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Comment by piinbinary | Hacker News Reader

While RTX is still a selling point for Nvidia over AMD right now (it has more developmentand broader support than AMD's ray tracing), I think that a lot of gamers aren't going to be willing to pay the premium to get it (to say nothing of availability)

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The only sticking point for me is that Nvidia has features like DLSS that could extend the longevity of my card

AMD has technology to compete with DLSS (or so I've read), but talk is cheap and nvidia are already walking the walk.

DLSS could be an absolute godsend for VR, if you imagine the next gen of HMDs at ridiculous pixel densities but the game can cheat and basically fake your peripheral vision.

Only if games support them, which relatively few do atm.

Generally speaking manufacturing proprietary features like that see poor support long term.

Physx, hairworks, SLI all come to mind.

AMD has come out with a DLSS equivalent, though more details need to be given.

That being said, AMD cards tend to age better than NVidia cards. My R9 290X went from being inferior to a 780Ti to 12-15% faster.

AMD hasn't come out with anything like DLSS yet, but they've said they're "working on it".

Technically they did already come out with a scaler that competes with DLSS 1, but for DLSS 2 they did say they are working on it. Of course, the first one isn't publicly available, and IIRC was focused on consoles.

>(it has more developmentand broader support than AMD's ray tracing),

We don't know for how long AMD has been developing their raytracing, or how much effort they've put into it.

What we know, however, is that the consoles use AMD tech this time around, and that's what games that run on both PCs and Consoles are going to be designed for.

Ray tracing also uses standard APIs, the effects are not going to be limited to one brand of GPU (in general).

Most of the time. E.g. Crysis Remastered used a Vulkan shim with Nvidia proprietary APIs.

This should clean up quickly though.

Yeah, as someone who works in 3D graphics, I was really hoping against hope that RDNA 2 would include better RT support, but alas, guess I'll keep waiting to try and get an elusive 3080.

>I was really hoping against hope that RDNA 2 would include better RT support, but alas

I wouldn't jump to conclusions. I'd instead wait until third party benchmarks.

AMD has the advantage of being in both Microsoft and Sony's new consoles, too, which in practice means games are going to be designed for AMD's RT.

Though, AMD is in the new consoles. Including the Xbox which likely has the same DX raytracing APIs as Windows. I would be surprised if RTX is the standard bearer in a few years.

"RTX" is NVIDIA's marketing speak for "raytracing". The APIs through which you access raytracing are either DXR (DirectX Raytracing), or Vulkan extensions - presumably both available on AMD RX 6000 series.

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