alt Hacker NewsAMD GPU's are fine, but nvidia's marketing (overt and covert / word-of-mouth) is better. "RTX On" is a meme where people get convinced the graphics are over 9000x "better"; it's a meaningless marketing expression but a naive generation of fairly new PC gamers are eating it up.
And... they don't need to. Most of the most played video games on PC are all years old [0]. They're online multiplayer games that are optimized for average spec computers (and mobile) to capture as big a chunk of the potential market as possible.
It's flexing for clout, nothing else to it. And yet, I can't say it's anything new, people have been bragging, boasting and comparing their graphics cards for decades.
[0] https://activeplayer.io/top-15-most-popular-pc-games-of-2022...
One thing I wonder about is whether PC gaming is splitting into two distinct tiers, high end for those with thousands to spend on their rig and studios who are pathfinders (id, Remedy, 4A, etc) in graphics, then the wider market for cheaper/older systems and studios going for broad appeal. I know the market isn't going to be neatly divided and more of a blurry ugly continuum.
The past few years (2018 with the introduction of RT and upscaling reconstruction seems as good a milestone as any) feel like a transition period we're not out of yet, similar to the tail end of the DX9/Playstation3/Xbox360 era when some studios were moving to 64bit and DX11 as optional modes, almost like PC was their prototyping platform for when they made completed the jump with PS4/Xbox one and more mature PC implementations. It wouldn't surprise me if it takes more years and titles built targeting the next generation consoles before it's all settled.