As we near the end of this graphics card generation, there’s a lot of excitement about what’s coming next for Nvidia and AMD. I am definitely one of those people who is eager to see what Team Green and Team Red have in store, especially if they can do more to prioritize energy efficiency and value to the customer rather than push ahead with power and performance that no one – even the planet – can afford. .
Having said that, I was in a relatively advantageous position for most people as I was already able to play on every current generation graphics card to work, and so I learned a thing or two about the current market situation for the best graphics cards, and where the technology needs to move to the next generation .
Ray tracing is still a work in progress at the moment
Ray tracing is a cool technology that has huge potential to create amazing life-like scenes by simulating the way our eyes actually see light, but boy, it’s computationally expensive.
The number of computations required to realistically illuminate a scene in real time is enormous, which is why real-time ray tracing was considered practically impossible on consumer-grade devices. This was, of course, until Nvidia released its Turing chassis with GeForce RTX 2000-series graphics cards.
Being a first-generation consumer graphics card with real-time ray tracing, it’s understandably a neat experimental feature, but you can’t do much with it while gaming without messing up the frame rate. That still holds true, even as we wrap up the Nvidia Ampere generation of cards.
These cards have a better ability to handle real-time ray tracing, especially at lower resolutions, but you will still need to compromise between resolution and ray tracing. For example, no graphics card can trace a scene in native 4K resolution that isn’t a full slideshow other than the RTX 3090 Ti, which can ray Cyberpunk 2077 at 24 frames per second with ray tracing turned on. .
AMD, meanwhile, is in the first generation of graphics card hardware with real-time ray tracing, and its performance is definitely where Nvidia Turing cards have been more or less when it comes to ray tracing performance, meaning it’s not terrible, but certainly still First generation technology.
Advance the future
So how can anyone effectively play any of the best PC games in HD with ray tracing turned on anyway if even the best gaming PC possible nowadays would struggle?
I’m glad you asked, because the real revolutionary development in the last few years hasn’t been ray tracing, but graphics upgrading. Nvidia Deep Learning Super Sampling and AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (plus AMD Radeon Super Resolution) make PC gaming with high resolution and settings with ray tracing possible.
In the slideshow above, you can see the difference between native 4K with all settings and ray tracing converted to ultra presets, and what the game looks like without DLSS, with DLSS set to Quality, and DLSS set to Performance. I can tell you the difference isn’t really obvious while running the benchmark or playing the game either.
Without the upgrade, those with Nvidia GTX 1060s and AMD RX 5700 XTs would have little reason to upgrade to a new graphics card, frankly.
Some of the best games don’t take advantage of this hardware, and those that do can still suck
The thing about games is that it’s rarely about the amazing graphics, but it’s about the experience. The kind of hardware we see now makes some great-looking games, but if they’re poorly optimized, what’s the point? You end up with Cyberpunk 2077, a game that was released so flawlessly on PC that it captured quite a bit of market value from the studio that made it, CD Projekt Red.
Meanwhile, something like Vampire Survivor could pretty much take over Steam even though it looks like it could play on NES doped on Adderall, largely because it hits the heart of what makes us want to play games in the first place: we want them to be fun. The truth is, you don’t need an RTX 3090 Ti to enjoy, and I think many of us forget that.
If Nvidia and AMD were smart, they would focus less on making cutting edge graphic optimizations and more on efficiency and value, so that those gamers who an act If you want to get the best graphics and performance out of a game, you can do it without having to spend a fortune to do it. Gamers will be less able to pay for the best Nvidia Geforce graphics cards and the best AMD graphics cards in the coming years, and it’s honestly going to get bad if we keep seeing an already inaccessible expensive hobby.