The developers behind Shadow of the Tomb Raider responded to concerns about the game running poorly on Nvidia’s just-revealed GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card with ray tracing enabled. While we were dazzled by the ray tracing support in the upcoming game during a demo showcased on Monday, August 20, the developers say it’s still a work in progress and the feature will be made available in a post-launch update.
“The Nvidia Ray Tracing technology currently being shown in Shadow of the Tomb Raider is an early work in progress version,” the developers state via Twitter. “As a result, different areas of the game have received different levels of polish while we work toward complete implementation of this new technology.”
During Nvidia’s big GeForce RTX 20 Series reveal, we viewed one specific crowded environment pulled from the game to show how ray tracing effects the way Nvidia’s hardware handles the area. The developers merely toggled the feature on and off to illustrate how ray tracing renders shadows, reflections and area illumination in real time differently than current rendering techniques.
Naturally, Nvidia and Eidos provided demos for the press to view after the presentation. The machine running the Tomb Raider demo included the just-revealed RTX 2080 TI while the game itself was only set to a 1,920 x 1,080 resolution. With FRAPS running in the background, ray tracing turned on and the game set to its highest detail settings, the framerate would fluctuate between 30 and 70 frames per second. You can view an off-screen video capture of the gameplay right here.
That fluctuating framerate for a game running in Full HD apparently generated concern. After all, the RTX 2080 Ti will have a starting price of $1,000 when it arrives later this month. It packs 4,352 CUDA cores with a maximum speed of 1,545MHz and 11GB of onboard GDDR6 memory clocked at 14Gbps. The framerate should be way higher than that, right?
In this case, no. As the developer points out, there is still work that needs to be done to get the ray tracing portion running on all cylinders. Despite the underlying hardware support from the card’s dedicated RT Cores and AI-focused Tensor Cores, optimizations still need to be made on the software side, hence the demo’s current framerate.
The big selling point with Nvidia’s new RTX 20 Series cards is the real-time ray tracing aspect. Typically, this rendering process takes high amounts of computing power and long wait times to render each frame, but the resulting scene can be photo-realistic. While a single graphics card still can’t produce that level of output in real time, Nvidia provides a “cheat” that involves artificial intelligence so we’re not waiting another 10 years.
Given real-time ray tracing is new to PC gaming, it’s a work in progress. The cards aren’t available nor is the content to support their ray tracing aspect. The best way to gauge performance is to wait and see both in action when they’re actually available rather than jump to conclusions based on pre-release demos.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.