State of GPU Hardware (End of Year 2025) - Adam Sawicki

I’ve compiled some data to show state of the market for the End of Year 2025, and using that we’ll try to come up with a list of features that you can or can’t use and help you pick minimum supported GPU architecture for games targeting D3D12. ... It may not be desirable to support GPUs that no longer get regular driver updates. If you stumble upon a driver bug on such a GPU, no one will be able to help you. Here’s a table of supported GPU Architectures by vendor. |Vendor|Oldest supported architecture| |--|--| |AMD|RDNA1| |Nvidia|Turing| |Intel|Xe| |Qualcomm|X1| Older architectures may still get security updates, but that won’t help you with driver bugs. That said, it is not necessarily off the table to support older hardware, if you accept associated risks. … We have already received some mixed signals about RDNA1/2 driver support from AMD. It was announced that those are now in a separate driver branch, so it is plausible that RDNA1/2 will lose driver support in coming years. On Nvidia end, they just recently dropped support for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta cards, so it doesn’t seem likely that Turing will lose support anytime soon. … ... Let’s first look at the situation with Nvidia’s Pascal and Turing GPUs. Unfortunately, within those architectures, raytracing support is inconsistent. To keep it short, here’s breakdown: Source for Turing statistic breakdown With that information we can narrow down uncertainty window. … Going up to SM 6.8 require you to give up 5,07% of market share, which includes *all* Intel and Qualcomm GPUs. Apart from support for Work Graphs, which require an additional feature on top of SM 6.8, it only adds some minor features. Most notable of those is Extended Command Information. Developers that are more familiar with Vulkan or OpenGL may consider it a basic feature, but for years DirectX 12 developers passed those values manually. So, this is not as major of a feature as some of you may think. … However, if your game uses upscaling, VRS is probably not for you. When using upscaling, you are lowering your render resolution, so VRS won’t give you as much performance improvement, but will still require a lot of complexity related to the implementation. But even bigger problem is that some upscalers will not produce good results when using them together with VRS. This topic is not well covered by available resources, but CoD force disabled VRS if you use any upscaler or sharpening other than TAA. … Saving VRAM may not sound like a particularly interesting feature, but there’s more to it. We are currently in the middle of memory shortage - it is just a matter of time until high VRAM GPUs become even more unaffordable than they already are. Secondly, if you are going to use DXR, you will need a lot of VRAM for acceleration structures. And since every DXR capable GPU also has Sampler Feedback support of at least Tier 0.9, this does sound like a reasonable strategy to counteract increased VRAM usage due to DXR.