The game Cyberpunk 2077 He was one of those who bet the most on the integration of Ray Tracing. Recently, this game has implemented Ray Tracing Overload, which is an NVIDIA solution that adds more realism to this technology. Well, this new technology has caused the NVIDIA RTX-3090 move said game to singleplayer 30fps In 1080p resolution.
What Ray Tracing Overload does is a panoramic ray tracing render. This technology is specifically designed for the RTX 40 series, as there are changes in the architecture of the RT Cores and Tensor Cores. At the same time, it makes any older generation graphics card obsolete.
Artificial obsolescence due to Ray Tracing
There Cyberpunk 2077 version 1.62 published this week adds Ray Tracing Overload. This update graphically improves the game when ray tracing is enabled, providing more realism. You see more realistic ambient lighting and deeper shadows. But getting it isn’t exactly free.
The demand is increasing, requiring very powerful hardware to be able to use it. More specifically, it requires of at least one NVIDIA RTX 4070Ti to run this technology with guarantees.
It must be pointed out that the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 are very powerful graphics that come close to the RTX 4070 Ti. The problem is that hardware level changes between generations are a very good “trick” to avoid compatibility. executed Cyberpunk 2077 v1.62 with overload on one RTX 3090 and DLSS 2 active and I only got one average of 30 FPS in 1080p resolution.
The problem is that the RTX 30 series does not support overhead and DLSS 3. The inclusion of panoramic lighting leads to increased compute costs. It artificially increases the gap between the two generations of graphics cards.
But, to show a button. MyDrivers uses a portable games with a NVIDIA RTX 4080 with a TDP of 175W. They are running Cyberpunk 2077 v1.62 with a 1440p resolution, with “normal” Ray Tracing and with Ray Tracing Super and Overload. the game with normal ray tracing present 104 frames per secondbut with these two new technologies collapses at 65 frames per second. For both situations, we enabled DLSS 3.
We see how brutal the computational cost is, since we have a loss close to 40 FPS. With this data, we believe that any graphics card below the RTX 4080 will have a hard time, even at 1080p resolution.
AMD has a huge opportunity
All of this gives your main competitor a great opportunity. AMD has always said that Ray Tracing is an interesting complementary technology, but it’s not critical. On the other hand, they offer FSR as an alternative to DLSS, which does not require additional hardware.
Not depending so much on Ray Tracing and not adding dedicated hardware for image scaling allows you to create cheaper graphics. At the same time, not everyone wants to use this new technology and of course these users opt for cheaper components and where this technology does not carry so much weight.
Obviously, they have a great opportunity to position themselves for those users who do not want to pay nonsense to take advantage of ray tracing. Also, attack those users who don’t care about this technology. Two types of users who may prefer their products to the very expensive NVIDIA ones.
