What does the Ray Tracing technology on the GeForce RTX 20x series mean to gamers?

Real-time ray tracing technology has been a distant dream for decades, and now NVIDIA's RTX-20 graphics hardware has finally done that.

Recently, NVIDIA has released three new GeForce RTX 2070, 2080 and 2080Ti graphics cards, promising new real-life rendering capabilities. According to NVIDIA, thanks to the technology of rendering Ray Tracing, the GeForce RTX is more powerful than the system including 4 GPU Volta or 10 GeForce GTX 1080Ti.

So, what is Ray Tracing or ray tracing technology, and how does it differ from current graphic extraction technology?

Basically, ray tracing is based on the behavior of light in real time when interacting with objects in the scene for rendering.

NVIDIA's new graphic architecture called Turing solves a wide range of problems of current ray tracing technology.

Ray detection technology is suitable for adding realistic lighting effects.

Turing cards use ray detection technology that is very expensive, so it has never been delivered to GPUs for general users. But now NVIDIA is ready to do that.

How is this ray tracing technology special?

Current graphics technology is using raster (Rasterization) technology, simulating light and behavior of light in a certain context. This is similar to the way a painter, each layer of objects is shown in turn from front to back, makes the rear objects obscured by the front objects.

Conventional Raster technique (left) and ray tracing technique (right).

In this way, the raster technique will not track and render light, making it difficult to render reflection. This technique is often used only in real-time scenes, not when simulating the movement of complex scenes such as 3D motion pictures or in video games . because the hardware cannot respond. OK.

But with ray tracing technology, it can reconstruct the behavior of light when traveling to surfaces, materials and moving objects, then extract and display more complex. It can even simulate in real time how light rays interact with objects, create reflection, scattering, refracting effects or detect and display refracting glasses and reflective mirrors. projection, visualizing the origin and color of light after passing through the object.

In fact, ray tracing techniques have been used by professional users to produce movies like Pixar's Monsters University, Marvel's Iron Man. And now NVIDIA has brought this technology to mainstream users.

This is the biggest leap that NVIDIA has ever made in a generation (GPU card) by ray tracing technology that requires a tremendous amount of computing power.

In the newly released GPUs, NVIDIA used the new Turing architecture to solve the problem of processing. Tensor Core core is capable of using AI to deduce the "real-time" part of the image that is equipped for dedicated beam detectors to make the GPU capable of simulating 6 times faster than the previous Pascal platform. here (on 1080Ti GTX).

This big jump in graphics technology will enable studios and individuals to expand the use of this ray tracing technology to apply in animation, games and scientific simulations.

Currently, this new GPU has only been produced by NVIDIA for desktop computers and the laptop will have to wait until next year. Metro: Exodus and some upcoming games are available with the NVIDIA RTX demo to show off their real-time ray detection capabilities.

Which game will support Ray Tracing?

Ray detection technology will not improve graphics in all games you play. It only helps on games that support NVIDIA RTX technology and only when you enable ray detection. Here are some of the games that NVIDIA announced will support this technology, of course there will be more supportive games in the future, but these are pioneering names:

1. Assetto Corsa Competizione
2. Atomic Heart
3. Battlefield V
4. Control
5. Enlisted
6. Justice
7. JX3
8. MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries
9. Metro Exodus
10. ProjectDH
11. Shadow of the Tomb Raider

The trailer below also mentions Atomic Heart, Battlefield V and Control, but they have gameplay different from what the video of Shadow of the Tomb Raider shows.

If you learn about this technology, you must have seen the Stormtrooper demo running on NVIDIA DFX Station, the computer is $ 60,000 (about 1.4 billion VND). This video shows real-time ray detection technology and makes everything look great. Of course, on your home desktop, it won't be as beautiful as this, but it's still really great. Especially stormy scenes, scenes with many costumes and surfaces. Scenes of the forest or the streets under ray tracing technology will be much more impressive, but still need more high-resolution textures to make them look more perfect.

Price of RTX

NVIDA said there are 3 different GPUs in the GeForce RTX 20. The starting price of the RTX 2070 is $ 499, the RTX 2080 card is $ 699 and the RTX 2080 Ti card is $ 999. These are high-end GPUs but are quite affordable for ordinary gamers.

You can pre-order the Founders version of these GPUs but the price of each will increase to 100USD.

The GeForce RTX 20 Series also improves performance

These cards are currently NVIDIA's fastest GPUs you can buy. Specifically, NVIDIA said that the RTX 2080 is 50% faster than 1080 GTX when running in 4K resolution in games like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Wolfenstein II. NVIDIA said the cards will deliver 60 frames per second in 4K resolution in games like Call of Duty WW2, Destiny 2, Far Cry 5 and Battlefield 1.

The GeForce RTX 20 Series also uses new DLSS (Deep Learning Super-Sampling) technology combined with AI to improve performance by up to 75% in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds game, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy XV.

In other words, besides ray detection technology, these are the fastest NVIDIA graphics cards available today.

Should you buy it?

If you like the latest, fastest technology, you should buy them.

If you are hesitating, wait a while longer, when the cards are sold and have accurate evaluations about them, then decide.

Because it is a new technology, its price will be very high at first. Then, as usual, many companies will follow and more and more similar devices are available at more affordable prices, gradually becoming more and more popular.

Although you do not buy this new ray detection technology, the RTX 20 series is helping game developers have the opportunity to integrate ray tracing technology into their products. Many games will support this technology when the corresponding graphics hardware is becoming more and more popular.

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