The Nvidia Flagships: RTX family graphics cards.

This isn’t a buying guide for the new RTX graphics cards. This is just my take on them and how they perform compared to their previous iteration and their ancestors.

RTX, are they good or are they bad?

Short answer: They’re great, if you have deep pockets.

Long answer: RTX graphics cards have a new selling point along with hardware upgrades: real time ray-tracing. In simple terms: this means that the graphics cards have a new piece of hardware inside of them that allows chip to calculate light placement better in video playbacks, rendering, and video games.

Remember that the whole idea so far is the light. The left looks very aggressive when it comes to the shade underneath the sphere and the side facing away from the light source. On the other hand, the right looks to be a big improvement on how much it looks (or doesn’t) like a computer animation with graphics generated by a discrete graphics card.

You may be thinking now: Oh that’s it? I’m gonna shell out $1,199.00 on an “upgraded graphics card by going off of one still image I saw on some guy’s blog?

Answer: Nah, I’m not done yet. And I’m not trying to convince you to buy it, you’re the one who considered it.

RTX 20 series graphics cards have this new technology that allows ALL pictures, in every frame that is only limited by the refresh rate of your display and the thermals of the chip. Yes, I said thermals.

Before I start listing everything (1.5 things) wrong with the new chips, let me finish.

To me what technology, especially flagships, does is more important than the hardware inside of it, although I could go into it if it was necessary.

According to people who have bench-marked the new GPUs against the former best in class chips, they have noticed a significant increase in power.

In case you may not know, a bench-mark is a test that a program that can calculate the performance of the tech being tested. This program in particular tests frame rate, frame rate drops in high settings all in 4k.

High settings and 4k is now an expectation for high end graphics cards. As you can see, the RTX 20 series blow the GTX 10 series out of the water with just the boost in hardware alone.

Now, what I meant by thermals.

I don’t mean thermals as in the card overheats. The GTX 10 series graphics cards where a blower style GPU. meaning that they drew air from the inside of the case and blew it out. Sounds logical.

Although Nvidia took a couple steps back by reintroducing fan style GPUs to a new and “improved” chip costing over a thousand dollars.

This isn’t a big deal. Cooling is a lot more advanced than it once was. All-in-one cooling solutions for CPUs were not nearly as popular a couple years ago as they are today. Also the new cards look really cool.