Wait, you wrote, "I'll stick with DLSS 4 and Multi-Frame Gen to achieve a playable framerate and save myself a few thousand dollars," and also said you're on an RTX 3060 (same card I currently have in my main system, by the way). Does DLSS 4 work on 30 series cards? I thought it was currently only available on 50 series, with discussion that they MIGHT in the future bring it down to other series (and maybe only to the 40 series). Or am I just behind on the news and that's now a real option including on 3060? Or did you just mean that it's not worth it for you to upgrade and were not trying to say that DLSS 4 works on the 3060?
As a related aside, I'll keep beating this drum until the market agrees (it will one way or the other eventually because graphics cards will keep improving, even if it has nothing to do with me): I don't think people realize how important ray tracing is. I know plenty of people don't care about ray tracing for the visuals and would happily sacrifice it for more FPS. But ray tracing, and really path tracing, is not just about improving the visuals, it's about saving development teams a HUGE amount of work creating lighting work-arounds using baked-in illumination and other tricks to give players a sense of lighting in scenes. When games can instead simply require that players have graphics cards capable of handling ray tracing, they can ditch all that work.
My sense is that means when most gamers are running roughly 4070 power (maybe it's as low as our 3060's, but I doubt it).
This means all that effort can go into more level design, DLC, or other games. When people bemoan the cost of games going up, the single biggest offset to that we can see is market-wide path tracing capabilities (AI might prove to be another).
If DLSS4 can improve older cards and gets us there sooner, that's a win for all of us. Anything that frees developers from those manual lighting solutions would be a godsend to gaming.
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