Over 83% of GeForce RTX 40 GPU owners have ray tracing enabled and 79% have DLSS turned up, courtesy of data collected through GeForce Experience, and Nvidia itself says so.

If you're wondering how they compare to the older RTX 30 and 20 series cards, Nvidia has those numbers as well (open in new tab). [79% of 40-series gamers, 71% of 30-series gamers, and 68% of 20-series gamers have DLSS turned on; 83% of 40-series gamers, 56% of 30-series gamers, and 43% of 20-series gamers have ray tracing turned on." Nvidia stated.

Nvidia concludes, "That is why it is essential to consider both ray tracing and DLSS when evaluating RTX 40 series upgrades.

Among other interesting data points are insights into screen technology: 62% of RTX 40 owners own monitors with 144Hz or higher, but only 28% game at 4K.

Of course, some typical cynics on Reddit have commented (open in new tab) that these numbers may not be quite what they seem. The gist is as follows. User turned on ray tracing. User turned off ray tracing. Boom! The user turned on ray tracing!

Nvidia does not provide details on what it takes to qualify as an RTX gamer with either DLSS or ray tracing enabled. Is a simple experiment like the one described above enough to qualify?

Without disclosing which games these numbers apply to, how long the gamers used the RT settings, and therefore whether they stuck with ray tracing for an extended period of time, we can assume that 83% of gamers with RTX 40 GPUs had ray tracing on at some point. The simple fact that it was turned on, something we know for sure from the data, is certainly not meaningful at all.

While the comparative numbers and increased usage with previous generations is interesting, it is also not necessarily directly meaningful: in 2018, Nvidia found that 37% of RTX 20 series gamers had ray tracing enabled (in the four games that were using it at the time) and DLSS enabled was only 26%, it stated.

One could argue that the increased RT utilization on RTX 40 cards makes sense given that those GPUs offer better ray tracing performance than earlier generations. But if that is what is causing the RTX 40 GPUs to have higher RT utilization, then why are older generations seeing progressively lower DLSS utilization?

One might expect higher upscaling utilization on older GPUs that need more help to achieve decent frame rates. But not so; owners of RTX 30 series GPUs still use less DLSS than RTX 40 owners, and RTX 20 owners still use less.

The existing RTX 40 cards (this data pertains to February of this year) are high-end models that are more likely to be owned by switched on enthusiasts who know these features, whereas the older GPUs are probably more mainstream and games throw by default We can assume that they are more likely to be used by gamers who just run whatever settings they want and don't delve too deeply into graphics options.

This was Nvidia's view when we spoke to the company about the numbers ahead of the RTX 4070 (opens in new tab) launch. So it is possible that some RTX 20 owners are missing out on the benefits of DLSS. However, unless Nvidia can provide a more detailed breakdown of the numbers, we simply will not know the details.

In any case, no matter how one interprets this data, there is no doubt that both upscaling and ray tracing are becoming increasingly important features for modern graphics cards.