[CT27]

I'm about to get a new computer and will probably get an NVIDIA graphics card.  Does FSO/Freespace work good with the new NVIDIA series of cards (RTX 20XX cards)?  I don't really know what this 'ray tracing' thing is that I've heard about.

[Nyctaeus]

Ray-based model of lighting. Rays of light will now be reflected than bounce several times around various surfaces. Count of reflections is adjustable. Especially hipoly, complex meshes like Arcadia, Hades or my new EA ships from Inferno would benefit from raytracing lighting the most, and would look much more realistic. I doubt if FSO are planning to add ray-tracing shaders to FS in near future, but it should be possible via external source like Reshade. People implemented this even to Minecraft.

[CT27]

Basically what I'm asking is if I got an RTX card, would Freespace still work with it even if the mods don't have all this ray-tracing stuff?  Or should I look for a GTX card instead?

[Colonol Dekker]

The card should work perfectly unless I'm missing something.

[Nightmare]

AFAIK there's nobody on HLP right now who knows how to write shaders.

[Nyctaeus]

It's still normal graphic card and very powerful one at the same time. I'm not hardware specialist, but RTXes seems to be overpriced a little and it's overally better to buy some good Ti. I guess someone with more recent hardware news would bring more light to this case.

[TechnoD11]

It's still normal graphic card and very powerful one at the same time. I'm not hardware specialist, but RTXes seems to be overpriced a little and it's overally better to buy some good Ti. I guess someone with more recent hardware news would bring more light to this case.

Higher end video cards typically are not rated as a value proposition, and these new RTX cards are no exception.
Which RTX card to get is going to be driven by your resolution (these are just guidelines):
1080P: RTX 2060S/2070S
1440P: RTX 2070S/2080S
4K/1440P Ultrawide: 2080S/2080Ti