Despite owning an Nvidia RTX graphics card, have you rarely dabbled in the ray tracing realm promised by the Green team over the past four and a half years? If so, you’re in the minority, according to the numbers you put out. Additionally, it is suggested that newer RTX GPUs are more likely to flick the RTX on switch. This is also true when utilizing DLSS upscaling/frame generation techniques.
Above you can see Nvidia’s numbers for RTX On and DLSS usage across three generations with the cores needed to accelerate these features (RT Cores and Tensor Cores respectively). We can see that during the reign of Nvidia’s Turing architecture, RTX-on and DLSS-on were less popular than he was in 2023 (left image). Note that the February 2023 RTX 20 and RTX 30 numbers are in tiny little letters below the RTX 40 heading (and image on the right). This table helps to clearly show trends between generations this data is all collected by his Nvidia via GeForce Experience software so it includes everyone using these GPUs It does not mean that
| GeForce series | RTX on in 2023 | DLSS on in 2023 |
|---|---|---|
|
RTX20 |
37% |
68% |
|
RTX30 |
56% |
71% |
|
RTX40 |
83% |
79% |
It’s understandable why RTX On isn’t as prevalent on first-generation graphics cards that support real-time ray tracing in hardware. At the time, the RTX 20 (Turing architecture) GPU was widely complained of underperforming for its looks. DLSS comes later and matures into something more compelling a few years after the RTX 20’s initial launch. Now DLSS helps make the aging RTX 20 series feel more vibrant.
Elsewhere on the slide, Nvidia has grown from launching the first generation of just four RTX On titles in 2018 to 400 games and apps now supporting this real-time ray tracing technology. is emphasized. That’s not all. The number of graphics functions accelerated with Portfolio RT Cores, Tensor Cores, and CUDA Cores has also increased significantly.
A new slide at the end details how to use the latest RTX 40 Ada Lovelace architecture graphics card. This shows that RTX on is the predominantly popular option, and is largely in line with players turning on DLSS. Remember, at the time of our research, only his high-end RTX 40 cards were released. With the release of his RTX 4070 yesterday, we are just entering the mid-range.
Anyone buying the top-end RTX 40 cards ever available wouldn’t want to just turn off graphics capabilities after investing heavily in hardware. You don’t have to spend a lot of money on your graphics card to not use everything it has to offer.
One thing that isn’t clear in the diagram is how GeForce Experience counts users as those with RTX on and DLSS on. I’m not sure if all compatible games need to apply these features, or if they just dabble occasionally to count towards the positive numbers. It’s probably best to apply some salt and skepticism to the whole number, as you always interpret the data positively to “prove” what you’re doing.
