nVidia formally announced their new graphics cards last night, and (I think) popped £1000 for a new consumer graphics card for the first time in an initial offering. Most of the initial feedback I've seen so far is along the lines of "they can fuck off" with regards to the prices.
The biggie new toy is Ray-Tracing, and looking at the demos (the launch trailer, and the Star Wars stuff they released a while ago) it does look very pretty...obviously, you'll need to know exactly what hardware it's running on, and there will undoubtedly be a lot of benchmarking done when these things are in the wild (and how long before someone bolts 4 of the 2080Ti's into a monster rig, only to demonstrate that 4xSli is still not that well supported in nearly all game engines). My own gut feeling is that the ray-tracing will not be fantastically well supported until the main game engines (Unreal, Unity etc etc) build in support, and (probably more importantly) there are consoles on the market that have similar capabilities. Most big games these days are developed with a heavy emphasis on the console market (a more stable, more profitable segment), and I struggle to see developers committing resources to using these new features until they can be utilised across multiple platforms. You also have to look at the current trends in gaming, which is a big emphasis on smaller, independent development teams, "early access" and retro-feel.
Pre-orders for the top-end RTX2080Ti are seemingly just over the £1000 mark, and you'll need to build that into a machine that can make use of it (it would be useless to my setup (admittedly a very niche edge-case), which is CPU-limited in most circumstances...to the point where I get very similar performance at 1080p and 4k in most gaming benchmarks).
It might be a defib for VR, which is (as far as I can ascertain) dead in it's curent incarnation, due to a lack of development support, and being right on the limit of providing a useable experiance. The new cards support a single connection solution (similar to Thunderbolt 3) to provide data and power to VR set-ups, limited the amount of cables. The bigger umph the cards can throw out can also help improve the resolution and frame rate that the headsets can generate, though again you'll need VR hardware to catch up with this, and I suspect a lot of potential early adopters hae been burnt by the current VR hardware generation...
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There is also a lot of "wait and see" stuff circulating around these cards since the focus of nvidia is almost exclusively on the raytracing and using that to measure the performance there have been some questions about what the normal non-raytracing performance of these things is. Sure it might absolutely destroy a titan in a realtime raytracing benchmark but then the
It strikes me that the raytracing stuff could end up being like the very early geforce the first one when they switched to hardware transform and lighting. Without support for that it was a slower card than the previous ones it was only as engines and games supported hardware transform and lighting that the thing started to show a lead over the previous stuff.
I guess since there is essentially no competition in the graphics market nvidia basically run the whole thing at this point they can entertain what ever wild fantasy features they feel like adding to extract more money out of people's wallets.
Once these cards get into the wild we'll have a better idea of their real world capabilities.
The boost in performance for things like VR would be nice maybe see some increased resolutions out there. I know there is a few headsets on the horizon that will need much higher performance than is currently feasible in current graphics cards the 8k based devices. The cable thing is a nice quality of life improvement although already we are seeing a shift towards wireless solutions which is a much better way to do it assuming it can cut the mustard lag wise. Vive just announced the price and release date ($299 and end of september respectively) of their intel designed wigig based wireless system for the vive and vive pro.