Do you still rock a Turing GPU in 2026? If you do, or are just curious about how well an 8-year-old card would do in 2026, I'm sorry to say that Turing has slipped off the end of our famous graphics card hierarchy . However, the following generation RTX 3070 at $499 offered very similar performance to the prior-gen $1,199 flagship. Those were the days (except that the cryptomining craze happened).
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Mark Tyson Social Links Navigation News Editor Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.
Trake_17 Still waiting for the impact of Ray tracing to matter. I guess it's just 30 years in the making now. Reply
BTM18 No one wanted it. No on e uses it. First thing i turn off. And i CAN run it on my 5080. Reply
PEnns Aside from certain techie writers and a few moneyed gamers, there is no such thing as " ray tracing obsession "! Reply
thisisaname Trake_17 said: Still waiting for the impact of Ray tracing to matter. I guess it's just 30 years in the making now. 30 years of marketing has made Nvidia some money just not as much as Crypto mining or the AI boom. Reply
MobileJAD I miss the GTX 1080 era, graphics cards were way more affordable back then, used less power and produced way less heat. And it was before all of this crypto and AI madness. Reply
usertests Trake_17 said: Still waiting for the impact of Ray tracing to matter. I guess it's just 30 years in the making now. BTM18 said: No one wanted it. No on e uses it. First thing i turn off. And i CAN run it on my 5080. It could start to become mandatory for the majority of games some time after the PS6 launches. Like 3-5 years (around 2030-2032). So we're over halfway to the starting line. Reply
thestryker Ray tracing is very much a transformative technology, but too much depends on implementation. Of course if there was better RT hardware then this would probably solve itself. The current state of linear RT performance means the vast majority of players don't have a capable enough GPU. I've really wished there would be a minimum level of RT performance rather than the linear scaling across the entire stack. I definitely use RT depending on the game, but the slowest RT capable GPU I've used is a 3080 12GB. If the RT capability of the forthcoming consoles is good enough the transformative promise might actually come true. It's not going to replace the render pipeline but the current consoles have such poor RT capability that it tends to be an afterthought on anything multiplatform. Reply
Nick_C PEnns said: Aside from certain techie writers and a few moneyed gamers, there is no such thing as " ray tracing obsession "! There was an attempt to start it here …. Reply
-Fran- Not sure if "obsession", but definitely the "end goal" for games graphics. Ray Tracing as a technology has always been the pinnacle of what you want to achieve. And not even with unlimited bounces, but just 2 or 3, with a very small number of rays (compared to real light). What most don't really get is the computational baggage of what RT introduces for graphical engines which are not prepared and, to this day, no one as actually built from the ground up for whatever reason. I wouldn't marry the engine to how nVidia wants you to do RT and Khronos is just not moving the needle for anyone, then Microsoft just doesn't care anymore. The formulas and way of calculating the rays are all there, but I still don't understand why there's nothing being re-build from the ground up for it? I'm guessing regular Raster is still what they want due to "legacy" computing. Oh welp, I'd really like to see someone building an engine from the ground up to use RT, but with the advent of DLSS5 and AI, I doubt we'll get there and instead go back to faking it, but harder this time. For those wondering, think about this: current raster engines fake reflections (at best) using textures as it's cheap and effective, so when you look in a mirror, the computational baggage is still reasonable. For RT, you can't fake it via a texture, you need to render not just what you have in front, but what is behind and all around you so the bounces are "true". So, this means, instead of drawing just 70°-100° in front of you, you need to do 360° instead so the bounces are real (or reasonably close). Then you have the noise, since the "rays" are absolutely discrete, when you know light (while technically discrete), they're so dense that no computational model can really calculate all of them, so you have to choose a density and then deal with the noise, which is another somewhat expensive element. The passes on RT for an engine are more costly, but the "math" should be simpler for a game developer, since you just put a light and then everything else just works. No need to pre-bake anything when it comes to lights and such. Remember that what nVidia calls "Path Tracing" is the closest to actual Ray Tracing. Anyway, I'm still waiting for "proper" ray tracing. Regards. Reply
Vicecrow The last 3 games I have player it's pixeled games from unknow developers. The last game have played with some kind of lightting have the name of god rays. Ray tracing are good for Photo mode. Reply
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- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/the-pc-gaming-ray-tracing-obsession-began-with-the-first-rtx-20-graphics-cards-released-on-this-day-in-2018-the-geforce-rtx-2080-and-2080-ti-led-the-charge-but-games-were-thin-on-the-ground#main
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