Highlights
Graphics card manufacturer Nvidia just published a blog that explores the relationship between gaming hardware and kill/death ratio. The paper particularly looks at this relation in the context of popular Battle Royale games like PlayUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG), Apex Legends and Fortnite. Their study shows some interesting correlation.
Nvidia's research examined the number of times a player scored a kill divided by the number of times the player was killed in one of the Battle Royale games. They wanted to see if there was a correlation between player performance and their gaming hardware. Typically, players tend to benefit from higher refresh rate monitors (144Hz and higher). This, they complement with adequately fast keyboard and mouse, but in order for the monitor to deliver the frame rates, the players need an adequately powerful graphics card. Hence, Nvidia hypothesized that better the GPU, higher the K/D ratio would be.
Initially, they looked at the K/D ratio of gamers using a 6-series GPU as a baseline and plotted the trends for each of the 7,8,9,10 and 20 series cards. Here, users who were on newer cards did show a better K/D ratio. However, Nvidia postulated that as players spent more time on each of the games, they were bound to get better, so they also looked at the number of hours each player was spending playing the game, in relation to their hardware and their K/D ratio. Here, Nvidia was able to conclude that regardless of the number of hours a player spent playing Battle Royale games, better GPUs did correlate with a better K/D ratio.
Nvidia’s blog concludes that while a better GPU will lead to a better K/D ratio, the study assumes that your skill level is already in the higher grade. GPUs won’t make your performance better, but if your reflexes are already at the top of their game, having the higher refresh rates will improve your chances in Battle Royale games. This is because when you’re playing with higher frame rates, you have a better chance at reacting faster. In short, Nvidia’s blog concludes that better the hardware on your PC, augmented by the new RTX GPUs from Nvidia, the more likely you are to have a higher K/D ratio, provided you are a skilled player. It would, however, be interesting to see just how a “good” player would perform if he/she were limited to lower-end hardware, capable of a max frame-rate of 60fps.
Related Read: Understanding real-time ray tracing: The RTX Way