J7SC_Orion

...8K 240 Hz 48 inch OLED, or bust

...below, some more OLED HDR eye candy I can recommend... But first, a quick 'FYI'...this may not be news to most folks, but the super-thin LG OLED panels not only have a clear protective foil on the front, but also the rear which definitely also has to come off for better heat dissipation...took me a couple of weeks to figure that out (and who reads the manual anyways)

Titan AdaL 48 GB HBM3... for left kidney

...some soothing 'weekend-brunch' food ...tasted better than it was visually arranged (in a hurry & hungry)

Were it not for the high price of HBM/3, it would look great on some gaming setups... However, at least for now, this is more likely for the enterprise / AI crowd (currently NV Hopper and AMD, Intel competing products and their successors) as they all seem to move towards a sort of 'ersatz' compute in memory by having memory as close to the compute die as possible.

...yup, the same happened to me as well at OCN...

...apart from the crypto issues, there is also the recent Covid situation which resulted in a lot of folks upgrading their home systems and/or components. That said, NVidia's real money maker is the enterprise / AI segment. Still, the RTX 4K release has been a bit weird - 4090 release prices were oriented on the 3090 Ti MSRP (before its price crash and subsequent inventory glut), and the 4090s very quickly sold out after release. IMO, the 4090 had raised expectations for the whole RTX 4K line re. price/performance, yet the debacle with the two 4080s (one since rebranded as 4070 Ti) and their biggish performance gap to the 4090 didn't help. Given some of NVidia's, uhm, business practices, a fair number of reviewers also were ready to pounce... I just checked, and my 4090 AIB model is still at the same price (~US$1,619) at the same retailer as it was last October, but some of the more expensive / 'premium' 4090s and most 4080s seem to experience some price drops, and the OP is obviously about the just-released 4070 price drops as well. Re. the whole RTX 4K palette in general, the line's DLSS3 / FrameGen / NVReflex make a far bigger difference (where available in apps) than most folks think. It actually delayed my mobo / CPU / RAM upgrade from a Ryzen 5950X / Asus DarkH setup, it is that good...about 80% of my admittedly smallish time budget for games involves DLSS3 / FrameGen / NVReflex apps, and I play exclusively at 4K.

...and at the other end of the scale, there's also the 4060 Ti waiting in the wings on the lower end...some discussion of that one as well as the 4070 price drops along your OP here

NVidia seems to go overboard with market-segmentation this time around; the RTX 4090 released first generated a lot expectations for the rest of the AdaL line-up...seems that even the 4080s aren't selling like hot cakes. Ultimately, this may mean that NVidia will look for additional revenues at the other end of the $-scale, earlier, ie. 4090 Ti/Titan Ada

...some more feedback and examples from the mod, by GN (time-stamped)

Is that a similar / same mod described above > here . ...haven't bothered with the 6900XT work system yet since the other one runs w/ the 4090...still might try it for the 6900XT when I have more time

...I usually leave the wallpaper engine running after about 10 min of idle, never mind that when I consciously leave the system alone - say lunch - I switch it over to the 4K television-over-IP box anyway. --- On an unrelated note, we were at a couple of big box stores (+ specialized computer chains) over the last few business days for other purchases. Needless to add that I steal myself away every time to look at the television and monitor displays...I saw LG C2, 3 and G3 and the respective and competing Samsung and Sony models - but never at the same height and/or next to each other...this is very annoying for anyone who would like a head-to-head comp with the same inputs and settings . For now, I am not interested the replace the C1 / 48 as it still awes me more than ever (even with nits turned down, per above), but the master-bedroom oldie IPS-HDR tv might need an upgrade over the next year or so... It is connected to a 3090 on its own. I've looked at all kinds of synthetic tv/monitor benchmarks, but they don't really do it for me...I like to see at least three options right next to each other with the same input settings...but apparently, that is too much to ask.

...lunch on the run --- wholegrain spaghetti w/salsa and country egg, fresh mushrooms, prosciutto

Some more (RTX 4090) path-tracing, with some emphasis on light reflections. Originals are in 4K Ultra setting with DLSS 3 Quality / FrameGen / NVR and RTX Overdrive (= path tracing); screenshots below are the shrunk .jpg versions but they should still get enough detail across.

...this discussion of a mod could be useful for RTX2K, 3K and RDNA2 with CP2077 Overdrive enabled @bonami2and @Sir Beregond might les us know how well it works. ...and also Digital Foundry's intro regarding CP2077 path tracing from last week which I had posted then in another forum/thread.

...after all that Cyberpunking, back to my other visual fav which looks stunning on the OLED FS2020, dawn over the Andes ...and afterwards, another great YT vid for OLED:

...some early dawn flying over the highest part of the Andes . The 4090 throttled to 70% (out of 121%) power limit, throttled GPU core voltage and only used a mild oc to get 'down to' ~ 400 W....which still is > 120 fps average at 4K, thanks to DLSS3 / FrameGen/ NVR...maxed oc and power limit gets into the high 500 W range in FS2020 but that makes no sense with the OLED 120Hz 4K. Original screenshots at 4K / png

...yeah, path tracing is pretty resource-intensive which is why DLSS3 + FrameGen + NVReflex are so important...I believe that all RTX4xxx can employ those techniques, not just a 4090, but it is probably better to use a 4089 or 4090 for path tracing on 4K settings. On another note, I mentioned the Unreal 5.x engine above - the demos I have seen are fantastic (as one would expect for demos), but perhaps it can also get to a form of path tracing in a more resource-efficient way; we'll see. Somewhat related, I would love to see non-DX drivers such as Vulkan to adopt similar tech and features - perhaps I am 'dreaming in technicolor', but a nice Linux-based system able to run major titles natively with the same eye candy as DX would be, well, a dream...

Custom cooling summary: All tubing is 1/2 x 3/4 and the quick-disconnects are all Koolance QD4s

...obviously, I like the upper screenshot of GT7 better. As to FS2020, it has been steadily improving - and I am surprised at the detail when photogrammetry kicks in. Using the Volocopter in a place like New York City and landing in the streets is a good way to get much closer to the buildings, and only then can you see that it is 'not real'. On another note, I using the new path-tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 > very nice, but at a huge resource costs (Watts, fps). I wonder if we ever get path tracing in FS 2020; for now I think that few if any GPUs could run full path tracing in FS 2020 given all the light reflections and fast-changing angles.

ahem ? That first segment pilot of the A380 flies like I do

Here are some of my fav screenshots with the new path traced tech. These are the original size (4K) and .png to try to get some visual fidelity across...later on, I will use smaller .jpg conversions. --- It would be foolish to judge path tracing on the basis of just one game, but it clearly does show tremendous promise, albeit at a very high resource cost...if you have a system you use for 4K and can get decent fps and frame times at DLSS 2, 3 Quality or FSR 2, you are not missing out that much yet compared to the full-on path tracing, but if you can run path tracing with your RTX 4xxx (and later gens), you're in for a treat, with more to come...

Cyberpunk 2077 has one of the best implementations of ray tracing in video games, and it has now added path tracing as well (currently only for NVidia RTX 4xxx). Below is a comparison for 4K ultra / DLSS 3 'Quality'/ FrameGen / NVReflex on my RTX 4090, clocked fairly high. On the left is the RTX Psycho' setting (RTX Ultra and 'Psycho' are fairly close in visual fidelity and fps), on the right is RTX 'Overdrive' that incorporates path tracing...all other settings and oc-profiles are the same. Normally, I restrict game play to the low-to-mid 400 W range and use a less aggressive oc profile, but I also wanted to see how the power consumption differed with the new path tracing using the same build-in benchmark... Path tracing does add some extra quality in many scenes, but it is not quite dramatic enough (yet) IMO, to account for or a loss of ~50 fps when compared to the RTX Ultra or Psycho. In fairness, 1.) it is still a 'Technology Preview', and... ...2.) in some scenes, it becomes quite magical and outright jaw dropping, especially when viewed on a big OLED ...that tech being discussed with @Sir Beregond @bonami2 and many other graphics aficionados > here

Path tracing certainly seems to be an exciting technology on the way to more 'real' imaging of how we see the world. Not all that long ago, 'video games' looked something like this... ...many eons and new graphics technologies later, we finally arrived at more wide-spread use of 'ray tracing' around 2018/19. For example, all my fav games have some sort of ray tracing now, though there are still a lot of other nice games out there that do not make any or much use of ray tracing. Still, path tracing could shape up to be a fairly big thing, if one is to believe NVidia which certainly does have 'influence' in the graphics market (side bar: I own both AMD and NVidia GPUs...). Then there is the upcoming Unreal 5.x, with some sample vids in > this thread Whether path tracing will get a bigger foothold in the future also depends in part on AI upscaling such as DLSS 2/3/X and also AMD's and Intel's similar technologies - AMD's FSR 2.1 for example is also quite impressive already...in any case, running 4K 'native' with full ray tracing (never mind path tracing) but without any sort of decent upscaling tech is not a fun experience, IMO.

I am starting this thread to dive deeper into path tracing. I will add some of my own results (quantitative and qualitative) in subsequent posts, but here is a very good video by Gamers Nexus to introduce path tracing and its 'costs' in Cyberpunk 2077 / patch 1.62