Next-Gen GPUs: Pricing and Raster 3D Performance Matter Most to TPU Readers

[btarunr]

Our latest front-page poll sheds light on what people want from the next generation of gaming GPUs. We asked our readers what mattered most to them, with answers including raster performance, ray tracing performance, energy efficiency, upscaling or frame-gen technologies, the size of video memory, and lastly, pricing. Our poll ran from September 19, and gathered close to 24,000 votes as of this writing. Pricing remains the king of our polls, with the option gathering 36.1% of the vote, or 8,620 votes. Our readers expect pricing of next-generation GPUs to remain flat, variant-for-variant, and not continue on the absurdly upward trend it has had for the past few generations, with the high-end being pushed beyond the $1,000-mark, and $500 barely bringing in a 1440p-class GPU, while 4K-capable game consoles exist.

Both AMD and NVIDIA know that Moore's Law is cooked, and that generational leaps in performance and transistor counts are only possible with increase in pricing for the latest foundry nodes. AMD even tried experimenting with disaggregated (chiplet-based) GPUs with its latest RDNA 3 generation, before calling it quits on the enthusiast-segment, so it could focus on the sub-$1000 performance segment. The second most popular response was Raster 3D performance (classic 3D rendering performance), which scored 27% or 6,453 votes.



Generational gains in raster 3D graphics rendering performance at native resolutions remain eminently desirable for anyone following the PC hardware industry for decades now. With Moore's Law in place, we've been used to near-50% generational increases in performance, which enabled new gaming APIs and upped the eye-candy in games with each generation. Interestingly, ray tracing performance takes a backseat, polling not even 3rd, but 4th place, at 10.4% or 2,475 votes. The 3rd place goes to energy efficiency.

The introduction of 600 W-capable power connectors presented ominous signs of where power was headed with future generations of GPUs as the semiconductor fabrication industry struggles to make cutting edge sub 2 nm nodes available, which meant that for the past 3 or 4 generations, GPUs aren't getting built on the very latest foundry node. For example, by the time 8 nm and 7 nm GPUs came out, 5 nm EUV was already the cutting-edge, and Apple was making its iPhone SoCs on them. Both AMD and NVIDIA would go on to make their next-generations on 5 nm, while the cutting-edge had moved on to 4 nm and 3 nm. The upcoming RDNA 4 and GeForce Blackwell generations are expected to be built on nodes no more advanced than 3 nm, but these come out in 2025, by which time the cutting edge would have moved on to 20 A. All this impacts power, which a performance target wildly misaligns with foundry node available to GPU designers.

Our readers gave upscaling and frame-gen technologies like DLSS, FSR, and XeSS, the least votes, with the option scoring just 2.8% or 661 votes. They do not believe that upscaling technology is a valid excuse for missing generational performance improvement targets at native resolution, and take any claims such as "this looks better than native resolution" with a pinch of salt.

All said and done, the GPU buyer of today has the same expectations from the next-gen as they did a decade ago. This is important, as it forces NVIDIA and AMD to innovate, build their GPUs on the most advanced foundry nodes, and try not to be too greedy with pricing. NVIDIA's competitor isn't AMD or Intel, but rather PC gaming as a platform has competition from the consoles, which are offering 4K gaming experiences for half a grand, with technology that "just works." The onus then is on PC hardware manufacturers to keep up.

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[Vayra86]

Amen to that. Stick those bullshit features in as bonuses or put them where the sun doesn't shine. It will NEVER serve as a true selling point. Not in the least because everyone has them. The bottom line is cold, hard, raw performance. It always will be. We've been fooled often enough, any gamer with a bit of age and historical experience knows this, graphics are just a means, not a goal. And drooling over every pixel is definitely a thing, but it'll pass, too, at some point it's all the same anyway.

The only real reason to upgrade is because you've moved to higher resolution, want more frames per second on the same content, or because the general perf requirement of games has surpassed what your current GPU can do. Its that simple. Artificial nonsense around it will always end up being artificial, and thus, fake progress. When I see that numerous older DX11 games show an OK (or even extremely good) picture at north of 100 FPS on midrange cards of seven years ago, there's just no explanation that slightly better looking games on DX12 struggle with todays midrange cards. There's just none. And upscale is clearly not helping that perspective either; its possibly even making it worse because why do you even need 'extra performance' if the original presentation was fine to begin with? You're basically implicitly telling us your base experience sucks donkey balls now. Which it does, too, if you remove the blur filters.

Some odd statements though in the article. 'Used to 50% gen to gen uplifts'... ?! Those are the exceptions. Definitely not the rule. I believe Pascal was the only straight up 50% gen to gen uplift in the last ten years, and maybe Maxwell was somewhat close to it too. The others all came with a heavy redesign of the stack/product tiering/pricing structure. And even Pascal came with a $50,- premium per tier. Its not a 50% gen to gen uplift if that only happens from one x90 to the next, while the rest barely moves forward at the same price point. That's just introducing new price points with new performance levels, realistically.

 

[Legacy-ZA]

Hardware Unboxed did such a great video on Ray Tracing specifically, there are only a few titles that actually utilize it correctly. Otherwise, game developers and nGreedia simply use DLSS and FG as a crutch. There is a saying "The juice, isn't worth the squeeze" and oh boy, are we being squeezed. I actually regret upgrading to 1440p, these "new generation" cards are an insult.

 

[mrnagant]

How much die space does AI and RT make up on Ada and RDNA3. Wonder what the cost would be if these were cut out, or how much more raster you could fit on the same die space. RT is take it or leave it, and fg/upscaling can still be decent/good and could still be made even better using regular old shaders. Seems like in the near future every chip is going to have AI on it, id rather buy a dedicated AI card. Your CPU has an NPU, the integrated GPU has NPUs, your dedicated video card has NPUs. Let's just make the NPU it's own dedicated chip.

Could RT work be split out to like a daughter board, or a dedicated card? Have the RT calculations offloaded on that.

Always wondered if we could get more out of RT, AI and traditional GPUs if they were split out in their own individual card. Would have a ton more die space combined. Like imagine a dedicated RT card the size of big Ada and run fully path traced games on.

 

[Dazz023]

In other words, you just get Nvidia GPU and get all of that except for pricing, which is not the most important thing for 63.9% TPU readers.

 

[londiste]

Our readers gave upscaling and frame-gen technologies like DLSS, FSR, and XeSS, the least votes, with the option scoring just 2.8% or 661 votes. They do not believe that upscaling technology is a valid excuse for missing generational performance improvement targets at native resolution, and take any claims such as "this looks better than native resolution" with a pinch of salt.

consoles, which are offering 4K gaming experiences for half a grand, with technology that "just works."

Those two things that are presented as contradictory are very directly linked

Btw, a missed opportunity here - the headline could have been "TPU readers do not care about VRAM". That would definitely bring more clicks.

 

[Sithaer]

I don't mind upscaling and pretty much use DLSS in every single game that has it. 'unless its a terrible implementation but thats rare nowadays'
In some games I even use it when I don't need the extra performance, for example I'm using it in Wuthering Waves and that game I could easily run natively w/o making my GPU sweat at my resolution.
Reason being is that the built in TAA paired with native res looks like crap and theres a lot of flickering 'which I'm allergic to' in the background and DLSS fixes that for the most part. 'this happened in a number of games I was playing in the past years'

I'm already paying a lot of money for even a mid range card in my country regardless of what brand it is so at that point I prefer the one with the better feature set and for my use case that means DLSS/DLAA. 'I usually upgrade every 3 years between ~mid range cards unless something unexpected happens before that'

 

[W1zzard]

Btw, a missed opportunity here - the headline could have been "TPU readers do not care about VRAM". That would definitely bring more clicks.

NVIDIA Doesn't Want you to know THIS, but TPU Readers Have the Answer. 5 Reasons why You Won't Buy a New GPU Next Year

 

[LittleBro]

I hereby thank to all sane people who don't appreciate fake frames and distorted images.
Fake is fake. Woman breasts with silicon implants are all fake. And a man's too.

Frame generation and DLSS-like stuff not only makes game devs more lazy (they don't have to optimize that much, just turn on fake frames baby to get instant FPS boost), it is also used to obscure poor GPU optimizations and lack of progress. I remind you that you'd pay $1600 for best GPU in the market (RTX 4090) with which you'd not be able to play newest titles at 60 FPS at 4K on ultra on native. What do you pay for?

 

[john_]

While TPU voters might be caring about raster performance, 80% of the buyers care about RT performance and DLSS. That's Nvidia's market share.
Even SONY pressured AMD to get it's sh!t together and improve RT performance and stop fooling around like what they did with RDNA3.

Personally I am going to insist in what I was saying the day reviews of RX 7900XTX/XT came out. RT performance must be a priority because that's where all the marketing is. Also upscaling and Frame Generation today is seen as a God send gift, not as cheating, we are not in 200x where cheating was exposed as something negative. Today it's a feature. This means that raster performance is more than enough when combined with upscaling and Frame Generation, meaning what AMD needs to do is to focus on RT performance. Only then they can level the field with Nvidia in performance and force Nvidia to search for another gimmick to differentiate their cards, while subotaging of course the competition.

 

[LittleBro]

While TPU voters might be caring about raster performance, 80% of the buyers care about RT performance and DLSS. That's Nvidia's market share.
Even SONY pressured AMD to get it's sh!t together and improve RT performance and stop fooling around like what they did with RDNA3.

Personally I am going to insist in what I was saying the day reviews of RX 7900XTX/XT came out. RT performance must be a priority because that's where all the marketing is. Also upscaling and Frame Generation today is seen as a God send gift, not as cheating, we are not in 200x where cheating was exposed as something negative. Today it's a feature. This means that raster performance is more than enough when combined with upscaling and Frame Generation, meaning what AMD needs to do is to focus on RT performance. Only then they can level the field with Nvidia in performance and force Nvidia to search for another gimmick to differentiate their cards, while subotaging of course the competition.

Frame gen and DLSS is not God's gift but rather Satan's image quality lowering and ghosting and hallucinating tool. Exactly the opposite, raster performance is not enough, it does not scale with shaders count and price tags as before. You are getting less and less for higher price.

 

[Daven]

Hardware Unboxed did such a great video on Ray Tracing specifically, there are only a few titles that actually utilize it correctly. Otherwise, game developers and nGreedia simply use DLSS and FG as a crutch. There is a saying "The juice, isn't worth the squeeze" and oh boy, are we being squeezed. I actually regret upgrading to 1440p, these "new generation" cards are an insult.

The worst part is that only some elements (water, lighting, etc) are ray traced. The performance drop for this partial quality improvement is enormous and eventually unnoticeable after playing a fast paced game for a while.

As more elements are ray traced, the performance will drop to zero fps on today’s cards which effectively ‘zeros’ out any chance of future proofing.

Ray tracing is a scam that tries to justify high GPU prices. All manufacturers are in on it but none worse than Nvidia. I look forward to AMD and Intel bringing some sense back to the GPU market. Hopefully PC enthusiasts will reward these GPU makers with their hard earned cash as hoping better competition brings down Nvidia prices doesn’t make sense if the vast majority only buy Nvidia and refuses consideration of other GPUs due to brand loyalty or internet myths about quality. That didn’t work out so well for Intel fans for the past two gens of CPUs.

 

[loracle706]

Upscaling and frame generation lol no one wants that bullshit, finally people awakes, and those thiefs companies are pushing hard in this way !!

 

[john_]

Hardware Unboxed did such a great video on Ray Tracing specifically, there are only a few titles that actually utilize it correctly. Otherwise, game developers and nGreedia simply use DLSS and FG as a crutch. There is a saying "The juice, isn't worth the squeeze" and oh boy, are we being squeezed. I actually regret upgrading to 1440p, these "new generation" cards are an insult.

I refuse to see a video with Tim, because I consider him as an unofficial Nvidia employee and promoter. He is promoting DLSS as God send and FSR as a crap from Hell the last 2 years. So, if in his video he is pointing out that developers are not doing a good job with RT optimization, making DLSS and FG a mandatory feature to get any meaningful frame rates with RT enabled, then his video is nothing more than his typical DLSS + FG promotion videos he is doing. He might be doing it indirectly in this video, leaving the viewers to come to their "own" conclusion that if they want RT today, the only way to have it, is with DLSS and FG, meaning RTX 4000 series.

Frame gen and DLSS is not God's gift but rather Satan's image quality lowering and ghosting and hallucinating tool. Exactly the opposite, raster performance is not enough, it does not scale with shaders count and price tags as before. You are getting less and less for higher price.

I guess it's like .JPG becoming the de facto save option for professional photography. But in gaming and with the right amount of $$$$marketing$$$$, only FSR is Satan's, DLSS is God's!

Hopefully PC enthusiasts will reward these GPU makers with their hard earned cash

AHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! sorry.... but that category live for proprietary techs, for techs that "ordinary" people wouldn't have access to. That category of users/consumers are one of the categories Intel and Nvidia target, as premium brands. They are going to be the last who will give money to AMD. That's why AMD is abandoning the enthusiast market.

 

[Flanker]

When the time comes, I just want something that consumes around the same amount of power as my GTX 1080, decent performance upgrade and doesn't set my wallet on fire

 

[john_]

Wonder what the cost would be if these were cut out, or how much more raster you could fit on the same die space.

There was one case in the past that could answer than question for you. GTX 1600 vs RTX 2000 series. For example RTX 2060 vs GTX 1660 Ti.

 

[TheDeeGee]

Amen to that. Stick those bullshit features in as bonuses or put them where the sun doesn't shine. It will NEVER serve as a true selling point. Not in the least because everyone has them. The bottom line is cold, hard, raw performance. It always will be. We've been fooled often enough, any gamer with a bit of age and historical experience knows this, graphics are just a means, not a goal. And drooling over every pixel is definitely a thing, but it'll pass, too, at some point it's all the same anyway.

The only real reason to upgrade is because you've moved to higher resolution, want more frames per second on the same content, or because the general perf requirement of games has surpassed what your current GPU can do. Its that simple. Artificial nonsense around it will always end up being artificial, and thus, fake progress. When I see that numerous older DX11 games show an OK (or even extremely good) picture at north of 100 FPS on midrange cards of seven years ago, there's just no explanation that slightly better looking games on DX12 struggle with todays midrange cards. There's just none. And upscale is clearly not helping that perspective either; its possibly even making it worse because why do you even need 'extra performance' if the original presentation was fine to begin with? You're basically implicitly telling us your base experience sucks donkey balls now. Which it does, too, if you remove the blur filters.

Some odd statements though in the article. 'Used to 50% gen to gen uplifts'... ?! Those are the exceptions. Definitely not the rule. I believe Pascal was the only straight up 50% gen to gen uplift in the last ten years, and maybe Maxwell was somewhat close to it too. The others all came with a heavy redesign of the stack/product tiering/pricing structure. And even Pascal came with a $50,- premium per tier. Its not a 50% gen to gen uplift if that only happens from one x90 to the next, while the rest barely moves forward at the same price point. That's just introducing new price points with new performance levels, realistically.

Fact is, Ray Tracing is easier to work with for developers compared to baked lighting.

Upscaling and frame generation lol no one wants that bullshit, finally people awakes, and those thiefs companies are pushing hard in this way !!

As if AMD, Intel and NVIDIA are going to listen, lol

 

[FreedomEclipse]

NVIDIA Doesn't Want you to know THIS, but TPU Readers Have the Answer. 5 Reasons why You Won't Buy a New GPU Next Year

Also. I dont care about RTX. I just want a card that will do solid 165-200fps@1440p for $520 or even less.

 

[Tomorrow]

Hardware Unboxed did such a great video on Ray Tracing specifically, there are only a few titles that actually utilize it correctly.

That was a very illuminating video about RT. Essentially half of all games that support RT in some shape or form could be considered useless to run RT on as it massively hurts performance but barely improves visuals or in some case actually hurts visuals.

Could RT work be split out to like a daughter board, or a dedicated card? Have the RT calculations offloaded on that.
Always wondered if we could get more out of RT, AI and traditional GPUs if they were split out in their own individual card. Would have a ton more die space combined. Like imagine a dedicated RT card the size of big Ada and run fully path traced games on.

That would require fully path traced games. Most games are raster-RT hybrids that require raster hardware. Combining raster from one card and RT from another card has major frametime issues like SLI/CF had. Even PhysX fell into the same pitfall.

I don't mind upscaling and pretty much use DLSS in every single game that has it. 'unless its a terrible implementation but thats rare nowadays'
In some games I even use it when I don't need the extra performance, for example I'm using it in Wuthering Waves and that game I could easily run natively w/o making my GPU sweat at my resolution.
Reason being is that the built in TAA paired with native res looks like crap and theres a lot of flickering 'which I'm allergic to' in the background and DLSS fixes that for the most part. 'this happened in a number of games I was playing in the past years'

I'm already paying a lot of money for even a mid range card in my country regardless of what brand it is so at that point I prefer the one with the better feature set and for my use case that means DLSS/DLAA. 'I usually upgrade every 3 years between ~mid range cards unless something unexpected happens before that'

Im allergic to blurriness which all upscaling formats have plenty of. I much prefer assisted AA like DLAA and FSR NativeAA that actually improve image quality compared to god awful FXAA, MFAA or TAA implementations. I only upgrade once my current hardware is no longer able to run what i need at the performance/quality level i want. I dont arbitrarily say "oh, 3 years is up - i better upgrade".

I remind you that you'd pay $1600 for best GPU in the market (RTX 4090) with which you'd not be able to play newest titles at 60 FPS at 4K on ultra on native? What do you pay for?

Yes that's just sad that some people buy the most expensive consumer GPU of this generation to supposedly enjoy superior image quality only to turn on upscaling and frame generation to reach playable framerates in a single game. In the past buying the fastest model at least had the benefit of providing unmatched performance without worrying about graphics settings even in the newest games. Just max out everything and enjoy smooth performance.
I remember when i bought 7900 GTX back in 2006 and then cranked all my games to max.

While TPU voters might be caring about raster performance, 80% of the buyers care about RT performance and DLSS. That's Nvidia's market share.

Where does this 80% number come from? If you're equating nvidia's market share to buyers who care about RT and DLSS then that's a false assumption. Not every Nvidia buyer considers these their main reason for buying Nvidia.

The worst part is that only some elements (water, lighting, etc) are ray traced. The performance drop for this partial quality improvement is enormous and eventually unnoticeable after playing a fast paced game for a while.

Exactly. Advocates for RT speak like this is some sort of great thing but Tim's video posted above proves that most games do not implement it in a meaningful way and all RT games today are hybrids of raster and RT and thus raster perf still matters and will matter for a long time.

Fact is, Ray Tracing is easier to work with for developers compared to baked lighting.

A false assumption. RT is in fact double work for developers. They have to make both raster and RT lighting versions of the game and then ensure turning on RT does not cause additional problems with raster. Only games that are fully RT or PT like Quake II RTX, Portal RTX etc have the benefit of only RT lighting.

By the way i was the one who suggested this poll. Im glad TPU went rough with it. 25k votes is a pretty sizeable sample size. Most polls consider 1000 a meaningful sample size for accurate results. It also pretty much confirmed my expectations. People have not suddenly started to place RT or upscaling/fragmegen above traditional price/raster/efficiency. Tho i was surprised that efficiency was this high up the list as i consider most current gen cards to be pretty efficient.

 

[Glina]

Wouldn't disabling RT solve most performance issues at 4K with current gen GPUs? This implies those improvements are needed, either on GPU or rather developers side.

All that matters to me is performance/watt (efficiency) as I like my GPU in TDP 220-250W range.

 

[TheDeeGee]

View attachment 369228

Also. I dont care about RTX. I just want a card that will do solid 165-200fps@1440p for $520 or even less.

RTX is the card name, not a graphical feature.

 

[Sithaer]

Im allergic to blurriness which all upscaling formats have plenty of. I much prefer assisted AA like DLAA and FSR NativeAA that actually improve image quality compared to god awful FXAA, MFAA or TAA implementations. I only upgrade once my current hardware is no longer able to run what i need at the performance/quality level i want. I dont arbitrarily say "oh, 3 years is up - i better upgrade".

We all have our preferences and luckily for me I cannot notice the quality loss between my native res and with DLSS Quality regardless of what anyone says I will trust my eyes first. 'I don't pixel peep while playing my games but I do notice the native/TAA flickering even when I'm playing'
3 years is more like my experience so far since 2008, pretty much last around 3 years with my budget-mid range GPUs since I'm a variety gamer I also play brand new more demanding games too. 'for example the new UE 5 games are starting to really push the limits of my 3060 Ti w/o having to murder my settings too much'

Btw I only buy second hand GPUs so I aint paying full price to any of the brands and this leaves me with more options in my budget range whenever its upgrade time.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

RTX is the card name, not a graphical feature.

Its also short of a feature called 'Ray Tracing'. And i dont care about Ray Tracing

 

[Tomorrow]

Its also short of a feature called 'Ray Tracing'. And i dont care about Ray Tracing

Short for Ray Traying is RT, not RTX.

 

[phints]

Uh oh VRAM is low priority on this TPU poll... only 12GB VRAM on 5070 confirmed.