NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti performs abysmally in Watch Dogs Legion demo: preview locked to 1080p/30 FPS with ray-tracing enabled

[Redaktion]

NVIDIA's top-end Turing card, the US$1400 GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, couldn't even run Ubisoft's Watch Dogs Legion at 1080p/60 FPS with ray-tracing effects turned on. This leads to speculation that users might need Ampere or Big Navi cards to properly experience ray-tracing in next-generation titles.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-RTX-2080-Ti-performs-abysmally-in-Watch-Dogs-Legion-demo-preview-locked-to-1080p-30-FPS-with-ray-tracing-enabled.481178.0.html

[S.Yu]

...This sounds more like abysmal optimization by the developers. That screenshot looks nice but most certainly not 30fps 1080P on RTX2080Ti nice. It's not that big of an improvement.

[kk]

So many wrong takes in this article.

First, the RT setting was set to Ultra, so of course it's extremly demanding. It should be much more performant at lower settings with minimal visual impact, so Turing won't get obsolete any time soon. The ability to accelerate DXR is something that is impossible to get obsolete.

Second, this is a Ubisoft game, they have always extremly demanding Ultra settings, it's nothing new for them and their games are not optimized well most of the time. This game still looks like a mid-current gen game and is no indication of how a next gen title would perform. Everything, I repeat, everything about this game is 100% current gen, the only exception are the RT reflections.

And lastly, it's completely unreasonable to expect a 4x RT improvement in Ampere, because there is a lot more to RT performance than just intersection tests and RT  is heavily limited by shader performance, so in theory you would need 4x the shader performance as well to get to that RT performance. 16K Shader cores or extremly high frequencies say hello.  I would expect such a professional hardware website like yours to know how Raytracing is done, but it seems like I was wrong.

[Barry Pinches]

The issue is until Devs start using DX12 Ultimate which is exposes features like Mesh shading, variable rate shading and sampler feedback streaming. Games using RT Raytracing will always be very demanding on the hardware. This game has been in development for sometime so won't be built around the new API, we have seen a** creed Valhalla is still DX11 based

The forthcoming XSX show should be the one to watch as the first party XSX will be using this tech.

[Grusto]

Ray tracing is just a waiste of time and resources (I own a 2080ti)...it is not a game changer at all and devs should focus instead on meaningful things like character animation, environment destruction/interaction, online multi-player innovation, etc.

[Spunjji]

First-gen RT tech sucks, no big surprises there.

[Ritvij]

This game looks highly downgraded compared to watch dogs 2 and watch dogs 1...The sky and environment looks like a 10 year old game. The city and map is also very small compared to gta franchise and the water is looking like very bad like just cause 3...After such a downgrade the game is not optimised.. Extremely disappointed.

[Robert Rose]

Really? Two orders of magnitude? Do you know what an order of magnitude is? You're saying that you get 1000x less performance.

[S.Yu]

Really? Two orders of magnitude? Do you know what an order of magnitude is? You're saying that you get 1000x less performance.

lmfao over this comment!!
First, you meant 100x less, because an order of magnitude is 10 times in multiplication or division.
Second, there is generally no such thing as 100x less, which leaves -99x, the correct phrasing is 99% less.