Faster video cards are great, but they are beginning to matter less and less. Nvidia has argued that it’s time for ray tracing, and it may have a point.
AMD announced its new Radeon VII video card today. It’s a $700 GPU that may have similar performance to Nvidia’s RTX 2080, which ranges in price from $700 to $800. This finally makes AMD competitive with Nvidia again on the high-end (if you ignore that $1,200 RTX 2080 Ti). But the Radeon VII may actually help Nvidia make its case about the future of 3D graphics.
From about 2006 to 2016, graphics-hardware engineers strived to meet the rendering demands of developers. The goal was to run 1080p games at 60 frames per second. That struggle came to an end about three years ago when AMD and Nvidia both launched $250 GPUs that can almost any new release at 1080p60.
Modern CPUs and GPUs are so powerful and fast that they’ve essentially conquered 1080p. Developers have so much headroom at this resolution that they are unlikely to need anything more than a $300 GPU.
If we’ve conquered 1080p60, then why do we need more powerful video cards? Well, even if rendering budgets are going to stay within the confines of a Radeon RX 480, display technologies are continuing to progress.
Gaming fans especially are looking to higher resolution monitors that are capable of more than 60 frames per second. This includes 4K panels, but it really means 1440p monitors with refresh rates of 120 or more. On the Steam hardware survey that tracks what hardware people are using, 2560-by-1440 displays are the third most popular resolution (3.89 percent) after 1920-by-1080 (60.72 percent) and 1366-by-768 (14.04 percent).
But running a game at 4K or 1440p144 does require a lot more power than you can get from a $250 card from 2016.
