Ray Tracing: Has it Been A Success for PC Gaming?

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Welcome back to the Hardware Inbox podcast. This week, we're going to be talking about YouTube stuffing us over with one of our videos that we published on the Hardware Inbox channel. You might have seen that. We're going to talk a little bit more about that. And then the majority of this episode is an in-depth discussion on...

the state of ray tracing at the moment. What's happened in the six years since the first RTX GPUs to now, what we're seeing around now and also some predictions for things into the future where we're sort of seeing things going and there's a bit of you know g-force versus radio and expectations and just talking about things like how NVIDIA's positioned at the moment and the things that we think that they're attempting to do with ray tracing. So yeah, big chat on that one. Let's get into it.

I was like, what are you doing? How you doing this morning, Steve? Have you switched back from Spanish to English for this podcast? That was actually so annoying because I, as you know, it was a bit of a struggle to film the Q&A for me yesterday because I've got a bit of a sore throat at the moment, let's just say. Yeah. So coughing was a bit of a problem.

And when you've got two hours of filming Q&A, it just becomes annoying. So anyway, we got through it. I know the struggles of being a YouTuber. Then Balin edited the video. I got the thumbnail already and we got it out by.

nine o'clock so worked all day on it we got it done that's great and then um a couple of mates wanted to play some games and i was like you know what i'm just going to play some games and relax i'm not going to do any more benchmarking for potential upcoming gp reviews or anything like that so started to relax video went out just checked it was all okay um and a couple of my mates were actually watching it um so that was all good

and i think it was about 20 minutes after the video went live one of my friends said to me uh the video's in spanish and i can't change it i was like what do you mean And then I saw a couple of tweets and stuff and then I looked into it. Then you messaged me. And I think when you contacted me, correct me if I'm wrong, but you were under the impression that the video, perhaps we made the mistake or something like it was uploaded and was never in English.

Yeah. Because you hadn't watched it? So basically what happened for me was obviously I left your place at like 6.30 or something. I had to drive back home. And it takes a while. It takes a couple of hours. So by the time I'd gotten home, the video had...

pretty much just been published by the time I rocked up at my house and then, you know, just get home, get, get so back into my house. And then I started seeing some messages about like the video being in Spanish. And I didn't think that you had. uploaded the video in Spanish instead of English because that obviously wouldn't be possible. But I was thinking more along the lines of maybe at some point in the video.

like an extra audio track was accidentally added to the file in Premiere? Because... You know, I've done it before. It has happened. You accidentally leave like a background track or something, or maybe there's been some recording where very faintly in the background you can hear a different...

instead of dialogue or something, and that dialogue might have been in Spanish. So I thought that might have happened because some people were saying like, oh, there's multiple audio tracks on this video and none of them seem to be English. I'm like, okay, surely that's just like a background file.

something we'll just have to you know fix that but then i clicked on the video i'm like hang on a moment what's going on here this isn't like and i was like clicking through i'm like where's the english version like what on earth is going on there so that's what happened to me

yeah well i had opened the video on my streaming pc and had paused i was just keeping an eye on the comments and stuff anyway when my friend told me that it was no longer in english i said what are you talking about and i've hit play and it's still in English. And he's like, I just paused it, and then I play again, and it's no longer in English. I try it again. I'm like, mine's still in English.

and then i refreshed it and then the english was gone i was like uh oh so that was frustrating um you know having spent all day on the video work to get it out in time got it out in time initially it went live correctly uh and then yeah that happened and obviously that's bad for the video because the video got a lot of dislikes from people who were upset perhaps they thought it was something we did deliberately to troll them i'm not sure

But we got many more dislikes than we normally get on a Q&A series and obviously the watch time tanks because people come and they're like, what's this? What the hell is going on here? And they just leave. So it definitely ended up hurting the video, which is annoying. But yeah, whatever. Yeah.

I think the performance of the video has recovered a little bit. It was looking dicey after we fixed it back into English or YouTube fixed it back into English last night. It's done okay now, but yeah, there was a period. It was weird. It was like a period of people clicking on the video to see like obviously word had gotten around.

that we'd published a video in Spanish or something. So there was that brief period where it was getting more views than usual, but obviously no one was watching it for very long, which is understandable. Which is not good for the longevity of the video. No, no. So it's done okay at this point, but obviously it would have been better for it to be in English the whole time. But yeah, basically when I saw it was in Spanish, I was like, I'd heard something about YouTube trialing.

like AI voice transcriptions into different languages. I didn't think it was enabled on our channel or anything. And I looked into it. I'm like, oh, no, it's actually been like enabled by default, I guess. So firstly, I saw that. I'm like, okay, well, there's a couple of different options in the YouTube studio. There was like you could manually approve all of the audio transcriptions.

Basically, that would be if there was a Spanish version that YouTube decided to generate, we would have to manually click approve. But I guess the default option was this other setting, which was manually approve questionable translations or something.

I guess Google had decided that they weren't as confident in the translation quality. So that would be for, you know, maybe more obscure languages or something. I don't know. Anyway, so my first protocol was like, well, obviously I'll just disable this feature because... i i'm not sure what you think but i don't really want a spanish translation of our videos that i haven't checked for its accuracy because like ai and stuff who knows what it's actually saying

Yeah, I mean, that is a concern. I'm not as concerned with that. That's sort of on YouTube to get that side of things right. It's more the fact that it deleted. Well, that was the second problem. That's probably the bigger concern for me is the fact that the way we'd uploaded the video, they just removed that audio track altogether. It was no longer an option. It wasn't...

It wasn't even a situation where it wasn't the default. It was just no longer an option. It was gone. Yeah, it's like they deleted it, which was especially weird because in the YouTube studio, we could see... the English version. Because if we went into the video editor where we can clip things out, delete small sections of the video...

the English version was the one that was playing. So that was even more confusing. It was like they still had the English version, but they weren't serving that to people. And so after I unchecked the box of audio... translations i was like surely that would fix the video because that would just not allow anyone to see the translations

But no, there's also an individual setting for each video. And it turns out that once the video has gone live and you've selected that setting, you can't unselect it. So first of all, that's a bit weird. Probably should be able to unselect the translation option. But then I found there's a second area called languages or language options or something on each video. So I clicked there and then I could see all of these translations that were available.

So I think there was like Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French on the video, but YouTube had also tried to make translations for many different languages. There's like at least another five or six in there, but it hadn't made those live yet. So I was like, okay, I'm just going to go through and try delete all of these translations because surely if I delete all the translations, then the English version would come back because there'd be no audio, right?

So I was going through, I was deleting like the botched versions, like Japanese. I'm like, let's get rid of that. Get rid of that. No problem. I think German, get rid of that. Then I tried to delete the Spanish, Italian, Portuguese ones, the ones that are already live. I was clicking delete. Nothing was happening. So I was like, I'm just slamming these buttons. I'm like, what's going on here? Like, why can't I delete these translations or anything? Eventually I had to...

you know, go through the dreaded system of the YouTube creator support feature. Yeah. Which was another level of AI trolling. Well, I think initially these days when you click on it, you get like AI to begin with and then you type in your question and then pretty quickly the AI was like, yeah, this is beyond my capabilities.

So luckily these days, it used to be much worse. It's a bit better now. You can actually speak to someone relatively quickly. So within a couple of minutes, I was chatting to this person. They were like, oh, we're going to have to look into that. So then we'd wait for like 10 minutes. They come back and they're like, can you give us a bit more time on this one? So I'm like, I'm waiting. I'm like, okay. And they're like.

Oh, so we're going to need to like pass this on to the technical YouTube team or something because this is very unusual behavior or whatever. And they're like, we'll get back to you in 24 hours. I'm like, oh, 24 hours. Like that's pretty typical for YouTube for any serious problem. It's going to be a long time waiting. We'll just have to wait and see in the morning, you know, for the...

to see whether they've fixed it. And that's when I was contacting you about, you know, do we delete the video and just re-upload a different version or just make it private until they've fixed it. Obviously, people were kind of enjoying the Spanish bit. A lot of people found it very funny. For the time being, I just left it up. But thankfully, within about an hour, I think they'd restored. Yeah, it was pretty quick, really.

Yes, they'd restored it in the end. I got an email this morning sort of just confirming, yeah, we've fixed this video. They didn't really give any additional details, unfortunately. It would have been nice to sort of get reassured that Yeah, so in the future, you know, this won't happen again. Like you're not going to upload a video and then it's only in Spanish or something. But they did fix it in the end. So a very weird process there. But yeah, for about...

About an hour, maybe an hour and a half yesterday, if you watched our video, Spanish Unboxed or French Unboxed, if you really wanted to, was the option that you got. Yeah, clearly a bug and we just uploaded it at an unfortunate period of time where we got hit with a bug because you hear from other YouTubers where they uploaded during certain hours and dumb, unfortunate things happened.

And then because of that, they report it to YouTube. YouTube fixed it. And by the time we uploaded our video, it was solved. So we were wrong place or, yeah, wrong time. Right place, wrong time. So, yeah, anyway, annoying. Yeah, it's a bit interesting because for a platform as large as YouTube, it actually is surprisingly bug-free most of the time. Like we're talking about millions of videos being uploaded there.

all of the time and we've had maybe one or two videos that have had processing issues where like normally for us when we upload a video it's processed into the 4k maximum quality within minutes so we don't have to wait too long it seems like If you are a larger channel, they sort of prioritize processing times and that sort of thing. So that's happened a couple of times. I think there was a few times where like the stat counters and stuff wouldn't work. So we'd publish a video.

It'd say zero views within the first half hour. We'd start panicking being like, oh my God, this video, what has happened to it? But then you see there's like obviously hundreds of comments on the video. So that has to be wrong. But, yeah, like it's pretty rare to get these sorts of problems on YouTube, but they do like to try a lot of different stuff. So we've seen people being like, oh, today there's like AI descriptions beneath videos of like what the video is about. It's like, okay, cool.

yeah nah you're right it does generally work quite well but yes the uh it's annoying when stuff like that happens again when you've spent tons of time working on it and yeah you just I maintain that if I had have, when you left to go home and I'd finished with everything I needed to do to get the video online, if I had have just gone back to benchmarking and worked all night, there would have been no problems.

But YouTube seems to hate it whenever I try to relax and take a break. So I think it's probably my fault more than anything.

Sure, we'll blame you for Spanish Unbox, no problem. So tonight I'll be benchmarking all night. Yeah. So whatever content happens to be out tonight should be smooth sailing. I thought it was... pretty funny to begin with but then obviously I was pretty frustrated that it wasn't like easily fixable because then yeah it's like oh the video performance is going to be affected and that sort of thing which is which is never good but yeah

Hopefully everyone enjoyed Spanish Unboxed and you can actually still go and listen to the Spanish version if you still want to. It is still available on that video. It's an optional feature now, not a mandatory feature. YouTube, YouTube. All right, so for today's main topic, which I was planning on talking about for pretty much the whole episode until they made our YouTube channel into a different language, is talking about ray tracing.

a sort of recap of I love ray tracing Tim so you've got me excited let's go We know that we're going to hear all of your hate comments about ray tracing in this podcast. No. Yeah, so why are we talking about ray tracing? Well, new GPUs are just about to launch, basically. So it's probably good to sort of...

give us state of play of ray tracing at the moment and our sort of thoughts on it. I've made a few videos recently sort of diving deeper into ray tracing to sort of set us up for next generation GPUs. And we've obviously tested a lot more games that use ray tracing this year, previous years, that sort of thing. I think it's probably fair to say to begin with that our opinion on ray tracing has been probably pretty negative.

throughout most of this ray tracing era, let's say, since RTX 20 series GPUs were announced. We haven't been the biggest fan of the technology. It has improved over time, but certainly... as things stand right now, I wouldn't say it's a hugely... crucial feature but i'm just interested to hear your thoughts because i've obviously said a few things in videos on the hardware unbox main channel after watching those and obviously testing gpus and games and stuff where do you currently sit

on something like ray tracing well i think with it's more than just us giving like just an opinion right so yeah there's more to it there's more nuance than just here's my opinion on ray tracing what's shaped that opinion, how we formed that opinion, really goes back to the very start with the promises that were made.

occasionally that will be criticized of being far too negative or we hate ray tracing or you know whatever the accusation may be but from day one ray tracing was this new feature that was gonna revolutionized gaming and you just you didn't want a game without ray tracing it was going to be that transformative that amazing you really wanted to ensure that you had a top tier gpu that could handle ray tracing because if you didn't have that

gaming was essentially going to suck in comparison can't remember the exact language that was used but i think everyone will recall there was a heavy emphasis on how great ray tracing was going to be and that you know you just wouldn't want to game without a ray tracing capable gpu so that was very much the sentiment back when the original geforce 20 series gpus were announced um released yeah and

So based on that, we were going to be a bit more critical of ray tracing, given that it was a feature that NVIDIA was using, a key feature they were using to sell you products.

if it was just a situation where you know the geforce 20 series in terms of cost per frame was like any other generation you know prices remained much the same at each performance tier but you were getting 30 40 percent more performance so that really moves the needle forward in terms of what you're actually getting compared to the previous generation the outgoing let's say two-year-old generation

And if that was the case and ray tracing was just this new exciting feature that we've added to the cards, so you're getting the usual value that you could expect plus this cool new feature or set of features.

that'd be awesome i think we'd be much more excited about ray tracing it still would have been a situation where you know ultimately it turns out being what it was so that opinion doesn't change but at least our initial reception and expectations of ray tracing would have been very different because it wasn't something you were paying a premium for it was a nice bonus that hopefully pans out well and you know is a worthwhile feature which i think

eventually it's it's getting towards that so but basically i just want to make it clear that's a really important thing to be aware of is that it was an initially and still to this day uh something that nvidia is pushing as a key selling point of their products so that being the case yeah you want to be able to use it a lot you want it to actually be transformative you want it to actually be a useful awesome technology that you're going to use in more than

on average, maybe two games a year. Yeah. So, I mean, I've just gone back and had a look at the sort of original articles that were used. There was obviously a keynote as well that talked about this. And what you're saying is absolutely 100% true. Really, we shouldn't be revising history. If anyone's trying to revise history, it's just suggesting that... Nvidia were not selling these cards for their ray tracing capabilities. They described the RTX 2060 as, you know,

On January 15th, the $349 GeForce RTX 2060 will deliver advanced ray tracing and AI features. So that's the first paragraph of their RTX 2060 announcement, and we've just shown that the RTX 2060... probably can't do ray tracing very well. But there's additional things as well. They're talking about extraordinary performance and real-time ray tracing that blurs the distinction between movies and games. It's like, well...

I don't know if the RTX 2060 really did that at the time. And then obviously in their keynote presentation, there was a lot of discussion of... how realistic ray tracing would be, all these features that it would bring. They used Shadow of the Tomb Raider as an example, showing these much more realistic shadows. They showed, I think, Metro Exodus with RTX global illumination in it.

Sort of just showing like how much more dynamic, true to life these sorts of features would be. And that wasn't the reality for quite a while after those cards launched. even though they were trying to promise this feature and it ultimately ended up as a tech demo, as we've sort of said.

They didn't even deliver it right away. So it wasn't even something that you could utilize when you had bought products like a 2080 or a 2080 Ti. And that played into a lot of the pricing discussion with those cards back then. The RTX 2080 Ti was a $1,200 GPU, which was much more expensive than the 1080 Ti. And then obviously you had products like the 2080 coming in at the same... price as the 1080ti offering roughly the same level of performance outside of ray tracing games

But then the idea was you spent that money to get ray tracing. So there was that whole discussion back then of do you buy a 2080 for ray tracing or do you just get maybe a cheaper 1080 Ti? And I think time has shown that...

It really didn't matter which option that you did because for at least a few years there, ray tracing wasn't really something that people could... people could use and i remember nvidia at the time getting very upset with us pointing this out very upset in some um in some you could say that meetings that we had and

I think it's only been much more recently, maybe in the last one or two years, that what NVIDIA was saying back in 2018 probably could have been classed as accurate. Like if you're talking about... significant transformations to quality, the transformative effects of ray tracing, the high levels of visual quality. It's going to make games look a lot better. I don't think it's... It certainly didn't happen in the first couple of years that we got examples of that.

We maybe got one example, Cyberpunk 2077, relatively early, but it's only been more recently with more path traced games. Cyberpunk added path tracing to it later. That we got more of what was... promised and so that really like that sets up the perception doesn't it when you've got this feature that you're selling to people that you're encouraging people to spend more money to access

but then it's not until 2022, 2023 sort of timeframe that you can actually realistically get that sort of experience, notwithstanding the fact that the cards probably weren't powerful, that you had bought back then probably weren't powerful enough.

But even just from the visual standpoint side of things, it took a long time for those sorts of features to come of age, I guess. I think overall our opinions are probably similar. I don't think... where our opinions differ one of us is more right than the other i would say i'm certainly more negative still towards ray tracing than you are like i agree with your opinion uh almost fully

I guess where I'm still down on ray tracing and not that excited about it is the fact that the good examples that you can point to that are certainly good examples. You can only enjoy them to a satisfactory degree, in my opinion, with top-tier hardware. And that is top-tier hardware that's available today, not top-tier hardware of past generations. So...

The opinion as an RTX 4090 owner on ray tracing... would be very different to the opinion of an rtx 4070 owner in my in my opinion having used both of those products to do ray tracing to varying degrees the experience on the 4070 is nowhere near as good as the 4090 now you might be like well duh you know it's a more high-end product of course the experience is going to be better but it's a for me it's the difference between the the experience being satisfactory to

varying degrees with a 4090 to just not satisfactory with a 4070 in my opinion whereas if you go to like rasterization performance yeah again the 4090 is much faster than a 4070

but there are loads of games that are extremely enjoyable, look fantastic, and play really well on a 4070 at 1440p, in some examples, even 4K, especially if you're going to use upscaling. So you get a great... overall experience with the 4070 but if you're focusing on ray tracing then i think the experience is not great the performance overall generally bad uh the examples where it's

what would you say transformative like noticeably better is very limited and in those examples you have to be willing to play at a certain frame rate to even entertain those examples so i i still think for the majority of the market for the majority of gamers ray tracing has certainly under delivered it's very underwhelming

And we're so many years from those initial claims. But something you said interesting that I totally agree with is we've praised NVIDIA employees and NVIDIA as a company recently for the way they've handled.

new launches like you know the way they've done their um sort of meetings with us let's say they've handled that really well but something that has been really frustrating dealing with nvidia over the years and something that they certainly need to work on is their book like i get that they're trying to sell the products i get that the pr marketing people right i get that they're

for a lack of a better term drinking the kool-aid let's say but they really argue a lot of these points where they ultimately end up being wrong often like it happens a lot with us right um yeah we got the whole clamshell memory thing you know there's just no way they could they couldn't offer the 16 gigabyte model for anything less than 100 us premium

It just couldn't happen. It's a complicated design. It's expensive to do. And then it was like months later, it's $50 cheaper. They've argued that you won't see examples where 8 gigabytes of VRAM is not enough. That's just not going to happen. the list just continues to grow and grow yeah again they argued that stuff like the 2060 2070 would be excellent for ray tracing and they would ray i guess going back to that argument

Back then, we said the problem with the 2016 and the 2017 is they kind of suck at ray tracing now. They're not going to get more powerful and better at ray tracing in the future. It's like what you see now is what you get yet.

games might become a bit more optimized and implement ray tracing a bit better but not to the degree where you're going to be utilizing a 2060 to really enjoy ray tracing and there's really no arguing that point is there at this point in time that's proven to be the case no it's definitely been proven i think it's even been proven to the extent that it's very clear with modern games that to have an acceptable level of ray tracing quality

you have to do more ray tracing. There's no solution where you can just have this really light implementation. It's really easy to run and enjoy. great quality ray tracing effects. That hasn't happened. It's been a situation where games that are more performance taxing in their ray tracing implementations that integrate more ray tracing effects, particularly things like reflections.

those things give you better ray tracing quality. They improve the quality of the game more, but they're also much more taxing to run. I think there was a brief period at the start where you'd see like, I think it was Battlefield V, right? Very taxing on performance, very grainy, low quality ray tracing reflections. So that was very disappointing at launch because it was just not a good example. That's all that generation could do though, really.

I mean, there was control, which is a better example in Metro Exodus, but even then the frame rates on the 20 series cast weren't, come on, they weren't good.

No, they weren't good. I think those early examples were probably, there has been optimization since then, so we don't see as many of those sort of halving your frame rate, just horrible levels of... grain and noise you know generally speaking today if you're having your frame rate with ray tracing effects you're getting actual improvements that's not obviously always the case but you're much more likely to get you know noticeably

and certainly usable quality because, at least in my opinion, the quality of the effects in Battlefield V were very underwhelming. But... I guess my point is I'd like to see less arguing things that either you can't prove right now or the only evidence that's available right now contradicts the argument you're making.

Back then, our argument was the only evidence we have suggests that these cards aren't good at ray tracing. And historically GPUs haven't... evolved somehow to become more powerful than they are like it's a fixed thing right uh and even if we another question for you would be okay so you bought an rtx 2080 which was the second highest gpu from that generation very expensive very powerful for rasterization generally an excellent product

similar to the 1080 ti in terms of rasterization performance really wasn't a smidge and faster from memory um i'm sure that's aged out a bit differently but that was the upon release uh sort of summary so you bought a 2080 expensive high-end product. To this day, how many examples of a great ray tracing experience can you honestly have had with that product? Yeah, okay. So if I break it down, in the latest videos I think we've done, we've found probably...

15 to 20 games. Again, I haven't tested every game that's got ray tracing in it, so let's just assume that there's more, maybe double the amount that we found of games that are great at ray tracing. So maybe there's... 30 games, 40 games at best. That's being very generous. That's good. So where you turn on ray tracing effects, you notice a difference. It's improving the visual experience.

But that doesn't mean all those games run on the 2080 Ti. The 2080. Yeah, so the 2080, right. So because that card has 8 gigabytes of VRAM, there's going to be a portion of those games that will run into VRAM issues. unless you're running at a very low frame rate. That probably wasn't the target of a 2080. There's certainly much more modern games, even some of the games where ray tracing effects are only available, like Star Wars Outlaws. I think that experience...

It's probably not going to be great on a 2080. I don't remember what the 2080 got in Star Wars. I'll have a quick look while you're talking. And then obviously we've got games like Black Myth Wukong with path tracing, Alan Wake 2 with path tracing.

where a 2080 is probably not powerful enough to run those effects at any sort of significant frame rate. They obviously don't support frame generation, even though they're probably running at 30 FPS, so frame generation is out of the question there anyway. But yeah, I mean, over the lifespan of that card, you probably would have been able to play maybe like Cyberpunk 2077 with some form of ray tracing enabled and a couple of other examples.

maybe controllers you brought up previously, those sorts of games, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition. But I would say the majority of the games that you would have played over that time would have been normal rasterized games and there would have been... a bunch of other examples of games that had ray tracing that you wouldn't have used the ray tracing in either because the effects did nothing or the performance hit was too substantial on that level of hardware because today what is a 2080 it's like

entry-level-ish performance, entry-to-mainstream-level performance? Yeah. Well, in Star Wars Outlaws, at 1080p using quality DLSS upscaling, the 2070 Super... which is basically a 2080 got 51 fps on average that's 1080p upscaling and that's without the rtx lighting uh feature enabled so that's just the yeah the standard normal ray tracing Based on that data, an RTX 2080 would be equivalent to an RX 7600 or slower than a 4060.

It's below current NVIDIA entry level, at least in this example. And then if you enable the RTX lighting feature, you're looking at sub 30 FPS performance at 1080p with quality upscaling. Yeah, and was that ultra preset otherwise? That's ultra preset, yeah. So, first of all, you probably wouldn't still be using that GPU if you had bought it anyway.

but the question more was for the period that you did conceivably have that product, how much realistically, how much ray tracing did you take advantage of? If you wanted to play Star Wars Outlaws at 1440p with upscaling, a 2080 Ti did 49 FPS on average. Right, and that's the Ti model. That's the Ti model. The issue that we're talking about is kind of two issues, right?

The first issue, when you bought a 2080 for the first couple of years, there just weren't that many Ray Trace games, like just period. There was at least one year. The first year of launch, I think we got...

maybe three or four games total, which is obviously not great. And then the second issue was in those games, could you actually run the ray tracing effects to a level where you would consider leaving it enabled? And in that first year, I think there was... maybe one example of a game where you would leave ray tracing enabled i mean control may control yes metro exodus at the time it was probably the

best of the other examples yeah they were still taxing games like you would you were playing at significant you weren't playing at high refresh rates so yeah again this is my problem if you've bought yourself a nice high refresh rate monitor and We've talked about this time and time again, but the high refresh rate experience is phenomenally good. The difference between 60 FPS gaming and 120 plus is day and night. For me...

That enhances the gaming experience significantly more than any ray tracing effects I've seen to date. And this is a subjective thing. It's a personal opinion thing. But in my opinion, I don't think it's crazy to say that. What's your opinion on that? Yeah, I mean, I would prefer to play a game at a high refresh rate than with ray tracing enabled at a... low refresh rate if that those if the options is like 60 fps with ray tracing or 120 fps without ray tracing which is a very common

So I'm not talking unrealistic levels of performance difference here. I would pick 120 FPS without ray tracing. It does depend on the game. There's probably some games where... Like Alan Wake, for example. Yeah, but I think if I'm talking about a general game, just like pick a random game, I'd be more likely to pick the high refresh rate experience. Control, Metro Exodus, Cyberpunk, all of those games play so much better.

at a high refresh rate high refresh rate experience is the way to play those games not at low frame rates with fancy lighting and reflections it's just it's it's not and not to dig up uh past drama but you know nvidia accused us of being out of touch with gamers and not understanding what gamers want and i think numerous polls blowback feedback and stuff has proven that's not the case gamers

especially buying high-end products typically want high refresh rate gaming or they certainly want frame rates to be nudged towards that we've heard uh by and large people in our audience want a minimum of about 90 fps to truly enjoy a game yeah and i think that's reasonable because it makes sense because you we again we did that test with bail and not that long ago with uh cyberpunk i think because bail and

he's sort of between us isn't he like tim likes single player games i generally like competitive multiplayer and balen hovers between both of those worlds i think he said i can't remember exactly but you were there he said something like i think i could play cyberpunk with ray tracing at 60 fps like i'd prioritize that visual experience and he is a console gamer as well so that sort of makes sense And then you were standing there and I showed him with a 4090, the ray traced.

maximum quality visual experience at 60 fps and he's like okay yeah it looks pretty good and then i just turned that off the frame rate shot up over 120 it was like 140 150 fps he's like oh actually this is this is a much better way of playing the game i prefer this i was like yeah it doesn't surprise me like it feels nicer it's better for aiming better for playing the actual game

uh and the visual downgrade for just playing the game it's not night and day like i i get that the ray tracing is most impressive there but if you're just playing through the game the smooth uh low input latency that that's what sells you on on the gaming so and again this is my opinion but it seems like the majority of gamers especially in our audience seem to agree with that and you know you agree with that as well

despite the fact that you primarily play single-player games. Yeah, I think the issue that NVIDIA's had, and I think it probably has actually affected the whole perception of ray tracing, right, is that... you had to convince gamers to ditch that experience to play ray tracing right. So people had already generally experienced, especially high-end gamers around that time, had already started to experience high refresh rate gaming because...

When the high refresh rate monitors come out, the early 2010s, we started to get G-Sync and that sort of thing. around 2014, 2015 from memory, maybe a bit earlier than that. So if you were a high-end buyer, you were in the market for 1080 Ti's, those sorts of products.

you were starting to realize what the experience could be like with 90 FPS, 120 FPS at decent resolutions in modern games. And that was certainly what was being sold for those premium experiences. That's why you would buy a 1080 Ti is to get... higher and higher levels of performance above 60 fps obviously some games again like the witcher 3 probably couldn't have been done above 60 fps but they were starting to to move down that path and so gamers

We're getting to this position by 2018, 2019, where sort of a lot of people had upgraded to high refresh rate monitors. They started to play games in that experience. And then NVIDIA was asking gamers, well... we want you to experience better visual quality, but to do this, you're going to have to sacrifice frame rate. And so that became the benchmark for a lot of people, right? You're playing games at a high refresh rate with reasonable quality levels.

And then you turn ray tracing on, but you had to sacrifice frame rate. And so a lot of people were making that toss up. And I think that's where we saw a lot of these comments of things like, well, I'm just not accepting the performance hit. If people were already used to 60 FPS and then upgraded to a new GPU that was still giving them 60 FPS gaming, but now it's ray tracing.

I think that perception would be very different because you'd be going from 60 FPS to better quality 60 FPS. But what was actually happening was people going from 120 FPS to 60 FPS with ray tracing. and making those comparisons and those comparisons not being favorable, especially early, because those early perceptions of games, the quality just wasn't there. People were turning on this feature and going,

I can't really notice the difference. Like the visual quality gain over ultra just isn't that good. My frame rate, you know, I was playing high refresh rate. Now I'm not. And that set the tone for the whole generation. I think that tone was set because NVIDIA tried to sell the feature as something that you could use right now, that this was something that you should be paying money for right now. Whereas...

We sort of made the point to NVIDIA at the time when we were arguing with them and also probably still continue to make this point to this day that if they had sold it as a technical demo. as something that we don't really expect you to play games in this way now, but just have a, like you sort of getting people to think about the future, right? You'd get them to play a game like Control with all the nice reflections.

And you would say, yeah, okay, you're 2080 or 2080 Ti. We understand that you're going to mostly prefer the high refresh rate experience today. But in the future, this level of visual quality will be the high refresh rate experience with ray tracing.

And you sort of show people that and you get people interested in, let's have a look at the visuals. Let's see the advantages that ray tracing can bring. And yeah, we're not expecting you to always use this. We're still giving you great value GPUs with excellent performance.

But this is where we're headed. If you buy Nvidia RTX, these are the things that we're planning on improving upon generation after generation to make it so that the experience is seamless. And I think they didn't do that at launch. But they've kind of failed the second part of that as well, which is they haven't given gamers fast enough hardware for this today. Like we're six years on.

And the performance that these GPUs can do, especially in the mid-range and entry level, is still not good enough. It doesn't work at all. So at what point are we going to accept that... mainstream gpus like when is the point in time when a mainstream 300 gpu should be capable of ray tracing because it's not really possible now so when when how long are we waiting are we waiting 10 years for that

I would have thought, like I think back when we were talking about the 20 series, we were saying in five years, couple of generations, this would be a much more impressive feature. But like is that really happened? No. Well, it's a situation where we're sitting here.

saying this but this it's not like arrow lake or zen 5 where amd and intel were releasing this product hoping it would be better and it kind of underperformed didn't work out the way they wanted they were a bit bamboozled by it and it just didn't go the way they wanted i don't think that's the situation with ray tracing i think nvidia knew damn well how this was all going to play out i think they knew for sure

that you were never realistically going to be ray tracing with first generation products and certainly not the more entry-level ones. That was never going to happen. They know damn well that you're not really using ray tracing on a 4060 despite the fact that it's advertised to do it because technically it can do it, but not under realistic, reasonable conditions.

that that was never the goal of any of this the the goal was to upsell you and that's what every everything nvidia has been doing since the introduction of these rtx graphics cards has been to upsell the gamer every single thing they've done every motive is to upsell you and it's to normalize five hundred dollars six hundred dollars as the entry level that anything below that

That's garbage. They want to phase that out. They want to keep moving the bar up and just keep normalizing more expensive GPUs. And even at $600, I don't really want people to be like, oh, $600, that's a good value. I want to get the new 50, 70 or whatever it may be. They want you to be like, oh, well, if I'm poor.

and can't afford anything better or i'm being a stingy tight ass that i guess i'll get a 50 70 you know they're not great not a huge amount of vram the performance isn't all that awesome but if i double my money look out awesome this product is it actually has enough vram now and the performance is great it's really fast

I should probably just do that. After all, I'm going to be keeping it for at least two years till the next generation, probably four years. So realistically, it's not a huge investment. I believe that is what all of this has been about. And it's not been about enhancing the gaming experience or getting better products in a gamer's hands. It's about making gamers pay more for products. So they don't want to offer you.

their flagship at $700 anymore. Why would they do that? That's not much money. They want to do that for $2,000 plus. So you're never getting ray tracing on a budget card. At least no time soon. It's not the goal. that's not in nvidia aren't failing by not delivering here it is all by design yeah i i agree with you and i think this is where some people get caught up in our opinions and uh

not as much of a fan of our opinions on ray tracing because a lot of the things that we've been saying so far are right. Well, but they apply to cards most people buy. So when we're talking about ray tracing, we're not as interested in what a 4090 can do. Like we know a 4090 can do, right? Like you probably have listened to part of this as a 4090 owner and being like, well, I can enjoy ray tracing because I've got a 49. It's like.

Yeah, okay, yes. Yeah, that's true. But what we're talking about is people who buy mainstream GPUs. Most people. Most people do not buy 4090s. Most people spend... NVIDIA would like you to think $500, but more realistically, most people spend $300 or less on their graphics card. And so when we're talking about how the ray tracing ecosystem has gone, how disappointing it's been.

It's been from the perspective generally of people who are buying 2070s, 2060s, then 3070s and 3060s, and now 4070s or 4060TIs because that's now that price tier. and 4060s. And yeah, as you said, Nvidia has tried to incentivize people to move up and up and up because they're trying to get you to look at ray tracing, see the amazing qualities, and then acknowledge that you're just going to have to buy a 4090 to do that.

And yes, if you buy a 4090, the ray tracing experience is pretty good. You can play a lot of games today with good quality visuals. good frame rates. There's a lot of games you can get ray tracing in a high refresh rate experience, especially at 1440p. That's all doable. That's all nice. But it's a 1600 or more like $2,300 GPU. It's not irrelevant, but in my thinking, it's almost irrelevant what that card can do for ray tracing because it's not...

It's not a mainstream model. So for ray tracing to be this feature that everyone talks about and enjoys and gets people interested and excited about, it has to be possible on products that people mostly have. So if we're talking about all those premium experiences that people can pay tons of money to access, I guess from my perspective, that's not that interesting to me. The most interesting products have always been the things that most people can purchase.

So yes, the 4090, very decent at ray tracing. And yes, I totally agree that NVIDIA is trying to get people to... spend more and more money on this sort of thing. But I think the issue that they've run into and why people have complained about the prices of products from the 40 series and stuff is that that upsell hasn't worked because people are buying. the lower tier products, and their first taste of ray tracing is not good. So imagine, right, for example.

You buy 4060. You spent $300. You put it in your system. You turn on ray trace. Maybe it's your first ray tracing GPU. So you turn on ray tracing. Yeah, so no thanks. Performance. fell off a cliff, the visual, maybe I'm only using 1080p medium level ray tracing or something, which isn't even going to be that impressive, right? So if that's your first taste of ray tracing and you're like, pretty underwhelming.

Why would you spend $1,600 to buy 4090 for more of that? The disconnect is there. The first experience for these things needs to be really good or at least somewhat acceptable. so that you're incentivized to pay more for the better version of it later. But the problem is that the entry-level version of ray tracing is not worth using. So that taints the whole, it kind of brings you back to like early HDR monitors.

Monitor manufacturers put in this garbage version of HDR to entry-level products. So people bought them thinking, hey, I've heard about this HDR thing. That's going to be pretty good. They buy their $300. not even HDR capable product, turned on HDR, they're like, oh, this looks terrible. What is this? I heard about this HDR thing. I've been sold this biggest dud. Like, this looks crap. And then...

It turns out that HDR is actually a good feature that significantly improves the quality of video and games, but it took ages for that. to actually come to monitors that people would consider buying with good quality levels and that sort of thing. But by that time happens, you have to start reversing everyone's opinion that they've already formed. You have to start convincing people, yeah, that early version you experienced wasn't...

really the thing that we're talking about. Now we've got the thing that we were talking about, but hopefully you haven't been tainted up to this point. But that's honestly what I think has happened with ray tracing. Yes, but also completely irrelevant doesn't matter. Because in this example, NVIDIA still wins. You've still bought an NVIDIA product.

they've got the mind share so realistically what happens there is the person's like why does ray tracing suck for me maybe they ask on a forum they look at a youtube video discord whatever the reason it sucks for you is because you were cheap you didn't spend enough money well what's the other reason what if you jump online and say hey i thought this ray tracing thing was awesome i bought an rtx 4060

It sucks. I can't use it. I get like 20 FPS whenever I try. What's the deal? What's the response you're going to get? Well, yeah, it's what you said, right? the response is you're a tight ass why the hell did you buy a 4060 if you want to do ray tracing are you dumb they're going to get some sort of negative bs they're going to made to be feel stupid and then they're going to be told that

If you want to do ray tracing next time, spend more money. So they're getting the message that NVIDIA wants them to get.

that's what they want to have happen they're not going to be like oh you've got to enable these special settings or do this thing you know it's okay the 4060 can do ray tracing and then they're going to be sitting there scratching their game but i bought an rtx graphics card it's meant to do the ray tracing thing isn't it and they're like well technically it can it is an rtx graphics card it just can't do it well as you've discovered you have to spend more money more money better experience

So they're getting the message that NVIDIA wants them to get. Yeah, I just don't think that would actually work for a lot of situations. Well, it doesn't matter, but it does work.

What's the alternative? If they want to do ray tracing, spend more money. If they don't want to spend more money, they just buy another cheap GeForce graphics card. Yeah, I guess what I'm thinking of more is that instead of continuing, like that buyer, right? Instead of continuing down the path of wanting to do ray tracing.

They just change their mind about ray tracing. Sure, but that's just how marketing works, right? They market some BS. If they do a good job of the marketing, which is essentially lying to the consumer base, they... you know that that works for a period of time like you know we had physics and other things in the past um you know the other visual thing they tried before ray tracing they tried to push for so long was like ansel like people were going to use ansel

um i mean really it's on an rtx 4060 ray tracing is just enhanced ansel isn't it you turn it on to take screenshots but There's always a marketing gimmick, some sort of feature. And while I'm not claiming that ray tracing is that sort of gimmick, it is on a 4060, let's be honest. Ray tracing is a gimmick on a 4060.

But overall ray tracing isn't a gimmick. It can enhance the gaming experience. You just need a crap load of processing power to achieve it. So anyway, I just, it's, yeah, it may sour some. well nvidia have been winning anyway and all of our polling data all of the opinions and feedbacks feedback that we've been able to get from enthusiasts has suggested that ray tracing was a flop

from the get-go. And even when we poll it today, the polling data would suggest that ray tracing is a flop, would it not? Yes, I think so. I think it's been... slightly improving over time. I imagine it's because people are high and buyers are getting cards that can actually do it now. But it is improving overall as well. Yes. All aspects of ray tracing have improved. We fully acknowledge that.

but not to the degree that we would like. Yeah, I mean, I think if we're talking about let's look at the six years it's happened for ray tracing in the past, the word that would come to mind is flop. because of the expectation that was set and all the things we've just talked about. I think as well it's been a flop because I expected it to be better at this point.

Like if I think back to what we were saying, and I think you would agree with this, if we go back to what we were expecting from the 20 series, and even then, right. The 20 series comes out, we say, oh, these cards aren't very good for ray tracing. But a lot of what we were saying at the time were things like ray tracing will be the future of gaming at some point.

There's going to be some generation in the future where these cards are good for ray tracing and you'll want to use it. And I would have thought that around this time now is when that would have happened. But we're still talking about, again, outside of... premium, flagship, expensive products that Nvidia's trying to upsell you, you can't really do that. It's not in that position that I thought it would be. Maybe I wouldn't have been expecting entry-level $200, $300 GPUs to do.

high quality ray tracing but i would have thought by now you'd be buying let's say a 500 gpu and for 1440p high refresh rate which is what you would spend 500 to get that you'd be doing that with ray tracing now Whereas previously you would have done that without ray tracing in that sort of price tier. That just isn't the case. Like a 4070 is not a 1440p high refresh ray tracing card. That's a 4090.

that was my hope as well but realistically it was never going to be the case and as i just said it's not the plan that it's not the plan and if you look at a game like metro exodus and control those games do play really well on a 40 70 yeah right so but the problem is the new ray tracing games have gotten more demanding it's really weird how that happens isn't it like

Every couple of years, games get more demanding. And you can argue as to whether or not they look more visually appealing. I would say that there's plenty of evidence that...

The good examples are certainly doing more things and the level of detail has certainly improved. And we've talked about the video game graphic nostalgia before. But if you go back and you look at the games from six years ago and you compare like... yeah the good examples from six years ago to the good examples to today there are clearly visual upgrades and the games are bigger the worlds are bigger there's more stuff in them

um i'm generalizing here um i'm not yeah i don't want to compare crap examples now to good examples back then but overall gaming has gotten better six years from now i can assure you gaming games will look better than the games we have today like that that's going to be a thing they'll use more good luck playing a game in six years with eight gigabytes of vram because it'll be like trying to play a game today with four gigabytes and for those of you with four gigabytes

graphics cards uh you're having you're not having too much fun out there it's a tough time so anyway it was always going to go this way like the the 4070 for example is going to be next to use Any of these 40 series cards, realistically, certainly anything below a 4090 are going to be absolutely useless in six years from now for any kind of ray tracing.

They're going to be so bad at it, so slow. It'll be very much a sub-30 FPS experience. It'll just be a repeat of what we've already seen with the 20 series cards. And this isn't some amazing prediction. It's kind of like... this is extremely obvious but again it brings me back to the 2060 the 2070 when we were saying this and we were just getting wrecked on reddit for just being super anti nvidia

anti-ray tracing saying this crazy outlandish stuff that a 40 60 is just no good for ray tracing and then you know and i mean there'll be people that for sure defend the 46 uh the sorry the 2060 or even the 4060 and say they're good for ray tracing they use them for ray tracing but uh yeah they're not they're not good yeah i think it's it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation as well because

While NVIDIA wants to upsell you, make you spend more money and games are getting better over time, at the same time, game developers, they're still not really doing that much ray tracing in their titles. There's a lot of games even released these days where the implementation is pretty lackluster. You really need to crank it up to like ultra level sort of ray tracing settings to see the difference.

I think that that's because game developers do not have an incentive to develop as many ray tracing effects because they know the minimum spec gamer doesn't have a car that's capable of doing it. Like there was this whole discussion back when ray tracing was... first release, that this is going to make it easier on game developers because instead of having to position every individual light in the scene and make sure all the fake...

lighting effects are sort of looking realistic and optimized and positioned well you just position your lights you turn on ray tracing the scene is naturally lit you don't have to do as much work to optimize the lighting and all that sort of thing you don't have to align your cube maps and deal with the compromises of screen space reflections you just turn on this feature everything just works that was what was talked about at the time right and

What's actually happened six years later is that game developers have to do all of that anyway because the minimum spec gamer, the entry-level gamer, that's the... That's the visual quality that they have to use. And then on top of that, they're having to do all the work for ray tracing. So maybe in some glorious future, games will be entirely ray traced. It will be easier on developers.

But that's not going to happen until entry-level gamers can use those effects so they can not bother with the rasterization features anymore. And so by NVIDIA continually trying to push people up and up and up the product stack, gamers understandably going, well, I can't afford to do that. They're getting into this position now where...

For that future to occur, we need to have these better entry-level GPUs because then game developers will be incentivized to make better quality ray tracing effects. You'll start to sell the whole ray tracing ecosystem. People want to use it. That can't happen without the entry-level GPUs.

And so you get this whole mess where for the true upsell to happen... games need to be amazing for ray tracing but we can't get games to be amazing for ray tracing until developers make them and developers won't make them until entry-level cards are really good at ray tracing which is not what nvidia wants because they want to upsell you so you get into this cycle

of where progress has just slowed and ground to a halt because those entry-level cards that we need to make this whole ray tracing ecosystem a thing are not there.

Alternatively, game developers, I guess, could go, let's do this whole thing. We'll try and make people spend $500 on a GPU. But I don't think that's going to work. I don't think if... game developers suddenly made a game that doesn't run on a 4060 that they would sell the game like the option is not they're going to sell the game and people are going to upgrade the gpu people would just not buy the game and complain and you're massively downvote it on steam or whatever

So they're in this sort of weird, yeah, chicken and egg sort of cycle for ray tracing where you can see where hopefully it will go in the future for this ecosystem, but something needs to break the cycle. And there's just no incentive at the moment for anyone to do that. No one is attempting to do it. Yeah. So pretty negative on ray tracing. And I think we've got plenty of evidence and justification for why that is.

And I think most people agree with us, so we don't really need to go and defend ourselves, let's say. But just to provide some sort of balance to this. More often than not, we do still recommend GeForce GPUs anyway, because they... generally offer better features and better value than the Radeon competition because AMD just doesn't like to compete. So that's a whole thing. But also, yeah, negative on ray tracing. Not because we hate GeForce, not because we hate RTX GPUs or anything.

DLSS, another feature that we were very harsh on initially because it was very embarrassing and very bad and didn't deliver on any of the promises that NVIDIA made to sell you GeForce 20 series GPUs, but they continued to their credit. DLSS is a technology that they continue to work on and make better. And it is a feature that works really well on the lower end GPUs.

Again, it's a technology that ideally you want to be at higher resolutions, which is less favorable to the lower end GPUs, but it's still decent at 1440p. It's usable on a low end card. Yeah, it's certainly serviceable and it is of net benefit. So we are big on DLSS. We think it's a great feature. We think it is a key selling feature, a great benefit of GeForceG. Because look, FSR is continuing to improve. I think...

Over time, the gap there has certainly shrunk, much more so than the ray tracing performance. But DLS is a great feature. We're big on DLSS. NVIDIA has really improved it to the point where... we really like that feature so i think really i've only got positive stuff to say about dlss in 2024 i don't know about you yeah

Yeah, I think I'm in the same position. I think the chat that we've been talking about today and why we're so negative on it is because we have looked at it in terms of what is everything that it's provided up to this point. So that includes the launch of it, the games that we were getting, how many games we've gotten over that period of time. I think what I'd like to sort of round out this conversation with is talking about where we see ray tracing.

sort of for next generation products and what we think it needs to be. Because, yes, ray tracing over the last six years, not great. You bought an RTX 20 series product, very disappointing.

But if you're coming into things buying RTX 50 series GPU, you're going to be in a very different position where there's certainly more examples of ray tracing, certainly more examples of games where... ray tracing is usable and at least at the moment in 2024 we're seeing more games being released where the best visual experience is with ray tracing enabled so if you do want that upper tier ray traced experience

in the latest games, that is with ray tracing enabled, which again is not what you could have said when the 20 series launched because the best visual games were still games with rasterization on Ultra or whatever. So as I was sort of saying in my...

ray tracing videos looking at this and recapping it and sort of thinking about the future of games and where things are heading for ray tracing I think it's pretty clear that If you're buying a high-end GPU, or at least you want the best visual experiences in games today, that...

more likely throughout the next two to three years, those will be Ray Trace games. I think if you're buying a 30 series product and probably a 40 series product, it would have been more of a mix of games like the Horizon Forbidden Wests and...

Hellblade 2, which did not have ray tracing in them, the original Flight Simulator, those sort of games, you could have made the case that, yeah, there's a chance that you're not going to be playing a game with ray tracing in it or the best experience is... Sometimes there'll be ray tracing, other times won't. I think over the lifespan of the 50 series and those sort of products, it's much more likely that to get those best top tier experiences, the games will require some form of ray tracing.

I don't know whether you agree with that, but I would say that at least for the mid-range and up, and ideally I'd like to say for the mainstream as well, I just think that's extremely unrealistic. I think for the mid-range and up.

ideally you'd want some level of reasonable ray tracing performance for the mid-range at 1440p and for the high end at 4K. Yeah, I mean, I don't necessarily... disagree with that it's just not going to be a reality that's the problem so if we look at Well, one of the main concerns, and I know we harp on about it all the time, but it's kind of a thing and we're definitely right about it, is VRAM.

yeah so the rumors again these are rumors we don't know we don't have any concrete facts at this point in time but the rumors for as long as i can remember and still to this date we're not that far off release now are suggesting that vram capacities aren't changing uh apart from like the 5090 which is rumored to have 32 gigabytes which is an absurdly large vram buffer compared to everything else it's going to be allegedly twice that of the 5080 which is 16 gigabytes

Moving forward, 16 gigabytes really should be the minimum for ray tracing capable GPUs that are going to do so at least 1440p. for future games over the next two years 12 gigabytes is the bare minimum so the 50s 70s rumored to have 12 gigabytes you can easily saturate under realistic gaming conditions with ray tracing a 12-gigabyte VRAM buffer in a dozen games today, especially if you're enabling frame generation. Yeah, if you have everything cranked up, it's getting close.

And I mean, we're talking about games that are already available now, not games in two years time. So while I'm not suggesting that 12 gigabytes will be useless or as broken as eight gigabytes is today, it's... pretty borderline how much you're paying for a 5070 do you think to get maybe borderline just possibly enough for your am for doing what you want to do for what you're talking about it's not going to be great

And then, yeah, 5060 Ti, 5060 sort of series. I have a hard time believing there are going to be 8 gigabytes. I know all the rumors are suggesting that. Possibly we'll see the 16 gigabyte. clamshell option again which again that was really the only model that sold from the 4060 ti lab

Yeah, I guess we'll have to wait and see what happens there. But if you're getting eight gigabytes as the mainstream offerings, then there, the ray tracing thing is exactly what I said. It's just not going to be feasible. And they're upselling you to the cards with, at this point in time, they're upselling you more on VRAM than their critical account.

Well, yeah, it'd be interesting to see whether that upsell works because I think that upsell would be more effective than the ray tracing upsell for sure because people would be playing games like Stalker where it just doesn't work on those. Well, it's an up. it's a ray tracing upsell as well because i mean first you know you don't need vram just for ray tracing but if you sure as hell want to do ray tracing and you want to do it to the degree that it's worth doing

You want more than eight gigabytes of VRAM. It's as simple as that, especially if you want to enable DLSS frame generation because that eats up quite a bit of VRAM. Yeah, I think that will be an issue. I think it's going to be pretty interesting this generation, even if I honestly don't.

I have no expectations for this upcoming generation. Could be bad, could be good. I've got no idea, right? Much the same. But I think there's going to be some pretty interesting battles because the way I see the mid-range... based on rumors and expectations and that sort of thing is that we're probably going to be getting a product like an RTX 5070, which is better than the AMD product for ray tracing, but is...

effectively gimped by its VRAM buffer. If it's 12, yeah. If it's 12 gigabytes to the point where it is good at ray tracing, but also not good, if you know what I mean. And then it's possible that we'll see an AMD GPU in that similar sort of price range where maybe it's not as good at ray tracing but has much more VRAM. But actually in some games, because it's got more VRAM, it's actually more viable for ray tracing. But then in other games...

you know, the raw performance of the car just isn't up to scratch for ray tracing. So you're saying a 3070 versus RX 6800 type scenario? Yeah, but we... probably with closer ray tracing performance. Which will be even more brutal if that's the case for the mid-range. Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, I guess where I'm coming from is... I'm not...

I've got no expectations or hopes that AMD is going to do anything like that. But they could and should, but whether they will, yeah, anyway. Yeah, I think they...

I don't know what to think about what they're going to do. But I guess my point is that if there was a mid-range battle and one card was... clearly better for ray tracing than the other i think for this generation that's going to be more important than it has been in previous generations and at the high end certainly even more important like it already is important right now if you're buying

thousand dollar gpus you would probably prefer the card that's better at ray tracing right now i think that's going to be more of a thing for ray tracing just sorry for the mid-range just because i believe There'll be more games, more examples where you'll be wanting to use ray tracing, but the question will be, right,

The NVIDIA card may be better in some games but not have enough freedom. The AMD card may be better for other games. I don't know how that's going to play out. Yeah, NVIDIA doesn't even care about that. That's a technicality. They just don't care because no one's buying the Radeon GPU.

For them to sell RDNA 4 GPUs, they have to be so much cheaper. They have to be so cheap, so much better value that you just can't ignore them. At least the majority of gamers can't. They can't be like, oh, but I'd rather have a GeForce GPU. Yeah. And that's where they've failed because most gamers, if they're honest, say I'd rather have a GeForce GPU.

There's no debating that, right? That's the situation. It's proven in market share. We don't even have to poll. The market forces have proven that is true. Yeah, I also know it to be true from personal experience, but it is true. So if you're in a situation where the vast majority of people buying the category of product you're selling would much prefer your competitor's product, you have to do something pretty drastic to turn that around.

and that's why people are saying it's frustrating because they did that with horizon people would much in 2017 by default people would much rather own an intel cpu Owning an AMD CPU was like icky. Didn't even want to consider it. So AMD were like, well, we're going to make a decent product and we're going to make it so damn cheap.

you tired asses can't you can't look anywhere else that's what happened like it was so hard to to buy a four core four thread processor when you get an eight thread six uh sorry eight core 16 thread processor For similar money, yeah, it might not have been nearly as good for a lot of gaming scenarios, but it was so much more powerful overall and power efficiency was solid that a lot of people were like, well, yeah, I'm happy to forgo a bit of gaming performance because...

Having eight cores, eight powerful cores that can really smash through productivity tasks and general usage is pretty cool. And it's on an affordable platform that is said to be supported for a long time, so I'm going to give it a go. And whether or not that was the exact train of thought, something along those lines happened because a lot of people were like, you know what, I'm going to give this a shot. And they built from there. But they haven't been able to do that with Radeon.

Well, they haven't been able to do it with Radeon because they haven't done it with Radeon. They haven't even attempted to do it. So that's why it hasn't happened. That's fair. But I think, yeah, I think with this generation.

If AMD is being serious about making their cards, as you say, the best value, the best value does not mean a little bit faster for rasterization performance and we're just going to ignore all the other stuff. The best value means... faster in all areas like the amd card or just or significantly better value

It doesn't have to be faster. That's what I mean, faster at the same price. Faster at the same price is what I mean. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, okay. I'm an idiot. Yeah, I'm not saying that their best card is going to have to be better than the 5090 or whatever. What I'm saying is.

If you're willing to spend $300, it has to be faster for rasterization and faster for ray tracing. Because the thing that I think has caught up people with the GeForce products and why people have been preferring GeForce is that even if... you don't necessarily want to use ray tracing or you don't think you'll be using it in every game there's always this idealized you know you in your mind you're like

yeah, maybe I'll use that. Maybe I'll play a cyberpunk. You know, I normally play Call of Duty or whatever, but maybe I'll try it cyberpunk. And yeah, I wouldn't mind trying out this ray tracing thing. And then you look at the performance charts and you're like, okay, well...

The GeForce card is maybe a little slower than the competing Radeon card for rasterization, but it's much faster at ray tracing. It's got all these other features, so that's why I'm buying GeForce. And I think that's on top of the whole... people are already in the mindset of buying g-force anyway yeah that's the sorry that's the reasonable justification but most people just have their nvidia goggles on they're like g-force better g-force best must get

I think the goggles, yeah, it's goggles, but it's also you've got the goggles on and then you look at the... features and performance of the cards and there's actual justifications for that as well so you sort of you're already primed to buy g-force and then you look at the features you're like oh it's got dlss amy doesn't have that that's a tick

It's got better ray tracing performance. AMD's slow for ray tracing. That's a tick. I'm sold at this point. Like I was already probably going to buy it, but I've looked at the competition and they're just not there. Whereas what I'm suggesting that Radio needs to do is have... cards that are faster for all of these things so that that excuse isn't there anymore so that someone with these g-force goggles is looking at a radeon card and there's no longer that excuse of like

g-force is much faster ray tracing it's like okay yeah so the amd card is faster across the board we've tested all the games it's faster at this price so now i'm having to decide upon all the other stuff and i think that becomes a much more if the bar charts, they're looking a bit more favorable, it's not going to turn everyone's or change everyone's mind, but it starts that conversation. Well, yeah, and I said the GeForce goggle thing, but I wasn't.

suggesting that gamers are idiots or people have been doing the wrong thing because as i said more often than not we've been recommending yeah it's not like yeah i'm not and that's the thing a lot of people say you know they want amd to be cheaper so they get a cheaper geforce gpu which there's some truth in that i suppose but that argument aside that's not what we're saying here we're saying radeon gpus need to be a lot better so we actually recommend them

because that it's kind of the first step in turning things around because it wasn't like people saw the rise in situation we're like hey maybe these are worth buying a lot of reviewers were saying these are worth buying like stuff the four core four thread thing because that's probably going to age poorly it's on a dead platform typically it costs more more money here are all the advantages while still noting the advantages of intel and yeah

am4 turned out the way it did i think that was probably a smart investment um and so yeah step one there was was getting the people who were knowledgeable and evaluating these parts in depth it wasn't like one media outlet i think most people were on the same page certainly by the time zen plus rolled out and then zen too that these were actually pretty good really really good value pretty good products

on their own merit and then when you factor in the value yeah exceptionally good value products whereas with radion i think it's like yeah these are pretty good products you know the 700 xtx is pretty good product 700 xt pretty good product so on and so forth you know they tick all the boxes and then you look at the price and the value you're like they're not terrible like they're not they're not bad but there's what's compelling me to recommend these over

the nvidia um options and then what would compel you to buy them over the nvidia options and it's like not much where there needs to be a lot yeah like at least my opinion is If I'm looking at the current market right, like if I'm spending $1,000, I'm not even considering a 7900 XTX. That's fair. Like I'd buy a 4080 Super.

And the reason for that is if I'm spending that amount of money, I'm probably going to be a single player gamer. And I say that because if you're a multiplayer gamer, you probably don't need a 4080 super. You probably could just get away with a lower tier card for a lot of...

popular multiplayer titles. It's not true for every multiplayer title. I just want to be very clear about that. But if you're playing CSGO, you know, Fortnite, Valorant, you can get away with the lower tier model. And if you're going to buy an expensive one, it's more of a situation that you just don't care. So you'll get GeForce because better. Exactly.

if you're buying these premium cards and you're thinking about aside from those situations where you just buy whatever is the most expensive thing because you can afford it you would be looking at I'm interested in high quality single player experiences And if I'm buying that price here, I'm thinking, yeah, I probably will want to play some games with ray tracing enabled. I probably will want to be using features like DLSS, FSR. Isn't that bad at 4K in some games?

But what's really getting me over the line is the features, the ray tracing performance. And that's why I would choose a 4080 Super personally, even if the 7900 XTX is faster for... rasterization performance and i think we're sort of seeing today that there's more games where that's becoming less true as games are sort of unreal engine 5 uses software ray tracing

you're seeing this sort of star wars outlaws examples with with ray tracing i think for the next generation in the mid-range i'd sort of be thinking along similar lines

of sort of like, well, I'm sort of expecting games to use more ray tracing. There's probably going to be more examples where they're fully ray traced games. I probably don't want to miss out on having the car that's way slower for us for ray tracing performance so i think that's going to be more more of a challenge uh to sort of go yeah for 600 i'm willing to buy the amd gpu that's a lot slower for those features

But certainly for the entry level, I just don't see a situation where ray tracing comes into it still. I think you'll be buying those cards purely for rasterization. But that's just my opinion, of course, being more of a single-player gamer. I could totally understand if you're...

not playing games with ray tracing, don't care about that feature, you're obviously not going to be looking at the ray tracing performance charts. I just think that there's going to be more games, more examples, better examples coming out where... Yeah, if you want that premium single-player experience with all the bells and whistles turned on, you'll be wanting cards where it can actually do it. But again, slow moving. I was hoping for more by now. That's the sort of situation.

Please give me more stuff. Anyway, yeah, it'll be a really interesting battle coming this next coming generation as well with Intel because Intel cards, while I wouldn't say like an A770 can do ray tracing. its performance when you benchmark it isn't that bad in that tier four ray tracing. Yeah, relative to the competing parts. Relative to the competing parts, it can...

You know, its performance is reasonable looking. So, yeah, that's kind of where I see ray tracing as it stands right now. So my summary, my very overview summary of things as I think it stands right now. Up to this point, the six years that we've had up until now has gone from being awful when the RTX 20 series was launched and people were sold. They were misled. They were sold.

things that were not true at that time. I think across the six years, we would probably say that it's been largely a flop or... very underwhelming at the very least. We would have liked to see things improve much more by now. I think if you're buying things right now for ray tracing, we're sort of in that transition period where...

It's not the worst idea to buy something for ray tracing, but there's still not really enough high quality examples, enough examples where the performance is acceptable for at least mid-tier cards and up.

And really for ray tracing, it's still very much a high tier experience for high end buyers. I think for the future of the next, at least the short term future of the next couple of years, things will move increasingly towards ray tracing being important. But I don't think we're going to be in a position where...

Ray tracing is going to be ubiquitous and the only option, at least for sort of your mid to lower tier gamers, I still think most gamers in those tiers will be using rasterization for at least the next couple of years while the high-end gamers will be...

we'll be playing with ray tracing enabled at least for you know single player experiences multiplayer we haven't even fact in multiplayer this there are just multiplayer ray tracing is i don't know a decade away just just not a thing yeah i mean it's largely unnecessary it's the same thing with dlss i praise dlss but i don't use dlss it's not a thing you use for competitive shooters so

You know, it's a great feature for the single player games, you know, your Starfields, Hogwarts Legacy, those type of titles. I would definitely use it. But yeah, for your competitive shooters, it's not something that I'd recommend you bother using. Well, it's because you're CPU limited, right, most of the time. Yeah, well, it increases latency as well, so it's not really a feature you want to enable, right? Let's take a break. We'll come back and we'll talk about our boring lives.

No home. No address. No address. No bank account. No bank account. No job. No job. No home. No home. No address. No address. No bank account. No bank account, no job, no job, no home. It's time to break the vicious circle. We're working with charities like Shelter to provide a bank account for people who are homeless. Search HSBC UK. No fixed address. Buying your kids a video games console this Christmas? Let's hit pause.

Internet Matters supported by Electronic Arts have all the advice and tools you need to make sure your kids have a good time. So for tips on setting up a child account, managing what they spend, understanding what they play and who they play with, go to internetmatters.org to find out more. Right, back to it. Show off. All right, we're back. What's been happening, Steve? Well, I have managed to get outside and do a few things, but the weather has still been all over the place here.

yeah it's pretty wet outside at the moment despite the fact that we've had some quite warm weather it looks like we're gonna have quite dynamic weather over the next seven days at least which is annoying is the hub gym um i've made some progress i was installing the bearers the other day balon and i carried the heavy ass steel beams into place and i started welding and then it started to drizzle so i thought welding in the drizzle probably not

a great idea so i hit pause on that uh and i went down to the shed and so i basically i decided i'd promised myself that i would take at least half the day off and not do any benchmarking so i'm like well what can i do now that it's raining And if you guys recall, quite a few podcasts ago, I explained how much I loved the Shelly products. They're like smart home type stuff. Yeah.

I used the Shelly 1 something or other for disabling or remotely turning on or off the floodlights down at my shed. So previous podcast, I explained all of that. It was like a $22 Australian little module that I installed and it worked a treat. And to this day, still working a treat, really love it. So I bought a heap more of them.

And the goal there was to wire up all of the light switches in the shed. So in the shed, we've got the flood lights, which I've already done. We've got the main shed lights. we've got the lights in the storage section i've got the lights over my workbench and we've got the lights in the deck out the front so under the there's a big deck the flood lights are on the roof um and there's some lights down lights in the roof there so i thought hey it'd be kind of cool to have all of those things

controllable remotely because sometimes i go down do some work in the shed or whatever and i leave like the storage light on and forget that i've left that on i go to the house and then you know it's dark at night and i can see there's like light emitting from the shed and then i had to walk all the way back down there unlock it turn it off you know

Not stuff you want to deal with, is it, Tim? There's a lot of extra walking. Oh, no. Sounds like a real problem. Yeah, I hate that extra walking, especially at night. It's not what you want to be doing. So bad weather, decided to wire up the rest of these Shelly 1 modules. And I decided to start with my bench lights where all my tools are because I often, let's just say...

I may leave those ones on from time to time. So I thought I'll start there. And the original one that I did for the floodlights, never done it before. uh and it didn't take me too long and i was blown away by how flawless the whole setup procedure was and everything so pretty confident with the second one you knew i was a professional at this point tim knew exactly what i was doing

So I've wired it in, set it up, and it's wired in in a way that you can obviously remotely turn the lights on or off, but the physical light switch still works. Yeah. that's really handy. So it doesn't really matter in which order anything's done. You can turn the lights on with the physical switch and then off with the app or you can turn it on with the app and off with the physical switch or use the physical switch exclusively or the app. So that's cool. Anyway.

i've wired in this second one um gone back turn the power on straight away it's in ap mode my phone's detected it I've loaded up the app. The app's like new Shelly device found. It's so fast, so seamless, like awesome. I add it. and it forgot my wi-fi details because i did the original one a few months ago now whenever that podcast was and i forgot my wi-fi details so i've detect you know it's selected the correct wi-fi mesh router thing and i stupidly

got one character wrong of the password you know when you know you've done it but you're going so quick and you can enter and i was like oh i think i did that wrong i'm like whatever i'll just wait for it to time out so i'm sitting there and i'm waiting and i'm waiting and i'm waiting

And it just says trying to connect, trying to connect, trying to connect. And then it's added it to the app with it just pending connection. I was like, okay, that's annoying. I'll just go into the settings and update the password. You cannot do that. There's no ability to do that. Anyway, long story short, after faffing around for a good 20 minutes, I realized that if you get the password wrong or any of the Wi-Fi setup stuff wrong,

The only way to correct it is to factory reset the device, which is annoying, but the setup procedure on these things is a one-time deal. So at the end of the day, it's like, it's not like you're doing this a lot. So fair enough. I factory reset it.

got the password correct this time and it still wouldn't connect to the wi-fi it just said pending connection so after a lot of research and stuffing around it turned out that a lot of people had the same problem and it was to do with the firmware now i don't know if when you factory reset it it somehow messes with the firmware configuration and and

the updated firmware addresses that. I'm not really sure what the bug is. Anyway, once I'd factory reset it, it was impossible to connect it to anything, whether it was Bluetooth or Wi-Fi or whatever. And the fix I found online was to factory reset it again, but not add it to the app. Instead, connect directly to it when it's in AP mode from my phone. So connect to it directly.

then get its IP address, log in using the web app, and then update the firmware that way, which once you've done it before and you're familiar with it, it's a one-minute type deal. So anyway, did that. updated the firmware, went back to the app, it added instantly. We're talking five seconds and it all worked. As soon as it was added, I'm hitting the button, the lights are turning on, they're turning off. It's all working flawlessly. I'm like, okay.

i wasted like an hour hour and a half on that that was kind of painful and then i had four more to do i think to myself do i I mean, it's all fresh in my head though at this point. I know what to do if we run into this so I can get through it relatively quickly. Anyway.

installed the other four and they all worked flawlessly like no dramas just like the original one so that's just like tech related stuff isn't it so got them all configured set individual photos in the app for all the different things and yeah it's it's been working flawlessly ever since they'll they're all great uh no dramas with them

There's no delay. The second I open the app and hit a button, they turn on or turn off whatever it is you want to do and all the light switches work as intended. And then after I did all that, the Shelly Black Friday deal popped up where you could get 40.

something percent off so i bought another eight so i'm going to do the studio and the extension and all that sort of stuff so yeah really cool devices no problems yet if any of them blow up or have any issues i'll um report back to you guys in a future podcast but so far so good so i've been happy with those and um i've been enjoying my new welder as well which i bought a while ago which i possibly mentioned on the podcast but i use uni mig gear because remember the one i bought to do your

job yeah at your house i bought the viper 185 um use that mig spool gun thing and um that was really cool really really liked that it was about a thousand australian dollars really affordable and it does a great job i use it gasless mostly um 0.9 mil wire works a treat anyway for the gym build doing uh some a bit more substantial work so i decided to buy another welder so i bought the

Razor Compact 250, which does MIG, TIG, and stick. I'm using that with the Argon gas, 1.2 mil wire, and it's a different experience, Tim. I'll take your word for it. Mate, it does the best welds. It's so good. So I've just been enjoying it. Every time I weld, I'm like, oh, look at that. It's so good. So yeah, it makes stitching steel together.

Just a breeze, an absolute pleasure. So I'm enjoying that. So yeah, it's fun. Maybe one day I can bring it to your house and weld something together there. Well, I don't know what needs welding around here. I'm sure we could find something. Just attach some steel beam somewhere. Maybe just a little job. We'll make you a new desk or something. Oh, well. Did we weld steel for your desk?

Yeah, yes. Okay, I couldn't remember. Yeah, I thought we did. Yeah, there's like a steel, one of those box sections going around the whole perimeter. Yeah, yeah. Nice and sturdy? Yeah, yeah. It's held up really well. sets and stuff yeah no it's uh it's all going well uh it's all held together probably needs a few you know touch-ups and some of the gaps and stuff as things sort of settle down down and move over time so probably about time to do that but

Yeah, no, things are going well around here. But it's good that you've had things going on because nothing much has been happening around here, if I'm totally honest. Just been working on all of our... Monitor coverage, especially for Black Friday and those sort of things, making the recommendation videos and looking through all the hundreds of monitors that there are to be talked about and those sort of things, that's been keeping me busy.

Yeah, Black Friday has been a pretty low-key affair for me this year. There hasn't been anything that I've been like, oh, I must get that. I added an extra. wireless access point to my mesh network so i could have wi-fi when i'm walking between my studio my house which is a very so it's kind of like you're turning off the lights which is remotely when you forget about them so the sort of problem

It's like sometimes I'll leave the studio and I'll be like responding to an email. There's like a brief period where there's no signal in that period where I have to switch over to my phone network.

The phone signal out this way is not good. Look, you don't want to have any black spots on your own property. I'm just – you've got to niche that up. Look, if we had good phone reception, I probably wouldn't have done it because it would just switch over to the phone network. But when that happens, it's like –

dicey as to whether I get any sort of good quality signal and you know when you're in that period where it's like a low wi-fi signal but it hasn't quite switched over to something that was really annoying me when I just like I couldn't do anything or just in the front part of my driveway and stuff if I'm down there just...

Terrible signal. So I added a wireless access point on Black Friday. I love the struggles in our lives. I know. I mean, we're talking about my boring life and my boring life is I had a small part of the area of my house that had not as optimal Wi-Fi signals. So I just added a wireless access point there. I love it. Yeah. I bought some measuring spoons because they all went missing. So I thought.

Black Friday deal, you know, $10 for some measuring spoons. That was nice. You went wild on Black Friday. Holy moly. You got to settle down. Yeah, well, you know, I don't really need it. Like the good things for Black Friday, things like TVs, monitors have been really good this year, appliances. Like I don't need a new washing machine. My washing machine works. I don't need a new fridge.

fridge works much much the same position really um so yeah i haven't really had anything that i've been like oh i must get that or get that you know things are going pretty well i bought some um i'm planning on in the next couple of weeks putting the irrigation into my orchard area where i've got all my fruit trees so i've bought all the you know the dripper pipes and the um

All that sort of piping gear and the attachments and all that sort of stuff, that's all sitting around ready to hopefully I'll get some reasonable weather on the weekend and I'll get out and I'll start putting that in and get that going for the summer period because... Like already very dry around here. I was just at your place recently. It was very green out your way. But yeah, I think we're probably going to get only about two-thirds of our usual annual rainfall this year out this way.

be relying a lot on the tanks for watering stuff throughout the rest of the summer period. So I want to get the irrigation in, making sure that those trees survive because most of them are, you know. Peach trees are not native to Australia, so you kind of have to water them a bit more. The natives generally, gum trees, that sort of thing, they're fine for the sort of dry periods. But yeah, the veggies and all that sort of thing.

I need to get them up and going, making sure that they survive and give me the fruits and stuff. So I'll put that in the weekend and it should be good. So, yeah. That's pretty much it for this episode, isn't it? We've talked about all the boring life stuff and things like that, and next week there should be some pretty interesting things to talk about. So stay tuned for next week's episode where we chat about some things. You'll see exactly what I'm talking about.

next week so it's funny how that works it's funny how that works but yeah so yeah thanks to everyone that's listened to this podcast the whole way through audio versions available if you just want the audio version we've got the youtube channel

the Hard Run Box podcast. That's the place to leave comments. So if you want to chat about the episode or something, we do tend to read the comments on the podcast over there. And yeah, that pretty much does it for this one. Thanks for listening. We'll see you in the next one. And the impressive IONIQ 5N shows how far the brand has progressed. Smart speaker. Search Hyundai. High and die. Hairdressing salon did speak. No, Hyundai. Iron guy. Abstract sculpture. No, the car company.

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