As the end of this generation of graphics cards is nearing, there’s a lot of excitement about what’s next for Nvidia and AMD. I’m certainly one of those people who want to see what Team Green and Team Red have up their sleeve, especially if they can do more to prioritize energy efficiency and customer value, rather than focusing on power and performance that no one – even a planet – it can afford.
That said, I was in a fairly privileged position compared to most people as I could actually play almost any current generation graphics card for work, so I learned a few things about the current state of the market for top graphics cards and where the technology needs to go in the next generation .
Ray tracing is still in progress
Ray tracing is a fascinating technology that has great potential to create stunning, realistic scenes, mimicking the way our eyes actually perceive light, but wounds, it’s computationally expensive.
The amount of computation required to realistically illuminate a scene in real time is enormous and therefore real-time ray tracing has long been considered virtually impossible on consumer grade equipment. This was, of course, until Nvidia released its Turing architecture with GeForce RTX 2000 graphics cards.
As a first-generation real-time ray tracing consumer graphics card, it’s understandable that this was a cool experimental feature, but you couldn’t really do much with it while gaming without an absolute frame rate cap. This is still true even as we finish the generation of Nvidia Ampere cards.
These cards are better at dealing with real-time ray tracing, especially at lower resolutions, but you’ll still have to compromise between resolution and ray tracing. For example, there is no other graphics card that can efficiently track a ray scene in native 4K resolution that is not a complete slideshow than the RTX 3090 Ti that is able to track ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 at around 24fps turned on ray tracing.
In the meantime, AMD is on its first-gen real-time ray tracing graphics cards, and its performance is definitely where Nvidia Turing’s cards were roughly when it comes to ray tracing performance, which means not terrible but still definitely first-gen technology. .
Improving the future
So how can you effectively play one of the best high definition computer games with ray tracing enabled when even the best gaming PC these days is struggling?
I’m glad you asked because the real revolutionary development of the last few years has not been ray tracing but graphics scaling. Nvidia Deep Learning Super Sampling and AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (as well as AMD Radeon Super Resolution) made it possible to play PC games at high resolutions and settings with ray tracing possible.
In our slideshow above, you can see the difference between native 4K with all settings and ray tracing turned on to ultra, and what it looks like without DLSS, with DLSS set to quality and DLSS set to performance. I can tell you that the difference is not really noticeable when running a benchmark or playing a game.
Honestly, without the upscaling, those with the Nvidia GTX 1060s and AMD RX 5700 XTs would have very little reason to upgrade to a new graphics card.
Some of the best games don’t use this hardware, and those that do can still be good for nothing
The thing about games is that they’re rarely about amazing graphics, but they’re about sensation. The kind of hardware we’re seeing now makes games look great, but if they’re poorly optimized, what’s the point? You get Cyberpunk 2077, a game that launched so broken on PCs that it took away significant market value from the studio that created it, CD Projekt Red.
Meanwhile, something like the Vampire Survivor could basically take control of Steam, even though it looks like it could run on NES with a twist of Adderall, mostly because it hits the crux of what makes us want to play games in the first order: we want them to be fun. And the fact is, you don’t need the RTX 3090 Ti to play with, and I think too many of us forget that.
If Nvidia and AMD were intelligent, they would focus less on introducing cutting-edge graphics enhancements and more on performance and value so that gamers who do you want to get the best graphics and performance from your game, you can do it without spending a fortune on it. Gamers will be less and less willing to pay for the best Nvidia Geforce graphics cards and the best AMD graphics cards in the coming years, and frankly, it would be sucked to continue to see that an already expensive hobby becomes even more inaccessible.