Exploring the Latest Trends in Graphics Cards for Gaming PCs

Gaming graphics cards continue to advance. Now capable of handling higher resolutions and refresh rates, machine learning applications such as ray tracing are also now possible.

GPU performance is measured in trillion floating-point operations per second (TFLOPS). A GPU’s generation number and relative ranking among its peers can also provide insight into its capabilities.

The COVID-19 pandemic

COVID-19 pandemic affected every industry, even those traditionally immune such as PC gaming. As a result, GPU shortage has driven prices upward and GPUs have become highly sought-after commodities.

GPUs have seen a surge in cryptocurrency mining demand, leading to shortages. Unfortunately, however, Nvidia and AMD control almost all production, making the industry vulnerable to supply chain disruptions that lead to shortages.

Nvidia has managed to survive and thrive during the pandemic thanks to GPU sales. Industry analyst Jon Peddie reported that Nvidia’s share of the desktop graphics processing unit (GPU) market increased substantially during Q2, due in large part to increased work-from-home orders, virtual schooling programs, and graphics-heavy gaming. Furthermore, new market segments like AI services and data center services provided opportunities to expand revenue and profit.

The crypto craze

GPUs are at the heart of gaming PCs. They enable immersive and high-quality graphics experiences for demanding gamers while also being utilized by engineering firms for computer-aided design work as well as video game and movie special-effects studios.

Unfortunately, many graphics cards are being used to mine cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and other digital coins – leading to their prices skyrocketing; some models now selling at double or even triple their retail cost.

As a result, gaming enthusiasts are having difficulty accessing and affording the latest GPUs for their desktop rigs. Many are turning to second-hand sales or buying cards from scalpers online at fractions of their MSRP; unfortunately these cards may also be of questionable quality.

The rise of ray tracing

Nvidia’s ray-tracing technology is creating waves in the graphics world. Designed to make games look more realistic by simulating how light works in reality, this technique involves tracking virtual photons across surfaces before calculating how they reflect or refract off those surfaces – it has long been used in CGI animation; however it requires farms of computers just to render one frame!

As for hardware, Nvidia’s RTX 2080 Ti GPU stands out as being capable of real-time ray tracing at 1440p ultra at 60 frames per second – it also supports DLSS upscaling and global illumination!

AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XT can support 1080p ray tracing, but falls short in performance and power usage comparison to Nvidia cards. Game developers have been optimizing both aspects of ray tracing equally; therefore the gap should close over time.

Artificial intelligence

Graphics cards contain powerful computing cores capable of parallel processing. This makes them especially helpful for creating images and graphics in video games since they can render multiple pixels at once.

People have noticed that GPUs are equally adept at performing other kinds of calculations–particularly artificial intelligence tasks like machine learning. As these activities require processing lots of data, GPUs are well-suited for this use case.

NVIDIA’s GH200 Grace Hopper GPU boasts enough processing power to run large language models at record speeds while training and running deep neural networks at record speeds – it is also great for training deep neural networks; however, these factors alone won’t overcome GPU supply chain shortages.