 ultra-wide resolution, that resolution represents nearly as big a jump in pixel count as the jump from 1080p to 1440p.

The goal is 4k at a minimum of 60fps. Consistent 100 hz or even 144hz on an ultra-wide 3440x1440 monitor represents a solid step in that direction.

With a 1060, when I really started gaming, it was pretty hard to have very good settings and get 60fps. Overwatch on Ultra ran at about 50fps (100% render scale), GTA 5 on the "nvidia optimized" settings was almost always 60fps but would drop down to 30fps sometimes. With a 1080, everything is always 60fps, even on Epic with some modifications (fog distance I think has the biggest effect). My attempt to max out the settings to just get 60fps has led to slow framerates (30-40) during hero selection and the "play of the game" intros, though. Only sometimes, it's very strange. (With the nvidia-optimized settings, this doesn't happen, though. But the graphics aren't quite as good in-game.)

Overall you should basically be able to pick any GPU and play any game at 4k. I would like to get another monitor for 1080p/1440p at 144Hz, but don't have anywhere to put it, so 4k@60 is enough for me. IPS panels are nice for everything except gaming, so I live with the compromise when playing games. Screen refresh rate is not the limiting factor in my ability, not by a long shot.

Try Battlefield 1, or some other last-gen game (I believe Rise Of The Tomb Rider is also in this category). You won't get 4k60 on that one without a Titan X or a 1080 Ti.

That is, with the image quality settings maxed out, of course.

Get a grip man. GPUs are not struggling. People are just demanding a lot from them because reasons.

I find it useful to multiply resolution with refresh rate to arrive at a number that indicates the number of pixels being pushed per second:

  1920x1080 x60  =   124,416,000
  2560x1440 x60  =   221,184,000
  3440x1440 x60  =   297,216,000
  3440x1440 x100 =   495,360,000 
  3840x2160 x60  =   497,664,000
  2560x1440 x144 =   530,841,600
  3840x2160 x144 = 1,194,393,600

Edit: And then you start seeing 144hz 4k screens; you will still find yourself wanting with a single 1080TI.

As for traditional usecases, I have a 3x monitor setup ( 2K@144Hz/4K@60Hz/2K@144Hz) and my 1080 GTX can't max out everything smoothly while I stream/record high-end games.

I would love it if all this was just vanity, but its my job. This stuff is an expense I'd happily avoid if possible. I don't own any nonsensical RGB lighted cases or non-essential peripherals.

That being said I have some trouble going back to my 1200p screens at work after being used to 4k at home. Surprisingly even for emacs and other work-related things 4K makes a pretty huge difference in my experience. Everything remains razor sharp even with a small font. I can split my screen and display a few full page datasheets and schematics alongside my code. No need to zoom in or anything. No aliasing, no pixels, I find it very relaxing.

I don't have very good screenshots available at the moment unfortunately but this should give you an idea of what's possible:

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/10059888168078...

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/10059888168007...

Here's Dark Souls III which looks pretty great at 4K but unfortunately doesn't manage to run at a solid 60FPS on my GTX 1080:

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/84843325410407...

And here's an older game, The Witcher:

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/84843969116367...

Those hold up pretty well at 4K. In contrast I present to you Wolfenstein: The New Order which often looks very mediocre and yet manages to run worse than DOOM:

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/10059888168132...

Note the low polygon count on some of the models and the very low resolution of certain textures.

World of Warcraft: Everything looks the same, except text is prettier, item textures are more detailed, and spell icons suddenly have noticeable details. ("Hey that's a guy with a shield! I never noticed that!")

Dishonored, or other FPS-es: Far-away details suddenly are not lost in the haze of antialiasing. Wires and greebling on bridges are visible, and Look Good. HUDs and ammo displays seem to universally SUCK -- they are often not scaled in older games.

All the face textures in most older games end up supporting the higher detail textures, but it gets closer to the uncanny valley. (I notice this a lot in bioshock infinite.) I haven't re-played Wolfenstein.

It's much like looking at the same picture or webpage on a retina screen vs a non-retina screen. Text looks better, some other things look much the same. Anything vector-based (HUDs, etc) might look better.

Also, VR gaming can never have enough GPU power, because supersampling increases the fidelity by a lot (first hand experience)

You literally just argued why it is demonstrably true. If a Titan X, Ti, or standard 1080 can get to 4K 60 on max then buying an Titan X or Ti is nothing more than bragging rights.

Nobody is arguing that the Ti isn't more powerful, just that that power likely doesn't buy you anything specific, all you've done is show how that is true.

Most of them upgraded from the two earlier series, because to get 1440p gaming on the new 144Mhz monitors and with high settings on modern games you really need these new cards.

I had similar thoughts to your own re: the hype, until I saw the games. They are amazing - and I find VR boring after 10 minutes.

Both the games that are designed for the higher resolution, as well as the games that 'scale up' (can't recall which was which) are amazing. It's a completely different gaming experience and I understand now how people become obsessed with frame rates, specs, cards, the unveils, the news and rumors etc.

I was so close to pulling the trigger myself even though I don't have a PC. I could probably justify the $500 + $500 for card and monitor on an existing PC (or a Mac upgrade clears throat) but not an entirely new machine to play games.

If you haven't seen cutting edge PC gaming go and check it out somewhere or somehow. There was this entire revolution happening that I knew nothing about.

I also partly think this is cultural, as the original commenter noted.

Last year shortly after Overwatch came out I built a new gaming PC, featuring an i5 6600K, GTX 980Ti, and 27" 1080p 144Hz monitor. My buddies gave me some flack for it because even at the time (~June 2016) these were not the top of the line options. Nevermind the fact that even with all settings on Ultra I was able to consistently get 120-140 FPS, and with settings turned down to their most basic (a common practice among competitive gamers to decrease input latency) I never dropped below 144, even in the middle of the most dense game play.

Granted, I'm playing at 1080p, but I have yet to find a reason to want more than that, and the performance is where I want it to be, so I'm satisfied. Still, since I didn't trade hundreds of extra dollars for an i7 and a GTX 1080 I'm the noob.

> Granted, I'm playing at 1080p, but I have yet to find a reason to want more than that, and the performance is where I want it to be, so I'm satisfied. Still, since I didn't trade hundreds of extra dollars for an i7 and a GTX 1080 I'm the noob.

So what you're saying is that you find a value in playing at 144Hz over 60Hz, but object to people finding value in playing at a higher resolution? Someone else might argue that you paying to play at 144Hz is only cultural, while you know it's not.

Except I didn't object to anything. Me calling the wants and needs of the high performance PC culture "cultural" is not me being dismissive of what they happen to enjoy. Buy whatever you want. My whole point was that you can still have a professional quality (as in eSports level) experience with equipment that's not super-ultra-top-of-the-line-fantastic, saving you the super-ultra-top-of-the-line-fantastic premiums.

I'm not sure I understand. In this area (as opposed to functional clothing etc) it's very easy to measure real differences between a GTX 1070 and a 1080, and seeing pixels on more than 1080p when the screen is 27" and up.

That you can get a rags-to-riches story in eSports learning to play on a 5 year old computer is very true, but it doesn't detract from the fact that it's easier with better hardware.

If you don't feel it's worth it it's not worth it for you, but the difference is very real.

I'm satisfied, so really it's not my problem; it's the problem of the hardware manufacturers and game developers to make better products and do a better job of convincing me that a higher resolution is something I need, and so far they haven't.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

https://developer.nvidia.com/academic_gpu_seeding

[0] Caveat: I only ever run a single monitor on my gaming rigs. [1] Turns out I get VR sickness something fierce, so VR won't really be a driving need for me.

I'm glad NVidia chose to canibalize that market rather than artificially constrain the consumer series.

Wasn't it Intel that did this with the Celeron's at some point to preserve the higher-end workstation market for performance? iirc they underclocked some processors that outside of L1/L2 cache weren't so different to the much more expensive Pentium 4/Xeon or whatever.

Yes, there are problems where squeezing in a slightly larger model than 11gb would give slightly better results; but that size of problem also would generally require a lot of computing power, at that point you're not comparing specs of a single card but benchmarks and scaling for clusters of multi-gpu machines.

Not in SLI, no. SLI is a technology to have two GPUs act as one, by syncing among themselves. When you have two GPUs in SLI, your CPU program will generally see them as a single GPU with (almost) twice as many cores and twice as much bandwidth, but the same amount of memory.

For this to work, the GPUs need to be very similar (i.e. you can't SLI a TitanX and a 1080).

You can, however, put many[1] different GPUs in the same system, and then the onus is on the CPU program to properly manage and send work to each one separately. This is not SLI.

Generally, SLI is useful for games where the program assumes "a GPU" and sends work to it, and you want to have more performance than your single card can provide. For compute/ML, you're much better off just using each card directly.

[1]: Don't quote me on this, but I believe up to 8x is supported, above that is uncharted territory.

- Is it possible, officially supported way, to have both GTX and Quadro at the same time in the machine? I prefer GTX for rendering speed (Redshift renderer), but I need 10-bit output Quadro has which GTX doesn't have.

- Are there GTX (1080 TI in this case) cards out there which don't take double PCI space? I don't need multiple outputs and I can hook them up to the water block, if needed. I need as many cards in a single workstation case as possible for rendering. I've seen people saw/solder off stuff from cards in order to get at that, but not something I would do personally. Ideally I would prefer to have eight 1080 TIs in a single machine along with a single (modest) Quadro for 10-bit output to three monitors - are there even motherboards that could support that?

Note that I'm looking for workstation / deskside solution, not server 747-fan-sound-behemoths.

I would like 12-bit output, but that's not possible due to limitations in X11.

Interesting that you mention this as I've been searching for an answer before I build a ML rig and embark on learning it. Is there any benefit for ML performance if I put a GTX 970 and a 1080[ti|x] in the same machine? Just trying to figure out how to re-use spare parts.

Both have max 32 PCI Express lanes - so you can theoretically hang max 2 PCIx x16 cards off each CPU, but as few of the lanes is reserved for other peripherals, in 4GPU/CPU setup they will practically run at lower speeds, ie 8/8/4/4. However, using system with PCIe root complex [1] can improve the GPU<->GPU communication speed.

[1] https://www.microway.com/hpc-tech-tips/pci-express-root-comp...

so GPUs get better bandwidth (P2P etc).

NVIDIA said the 10-series can only do dual-SLI at most (two cards), nothing more.

In cases where you want faster cross-card transfers and are willing to mess with HW configurations, there's NVLINK.

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVLink

PR piece: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2014/11/14/what-is-nvlink/

IANAEE (I am not an electrical engineer).

Something nice about GPUs is that graphics rasterization is a very parallel problem. If you can handle thermals, power consumption, memory bandwidth, etc. that go with it, you can pretty much just add more of the parts that do the processing (in this case, CUDA cores - 3,584 of them) and get a more powerful GPU. A 1080 TI has 12 billion transistors. The 1080 had 7.2 billion. The 980 had 5.2 billion.

CPUs handle more branching problems, so it's harder to get improvements by just adding cores.

They're also smaller than the pre-1080 - 16nm down from 28nm, which lowers power consumption and therefore heat. It's a huge help and it's part of what allows them to just add more transistors in the first place - but in this area, GPUs will run into the same problems CPUs do. It's hard to shrink transistors.

Why not just write "I am not an electrical engineer"? Defeats the purpose if you still have to explain it.

It makes sense from the perspective of the fact that not all users may understand what the acronym means at first, and doing this is a great courtesy (also, it removes ambiguity in instances where you may be using an acronym similar or same as that for another domain - perhaps the domain of the forum or medium you are communicating on).

A considerable chunk of it is process improvements. Take a look at the chart at http://wccftech.com/nvidia-pascal-gpu-analysis/ that's about halfway down. nVidia's current generation GPUs are at 16nm. For comparison, Intel is at 14nm for their processors (though their 14nm process is better than most other chipmakers 14nm process) and hopes to start delivering 10nm this year, a year or so later than planned. So nVidia has a couple more process bumps to go, whenever they become affordable, and then they hit the wall like everyone else and have to focus mainly on architectural improvements for further performance gain.

CPUs are stuck at clocking 4Ghz and beyond, so graphics cards still have some headroom to grow into.

I'm locked in with a GSync monitor, and can't wait to replace my 2x 980s with this one. I'll still wait for Vega to come out, hopefully putting downward pressure on the pricing.

More details here: http://www.pcgamer.com/nvidias-geforce-gtx-1080-ti-is-finall...

I'm not looking for 4k support, but I am looking for dual monitor gaming on one while streaming video on the other support.

You'll probably wonder if your PC is still there, with noise levels likely to plummet. My 980 SLI certainly mounts a racket under gaming load.

Since I'm on the fast insider ring, I've tried both with and without game mode turned on (which supposedly now works), and both cause the TV stream to stutter. I don't even recall having this issue before they even announce game mode, but I can't be sure when I first had the problem, because I was also having physical internet issues in same time frame (thanks, Comcast).

Question: Ignoring sli, do you have different GTX versions plugged into your Motherboard for rendering? Like, 2 1060s and a 980Ti ?

Have you tried background task rendering via commandline, targeting the GPU as workers, but also using the CPU?

e.g. iF you have 2 graphics cards. Run 3 commandline blender render jobs (2GPU + 1 CPU).

As far as rendering from the command line with both the cpu and gpu its definitely possible albeit a little hackish. Rendering from the command line uses the cpu by default. To render using the gpu you have to pass a python script as an argument that changes the render device using the blender python api. Blender supports multiple gpus out of the box, so there is no reason to split them up into separate jobs (even different model gpus that don't support sli). You'd only need one job for the cpu and one for the gpu(s). The tricky part is making sure the cpu and gpu work on different things. For animations you'd probably want to change the render step option. Setting it to 2 would make blender render every other frame, so the cpu would work on the even number frames and the gpu would work on the odd frames. For single frame renders you could set the cycles seed value for both devices and then mix the two generated images together. Both the seed value and the step option can be set in the python script which means its pretty easy to automate the entire process. It definitly not trivial to get working so at some point you need to decide if the 0.1x speed bump from adding the cpu is worth the effort. Any new nvidia gpu is going to be worlds faster than whatever cpu you might be using.

See here for instructions on stacking cycles renders with different seed values:

http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/5017/stacking-cyc...

I don't believe this is still true. When I render from the command line, it will use the GPU if my user preferences are set to GPU. (confirmed by render timings)

I also have a secondary monitor hooked up, but it's a 2560x1440 monitor turned vertically. It works fine, but I forget if font scaling is applied across the board or just to each monitor.

The ideal 4k desktop monitor size is likely at least 36-38", but I'm not sure if those are economical yet or not.

At work I have a Dell 34" Ultrawide (3440x1440). Not quite 4k, but no scaling is needed, and it's a great monitor. The one downside is that it's just got the vertical height of a 2560x1440 monitor, so I kind of miss the vertical height of my home monitor at times, but I can easily have three or four files side by side in my IDE.

I also have an Ubuntu system at home hooked up to the 4k monitor at home and it works, but you'll possibly need to adjust font sizing in your apps. I haven't spent a ton of time recently with this system though.

For all of these monitors you want a video card with Displayport 1.2. You do not want to use HDMI because you will likely end up at 30hz and that is a horrid experience. HDMI 2.0 supports higher refresh rates, but having both a HDMI 2.0 port and monitor is pretty rare.

Anyways, probably too much info, but it was either do this or work on an annoying bug :)

I move my head around a lot more to focus on different parts of the screen. But I like that experience.

My vision isn't great - I'm near sighted with 20/200 vision. I can use the screen comfortably at the default scale with glasses, or with a small bump in text size without them.

I'm using OSX, with Atom & iTerm2 mostly. So that may have different font rendering than Windows.

On Windows, things have gotten better. I have two monitors of different physical sizes, one is at 125% scaling and the other is at 225% scaling. Windows resize as you move them between the monitors. Some old apps look like garbage, but it's really an issue of Windows developers wanting their app to look "special" instead of using standard components. The apps most affected are mostly useless, like tools for changing the LED color on your motherboard. Everything important works fine; web browsers, Windows explorer, Photoshop and friends, etc.

On a 24" 4k monitor, fonts look just amazing. It is spectacular how nice the shapes are and how smooth everything is. On a 32" monitor, it's business as usual, really. Not enough pixels to feel different from 100dpi that we've had for decades.

I am using a 2560x1440 at home with 100% scaling though.

I can say that it is pretty usable, but whenever moving windows between monitors you have to fully move them otherwise you will get weird results. Another caveat is that not all apps support 4k so I get really small icons in some applications such as greenshot.

All in all, it's decent and one can live with it.

YMMV if you're using it to display something other than a terminal or browser though, and I haven't tried using this display with Windows or Linux.

== gratuitous shilling below ==

For Christmas I got a new CPU/motherboard combo with a Samsung 960 EVO SSD, and it's ludicrously fast, decently cheap, and a noticeable improvement over my old (heh) SATA SSD.

http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/product/co...

Of course, I also have a GTX 1060 and an RX 480 for... other purposes.

Does it have to be NVIDIA?

Thanks to this, their hardware just works out of the box on any distribution that's not years behind.

As you don't even need to play games, I believe AMD is the better option here.

What would be the AMD equivalent to say a GeForce GTX950? Because this is the NVIDIA model that seems more than enough for my needs.

Thanks.

[1] https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/308602-onboard-gpu-enou... (note this is a HD4600. Newer Intel graphics is more powerful).

Guess I'll be boxing it back up and returning it, which I dislike doing.

Hope your return goes smoothly.

The Ryzen is a desktop chip, no ecc, half the memory busses, good at cache friendly stuff. No faster than last years CPUs on anything memory intensive.

Of course AMD's going to cherry pick the cache friendly benchmarks to brag about.

Of course AMD compares to the competing 8/16 chip, because for enthusiasts its just a much better deal. There are a lot of enthusiast gamers that do streaming or video editing for example.

Mainstream is probably better of with waiting for the 4C/8T Ryzen models and pairing that with a RX 480 or mid range Vega.

[1] https://www.computerbase.de/2017-02/cpu-skalierung-kerne-spi...

Really ? That contradicts everything I've ever heard and experienced myself.

At least until really recently, games where still massively dependent on the single threaded speed since all the graphic stuff was single threaded (because of DX<12 or OpenGL). Did this already change thanks to the newest graphic API (DX12 / Vulkan) ? Last time I checked, the adoption was still pretty low, it's really good news if the landscape is changing quickly. Or is it something else ?

  MSI and Gigabyte explicitly mention "(operate in non-ECC mode)". 
  Is that also true for Asrock AM4 motherboards? Or do they fully support ECC?

  From: ASRock Support <snip>
  Date: Mon, Feb 27, 2017 at 10:17 AM
  Hello,
  ASRock AM4 motherboards fully support ECC function.

This used to mean it was solely a motherboard feature, but starting about a decade ago, the memory controller was moved onto the CPU, so now it requires both CPU and motherboard support.

With widespread FreeSync availability (and better monitors), buying a Nvidia card is almost shooting oneself on their foot.

If all you want it for is gaming. If you also want to play around with machine learning or other GPGPU applications, then getting anything other than Nvidia is a bad idea, since that is what everyone uses and supports at the moment.

Not everything starts and ends with gaming in the high end computer space.

Not that it really helps with some games. Dota 2 is CPU bound for the moment, so if you play that a lot then maximizing single-threaded performance is probably the way to go.

Still, if I was buying a CPU today, I'd be cautious about going for less than quad core if I was interested in new AAA games.

1) Games are becoming less CPU-bound and are putting more work on the GPU, so the CPU matters less for gaming today than it used to.*

2) Vulkan and DirectX 12 make multi-threading easier and more efficient, so there is more incentive to adopt a parallel architecture with those APIs.

* Of course, I'm generalizing. Strategy games, for instance, are still very CPU-heavy and likely always will be.

Apparently a 1060 can already render a game like overwatch in 4k, so I think we're already there. You just need to find someone that will take 4k screens out of some phones and put them in a headset.

Ha! With what cable? 4K * 2 * 90hz blows way past display port (even DP1.3). If it was just a matter of gluing two android phones together it would be on shelves already...

And cancel the rest of my comment, I just found out there already are early 4K VR headsets.

https://vrworld.com/2016/11/10/hands-on-review-pimax-4k-vr-h...

http://360rumors.blogspot.com/2017/01/ces-2017-hands-on-with...

This particular device uses HDMI 1.4 and has a terrible framerate, but it's close to doing the right thing.

A single displayport 1.3 cable, supported by all recent GPUs, can push 4K at over 120Hz. Screens that use such data rates already exist too.

Anecdotally, this seemed to hold true for me, as I initially had dual 1080s in SLI and moved one of them to a second machine with no noticeable difference.

If your VR doesn't scale up its performance with resources, perhaps it's artificially throttling itself to a max framerate? Can't push pixels fast enough to the headset? waiting for sensor data from the headset before rendering?

This is a bit anecdotal, and I don't have expertise in the underlying technology, but I read mentions of requiring use of specific driver functionality to get better performance out of an SLI or dual GPU setup, via mechanisms like using a dedicated GPU to render each eye independently from each other instead of attempting to render both images together on a bridged virtual card. Allegedly, it's a bit of extra effort to do this (as they'd need to support both the AMD LiquidVR and Nvidia VRWorks) and would only benefit a minimal audience, so other aspects of the game get prioritized for development effort.

There are a couple of implementations that do. eg, Nvidia Funhouse VR was a showcase app of what implementing their SDK could do and they used it. I think Serious Sam VR used it, but I haven't tried that game..

Ever since I got a 144hz monitor, my 980ti struggles to do 144hz consistently at 2k. Even though I'm not doing VR, the extra frames are very noticeable, and its hard to go back to 60hz displays for things in 3D.

Plus you can use reprojection to get ultra-low motion latency.

Future headsets can use internal cameras to track the position of the pupils to figure out where that sweet spot needs to be every frame.

This was (going from memory here) due both to the much higher refresh rate that's required, to having to pre-render not only what the user sees but the whole 360 degree sphere they might look to around them at any moment, and perhaps some other VR-specific requirements that don't spring to mind at the moment.

Was I dreaming that I read this? Maybe a VR developer or someone more knowledgeable than I could comment?

The parent post is probably referring to foveated rendering - a research technique which uses eye-tracking to render most of the screen in low quality and areas being looked at in higher quality. (Real vision is perceived something like this - try reading text that isnt in the center of your gaze.) You can do foveated rendering better for a close screen so eventually it's possible that the quality of VR rendering will surpass regular rendering.

[1] docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SinglePassStereoRendering.html

Even better, if you render just a couple degrees extra you can double your framerate via interpolation. That way you can have 120Hz head-tracking while only having to render the world at 60Hz.

For proper quality in VR MSAA (and not other anti-aliasing methods) is highly recommended, which already makes this 4k. Not really, because MSAA isn't the same as actually rendering in higher resolution, but close. Or, "close" depending on your shaders and render pipeline configuration...

And by the way, about render pipeline: MSAA means you'll be using forward rendering, not deferred, which also limits you in terms of amount of light sources, for example (but makes transparent stuff much easier). But wait - may be this 1080Ti will allow us to implement MSAA on deferred renderers, finally giving us VR folks all their goodies, like HDR? Well, no - unless it becomes a minimum requirement, nobody's going to support two rendering paths in their games.

Also, you mention 360 degree - but who actually needs that? We only need to render what the player actually sees - and if we finally get stable eye direction detection, it means we will be able to decrease the angle even further, rendering all outside the focus zone in a much decreased resolution. The same goes for "per eye" as well: another usual optimization tactic is to render everything that's far away enough from a single camera, saving fill rate.

Oh, and by the way - we still didn't talk about what texture resolution do we want, what shader features do we want to use, what amount of objects in the scene and in camera, amount of triangles... But we would need to create a series of prototypes (gameplay and graphics at least) before answering these questions anyway.

... or are we there? I really have no idea how resolutions in VR work.

Or even better, how about if you had 3 1080 Ti's and 3 monitors, could the application/game just easily assign one GPU per monitor without having to resort to using SLI (which has such a bad reputation)? This would make things so simple, want an extra monitor or two? Just add a GPU to power them. I cant imagine that the coding for something like this would be anywhere near as complicated as SLI/Crossfire.

http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/2659-nvidia-gtx-titan-x...

See the Mirror's Edge and The Division benchmarks. Averages are (just) over 60, but there are dips below.

Personally, I think the best resolution for current-gen cards is 3440x1440. Should be rock solid 60+ fps in all games, and gives the benefit of being ultrawide.

* ASUS PG348Q (I own this one and I love it)

* Acer Predator X34 (My colleague 4 seats down has this one and she loves it).

I'd rather have 2560x1600 than 3440x1440, even though it's less pixels.

IMAX film format has a more immersive aspect ratio too, which is taller still at about 16:11.

I believe it's more like 2:1 (so even 16:9 isn't quite wide enough).

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=211Vdi4oC9o

The biggest limitation it seems is lack of displays because the gpu tech seems to be able to handle it.

Thats a 12600x6000 screen = 76megapixels. 4k is 8.3 megapixels, 8k is 33.2 megapixels. 8k/eye sounds about right.

[0] https://youtu.be/Qwh1LBzz3AU?t=23m39s

Here is an article on Nvidia's implementation: http://www.anandtech.com/show/10325/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1...

Once you have calculated the pixels for the left eye, those should be possible to re-use for the right eye, with some mapping. Certain pixels that are only visible to the right eye will have to be computed. I'm not sure if it's possible or if it even has a chance to be a performance gain (or indeed if this is actually how it already works). Doing the full job of 2x4k pixels for two eyes when they are a) almost identical for objects beyond a certain distance and b) quality is almost irrelevant for most pixels where the user isn't looking.

With foveal rendering and some shortcuts it should be possible to go faster with a 2x4k VR setup than for a regular 4k screen when you need to render every pixel perfectly because you don't know what's important/where the user is looking. Obviously one needs working eye tracking etc. first too...

Search for Monoscopic Far Field Rendering here: https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-4-15-release...

It seems logical that each surface/polygon could be rendered once, for the eye that can see the most of it (a left facing surface for the left eye, a right facing surface for the right eye), then squashed to fit the correct view for the other eye. Then, fill in all the blanks. Of course, the real algorithm would be more complicated than this, but it seems like at least some rendering could be saved this way.

Technically the lighting won't be right, but you don't have to use it for every polygon, and real-time 3D rendering is already all about making it 'good enough' to trick the human visual system, not to be mathematically accurate. If technically-accurate was what we insisted on, games would be 100x100 pixels at 15FPS as we'd insist on using photon mapping.

The field of view of current consumer HMDs is too narrow for there to be a big saving compared to the downside. As you move to larger FOV displays the brain will start doing more saccades (rapid step changes in viewpoint[1]) and the response time of the image generator and eye tracker is too slow to generate more pixels at the right spot. It's much more effective to just render the whole thing at the maximum possible resolution. There has been promising research on rendering at a reduced update rate or reduced geometry in low interest areas of the scene[2].

Also, eye tracking is a massive pain in the ass.

[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10991/ [2]https://kth.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:947325/FULLTEXT0...

4K is the real sweet spot for typical human vision.

Doom 4 performs unusually well on AMD cards compared to other games, so on average Vega is probably similar to a stock GTX1080. Which leaves them with no answer to the 1080ti :(

So far I do not believe they've shown enough for us to know it to be either way.