'We launched ray tracing and DLSS to a thud' reveals senior Nvidia suit reminiscing on the troubled launch of Nvidia's first RTX GPUs
Sometimes it feels like Nvidia's dominance is so great, the company couldn't possibly care or even notice what we tiny fleas of PC gaming think. So, it's intriguing to find a senior Nvidia suit observing that the RTX 20 series of graphics cards launched to a «thud». Maybe Nvidia does see us after all.
More specifically, senior Nvidia VP Jeff Fisher says that Nvidia, «launched ray tracing and DLSS to a thud.» It was, of course, the RTX 20 family released in September 2018 that introduced those technologies.
This revelation comes from the same new book on Nvidia, The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant by Tae Kim, as the news that CEO Jensen Huang dreamt up DLSS upscaling just two weeks before it was announced but that it took six years to train up the AI model that made frame generation possible.
Kim explains that, «the problem was the GeForce RTX offered negligible gains in frame-rate performance over the previous-generation Pascal cards. And when gamers turned on ray tracing, which was supposed to be the killer new feature, the RTX cards suffered a 25 percent drop in frame rate. DLSS performed marginally better. When enabled, it allowed cards to run about 40 percent faster than Pascal, but at a noticeable loss of image quality.» Ouch.
The book was written with widespread cooperation from Nvidia, including access to multiple senior Nvidia figures and Jensen Huang himself. So, while it's not Nvidia itself describing the RTX 20's performance gains as negligible, decrying the frame rate drop due to ray tracing or noting the poor image quality of early DLSS upscaling algorithms, these are sentiments that originate very close to the company.
They also make for uncomfortable reading in the context of Nvidia's very latest. RTX 50 GPUs, like the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080. The latter in particular brings very little inherent performance advantages over its RTX 4080 and 4080 Super predecessors. According to official specifications from Nvidia, the same looks
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