> But why do reviewers have to do the job of Nvidia's marketing department?
Are you suggesting you would rather read reviews of Nvidia products that are written by Nvidia, and you would trust them more than 3rd party reviews?
> I don't understand Nvidia's marketing at all.
Do read @TomVDBs comments; this isn't Nvidia, this is the industry-wide marketing terminology.
Cores are important to developers, so what you're talking about is that some of the marketing is (unsurprisingly) not targeted for you. If you care most about Blender and games, you should definitely seek out the benchmarks for Blender and the games you play. Even if you understood exactly what cores are, that wouldn't change anything here, you would still want to focus on the apps you use and not on the specs, right?
> I have the feeling they're not; if you're using all Y tensor cores, then there aren't Z unused CUDA cores sitting around, right?
FWIW, that's a complicated question. There's more going on than just whether these cores are separate things. The short answer is that they are, but there are multiple subsystems that both types of cores have to share, memory being one of the more critical examples. The better answer here is to compare the perf of the applications you care about, using Nvidia cards to using AMD cards, picking the same price point for each. That's how to decide which to buy, not worrying about the internal engineering.
I wouldn't trust them more, but it would be a good rule of thumb for whether or not I need to be awake during this product cycle. For example, if they're like "3% more performance on the 3090 vs. the RTX Titan" then I can just ignore it and not even bother reading the reviews. Instead, they're just like "well it has GDDR6X THE X IS FOR XTREME" which is totally meaningless.
> Instead, they're just like "well it has GDDR6X THE X IS FOR XTREME" which is totally meaningless.
That's referring to memory and not cores; is that a realistic example? I'm not very aware of Nvidia marketing that does what you said specifically - the example feels maybe a little exaggerated? I will totally grant that there is marketing speak, and understanding the marketing speak for all tech hardware can be pretty frustrating at times.
> if they're like "3% more performance on the 3090 vs. the RTX Titan" then I can just ignore it and not even bother reading the reviews.
Nvidia does publish some perf ratios, benchmarks, and peak perf numbers with each GPU, including for specific applications like Blender. Your comment makes it sound like you haven't seen any of those?
Anyway, I think that would be a bad idea to ignore the reviews and benchmarks of Blender and your favorite games, even if you saw the headline you want. There is no single perf improvement number. There never has been, but it's even more true now with the distinction between ray tracing cores and CUDA cores. It's very likely that your Blender perf ratio will be different than your Battlefield perf ratio.
I haven't seen any of those. All I've seen is a green-on-black graph where the Y axis has no 0, they don't say what application they're testing, and they say that the 3070 is 2x faster than the 2080 Ti. Can you link me to their performance numbers? As you can tell, I'm somewhat interested. (And know that real reviews arrive tomorrow, so... I guess I can wait :)
The official press release of the 3000 series[1] has a graph that seems to be what you're looking for. Look for the section named "GeForce RTX 30 Series Performance".
It has a list of applications, each GPU and their relative performance. Y=0 is even on the graph!
Are you suggesting you would rather read reviews of Nvidia products that are written by Nvidia, and you would trust them more than 3rd party reviews?
> I don't understand Nvidia's marketing at all.
Do read @TomVDBs comments; this isn't Nvidia, this is the industry-wide marketing terminology.
Cores are important to developers, so what you're talking about is that some of the marketing is (unsurprisingly) not targeted for you. If you care most about Blender and games, you should definitely seek out the benchmarks for Blender and the games you play. Even if you understood exactly what cores are, that wouldn't change anything here, you would still want to focus on the apps you use and not on the specs, right?
> I have the feeling they're not; if you're using all Y tensor cores, then there aren't Z unused CUDA cores sitting around, right?
FWIW, that's a complicated question. There's more going on than just whether these cores are separate things. The short answer is that they are, but there are multiple subsystems that both types of cores have to share, memory being one of the more critical examples. The better answer here is to compare the perf of the applications you care about, using Nvidia cards to using AMD cards, picking the same price point for each. That's how to decide which to buy, not worrying about the internal engineering.