You can trust VideoGamer. Our team of gaming experts spend hours testing and reviewing the latest games, to ensure you're reading the most comprehensive guide possible. Rest assured, all imagery and advice is unique and original. Check out how we test and review games here
As another 20 NVIDIA RTX titles are added and DLSS support continues to grow, there’s never been a better time to pick up a 40-series card
SPONSORED PIECE
Nvidia graphics cards remain the most popular choice for gamers by an overwhelming majority, and there are good reasons for this, not least because they have the best tech when it comes to Ray Tracing, AI graphics acceleration, and anti-latency technology. The GeForce 40-series in particular takes the performance in these areas to the next level, making them the ideal choice for a new upgrade. Nvidia has been working closely with a great number of game developers to properly integrate this tech into the latest titles, and in August 2024 the number of games which supported NVIDIA RTX surpassed the 600 mark. Even more recently there have been twenty new games announced that support these features. Read below for more details on all the above and which cards we recommend for your PC build.
Industry-leading Nvidia graphics technology explained
RTX
The RTX prefix you see at the front of the model names for all Nvidia graphics cards following the 10-series is short for ‘Ray Tracing Texel eXtreme’, more commonly known as Ray Tracing. Simply put, Ray Tracing models how light behaves in a way that’s much closer to real life than what came before, making for an extremely immersive graphical experience; this takes a substantial amount of processing power to accomplish however, so your in-game FPS will take a hit when it’s enabled, but the performance benefits of DLSS that we’ll discuss below have made it more viable than ever.
Although Nvidia cards aren’t the only ones that support this technology, they are far and ahead the ones that implement it best, so if you’re interested in implementing Ray-Tracing in your games then there really is no substitute. Each generation of Nvidia GPUs has got better at implementing the tech, with the Nvidia 40-series being the current leaders.
This revolutionary tech is even being brought to older titles thanks to RTX Remix: a modding platform that NVIDIA has introduced to allow modders to integrate Full Ray-Tracing into remasters of classic games, including the upcoming Half-Life 2 RTX.
DLSS
DLSS is NVIDIA’s proprietary AI-based graphics acceleration technology, which was one of the most ground-breaking innovations the industry had seen for some time when it first arrived. In essence, DLSS means your graphics card doesn’t have to natively render all the pixels in every single frame at full resolution in the conventional, process-intensive manner, instead the AI neural network can take, for example, a 1080p image and turn it into a high quality 4K image, which is a much less intensive process. In some games, with the latest 40-series cards, this technology can give FPS performance increases of up to around 300%, which is absolutely huge, particularly if you’re looking to game at higher resolutions and your hardware wouldn’t otherwise cut it.
The most impressive of these gains are down to improvements in the latest version of NVIDIA’’s frame-gen tech: DLSS 3, most importantly, DLSS Frame Generation. This is basically a souped-up version of the DLSS tech, whereby instead of just helping to generate pixels it creates entire frames, increasing average FPS even more, to frankly ridiculous levels. It’s important to note this particular feature is only available on NVIDIA 40-series cards: the older gen models do not have it.
Below you can see examples of the huge gains in FPS that are possible in a game like Star Wars Outlaws at 4K, 1440p, and 1080p resolution from the different cards within the NVIDIA 40-series, with Frame Generation enabled.
The second major new update is called DLSS 3.5, which features DLSS Ray Reconstruction. This improves the image quality for Ray Tracing applications by generating better-quality pixels in between sampled rays, thereby creating more accurate light replication and reducing the noise in the image. Ray Reconstruction has also now been added to RTX Remix for modders to use in their projects.
Reflex
Any NVIDIA GPU from the last few generations is compatible with NVIDIA Reflex: a technology geared towards fast-paced competitive gamers, to help reduce in-game latency.
First and foremost among the features of this tech is Reflex Low-Latency Mode, which is what actually reduces the system lag in supported titles. This is based on kits that NVIDIA has given to developers to allow them to optimize the coding in their games when being played on NVIDIA hardware. Along with the driver-based Ultra Low Latency Mode setting from within the NVIDIA control panel, these features can really make a significant impact on your PC’s responsiveness and are particularly useful in mitigating the increase in lag that can occur when you specifically enable DLSS 3 Frame Generation, to the point where it can be hard to notice a difference in your PC’s responsiveness.
If you’re using a G-Sync monitor you can also use the tool known as the NVIDIA Reflex Latency Analyzer, which provides you with a performance overlay with a breakdown of your mouse latency, PC+Display Latency, and System Latency, helping you identify where the problem lies.
The latest titles with full RTX & DLSS integration
Below is the full list of the latest games announced with RTX & DLSS integration: some of these have hit the shelves already, others will be coming out over the next month or so. They are a broad range of titles, from AAA big studio games to indie productions, across numerous genres.
- Arena Breakout Infinite
- Avowed
- Black Myth Wukong
- Black State
- Concord
- Dragon Age: The Veilguard
- Dune Awakening
- Empire of The Ants
- Eternal Strands
- Final Fantasy XVI
- Fragpunk
- Funko Fusion
- GreedFall II: The Dying World
- Half Life 2 RTX
- Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
- Killing Floor III
- Kingmakers
- Marvel Rivals
- Mecha Break
- Once Human
- Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap
- Retrieval
- Spine
- Star Wars: Outlaws
- Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown
- Unawake
- Wuthering Waves
Which graphics cards work best with these titles?
Many of the features listed above work well with the older generation NVIDIA 30-series graphics cards, but as mentioned there are some sub-features such as DLSS Frame Generation (which is particularly useful for being able to maximize graphical settings in demanding games like Cyberpunk 2077 for instance), that are only available on 40-series NVIDIA GPUs. As a result, these are the ones we’d most recommend picking up.
In terms of brand, ASUS are one of the top names out there when it comes to high quality AIBs, and we’ve listed some of their products below for you to consider.
The mid-range
The RTX 4060 is one of the best graphics cards out there on a power/performance basis, and although you won’t be cranking every game out there to max settings with one of these cards, it is still capable of playing every AAA title on the market to a respectable standard, particularly when you utilise DLSS to unlock those massive performance gains. If you want something with a bit more power, the RTX 4060 Ti is also available for slightly more money.
ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 4060 OC White Edition
Core clock speed
1830 MHz Base clock 2505 MHz boost clock
CUDA cores
3,072
Memory
8GB GDDR6
Dimensions
227.2 x 123.24 x 49.6 mm
PSU required
550W
TBP
115W
ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB OC Edition
Core clock speed
2595 MHz Boost clock
CUDA cores
4,352
Memory
8GB GDDR6
Dimensions
227.2 x 123.24 x 49.6mm
Recommended PSU
650W
The upper mid-range
The RTX 4070 and even more so the RTX 4070 SUPER, are both great cards if you’re looking to game at 1440p with Ray-Tracing enabled, capable of running even fairly demanding games at these resolutions on relatively high settings and generating solid FPS.
ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 4070 White OC Edition 12GB
Core clock speed
2520 MHz Boost clock
CUDA cores
5,888
Memory
12GB GDDR6X
Dimensions
267.01 x 133.94 x 51.13mm
Recommended PSU
650W
ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 4070 Super OC Edition
VRAM
12GB
Base Clock
2,520 MHz
Boost Clock
2,550 MHz
TDP
220W
The high-end
At the top end of the market for the vast majority of gamers is the RTX 4080 Super. This graphics card brought greater efficiency benefits and a slight performance boost over the preceding RTX 4080, but at a cheaper price, and that sounds good to us! This GPU is capable of playing any game at the highest settings with Ray Tracing enabled with terrific FPS at resolutions up to 4K. For true top-end 4K gaming though, buyers may want to consider the RTX 4090, which doesn’t outperform the RTX 4080 Super much at lower resolutions, but at full UHD/4K the extra Raw performance, Ray Tracing performance, & VRAM it possesses means it pulls ahead by some margin.
ASUS TUF Gaming RTX 4080 Super
Base Clock
2.025 gigahertz
Boost Clock
2.505 gigahertz
VRAM
16GB
TDP
320
ASUS ROG Strix RTX 4090 OC
Base Clock
2235 MHz
Boost Clock
2640 MHZ
VRAM
24GB GDDR6X
Dimensions
357.6 x 149.3 x 70.1mm
Recommended PSU
1000W
Other options
If you want to shop around further to see what options are available (including different color options for an aesthetic PC build), or the full selection of ASUS graphics cards, click here to see the full range available from ASUS along with additional information.
About the Author
