Nvidia GeForce Special Event live report

Hello and welcome to Digital Foundry's coverage of the Nvidia GeForce Special Event! I'm Will Judd, the fifth Beatle of Digital Foundry, and I'm joined today by my #friendandcolleague Alex Battaglia.

Hello there people of the internet! I will be following the livestream here with my #friendandcolleague Will Judd! Hopefully posting meaningful insight alongside ticker-style bulletins.

Leolian: Anyone in the market for a kidney?

Let's hope that it won't be that expensive! Maybe you'll only have to pay a pound of flesh.

barchetta: I have 2 kids, xbox and PS literate, house trained and good for co-op FIFA, COD, Fortnite etc. Will swap for GTX 3080 or equivalent.

Seems like a good deal!

Cyclone: Wouldn't mind a reasonably priced 3050/3050 Ti. My 1050 Ti is getting a bit long in the tooth, and Cyberpunk 2077 is only two and a half months away.

It'll be interesting to see how Nvidia handle this! Normally we see mid-range and high-end cards first, but never say never...

JDSP: If they release a 2080ti equiv for £700-800 that will be the card I'll buy, I just need HDMI 2.1 a little uplift in perf for 4k 60

I'm waiting for HDMI 2.1 too! I need something to go along with my LG B9... cough cough /articles/digitalfoundry-best-4k-tvs-for-hdr-gaming-7009

Fixxxer: Hopefully graphics card technology has moved on sufficiently that one of these cards will finally be a worthwhile upgrade from my GTX 570. But it's certainly not happened to date.

I think a lot of people are in the same boat! The GTX 970 was such a beast.

I also used to have a Titan X Maxwell before joining DF - pretty cool card.

Wow, a Titan X! Not bad Alex - I think the coolest GPU setup I had before joining DF was a pair of HD 6950s in Crossfire, which I bought with my first paycheck after getting a job! They didn't scale well, sadly, but it felt insane to run Battlefield 3 at 2560 by 1440!

tilmitderbrill: The real question is: Will we see Jensen pull out the line-up out of his oven in the kitchen?

If we don't get some more oven shots, we'll be soundly disappointed.

judderman1: Are we expecting pricing today? What, historically do Nvidia say about price at these types of reveal?

Nice name, Judderman! I think pricing today sounds likely - this isn't a console reveal, after all ;-)

judderman1: Are we expecting pricing today? What, historically do Nvidia say about price at these types of reveal?

I would expect pricing

Alex is really excited about pricing.

rondn: Is something like this going to show up on your channel later in video form? Like with the console reveals etc?

We'll definitely have some video content, so stay tuned.

Balu2222: What do you think about the 3x8-pin cards?

Great for those who want to do heavy overclocking and need stable power/high gain

Whoop, someone just moved the countdown text out of the way for a few seconds. It's really live, then. 12 minutes to go!

Just a few minutes here...

Hi everyone - I've been contributing to Eurogamer since 2007 and yet this is the first live text I've ever done. I'm really looking forwards to this one!

Leather Jacket or Baking Oven? Which one do we get?

The kitchen is back! As is the leather jacket.

tilmitderbrill: Sick nVidia Main theme!

the nv house band

Can I get an Inception horn when the perf boost is revealed?

Does that slide have RT reflections, Alex?

"Digital Foundry streams to put their heads in virtual toilets and gaze at the pixels inside."

John Linneman's most played game of 2018,2019, and 2020 getting RT!

RTX-enabled flossing. My word.

Finally, I can finally get out of Wood League in Valorant!

Ooooh, new displays. Neat.

Valorant is one of the few games that you really can probably get 360 fps in a rather stable way. Learning it was Unreal Engine 4... floored me.

I've got to admit, these RTX streaming apps are rather impressive. RTX Voice, I use it all the time. It's been a game changer for John and his oven-like office that requires full-on AC.

Finally, my collection of mechanical keyboards will finally be out of sight during Zoom meetings.

Are they using AI to blur that logo on the gaming chair?

There is some utility in that tracking feature for a 4K camera feed...

I am a big fan of the post-process motion blur it can manage :)

I hope we get RTX marbles as an .exe at some point.

Whoa that is incredibly cool. And creepy.

I always need more Vespene Gas.

Can we sort out a neural network to do the pixel counting? You've no idea what a time sink that is... :/

ML driven animation is gonna be a big thing in a few years I imagine. Offline maybe at first, but then real time.

Oh my, that's our name up there.

We've been tracking the progress of DLSS over the last couple of years and it's evolved into something very special. Death Stranding at 4K60 on an RTX 2060 is possible.

Interesting that Nvidia are referencing the benchmarks used by Microsoft in the Hot Chips presentation.

They just used the xbox metric there, RTX Turing in full form is 34 TFlops equivalent there. Very interesting.

OK, did everyone write down those numbers? We'll be testing you later!

Well, there it is. Nvidia got a lot of heat for investing in RT and tensor cores - and with Ampere they're literally doubling down on them.

RT being 58 equivalent TFs is huge. Big RT performance upgrade.

neilka: This Marbles Avengers game isn't what I was expecting

It sure is pretty, though.

This is the weirdest ASMR I've ever watched.

You've got to hand it to Nvidia - we need the software support of course, but there's an actual vision for next-gen graphics here.

I think Alex has passed out from ray overload.

This sounds an awful lot like what Microsoft were talking about...

So using that metric that MS made which NV quotes here: Xbox Series X is 13 equivalent TFs for Rt HW accelleration. Full turing is 34. Full Ampere is 58.

C Y B E R P U N K

Oh I am quaking - cyberpunk time

I need this trailer in 8K, stat

Is this the real next-gen killer app?

It's happening...!

Game on.

Snazzy.

19Gbps GDDR6 confirmed.

Structural sparsity - that is new

Some sort of real time ML thing, there was a patch being made for Wolfenstein Youngblood that referenced that I think!

dfunked09: If 3080 is their flagship then what on earth is the 3090?...

Good question! I guess it's more like a Titan

Interesting that the focus is on 3080 when we know there's a 3090...

IT WAS BEHIND THE SPATULAS THE WHOLE TIME

lol that thing of spatulas

I'm loving the Star Trek-level techno-babble. Of course, nothing ever surpassed Lt Commander Data's multi-modal reflection sorting.

samjones: Best of Both Worlds

a great ep of TNG

Pricing, guys. Faster than 2080 Ti for $699.

$700. September 17th.

Well how about 499? That is... interesting

They are aiming for the pascal audience - which at this point in time might have had a GPU for around 4 years.

Sooooo, by extension is a prospective RTX 3060 as fast as RTX 2080? I've been using one of those a lot recently and it still has a ton to offer, especially in DLSS-enabled titles.

Looks like RT shadows here, perhaps reflections?

Wait - are we getting a 3090 reveal?

Been baking for a few years

It's T H I C C

"a silencer" hahaha

Starting at 1499 as per that slide

8K. Get out of here, Nvidia.

Native 8k is dumb as heck. But reconstructed 8K makes a lot of sense. Now 8K TVs need to actually be good though

I'm guessing some kind of more intensive DLSS algorithm?

Damn, this means I gotta find a good 8K TV recommendation now...

I think 3090 is based on the same core processor as 3080 - so I'm kinda curious if the 3080 can also deliver that 8K experience.

21 years of GPU development - so much has happened.

Note: both Control and Youngblood feature DLSS 2.0, so no surprise that they're good candidates for 8K!

Can I get a special edition spatula as a pre-order bonus?

OK, with that supremely next-gen speech it looks like we're done!

Expect DF coverage... shortly.

We have specs, we have bold performance claims and crucially we have prices. The demos were impressive and they full feature support on what must surely be the year's biggest game. This next-gen battle just took on another interesting dimension.

A lot to digest here from the presentation: RT performance is a big deal, the HW accellerated support for Directstorage API bringing PC memory architecture closer to that found in next gen consoles (will RTX 2XXX support be there?), DLSS mentioned the entire time with NV pushing it hard.

jaju123: Why is RDNA2 so missing in action?

This is an interesting question... I mean, I've seen RDNA2 silicon at Microsoft six months ago.

By that I mean Xbox Series X, of course.

NULL-PTR: @jaju123 Not as much missing in action but wasn't supposed to be launched until later this year. AMD clearly learned it's lesson to not just paper launch hardware and pretend that it's been launched proper.

Yup, and also the competitive landscape vs Nvidia means it makes sense to play your cards close to your chest.

Thanks for joining us everyone! We've just posted our recap of the event, so do check that out, and stay tuned for more coverage coming soon.

Thanks for watching everyone! So much to think about here!