Why Real-Time Ray Tracing In Nvidia's GeForce RTX Graphics Cards Is a Big Deal

If you missed it, Nvidia announced its next-gen graphics cards at Gamescom 2018 last dark. And while the big news is a the huge leap in performance, Nvidia is focussing on the real-time ray tracing every bit ane of the key highlights of the new GeForce RTX 2080Ti, 2080 and 2070 GPUs.

But what exactly is ray tracing? As we all know graphics in video games have come up a long mode. Nonetheless, the expectations of gamers from a game'due south graphics take also grown exponentially. These days, gamers need greater visual allegiance and realism in games. That's where ray tracing comes in.

What is Ray Tracing?

Simply put, ray tracing leverages powerful GPUs to make changes to the visuals based on a number of factors. Ray-tracing is a method of calculating 3D scenes which mimics how humans see the earth, or more specifically, how the light in our world interacts with elements.

Ray Tracing

As Nvidia's website says:

"Ray tracing is the definitive solution for lifelike lighting, reflections, and shadows, offering a level of realism far beyond what'southward possible using traditional rendering techniques. Turing is the first GPU capable of real-time ray tracing."

We will get to real-fourth dimension ray tracing later, but it's worth knowing that ray tracing has been around for years – as long equally 3D rendering itself – and works by calculating beams of calorie-free from a source to its destination and how that beam bounces off, permeates through or is occluded by, objects in a scene. This allows graphics artists to create a more realistic looking scene (think sunlight streaming in through a cracked window).

Given enough time and computational power, computer generated scenes tin can be indistinguishable from reality (or virtual reality), which is the advantage that Nvidia is emphasizing on with its new chips.

Real-time Ray Tracing

"Turing opens up a new golden age of gaming, with realism merely possible with ray tracing, which most people thought was however a decade away," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, said at the announcement last night.

"The breakthrough is a hybrid rendering model that boosts today'southward computer graphics with the add-on of lightning-fast ray-tracing dispatch and AI. RTX is going to define a new wait for estimator graphics. Once you see an RTX game, you can't go back," he added.

It was only a affair of time that graphics cards became capable of existent-time ray tracing to bring a level of allegiance that's as however unseen in video games. We tin expect more than and more than AAA titles to feature realistic graphics, with accurate representations of lighting conditions along with better sharpness. Information technology's particularly conducive for virtual reality environments, which can mimic real-globe objects to a virtually indistinguishable degree.

This is ray tracing in action with the new GeForce RTX cards, equally shown by Nvidia.

AMD too is working on making ray tracing a focal point of its menu development going forrad. At GDC 208, the company announced that information technology is collaborating with Microsoft to help define, refine and support the future of DirectX 12 andraytracing. AMD will be working with game developers to explore ideas and go feedback related to PC-basedraytracing techniques for image quality, visual effects and performance.

Ray tracing certainly promises to bridge the gap betwixt reality and virtual reality, which is why Nvidia's graphics cards are such a big deal. But that also means they are a lot more expensive than one would have hoped.

The Nvidia "Founders Edition" versions showtime at $599 for the 2070, $799 for the RTX 2080 and $1,199 for the RTX 2080 Ti. Manufacturer cards will kickoff at $499, which is all the same quite a lot to pay for ray-tracing and the Turing compages. It remains to be seen whether these prices and the fact that but major new games will take support for this technology, means information technology's a risk Nvidia is taking. Find out more about the engineering here.