Is RTX worth it?

Geforce RTX, the key feature released with Nvidia’s Turing Architecture promises to provide an easy way for developers to code lighting effects with much more accurate lighting patterns than would be generated using standard rasterization rendering. However, Nvidia’s Turing architecture was largely acknowledged to not have a big enough performance boost to warrant buying, so reviewers recommended consumers to buy last generation Pascal graphics cards at discounted prices. Despite this, many reviewers bought onto the hype of RTX and hailed it as the future of gaming. Now, with the release of Nvidia’s Ampere architecture which comes with massive performance gains over the previous generation, is RTX worth the FPS penalty?

Although Nvidia managed to produce stunning graphics which demonstrate the capabilities of RTX in its most ideal form, in most fast paced games, one may not even notice RTX is turned on. Even in single player titles or scenery based games like Minecraft, players will not notice much of a difference with RTX turned on due to the effectiveness of rasterization in providing accurate lighting and shadow effects. As an owner of an RTX 2070 Super, I bought the GPU thinking that Ray Tracing could be an interesting way to make video games look better, but I chose to keep RTX off in most situations because the performance hit was almost never worth barely noticeable reflections in puddles or off my gun in Battlefield 5.

As seen by the above graph, when RTX is turned on, the game’s performance takes a big hit, to lower than 60 FPS on the RTX 3070, the RTX GPU most people would buy. Even though RTX performance greatly has improved with Nvidia’s Ampere GPUs, almost nobody would sacrifice the smoothness of a game at 100 FPS for slightly better looking illumination and shadows. For most people, the performance hit is not worth the barely noticeable shadows of RTX. The experience of running a game at a high resolution and high framerate is always going to be more valuable than slightly better looking lighting effects. The only people who should consider turning on Ray Tracing are RTX 3090 owners who can experience RTX at over 100 FPS, but for RTX 3090 owners, RTX should still be only turned on in very specific situations.

Due to the limited benefits RTX introduces over standard rasterization lighting and the huge performance hit caused by turning RTX on, I would almost never recommend buying a graphics card for its Ray Tracing performance and inclusion of DLSS (because DLSS is only helpful with RTX on). For those who have a massive disposable income, the RTX 3090 could definitely find a place systems for Ray Tracing enthusiasts. Although much of the tech media is obsessed with the addition of Ray Tracing on recent generations of graphics cards, they are more excited about the technology coming to consumer cards than its ability to be implemented in an effective manner. As Ray Tracing technology gets better, it could definitely solicit widespread use, but as for right now, don’t buy a graphics card specifically for Ray Tracing performance.