PC World - USA (2021-01)

100 PCWorld JANUARY 2022

HERE’S HOW SUPERCHARGE YOUR GEFORCE GPU

world to life, with shimmering water and

reflective light effects.

It’s not all sunshine and glistening vistas,

however. Ray tracing also comes with some

performance penalties. Even on lower

settings, it can be taxing on even the latest

RTX 3000 GPUs. First, to take full advantage

of what ray tracing has to offer, you’ll want the

beefiest GPU you can get a

hold of. With the current

vast shortages, that’s easier

said than done—but you

can expect the best

performance from the RTX

3090, 3080 Ti, and 3080

with second-gen RT cores.

Don’t worry—even some

older 20-series GPUs can

benefit from ray tracing, but

you’ll be more constrained

performance-

wise. Check out

Brad Chaco’s

article on ray

tracing for more

information (fave.

co/3ebGQ6M).

DLSS

Nvidia has a

solution for this

performance hit:

Enter DLSS, Deep

Learning Super

Sampling. In plain English, this will let you rev

up your graphics settings and ray tracing to

the max while giving you a sweet FPS

performance boost. DLSS, which uses AI, is a

perfect combo with ray tracing—beauty and

brains! This is a must-enable option if you plan

to take full advantage of ray tracing while

keeping high performance. We recommend

Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing enabled.

The ray tracing and DLSS options in Cyberpunk 2077.