Minecraft
I'd like to point out that TPU tests with Ray Tracing - which means high settings, but not Path Tracing or "Full Ray Tracing" as NVIDIA calls it.
The point i'm trying to make here, is that as you increase the load on the ray tracing hardware of these cards, the NVIDIA cards become faster, relatively, to their AMD equivalents. This is important to understand, because some popular games include very lightweight or basic implementations of "ray tracing", such as global illumination only, for example. This skews the data slightly, because the "ray tracing" performance penalty is much smaller, than if the entire game's lighting was ray or path traced, instead of a hybrid design of rasterised lighting and ray/path traced lighting.
I am very aware of that. I thought I made that clear already in the thread but now you know. We have actually discussed exactly that in other threads. I chose to say "The 4080s has ~20% more RT performance than the 7900xtx according to TechPowerUP reviews" rather than reference path tracing because so few games use it. Are there even more than 10 games that use path tracing so far? The handful of people who play those games should understand their performance needs and that should reflect upon their purchasing decisions. Someone who plays a lot of path tracing games would be willing to pay a significantly higher price for Nvidia Hardware because it is simply worth it for them.
Obviously 4K path traced gaming isn't currently viable at native, without using some form of upscaling/tech to improve FPS, or any combination of performance/quality improving tech such as DLSS/DLAA, Frame Generation and Ray Reconstruction. ...when these cards are actually stressed with intensive ray/path tracing implementations.
I wanted to write this because I don't think people (especially people who don't own an RTX card, or even those who haven't tried a higher end Ada generation card) really understand the difference in performance between the two vendors, and just how far ahead NVIDIA is.
Path tracing performance, up scaling, frame generation are all within Nvidia's feature set and are something people should consider in their purchasing decisions.
With the release of the PS5 Pro and the eventual Xbox Series refresh, the PS5 Pro is rumoured to have significantly faster ray tracing performance, meaning developers will probably start using heavier RT/PT implementations. But I doubt we'll see widespread path tracing until the next generation of consoles are released, e.g. PS6.
As developers start to actually make full use of the new lighting techniques of the latest game engines moving forward, I expect this trend will really start to show the differences in performance more completely, and game performance testing will show numbers skewing closer and closer to what's been shown here. Path traced lighting, e.g. no rasterized lighting at all, is the obvious end game.
This is what I'm getting at, most games today don't come close to fully using the ray tracing hardware on current generation cards, so even with "ray tracing" turned on, the FPS is still dictated by classic rasterization performance. This will change, as games use heavier and heavier RT, or full RT/PT implementations.
I cannot speak for everyone. There are obviously those who are currently enjoying ray tracing games. I personally do not care about most of Nvidia's feature set.
I do not play path tracing games. I have only ever played one ray tracing game and my meager 6750xt gets adequate performance. As pretty as ray tracing and path tracing are, I do not value it right now. Too few games use it. Even fewer are games I am likely to play.
DLSS of any version is great but not necessary to me. Too few games use it. Even fewer are games I am likely to play.
Nvenc is amazing. I enjoyed it with my gtx 1060. I don't often record gameplay so that feature goes unused with me.
CUDA and in general compute features and performance is wasted in me. I haven't done anything with compute since 2014 if I ever did.
The ai hdr feature interests and reflex are the two features that interest me most but I can easily live without. I would rather spend less money.
I am probably forgetting about features that is how little they matter to me right now.
Maybe one day xx60 class gpu has above 5090 performance and games I actually play heavily use ray tracing I will care. That is me though. That is why I only value nvidia's feature set 5 to 10% higher than AMD. Other people have different priorities and will value it differently.
I remember being blown away when Minecraft RT released, feels like version 2.0 of the game.
I think Minecraft RT is one of the best showcases of ray tracing. Minecraft does not have fancy graphics. Everything is blocky and low res by default. When ray tracing is the only thing adding visual interest it really shows how big a difference ray tracing can make.
