4K owners, if you have to choose between native res and ray tracing...

Imagine you have a graphics card with which one is about as demanding as the other. Which do you choose? 1080p rays or 2160p no rays.

You mean 1080p with RT or 4k without RT?

1080p is an unplayable blurry mess. 4k over RT any day.

1440p with RT all the fucking way baby! Yes, I like my games to have RT and I always use it whenever possible. Who needs 4K when RT gives you more to look at? And that's just my opinion so don't come at me.

RTing is a gimmick.

Playing on the go is a gimmick.

Depends on the game I guess. Games that require more input, native res with no RT for more FPS. Games that actually showcases raytracing or are slower games? I'd use 1440p/4K with RT on.

Much more interested in ray and path tracing in older games.

Lighting in modern games looks plenty fine so I never activate Ray Tracing, even if I got the performance to spare.

Yes, thanks, edited.

Can i cheat? 4K using FSR so it renders internally at 1080P and upscales :P.

Hard to choose between the 2. I play on a 43" monitor so 1080P can be quite blurry. But Pretty lights and shiny reflections!

In saying that i played Quake 2 RTX and, well, 4K native ain't happening on a 6900XT....on Linux (the RT support on Linux is still very much a work in progress). Still it didn't look bad when rendering at 1080P internally. The main problem was more prominent artefacts from the denoiser. But....that's still Quake 2 at the end of the day.

In reality I would look for a balance of visuals/performance i am happy with. Like using FSR/DLSS. Maybe use only some RT settings rather than all of them (if possible). RT reflections would be the main one for me.

If i was using consoles though i would always leave it on quality mode rather than performance.

4K? FHD? Such extremes. 🥱

WQHD with RT and DLSS, if needed. In my experience provides the best balance of graphical fidelity and fluid motion.

A lower resolution is no guarantee of better performance with RT enabled you know. The reason being is because RT is not 100% dependant on a good GPU, it needs an equally a good CPU as well.

On my tired (soon to be retired) i7 8700 and RTX 3070, enabling RT on game a such as Cyberpunk adds a further 20-25% workload on my CPU.

Apologies if you already knew this, but discussions regarding RT on these forums always talk about the power of the GPU and pretty much ignore the CPU.

My new PC (which I didn't build this time) is coming in a few days. It's an i5 13600K, 32GB RAM and an RTX 3080. Now I won't be playing max settings or anything like that, that's just stupid. But I will be trying different settings to get 50-60fps on my RT games with at least 1440P. Fun times!

4k

DLSS and FSR look weird...

Must be something wrong with your eyes then. Cyberpunk with 4K performance mode (1080P) looks pretty much as good as real 4K.

Why not both? RT with DLSS quality + GSync is a sweet spot.

Unless I'm doing something wrong, not even close. FSR looks much more pixelated and soft. Don't have the Nvidia card installed anymore.

@warm_gun:

4K DLSS Performance Mode

If you are using FSR then make sure you are using FSR Quality mode. FSR performance (especially for titles that use FSR 1) is quite poor and not recommended.

I tried it a bit (Quality mode) in Horizon Zero Dawn and looks fine when stepping up to 4K.

A mix of temporal super-sampling, variable resolution, and image upscaling offers the best balance to performance and visual fidelity. RT or not I'd take a balance mode over native 4K anyday.

That's what I did and it looked like shit compared to Bond's screenshots. Really fucking annoying that Gamespot no longer allows uploads over 3 MB. No, I'm not gonna compress my 4K/FHD FSR Horizon screenshot comparison, because I shouldn't have to.

@Bond007uk: Would have been helpful if you had also shown 4K comparisons of the same scenes. Now I can't tell if anything is messed up or not.

Prefer to play as close to 4K as possible with higher settings over RT.

But the format here was always crappy, to be honest. On another forum, I could simply spoiler-tag my 3.3 and 3.8 MB JPEGs, to spare people. (Yes, I'm over by not even one megabyte. Awesome, Gamespot.)

If DLSS and FSR isn't an option I'll play at 1440p. Although 4K DLSS Performance mode actually looks pretty decent and on par if not better than 1440p DLSS quality mode.

@Bond007uk: why upgrade from a 3070 to a 3080? Should have gone for something more substantial honestly.

@nfamouslegend: I haven't upgraded, I've bought a whole new PC. There wasn't a lot more substantial in my price range. This new machine has already cost me nearly £2500

It really depends on how good the ray tracing is implemented in the game for me.

Whatever helps me do over 90 FPS at 4K without getting blurry.

Even 60 fps kinda' hurts these days. And now I realized PS5 actually plays several games at 4K 30-40 fps, or 50-60fps with 4K upscaling. Jesus christ I feel bad for those people.

4K over 1080p with RT.

1440p/60fps is my minimum. I wouldn't use RT if it dropped me below that and I prefer 80fps as the minimum for a FPS game. I haven't bothered with 1080p for many years. Having a 4090 means I generally don't have to worry about anything. Just crank that shit to the max! 1440p, ultrawide, 4K... All good. :)

Some SW enjoyers main the S as their only system. Others have a 1070 and pretend to be all about performance over graphics. This is System Wars.

Able to get 4k but generally don't give a shit about it.

Same with ray-tracing.

Grew up watching pirated VHS tapes, my standards are extremely low.

1440p/60fps is my minimum.

Probably 4K because 1080p is too low. Don’t care that much for RT but high-end parts such as the 4080 and 4090 can do 4K/60/RT with the help of image reconstruction, especially in the case of the 4080.

60 fps lock. zero dip and no rt. is all i care about

Well, I can't speak for others, only for myself. I don't bullshit people on here. I generally tell it like it is... or at least how I see it. People may not agree with me or think I am an elitist or whatever, but that is fine. I care about quality and I know the majority of people do not really care about quality. They are OK with the basic bitch experience. All I can say is... if you follow my recommendations, you too can experience quality gaming.

Obviously, I will never recommend a Series Shit. LOL

Lots of basic bitch gamers on SW. Genuinely disgusting.

I have RTX 4090. I can do both now: 4K and RT 😎

Thought you said you had a 1080p TV.

@warm_gun: In this room.

1080p is way too low. 1440p minimum. But it is pretty tough noticing the difference between 1440p and 4K, even with a 77" OLED.

Choices are best, if you can choose 4K, ultra wide screen, high framerates, high settings, ray tracing... That's living.

I love PC gaming. I can choose to play older games, crank them up to 4K and install graphics mods. Means I don't have to play modern games with their trash microtransactions 😎

Here you go. Smaller file sizes and compression aside, the difference is pretty difficult to detect, if not impossible from these screenshots. All taken from my own PC.

4K DLSS Performance Mode

4K Native

4K DLSS Performance Mode

4K Native

Native 4K

Living the good life. I'm right there with ya, buddy! This 4090 is insane.

Don't really care about ray tracing until it becomes less of a resource hog.

I used to have 4k monitor, I broke it with an index controller and then decided to get an ultrawide 1440p as a temp monitor before finding another 4k one at a decent price. I ended up sticking with the 1440p monitor in the end because I couldn't tell any difference in the fidelity even at just a few feet away from the monitor and the performance gain from not playing in 4k is HUGE. IMO 4k is a waste of performance, id take well done RT over it any day of the week and probably even the half arsed RT they put in AMD sponsored/console games too.

I agree that 4K is probably a waste of performance when using a monitor. But TVs are bigger and sat farther away from. I don't use 4K with many new games. Been using 1440 to 2160 FSR the last few days and it's alright. But the option for native 4K when the game is easy to run is nice.

Yeah, high quality FSR 1440>2160 is kind of shit in Horizon. It can't figure out those individual blades of grass especially. Game looks better at 1440 with TAA on a 4K TV. Less blurry.

Snake oil for morons, just like AI upcaling in movies.

Why not 4k with raytracing? It destroys the frames on my 3090, but its doable.

That being said, I won't be using RT until it becomes less of a resource hog.