For video professionals doing ray tracing this upgrade would likely be a must-have. This assumes the improvement (i.e. 6x or anything in that ballpark) is real and their software supports it... if so, hell, nVidia could double or triple the price of the card and it would still make sense for them. nVidia is just cashing in on a lack of any real competition at the high-end currently... hopefully we'll see AMD get back in the game at some point re: GPUs.
Not true. There is (or at least until now, has never been) a reason for video or 3D professionals in the "Arts" to use anything but GTX cards. 3D CAD and AI professionals on the other hand will profit from the Quadro cards.
The main difference between Quadro and GTX were amount of memory, clock speed, longevity and drivers.
GTX are faster clocked but relatively less reliable.
GTX are game optimized, Quadro drivers are CAD optimized (extremely so)
GTX are much cheaper, but may have a shorter lifetime (but who runs a render farm on 10 year old cards...)
GTX offer very fast single precision calculations, Quadro single and double. Almost all 3D rendering is done single precision.
It's a spectrum. Not every professional wants and/or can afford the top end cards. Many professionals (i.e. those who make money doing a thing) have been using high-end gaming cards for work pretty much since they existed. There's also the long-running debate as to the actual value of the 'pro' line of video cards for non-mission critical purposes (enough of one that nVidia in their license prohibited the use of gaming cards in servers with the odd exception of crypto mining)
But they are the low-to-mid segment of professionals doing weddings and local business presentations with median income around $50k. The ones doing interesting work can't live without real 10-bit HDR on calibrated 4k screens for realistic printing/video projections, without proper 5k+ RAW cameras and top-end lens etc. and those are extremely expensive.
Every self-declared "professional" I've met spent most of their time unproductively fiddling with their equipment.
While a select few can push the envelope with technology alone, a bit of talent seems to easily compensate for almost any technological limitations. The "latest and greatest" is the easy route to mediocracy.
That's been true for all creative disciplines: from photography to writing to animation. There might even be a mechanism, where inferior (or at least different) tools may be a restriction that nurtures creativity, or at least guarantees results that are easily distinguished from the rest of the market.
>But they are the low-to-mid segment of professionals doing weddings and local business presentations with median income around $50k
Yeah, tell that to the Octane Render community. There's plenty of incredible starving artists using consumer GPUs in their workflow to render top-notch work.
These expensive items are actually useful equipment for video production, but it doesn't mean a video card has the same importance. Who cares about slightly longer rendering times for rarely used special effects?
Isn't this just an implementation of Microsoft's DirectX Raytracing API?
If so, only video games are really going to use that API. I doubt that a software renderer (or CUDA-renderer) would leave raytracing / light calculations to a 3rd party.
There's a rumor that Dinsey bought a bunch of real-time raytracing equipment for their theme parks (the Star Wars section in Disney World). So high-quality realtime computation is needed for high-tech entertainment / theme parks / etc. etc. So there's definitely a market, even if gamers don't buy in.
Do you have a link of one of these raytracing companies explaining how they plan to use NVidia's RTX cards for this sort of thing?
As far as I'm aware, the only API to access these RTX raytracing cores is through the DirectX12 Raytracing API. I did a quick check on Khronos, but it doesn't seem like they have anything ready for OpenGL or Vulkan.
Alternatively, maybe NVidia is opening up a new Raytracing API to access the hardware. But I didn't see any information on that either.
