It seems like it’s been a long time since NVIDIA introduced the first graphics cards with Ray Tracing support. The first models were the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti, announced at the end of September 2018. Just over four years later, 64% of users have never used Ray Tracing.
When NVIDIA introduced real-time ray tracing technology, there was already a lot of discussion about it. The number of games that support this technology has grown, but it is still far from being a standard. Now, in addition, we know that most users have no interest in this technology.
Ray Tracing does not attract the attention of gamers
Who introduced this technology to the market, making it a necessity, was NVIDIA. The truth is that AMD graphics cards also support this technology, but on a smaller scale. So much so, that the company hardly talks about this technology, and now we understand the reasons.
LinusTechTips, the world’s largest hardware and technology channel has asked about Ray Tracing. Specifically, he has asked how many of his followers have used it and the result is devastating. 86,500 people have participated in the survey , which is a fairly large sample.
According to the survey, 13.6% of users have used Ray Tracing in the last week, 8.3% in the last month , and 14.4% in the last year . But the most revealing data is that 63.8% of users have never run Ray Tracing in a game. Some data that are quite devastating and that tell us how green this technology is.
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Despite NVIDIA’s efforts, users generally sweat a lot from Ray Tracing. Among the reasons would be the high price of graphics cards that support this technology and the cost of performance. And it is that ray tracing can generate a reduction of up to 50% in FPS. Something that NVIDIA makes up for with DLSS technology, which is AI-supported image rescaling.
We are talking about not just one addition to support Ray Tracing , such as RT Cores, but two. For DLSS , Tensor Cores have been integrated, which only execute AI tasks. Two elements that only make the hardware more expensive, not at all.
Ray tracing has left me cold
I must say that, personally, I found this technology interesting at first. I like games with history and good graphic quality, it seems to me that there is no better combination in a game. So I thought that ray tracing could give some extra depth to them and improve the experience.
The truth is that more than a year ago I bought a laptop with an RTX 3060. A few months ago I bought the Cyberpunk 2077 to test Ray Tracing and to be honest, I was disappointed. Well, really the disappointment has been double. Although Cyberpunk 2077 seemed interesting to me, the truth is that it seemed very boring to me, little more than a futuristic GTA.
Regarding Ray Tracing, it is not that it has left me dazzled. Quite the contrary, the FPS drop with Ray Tracing active and DLSS turned off has shown me that this technology is very green. Not counting the temperature rise to the beast of the graphics card and the maximum operation of the fans.
I think ray tracing is a good idea, but it does very little. In the end and so far, it seems that it has only served to make graphics cards more expensive.