Ray tracing explored one year after Nvidia's first RTX GPU

Real-time ray tracing on Nvidia’s RTX graphics card has come along way since its introduction over a year ago at Siggraph 2018. When Team Green first announced ray tracing-enabled GPUs, their price seemed unjustified considering its limited applications. Fast-forward to today, and RTX graphics cards have become the new gold standard for product design, gaming, architecture, effects, and scientific visualisation.

Leading software makers from across the globe have introduced over 40 applications with RTX technology, enabling millions of users to take advantage of AI and ray tracing, which were previously thought too computationally demanding for working with interactively.

Ray tracing calculates how each photon of light in a scene interacts with surfaces and materials. Thus, providing more accurate, lifelike images than traditional computer graphics.

Greg Estes, VP of corporate marketing and developer programs at NVIDIA said: “Around the world, designers and artists, OEMs and software providers have embraced real-time ray tracing and AI acceleration as the new industry standard in product design and content creation. From RTX Studio laptops used by millions of creatives to data centres managed by global businesses, the power of NVIDIA RTX can be accessed from anywhere to design better products and produce richer, more immersive entertainment faster than ever.”

A year after its debut, RTX has become available everywhere. Every major 3D design applications have already committed to supporting RTX by the end of 2019. The gaming industry has fully embraced ray tracing with the number of titles launching with the feature skyrocketing in the past couple of months. Major OEMs have also unveiled RTX-powered systems.

27 RTX Studio laptops and mobile workstations now enable content creation on the go with desktop-level performance. Nvidia’s RTX Servers deliver cinematic-quality graphics enhanced by RTX ray tracing for a fraction of the cost of power as compared to a CPU-based rendering cluster with similar performance.