Next Gen GPU's will be even more expensive

[DemonicRyzen666]

Third point... we have over a decade of living proof that its definitely harder to code well for mGPU / Crossfire / SLI because of the simple fact you are adding complexity to the pipeline. Frames must be sent to one or the other GPU, or both, so there is overhead, too, that you do not have with a single GPU; plus, all of this extra overhead leans on VRAM data transport, which is a primary focus to actually make GPUs faster by using it better, bandwidth on VRAM is expensive. These are simple facts, and these facts add milliseconds of latency to anything you do. This is why all SLI setups could spit out fantastic FPS, but their frametimes were always (virtually always) all over the place: you literally feel the impact of that extra overhead on every frame. This problem was never fixed, and if it was, it always came at an immense scaling performance cost, effectively killing the advantage of mGPU on its own.

you're talking about A.F.R style mGPU which you don't need to do for mGPU, so that this comment is completely false.

 

[Vayra86]

While I like the Shader based solutions in UE5/snowdrop it's still not very good at a lot of things reflections are still pretty terrible and the lighting still easily breaks. Hardware Lumen is significantly better but still significantly behind path tracing.

If they can substantially improve it sure but it likely only exist for weak console hardware to begin with and AMD current generation gpus that just don't handle full RT whatsoever.

Even BMW with it's only ok RT implementation looks substantially better with hardware RT especially water and shadows it just breaks way less.

Even Hellblade 2 which I still think looks better than BMW would greatly benefit from at least hardware RT reflections which are pretty terrible with the Lumen pass.

Beyond that hardware is all moving towards handling real time RT better. That seems like the primary focus with The PS5 pro/RDNA 4 and looking at leaked slides next generation consoles. The shader solution is just a half step bandaid till AMD gets it shit together imho.

You forget a few things here.

1. You desperately need a high end GPU to even begin to think of running all these bells and whistles
2. You need DLSS, preferably with frame gen and all the extra sauce on top

Then and only then is the performance hit somewhat palatable, but even then its still a performance hit, noticeable and substantial. I'd also be careful mistaking your expert gaming eye wrt graphics and the hyperfocus you earned on RT effects over time, for what the general audience is looking at - THEY are now looking at implementations that get very close while costing substantially less to run. They can play BMW on a 500-600 dollar console. Today. Similar things apply to all the ports that have spicy RTX on the PC. Great for the PC enthusiast, but the vast majority doesn't give a rat's behind.

PT is too expensive for what it is and what it gives. It ain't happening in any semblance of mainstream gaming for the next 3 generations for sure. In case you missed it, Blackwell is going to be a completely stagnant turd for anything below the x90, not quite unlike Ada sans DLSS3. The bar ain't moving forward nearly fast enough for PT to be reasonable anytime soon. You can thank Nvidia for that, too. This ain't even remotely AMD's problem. They have a console market. If you think AMD is in any rush to get parity with Nvidia, you are mistaken, and the proof is in their products as we speak.

The popular games and the killer apps in the history of gaming have never, literally never been graphics posterchilds. Graphics don't make games. Only the games that presented new graphical tricks alongside being brilliant games that moved gaming forward, have been memorable, you can look at the history of shooters for proof. All of them brought new gameplay or gaming brilliance to the table while looking good. What games do that, today, with RT in it? I can't think of a single one - it sure as hell isn't Cyberpunk 2077. And then, even if they did exist, the current form of RT isn't even appearing on every display, because its extra, not integral to anything. That is why I say the real development will be carried not by proprietary sauce, but whatever the engines and consequently the consoles will run unanimously, and without dreadful performance. History only repeats. Nvidia ain't writing anything new.

you're talking about A.F.R style mGPU which you don't need to do for mGPU, so that this comment is completely false.

Implementing mGPU with stable frametimes is even harder to get right, so sure, if that was your point, point taken. Split frame rendering or alternate frame rendering suffers from the same timing issues - you have two GPUs that are not 100% identical.

 

[AusWolf]

You forget a few things here.

1. You desperately need a high end GPU to even begin to think of running all these bells and whistles
2. You need DLSS, preferably with frame gen and all the extra sauce on top

Then and only then is the performance hit somewhat palatable, but even then its still a performance hit, noticeable and substantial. I'd also be careful mistaking your expert gaming eye wrt graphics and the hyperfocus you earned on RT effects over time, for what the general audience is looking at - THEY are now looking at implementations that get very close while costing substantially less to run. They can play BMW on a 500-600 dollar console. Today. Similar things apply to all the ports that have spicy RTX on the PC. Great for the PC enthusiast, but the vast majority doesn't give a rat's behind.

PT is too expensive for what it is and what it gives. It ain't happening in any semblance of mainstream gaming for the next 3 generations for sure. In case you missed it, Blackwell is going to be a completely stagnant turd for anything below the x90, not quite unlike Ada sans DLSS3. The bar ain't moving forward nearly fast enough for PT to be reasonable anytime soon. You can thank Nvidia for that, too. This ain't even remotely AMD's problem. They have a console market.

The popular games and the killer apps in the history of gaming have never, literally never been graphics posterchilds. Graphics don't make games. Only the games that presented new graphical tricks alongside being brilliant games that moved gaming forward, have been memorable, you can look at the history of shooters for proof. All of them brought new gameplay or gaming brilliance to the table while looking good. What games do that, today, with RT in it? I can't think of a single one. And then, even if they did exist, the current form of RT isn't even appearing on every display, because its extra, not integral to anything. That is why I say the real development will be carried not by proprietary sauce, but whatever the engines and consequently the consoles will run unanimously, and without dreadful performance. History only repeats. Nvidia ain't writing anything new.

While I agree with you, I'm just boggled by the fact that we're discussing lights and shadows in length that have looked fine way before RT appeared in games, while humanoid faces still look like awkward, shiny porcelain dolls with little detail most of the time. I'm not saying that RT isn't good (when it's done properly), I just think focus should be elsewhere.

 

[Vayra86]

While I agree with you, I'm just boggled by the fact that we're discussing lights and shadows in length that have looked fine way before RT appeared in games, while humanoid faces still look like awkward, shiny porcelain dolls with little detail most of the time. I'm not saying that RT isn't good (when it's done properly), I just think focus should be elsewhere.

Hellblade 2 gets where it gets because of in-engine, shader based rendering. Not RT. So the focus is elsewhere and we're starting to reap the fruits. This 'industry push' Nvidia keeps harping on about isn't all that impressive. The more impressive part is happening in engine development. And GPU capability will scale with that, not with whatever Nvidia's latest board meeting wants for its shareholders.

 

[igormp]

Its funny that developers were the ones who wanted a more "low level a.p.i." like Dx12. Yet they can't even use it, because it requires too much knowleadge of coding, recoding, redesigning & recomplining. Also too much time to do properly. That developers didn't need when using older DX11. DX11 had a lot of work easily done by compliers for developers. A lot of those compliers don't work on dx12.

Most game developers rarely ever touch on such APIs. Most of your AAA games people just work with the game engine itself and its APIs. The engine is the part that interfaces with the underlying API, so it'd be better to try to understand which kind of developer you're referring to.
Engines like UE5 seem to not have any proper support for such thing anymore.
EA has made a research engine that supports mGPU and other fancy stuff, but it's not really meant for games. Here's some stuff in case you want to give it a read:

https://media.contentapi.ea.com/content/dam/ea/seed/presentations/wihlidal-halcyonarchitecture-notes.pdf

Project PICA PICA

PICA PICA is a real-time raytracing experiment featuring self-learning agents in a procedurally-assembled world.

www.ea.com

I don't believe its harder to code for multiple gpu either now newer a.p.i they were designed around the idea. Espically since vulkan uses a similar method as dx12 for mutli-gpu. Its pretty simple to add support for it on newer vulkan builds.

Why don't you give it a try and report back on your journey?

Titan rtx was 2500, Titan Volta was 3k, and Titan Z was 3k so none of these prices are unprecedented....

The 3090 was hella cheap tho and is an awesome workstation GPU on the cheap. I even have 2 of those for this sole purpose haha

Interesting, is AD102 so complex chip that the yields just don't allow a full chip to be manufactured without disabling units from it?

Both the RTX 6000 and the L40 have 142 out of the 144 SMs, I'd consider 2 SMs not that relevant, and I guess leaving those 2SMs out for yields reason means that the remaining SMs can clocks higher or something like that.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

You forget a few things here.

1. You desperately need a high end GPU to even begin to think of running all these bells and whistles
2. You need DLSS, preferably with frame gen and all the extra sauce on top

Then and only then is the performance hit somewhat palatable, but even then its still a performance hit, noticeable and substantial. I'd also be careful mistaking your expert gaming eye wrt graphics and the hyperfocus you earned on RT effects over time, for what the general audience is looking at - THEY are now looking at implementations that get very close while costing substantially less to run. They can play BMW on a 500-600 dollar console. Today. Similar things apply to all the ports that have spicy RTX on the PC. Great for the PC enthusiast, but the vast majority doesn't give a rat's behind.

PT is too expensive for what it is and what it gives. It ain't happening in any semblance of mainstream gaming for the next 3 generations for sure. In case you missed it, Blackwell is going to be a completely stagnant turd for anything below the x90, not quite unlike Ada sans DLSS3. The bar ain't moving forward nearly fast enough for PT to be reasonable anytime soon. You can thank Nvidia for that, too. This ain't even remotely AMD's problem. They have a console market. If you think AMD is in any rush to get parity with Nvidia, you are mistaken, and the proof is in their products as we speak.

The popular games and the killer apps in the history of gaming have never, literally never been graphics posterchilds. Graphics don't make games. Only the games that presented new graphical tricks alongside being brilliant games that moved gaming forward, have been memorable, you can look at the history of shooters for proof. All of them brought new gameplay or gaming brilliance to the table while looking good. What games do that, today, with RT in it? I can't think of a single one - it sure as hell isn't Cyberpunk 2077. And then, even if they did exist, the current form of RT isn't even appearing on every display, because its extra, not integral to anything. That is why I say the real development will be carried not by proprietary sauce, but whatever the engines and consequently the consoles will run unanimously, and without dreadful performance. History only repeats. Nvidia ain't writing anything new.

For sure until the baseline gpu is a 4090. Beyond that both of us are just speculating either scenario could play out.


Just to be clear when I say path tracing I'm not talking about the current Nvidia biased rendition that you need a 4080 at 1080p and a 4090 at 1440p just to run satisfactory I'm talking about at some point a more open better version of it. Even thought it's been 6 years since the first RTX gpus we are still in the infancy of real time ray tracing capable hardware developers could make it look substantially bettet almost movie quality VFX level but nobody could run it currently faster than 1 frame per second and probably slower than that.

And sure graphics do not make games I much rather play a game with meh graphics but awesome gameplay but a generational impressive game visually with amazing gameplay would always be ideal.

Nier and Dragon age origins are good examples of this each are two of my favorite games ever made both looked like shit, still if either had generation defining visuals they'd have been even better.

Just to be clear I still think path tracing is at least 2-3 generations away before we see it in every game and honestly by then hopefully somthing better replaces it.

While I agree with you, I'm just boggled by the fact that we're discussing lights and shadows in length that have looked fine way before RT appeared in games, while humanoid faces still look like awkward, shiny porcelain dolls with little detail most of the time. I'm not saying that RT isn't good (when it's done properly), I just think focus should be elsewhere.

Screen space reflections are terrible and accurate lighting and materials that accurately reflect light are the biggest issues with non RT implementations. Can developers fake it with old techniques sure but you basically have to render the image twice which is even more demanding than RT.

Even faces and skin texture look way better when lighting and shadows properly map to them.

People act like RT is somthing new or that Nvidia invented it it's honestly just the next step movies have been doing it for a long time with offline rendering.

As @Vayra86 Says above though art direction and gameplay will always be king but thinking real time RT isn't the future of game engines is probably wishful thinking at best.

Same thing with Gsync now everybody does it, same with DLSS now everybody does it, same with RT now all 3 gpu makers and even mobile hardware do it, frame gen you guessed it.

Nvidia sets the trend and everyone copies it in an ideal world we get an adaptive sync situation that works great on all hardware but other companies need to make a equivalent not worse implementation first.

The Shader based solutions are awesome fallbacks for weaker hardware and consoles though although the PS5 pro might be stronger than any current amd gpu at RT and have substantially better Upscaling which shouldn't be a thing AMD should be leading with that in the Desktop space.


Either way we are all just along for the ride none of us really know what the future of gaming holds as it is companies care less and less about it and game publishers rarely take any chances anymore. The cost of game development has gotten out of hand. So if somthing doesn't change we might only see 1-2 games a year even pushing the envelope forward as it is. This year we've had BMW and HB2 that look impressive last year we had Alan Wake 2 and Phantom liberty that were doing anything mildly impressive so it's definitely slowing way down to a handful of games a year at best.

That new Warhammer game looks great though without pushing any new technology rendering wise so maybe there is still hope lol it's just not somthing I have any interest in playing.

As you say though lots needs to still improve and I agree that should be more the focus. Texture quality is still bad even in games like BMW, character models and voice acting in the majority of games is still wooden AF, LODs are still obvious, and please developers if not using a decent RT technique for reflections don't use a really bad SSR implementation the RE engine is a poster child for this not only is RT terrible but the rasterized version is even worse even though the game otherwise looks decent.

Regardless it's still fun speculating and I honestly love seeing other people's opinions on it Regardless of if we agree are not. I think in our own way we all want gaming to get better even if we don't agree on what that actually means or how we get there.

 

[tfdsaf]

The issue with RT is that when Nvidia pushed the scam it was to sell their 2000 series turds. They came off of one of their best GPU launches in history with the 1000 series and they couldn't beat it on performance, efficiency or value, so they tacked on some "RT" cores and said we got RT now, the future is now, yes our 2000 series GPU's suck, yes they are turds of the highest order, but you can now play games with RT, movies like quality in your games. Anyone with more than 2 grams of brain wasn't fooled, but a lot were and because they jumped the gun too soon, we've been stuck with garbage RT, inadequate hardware to actually do RT in real time and to force RT to work we got even worse shit like upscaling and quality downgrades just to be able to run garbage RT which no GPU could otherwise run.

Nvidia come up with gimmicks to sell GPU's that have realistically been stagnating in every single way since their 1000 series. AMD at least had the 5000 series after the 400/500 series which were actually the best value GPU's I think in all of history. The RX 5700XT was competing with the much more expensive 2070ti and often beating it for $200 less.

 

[ir_cow]

The issue with RT is that when Nvidia pushed the scam it was to sell their 2000 series turds.

20 series gave us RT and Tensor cores. Which pushed graphics forwards to what it is today. Ray-Tracing to Pathtracing and had developers like Epic create Lumen as a software solution to RT cores. On the Tensor cores we got DLSS, which paved the way for DLSS 3 and frame generation, AMD FSR and Intel XeSS. Basically without Nvidia offering things no one else had, we would not have all the graphical and performance enhancements you see everywhere today. You are stuck in the past with Pixel Render Pipelines

 

[oxrufiioxo]

20 series gave us RT and Tensor cores. Which pushed graphics forwards to what it is today. Ray-Tracing to Pathtracing and had developers like Epic create Lumen as a software solution to RT cores. On the Tensor cores we got DLSS, which paved the way for DLSS 3 and frame generation, AMD FSR and Intel XeSS. Basically without Nvidia offering things no one else had, we would not have all the graphical and performance enhancements you see everywhere today. You are stuck in the past with Pixel Render Pipelines

Nvidia is the Devil bruh the only reason AMD can't compete is Nvidia shady practices.... lives in the mind of AMD fanboys.

The reality is all these companies would behave identically... Intel did it when they were way ahead in cpus, the minute amd got ahead with ryzen we got the 300 usd 5600X lmao, and now Nvidia is so far ahead intel/amd are just fighting for scraps.

People should be upset amd is not offering better products with better technology not that Nvidia the market leader by a mile is acting like a market leader.....

They are all shitty in 2024 in their own way but acting like any silicon maker/hardware maker is morally better or worse than the other is delusional.

 

[64K]

For me I like the direction we are going with RT but I think the real question isn't whether we want RT or not. The question is what is inevitably going to happen anyway. No matter how much anyone wishes RT will just go away and leave us all alone with the past that we are comfortable with, it just won't. It's here to stay now and it is the future. Nvidia is going to make this happen and we are all just along for the ride. Some of us will be happy with it, some ambivalent, some will be dragged kicking and screaming into the future of gaming.

AMD knows that this is true and that is why they are committed to much improvement with RT performance in the next generation.

 

[Hyderz]

It’s another 4 years or so till ray tracing in games 10th anniversary, let’s see the performance hit then. My guess it will still be taxing as ever

 

[ir_cow]

For me I like the direction we are going with RT but I think the real question isn't whether we want RT or not. The question is what is inevitably going to happen anyway.

RT is great and the best part is you don't have to enable it if you don't like it.

 

[R-T-B]

you're talking about A.F.R style mGPU which you don't need to do for mGPU, so that this comment is completely false.

No, you need to code something completely custom and undefined to manage your work balancing, which is arguably far worse.

EDIT: Let me ask you this: Why do you think devs avoid mgpu with a 10ft pole if what I said isn't true?

 

[igormp]

20 series gave us RT and Tensor cores. Which pushed graphics forwards to what it is today. Ray-Tracing to Pathtracing and had developers like Epic create Lumen as a software solution to RT cores. On the Tensor cores we got DLSS, which paved the way for DLSS 3 and frame generation, AMD FSR and Intel XeSS. Basically without Nvidia offering things no one else had, we would not have all the graphical and performance enhancements you see everywhere today. You are stuck in the past with Pixel Render Pipelines

Tensor cores also pushed nvidia even further in the ML game.
For games and the likes the perf jump from 1000 to 2000 was kinda meh, but for other areas it was more than twice as fast, while allowing for the use of half of the vram (so something that used 11gb in a 1080ti now only uses 5.5~6gb on a 2080ti, allowing for bigger models)

 

[AusWolf]

For sure until the baseline gpu is a 4090. Beyond that both of us are just speculating either scenario could play out.


Just to be clear when I say path tracing I'm not talking about the current Nvidia biased rendition that you need a 4080 at 1080p and a 4090 at 1440p just to run satisfactory I'm talking about at some point a more open better version of it. Even thought it's been 6 years since the first RTX gpus we are still in the infancy of real time ray tracing capable hardware developers could make it look substantially bettet almost movie quality VFX level but nobody could run it currently faster than 1 frame per second and probably slower than that.

And sure graphics do not make games I much rather play a game with meh graphics but awesome gameplay but a generational impressive game visually with amazing gameplay would always be ideal.

Nier and Dragon age origins are good examples of this each are two of my favorite games ever made both looked like shit, still if either had generation defining visuals they'd have been even better.

Just to be clear I still think path tracing is at least 2-3 generations away before we see it in every game and honestly by then hopefully somthing better replaces it.




Screen space reflections are terrible and accurate lighting and materials that accurately reflect light are the biggest issues with non RT implementations. Can developers fake it with old techniques sure but you basically have to render the image twice which is even more demanding than RT.

Even faces and skin texture look way better when lighting and shadows properly map to them.

People act like RT is somthing new or that Nvidia invented it it's honestly just the next step movies have been doing it for a long time with offline rendering.

As @Vayra86 Says above though art direction and gameplay will always be king but thinking real time RT isn't the future of game engines is probably wishful thinking at best.

Same thing with Gsync now everybody does it, same with DLSS now everybody does it, same with RT now all 3 gpu makers and even mobile hardware do it, frame gen you guessed it.

Nvidia sets the trend and everyone copies it in an ideal world we get an adaptive sync situation that works great on all hardware but other companies need to make a equivalent not worse implementation first.

The Shader based solutions are awesome fallbacks for weaker hardware and consoles though although the PS5 pro might be stronger than any current amd gpu at RT and have substantially better Upscaling which shouldn't be a thing AMD should be leading with that in the Desktop space.


Either way we are all just along for the ride none of us really know what the future of gaming holds as it is companies care less and less about it and game publishers rarely take any chances anymore. The cost of game development has gotten out of hand. So if somthing doesn't change we might only see 1-2 games a year even pushing the envelope forward as it is. This year we've had BMW and HB2 that look impressive last year we had Alan Wake 2 and Phantom liberty that were doing anything mildly impressive so it's definitely slowing way down to a handful of games a year at best.

That new Warhammer game looks great though without pushing any new technology rendering wise so maybe there is still hope lol it's just not somthing I have any interest in playing.

As you say though lots needs to still improve and I agree that should be more the focus. Texture quality is still bad even in games like BMW, character models and voice acting in the majority of games is still wooden AF, LODs are still obvious, and please developers if not using a decent RT technique for reflections don't use a really bad SSR implementation the RE engine is a poster child for this not only is RT terrible but the rasterized version is even worse even though the game otherwise looks decent.

Regardless it's still fun speculating and I honestly love seeing other people's opinions on it Regardless of if we agree are not. I think in our own way we all want gaming to get better even if we don't agree on what that actually means or how we get there.

Speaking of Alan Wake 2, I don't know why everybody uses that game as the poster boy for RT. I tried enabling it, and it didn't look very different from it being turned off, except it ran like crap. If you gave me a single screenshot of the game, I wouldn't be able to tell whether RT is turned on or off. And this is my problem with RT: it doesn't add enough to the game to warrant the impact on performance. And no, it shouldn't be helped with blurry-ass upscaling, which I see as a helping hand for weak and/or old GPUs, and not something that lets you enable a massively hardware consuming feature that you can't even see most of the time.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

Speaking of Alan Wake 2, I don't know why everybody uses that game as the poster boy for RT. I tried enabling it, and it didn't look very different from it being turned off, except it ran like crap. If you gave me a single screenshot of the game, I wouldn't be able to tell whether RT is turned on or off. And this is my problem with RT: it doesn't add enough to the game to warrant the impact on performance. And no, it shouldn't be helped with blurry-ass upscaling, which I see as a helping hand for weak and/or old GPUs, and not something that lets you enable a massively hardware consuming feature that you can't even see most of the time.

I do find these takes interesting just becuase the difference to my eyes is night and day.

Although non rt lighting has become really easy for me to see how broken it is in almost every game at this point. UE5 does a good job though and Some UE4 games like Gears 5 handles indirect lighting pretty well.

Crazy thing is what we currently have is very rudimentary compared to what's actually possible as far as RT goes.

 

[64K]

I suspect that a good bit of the RT bashing will cease when next gen GPUs from AMD start getting used and FSR is improved.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

I suspect that a good bit of the RT bashing will cease when next gen GPUs from AMD start getting used and FSR is improved.

I also keep forgetting amd users can't use ray reconstruction because amd doesn't offer an equivalent which not only makes Path tracing look even better but usually gives a bump to performance.... Definitely a net gain in both visuals and perfomance even though it has some downsides.

Not sure a midrange card regardless of how much better it is compared to RDNA3 will change their minds...Now if amd offerd all of the above but better maybe. I did notive once AMD offered frame gen people started praising it lmao to be fair it's not a bad implementation only let down by the quality of FSR.

I'm still not a fan of frame generation being used in benchmarks though and would be just as happy with my 4090 if it wasn't a thing.

 

[AusWolf]

I do find these takes interesting just becuase the difference to my eyes is night and day.

I agree, our differences in perception are interesting. RT doesn't look any special to me in most games, whereas people praise upscaling, but for me, it's a blurry mess whether it's DLSS or FSR, unless it's at 4K on a TV that you sit far away from.

I suspect that a good bit of the RT bashing will cease when next gen GPUs from AMD start getting used and FSR is improved.

Oh definitely! My problem isn't RT itself. My problem is that the visual improvement is negligible compared to the performance impact. But that is true on both Nvidia and AMD.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

Oh definitely! My problem isn't RT itself. My problem is that the visual improvement is negligible compared to the performance impact. But that is true on both Nvidia and AMD.

Yesh and can totally understand that perspective if I was still on my 3080ti the visual improvement wouldn't be worth the perfomance hit but my current card is literally 2x faster and that's before we even account for DLSS in path traced games.

I also think people are so use to the way games look more realistic doesn't always look better to them.

I still find it hard to believe anyone wouldn't notice PT on vs off in AW2 though.... But we don't have the same eyes or same monitors or the same hardware...

Even with crap youtube compression it's easy to see a difference at least to me.

That being said there are areas that don't benefit just like in CP2077 but until we get games developed with it solely that probably won't change.

At the end if the day what looks better is always going to be subjective. Alan Wake 2 still looks very good with RT off regardless.

 

[AusWolf]

Yesh and can totally understand that perspective if I was still on my 3080ti the visual improvement wouldn't be worth the perfomance hit but my current card is literally 2x faster and that's before we even account for DLSS in path traced games.

I also think people are so use to the way games look more realistic doesn't always look better to them.

I still find it hard to believe anyone wouldn't notice PT on vs off in AW2 though.... But we don't have the same eyes or same monitors or the same hardware...

Even with crap youtube compression it's easy to see a difference at least to me.

At the end if the day what looks better is always going to be subjective. Alan Wake 2 still looks very good with RT off regardless.

You can see the difference in a comparison video/screenshot, but there isn't much to see in a live game where you're focused on the story and gameplay anyway.

The difference between upscaling on and off is much more prevalent to my eyes. I much sooner turn RT off, or even the overall graphics quality down to medium than enable upscaling in most games. Of course, there's differences in implementation (FSR didn't bother me too much in Hogwarts Legacy, but it looks like trash in Wukong, for example), but that's a different story.

 

[chrcoluk]

20 series gave us RT and Tensor cores. Which pushed graphics forwards to what it is today. Ray-Tracing to Pathtracing and had developers like Epic create Lumen as a software solution to RT cores. On the Tensor cores we got DLSS, which paved the way for DLSS 3 and frame generation, AMD FSR and Intel XeSS. Basically without Nvidia offering things no one else had, we would not have all the graphical and performance enhancements you see everywhere today. You are stuck in the past with Pixel Render Pipelines

I do see DLSS and especially DLAA as actual useful features, but the problem is they have been enablers for devs to do less optimisation. They now happy enough to meet performance targets that require these technologies to get there, I think within 2 years frame generation will be needed to hit 60fps on latest gen GPU for even 1440p.

To me the biggest benefit of frame generation is it lowers CPU cost, CPU is a bottleneck more often than people think, it seems to also have bigger issues the lower the frame rate due to the latency overhead and that its harder to accurately inject frames at a lower frame rate.

RT I still need to be convinced. The only benefit of it I have noticed that I like is it gets rid of the horrid issue I see so often in games where there is a very small draw distance for maximum shadow resolution/detail. Often just in front of you. Hardware is too immature for it to be used widespread though, as the costs of enabling the features are still too heavy. Poorly done RT (so its manageable on weaker hardware) often looks worse than pre RT methods.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

You can see the difference in a comparison video/screenshot, but there isn't much to see in a live game where you're focused on the story and gameplay anyway.

The difference between upscaling on and off is much more prevalent to my eyes. I much sooner turn RT off, or even the overall graphics quality down to medium than enable upscaling in most games. Of course, there's differences in implementation (FSR didn't bother me too much in Hogwarts Legacy, but it looks like trash in Wukong, for example), but that's a different story.

Don't get me wrong I really don't have issues with people not liking RT or upscaling. I might make sarcastic comments but that's just my personality. I do try to hold back though lol.

I do find it interesting that I like RT and don't mind the perfomance hit in most games Alternatively I don't mind taking a small hit to image quality with the latest DLSS versions like 3.7 for a 40-60% performance boost. On the other hand you don't like the perfomance hit of RT ( I would imagine most fall into this camp) but also don't want to take a hit visually for a massive perfomance increase with FSR.... Although I will say if DLSS wasn't available to me I probably wouldn't use FSR in most games especially below 4k in the quality mode.

I truly hope a lossless or near lossless version exist at some point. My guess is nvidia will be first though.


getting super side tracked though at this point went from gpu's being expensive to where games are going to I guess justify those gpu's lol.

 

[Laurijan]

nobody is gonna make me pay 2000 bucks for a GPU. I got a bargain 750 bucks GTX1080 back in the days and the most money I have spend on GPU is now my RTX 4070ti for like 999e

 

[wheresmycar]

nobody is gonna make me pay 2000 bucks for a GPU. I got a bargain 750 bucks GTX1080 back in the days and the most money I have spend on GPU is now my RTX 4070ti for like 999e

You're missing out.... Jensen did the maths "the more you buy, the more you save". Its no longer a matter of buying one card, its two!

Don't get me wrong I really don't have issues with people not liking RT or upscaling.

I don't believe anyone dislikes RT/upscaling. These are fantastic evolving technologies edging towards graphical realism and smoother gameplay (both high on my list). But there is some justifiable discontent evolving around the extortionate cost of adopting these features (incl. FG) or RTX GPUs in general. Not just the feature embracing tax but Nvidia firmly welding on to those highly profiting post-crypto/pandemic and AI price increases. For many (or the mainstream consumer) its just not feasible and where affordability does come into play with low/mid-tier cards, the RT performance tax is hardly recompensing. Personally i'm extremely ~90 to 120FPS sensitive hence anything falling short of that target (depending on the game) will compel prioritising performance over sub-par RT. At some point with subsequent releases, providing the tech continues to evolve quickly, we will get to that special place where the more appealing price-to-performance balance resides and no doubt RT or similar/any type of tech pushing on graphics realism will be highly praised.

In other words, its not the tech, its the nV price/performance tax.