Explaining our RTX head-to-head, and where we missed the mark

(Image credit: Mojang)

Earlier today we published a pair of articles on PC Gamer designed to ignite a debate about the success or failure of real-time ray tracing in games. The two articles were designed to be read in conjunction with each other, and were positioned on the site with two opposing viewpoints on the next-gen graphics feature.

On one side we had a piece which held the view that the computationally intensive feature had done little for actual gaming, and on the other a counter-argument supporting it, explaining that the first generation of any nascent graphical advancement will always appear a niche effect… until it becomes utterly ubiquitous.

But we missed the mark with the original headlines, which we understand contained implications that we absolutely did not intend them to have.

We have altered the headlines because of that, adding both viewpoints into each piece, and hope the articles will now be seen as intended - a head-to-head argument between passionate gamers, created around the end of the first generation of ray tracing capable GPUs, to frame its place in PC gaming and in the minds of the players. Just as we're about to enter a whole new era of graphics technology.

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.