AMD AND NVIDIA GPU FEATURES

The latest generation GPUs from AMD and Nvidia both support ray tracing and the full DirectX 12 Ultimate feature set, which defines the baseline of what we expect to see going forward. Nvidia still has some extra hardware in its tensor cores, which power technologies like DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) and Nvidia Broadcast, and those are both useful additions.

AMD offers something of an alternative to DLSS with its FSR technology, which is due for a major update in the not-too-distant future. FSR 2.0 will move to a temporal upscaling solution, but it will still work on a wide range of GPUs, including those from the competition.

Intel meanwhile has XeSS (Xe Super Sampling), which sounds an awful lot like DLSS, only done on Intel hardware. But having a software solution such as DLSS or FSR isn’t the same as getting it adopted by game developers, and DLSS easily wins in that arena.

Stepping back to earlier generation GPUs can mean giving up features, and in some cases, certain games may refuse to run at all. Of our test suite, FarCry6 was the only game that didn’t want to run on one of our legacy GPUs. The GTX 780 lacks the appropriate DirectX feature level, and the game simply failed to run despite our best attempts. Of course, there are also games such as Metro

ExodusEnhancedEdition that require ray tracing hardware, so you’ll need at least an AMD RX 6000-series or an Nvidia RTX card to run it.

Other features that ultimately deliver more performance, like AMD’s Infinity Cache, aren’t particularly important to the end-user, as speed is often the goal. However, video codec support can be important, especially if you’re thinking of using a card in a home theater setup.

Nvidia currently delivers better overall video encoding and decoding hardware, though Intel’s upcoming Arc GPUs will be the first with hardware

AV1 encoding and decoding support. Nvidia’s Ampere and Turing GPUs support hardware HEVC and AVC encoding and decoding, except for the GTX 1650.

AMD’s 6000- and 5000-series GPUs also support hardware HEVC and AVC encoding and decoding, except for the RX 6500 XT.