It’s time to decide if you’ve waited long enough to upgrade to a new GPU

With the pending release of Alan Wake 2, could PC hardware fans have another Crysis on their hands? Until now you they have probably heard that this new game requires a feature – Mesh shades – which is not supported by graphics cards as recent as AMD’s Radeon 5000 series and NVIDIA’s GeForce 10 series. At a minimum, you’ll need an AMD Radeon 6000 Series, NVIDIA RTX 20 Series, or Intel Arc card.

It may be hard to believe, but it’s been five years since RTX launched, with the introduction of the RTX 2080 in September 2018. And while the merits of real-time ray tracing have been hotly contested (let’s face it, improvements in reflections or shadows are not always so easy to observe in real time), once you have seen a fully ray traced title you might just become a converter. Path tracing is the future (and it’s very, very hard on the hardware).