The new Port Royal benchmark is beautiful, but you really have to have TWO Geforce RTX 2080Ti graphics cards to appreciate it. It is worth noting that the Port Royal benchmark does not run at 4K. I’ve heard reports that it runs at 1440p, but it looks terrible enough that I feel it might even be dialed back to 1080p. On my watercooled. overclocked RTX 2080ti it averages about 35fps. If you force it to run at 4k, it will barely pass 15fps and is totally unwatchable.
This benchmark shows us a glimpse into what the future of computer games might look like, however, it still requires us to use imagination as it proves that the current generation of Geforce RTX 2000 series cards are just not up to the task quite yet. Even if I had spent the $3000 required to get TWO of the best cards on the market, i would still only be achieving ~35fps at 4K for this scene.
We have come a long way, but, clearly, we still have another decade to go before all these graphical goodies will truly come to fruition. I figure we need several generations of graphics cards upgrades to do what developers truly want to do with Raytracing. I figure this:
1) Power needs to double to satisfy 4K customers.
2) Most current games only use raytracing for one effect. Reflections, refractions, shadows, global immumination. The power of these cards probably needs to double 3 more times if games are to take advantage of all 4 of these effects.
That’s 4 generations of graphics cards. Figure an average of 2-2.5 years in between generations… 10 years… approximately.
Hopefully old age doesn’t catch up to me before then. Happy raytracing, everyone!
