The advertising comparison became a joke
In August 2018 NVIDIA unveiled the GeForce RTX gaming graphics cards, built on the Turing architecture, and showed how ray tracing changes light, reflections and shadows in games. Its official presentation did compare scenes with and without RTX. Even then, users started joking about the price of the new cards and turning the idea of improved graphics into a comparison pushed to an absurd extreme. Early posts on Reddit and in gaming communities date from August 2018, but their dates do not prove that they created every variant of the format. Another point matters too: this picture is not a technical test. Its left half is an amateur photo with a phone and coins, and its right half is a staged frame from a fantasy film.
Neo as a sign of impossible improvement
On the right, Neo from “The Matrix” stops bullets in flight; the scene is built on the effect of supernatural control over what is happening. On the left, a similar composition with a raised hand also shows a person and coins, but it looks like an accidental phone snapshot. The green tags RTX OFF and RTX ON give these two frames a technical scale, as if a more expensive graphics card had turned an ordinary photo into a movie. The humor comes not from any real difference in quality but from the mismatch between the examples. RTX can change lighting and detail in a supported game, but it does not turn an ordinary person into Neo or make a staged scene out of a snapshot.
From graphics to any “before and after” pair
The template transfers easily to two pictures with a recognizable shared element: one modest, the other spectacular. It matters that the viewer understands what supposedly got better. The comparison can be literal, such as an old monitor and a new one, or deliberately absurd, as here. It also works for jokes about expensive gadgets: the upgrade turns out to be so valuable that the owner has to economize on everything else after the purchase. But this version is especially memorable because it does not show the graphics cards themselves and does not discuss tests; it turns the promise of visual progress into a miniature fantasy of a superpower.
Invented pairs
An invented pair for home repairs: on the left, a light bulb above a desk; on the right, the whole desk flooded with light, like a theater stage. The RTX OFF and RTX ON captions make swapping a bulb look like a graphics upgrade. For a hike, you can place side by side a blurred photo of a tent and a shot of mountains in perfect light: the spectacular version looks as if a cinematic render were added to a night forest. A third variant is an old school photo with a poster next to a museum photograph of the same exhibit, where the small details are clearly visible. The joke works here only with a similar subject: if the pictures are completely different, the comparison stops being “before and after” and no longer suggests an imagined enhancement of the image.
