How important is RTX

Mira Yurizaki · November 25, 2019

Some food for thought.

The performance of games with ray tracing and RTX now may not be indicative of things to come. After all, this is new technology on both the hardware and software side of things. As developers use the technology more, the software side of things will improve as well. Such is the case when DICE introduced a patch to Battlefield V that significantly improved RT performance.

So I thought maybe this happened before, looking at benchmarks in the past that tested with the first generation DX11 cards with say "second generation" or "third generation" DX11 games. I found one in particular that stood out: The GeForce GTX 400 series and Metro Last Light: https://www.techspot.com/review/670-metro-last-light-performance/page4.html Also for comparison, the GTX 480 against a Radeon HD 7870: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1135?vs=1034

One could argue though that it was an NVIDIA sponsored title, so obviously at the least, optimizations to AMD cards wouldn't be considered as much. However, I think it was due to the developers using heavy amounts of tessellation in the game. And while I haven't verified it, there is a claim that on "Very High", tessellation works out to 15 meters ([1]) and there's a lot that gets tessellated ([2]). NVIDIA out the gate put a lot of investment in tessellation hardware and any time tessellation was turned on, there was a large gap in performance compared to a comparable AMD card of the time ([3] [4] ). Though this did lead to the conspiracy that if NVIDIA wanted to make AMD look bad, they had the game developer tune up the tessellation factor beyond what was really "necessary."

Basically what I'm saying is higher-end first generation hardware may still be viable in future titles that make use of the new technology simply due to developers getting better at using the technology. And depending on your tolerance to lower FPS, even upper midrange hardware might still be viable. But this comes with the caveat that it's a gamble and you're paying the first adopter's tax.

Jahatten · November 25, 2019

Are the game you planning to play have ray tracing support? What resolution are you looking to game in at 1080p 1440p? What kind of monitor do you use or plan to use?

Ebony Falcon · November 25, 2019

On 11/22/2019 at 1:25 AM, Martin2132 said:

im waiting for a proper implementation of raytacing on PC that doesn't kill FPS that much..

if the next gen Nvidia, AMD or even the Intel GPU makes a Raytracing GPU that works well, ill spend $500 on that

Keep dreaming

hollyh88 · November 25, 2019

7 hours ago, Midnitewolf said:

guess my point is if you buy RTX 2070 Super just for the ray tracing capability, the likelihood is, your going to have to either drop the settings considerable or turn off ray tracing on AAA titles 18 months down the road anyway.

18 months makes total sense i bought it to enjoy it and get a good improvement over my regular 1070. still though. 18 months is still 1 and a half years. there will be way better versions out then. Think of the 3070 ti or super whichever they want to call it.

next gen gpu's from nvidia come next year and will have a way better increase in raytracing performance. due to them simply not allowing amd to take that win away since their consoles and ofc gpu's will also be supporting it.

hollyh88 · November 25, 2019

3 hours ago, Ebony Falcon said:

Keep dreaming

doesn't need to dream. all that needs to be done is making a gpu with strong enough power to properly use raytracing. which will happen with next gen current gen is just a stepping stone. but its a stepping stone to something big