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What do gamers actually think about Ray-Tracing?

tommybhoy said:
Which makes raster is still the main reason to upgrade with upscaling the least reason to upgrade.:thumbsup:
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the thing is though, if you already have a high end gpu, rasterisation is already insanely fast.

surely it gets to a point where it no longer matters..... I can see people with low to mid range hardware still caring but it is a none issue for me. i care about that as little as i care about performance on a monitor at 8K.

So i really think that poll is kind of lacking, because it all depends where about in the product stack you currently sit.

So i would suspect the best thing for next gen would be a low to mid range card with really improved rasterisation, but at the high end i hope they throw more at RT myself and dont worry too much about hugely beating the rasterisation of a 4090.
 
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Despite the flaws in the survey, it's telling how quickly RT has moved to second on the list of upgrade priorities.

What will put many off at the moment is the high cost of respectable RT performance. This should hopefully change over the next few years, whereby playable frame rates with RT aren't only possible on £1000+ GPUs.
 
D3K said:
What a bizarre first line. On the contrary, "Why is it hard" for you to communicate like a civil human being and not react like every word that contradicts you, directly or indirectly, is an existential attack on you? It's an absolute displeasure reading your toxic tone in every post, then later to see you u-turn and claim you were always aligned with the topic despite mocking it, and claiming everyone else just doesn't understand where you're coming from. You are not that deep.

Again, do you really believe efficiency is such a priority for gamers? Use logic. I suspect you know better and just cling on to the the numbers since it's an extra point score for you in the context of this thread.
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Fair enough and my apologies, let me ask in a more reasonable way. Where is your data to conclude other people prioritise efficiency are miners and not gamers? I don’t prioritise it as a gamer but it is certainly a factor to consider. I do find it odd it is indeed that high in this survey.
 
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Ayahuasca said:
Despite the flaws in the survey, it's telling how quickly RT has moved to second on the list of upgrade priorities.

What will put many off at the moment is the high cost of respectable RT performance. This should hopefully change over the next few years, whereby playable frame rates with RT aren't only possible on £1000+ GPUs.
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Can I ask where RT is second on the survey? I’m seeing it fourth on the live results.

Raster 35%
Efficiency 34.5%
Price 14.1%
RT 10.8%

I am surprised efficiency is as high as it is but we can’t simply declare they are mostly miners without some logical data to back it up.
 
Ayahuasca said:
In the picture Tommy posted. The shift since then looks incredibly suspicious to be honest. RT was 2nd with 1333 votes and thousands of votes later it's only 1405...
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Apologies I thought you were quoting the live results and thought mine was not refreshing.

Not unreasonable to assume that it is dodgy to be fair. It might just be the number voting for RT has plateaued but the survey should have been multiple choice and showed weighted ranking. I suspect as it’s just a forum poll that such complexity is not possible.
 
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ICDP said:
It might just be the number voting for RT has plateaued
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To me, that raises more questions than it answers, so all the people who prioritise RT voted first or many of them had a change of heart.

Anyway, hopefully someone can come up with a weighted poll that better deals with the complexities and non-gamers voting.
 
Ayahuasca said:
To me, that raises more questions than it answers, so all the people who prioritise RT voted first or many of them had a change of heart.

Anyway, hopefully someone can come up with a weighted poll that better deals with the complexities and non-gamers voting.
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Ultimately polls don’t matter and they are a snapshot in time, but some people seem to use them to validate their own preference. We can’t dismiss a poll because it doesn’t fit our own preference. It’s like the US voting polls where some YouTube “expert” is only picking the polls that suit their narrative and ignoring the rest… see Trump/Harris is ahead in ALL the polls I look at.
 
ICDP said:
Why is it hard to understand I am saying that other people have different priorities. You or I don’t get to decide what someone else votes on a survey, we just get to look at the results.

Are you going to provide your sources for why you think people who voted for efficiency are mostly miners and that most gamers don’t care for efficiency?
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In fairness I remember back when Nvidia released the 900 series cards they didn't have the performance uplift people were hoping for but instead increased efficiency. At about this time lots of people commented that nobody cares about efficiency and the difference is barely enough to run a <whatever the example was>.
For a long time this seemed to be the line, then AMD made their CPUs more efficient and some people then decided that efficiency was super super important...
 
GoogalyMoogaly said:
In fairness I remember back when Nvidia released the 900 series cards they didn't have the performance uplift people were hoping for but instead increased efficiency. At about this time lots of people commented that nobody cares about efficiency and the difference is barely enough to run a <whatever the example was>.
For a long time this seemed to be the line, then AMD made their CPUs more efficient and some people then decided that efficiency was super super important...
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Yeah I am aware of the nuances and hypocrisy from various “factions” shifting around on the importance of efficiency. Though I would say an anonymous survey is not the usual place that crap appears. If techpowerup forums are full of miners I can understand the skewed results, but the survey did say GPU choice and is not exclusive to gamers.

I do agree the survey is flawed.
 
typically you have got 3 dimensions that the end consumer can appreciate
- performance
- quality
- price/cost

factors that dont explicitly capture above dimensions are generally not visible to them, so in other words a consumer would often know "what" they want but they are unaware about the "how", upscaling squarely falls in this category.. one could argue the same about RT to some extent. so tomorrow if MS releases DX13, i dont think a consumer poll would be the right approach to validate its utility..
consider the obvious contradiction here - upscaling addresses the "how" to achieve higher raster performance for less power, now compare that to the voting stats

other than the fact above, the question is terribly framed
 
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ICDP said:
Fair enough and my apologies, let me ask in a more reasonable way. Where is your data to conclude other people prioritise efficiency are miners and not gamers? I don’t prioritise it as a gamer but it is certainly a factor to consider. I do find it odd it is indeed that high in this survey.
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There is no data, we don't see behind those polls, I'm basing my claim on experience with crypto and familiarity with gaming preferences. It's fine to have efficiency as a nice-to-have, but makes little sense to be your #1 priority, and not with such weighting in the poll. If legit, it seems the only people who truly would want efficiency are miners since electricity prices are always the biggest factor in the decline of a mining boom - whether its because they got too high, or the return on investment gets lowered due to coin value/halvings.

Efficiency for AI is also a possibility, but that trend isnt high enough in the consumer market, and I doubt so many professionals are voting in that poll. The most likely reason is that the poll has been manipulated as others suggest.
 
Don’t lose sight of the fact that a lot of people use low to mid range systems with basic spec PSUs. A tech forum has all sorts of enthusiasts and not all are hardcore gamers with systems costing multiple thousands of pounds to build. They play their old steam library of cheap games at 1080p on 2, 3 or even 4 gen old tech that cost them £700.

I work in IT and most of the “gamers” are on 2060/5700 XT or maybe 3070 if they are “current”. They almost always build their PC to a very strict budget and run the same parts for many years. So expensive PSUs are not on their radar let alone expensive GPUs that use 300w of their 550w poverty spec PSU just aren’t even remotely on their “must have” list.
 
D3K said:
There is no data, we don't see behind those polls, I'm basing my claim on experience with crypto and familiarity with gaming preferences. It's fine to have efficiency as a nice-to-have, but makes little sense to be your #1 priority, and not with such weighting in the poll. If legit, it seems the only people who truly would want efficiency are miners since electricity prices are always the biggest factor in the decline of a mining boom - whether its because they got too high, or the return on investment gets lowered due to coin value/halvings.

Efficiency for AI is also a possibility, but that trend isnt high enough in the consumer market, and I doubt so many professionals are voting in that poll. The most likely reason is that the poll has been manipulated as others suggest.
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I seem to remember a very similar argument happening about gamers not caring about efficiency and someone raised the concern of heat and the issues with trying to game in a room with your GPU dumping a lot of heat into the room.

So it’s not just the electricity bill.
 
If your room is getting too hot because of your GPU, you would need to use a GPU with significantly lower power consumption to bring it down from too hot to comfortable.

I played around with this on my 3090, running it with the power target slider and temp maxed out, then with a significant undervolt where it drew like 100-150w less during gaming, the difference in room temp was negligible. This was also in a small box room office at the time, where it would make more of a difference.
 
gpuerrilla said:
Maybe @CAT-THE-FIFTH might stick his head back in as I recall we had the conversation about efficiency last gen and it seemed very selective when this was a key feature to some folk but if you are focusing on the 'average gamer' they are absolutely in the low side of the hardware stack when compared to this forum.
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It does seem to flip-flop. Last generation AMD was ahead and nobody seemed to care - the moment the RTX4000 was ahead,suddenly it was important.

In my case I have a SFF PC,so power draw does matter to some degree,but performance is still the more important metric.
 
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