If 80% of Nvidia 40 series owners enable DLSS, what happens to the rest?

Expand / Buying one of these Nvidia cards is a big commitment, both in dollars and storage space. Most people who buy them enable DLSS and ray tracing, according to Nvidia. So... what's up with people who don't? Andrew Cunningham

As part of its push for the RTX 4070, Nvidia's new $600 entry point into its Ada Lovelace GPU series, Nvidia has stats that, depending on how you look at it , are either completely confusing or entirely believable.

In a blog post and press materials sent ahead of the 4070's debut, Nvidia offers stats taken from "millions of RTX gamers who played RTX-enabled games" in February 2023. They show that:< /p> 83% of Series 40 players "turn on RT" (ray tracing) 56% of 30 series 43% of 20 series

When it comes to DLSS, Nvidia's AI-accelerated frame scaling and generation tool for games that support it, Nvidia writes that 79% of Series 40 owners , 71% of Series 30 and 68% of Series 20 owners have enabled the feature.

Enlarge / Chart from Nvidia showing adoption of DLSS and RT among owners of Nvidia 40-series cards, among other interesting statistics. Nvidia

Nvidia (or whoever writes its copy, at least) believes that the "heart of this story", the takeaway from these numbers, is that "technologies don't just define how people create content, they redefine how it is consumed, ultimately becoming part of its transformation." Or, to put it another way, less for grad students than for dinner parties, ray tracing and DLSS are "how today's gamers get the best graphics and performance." In other words, consider upgrading your video card.

Not everyone sees these numbers and comes to the same conclusions. In a Reddit r/hardware thread (first spotted by PC Gamer), many ask what the exact criteria for "turn on" is. From experience, ray tracing, or RT, is something you can definitely turn on, play a game for a minute, notice it looks like a RealVideo stream from 2003, and then turn it off. If you did in Feb 2023, did you "turn on RT"?

Another question would be what the sample sizes look like. The March 2023 Steam Hardware and Software Survey, which incorporated data from October 2021 through March 2023, showed that 15% of Steam users were using 20-series RTX cards, 34% 30 and only 0.68% of the 40 series (thanks to u/nukleabomb for the math). Are these early adopters more or less likely to try out the same features as the rest of the gaming world once they finally switch to better performing cards? We'll have to find out.

Remainders are more confusing to think about in Nvidia's numbers. Of that very small group of people who were able to get a 40-series card and also afford to pay for one, the number of people who would try DLSS seems likely to be closer to 100%. Since Nvidia's numbers presumably come from those installing its card and using the...