Nvidia RTX has been out for almost three years now. I've had my RTX 2080 Super for a year and a half, and now I'm going to look back on real-time ray tracing's origin story.
I jumped on the ray tracing bandwagon as a bit of an early adopter. Nvidia had introduced two new technologies, DLSS and RTX, and had released its Super cards, while AMD stuck to traditional rasterization but launched a brand-new CISC architecture, RDNA, dedicated to gaming, replacing the aging GCN architecture. I went for Team Green for the GPU, got a 2080 Super and paired it with a Ryzen 7 3800X. It was glorious to turn on ray tracing. Shadow of the Tomb Raider was one of the few games that supported ray tracing, it featured ray traced shadows and looked glorious. The details were beautiful, the lighting and shadows were lifelike, all in addition to phenomenal gameplay and setting. Minecraft showed a night and day difference, it looked like an entirely different game! The water actually refracted light so that it looked shallower than it was! Fast forward to the present day, and things are quite different. GeForce RTX GPUs have been on sale for almost three years, next-gen RTX GPUs launched, RDNA2 debuted with Ray Accelerators to support real-time ray tracing, and the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S support real-time ray tracing as well. Is ray tracing finally commonplace? Unfortunately the pandemic caused the gaming industry to explode at the same time as chip shortages due to pandemic restrictions, leading to supply severely outstripping demand. Do I think it was a good decision to buy a first-generation RTX GPU? Yes, I am so glad that I went with an RTX 20-Series GPU instead of a GTX 16-Series, GTX 10-Series, or RX 5700XT. RTX is a revolutionary technology, and in order to make it work, Nvidia had to make their cards tremendously powerful, add special RT Cores to accelerate ray tracing calculations, and on top of all that borrow Volta's Tensor Cores and create the DLSS algorithm to run on them. The RTX 20-Series GPUs are not perfect, ray tracing causes them to take a substantial performance hit, although it is definitely possible to enable at high resolutions and high settings on more powerful GPUs like RTX 2080, 2080 Super, and 2080 Ti. Even the RTX 2060 can ray trace at 4K with some settings turned down thanks to DLSS 2.0.
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DanielI'm a software engineer, volunteer IT support, amateur blogger, casual gamer, and tech enthusiast. I also love cars and the great outdoors. Archives
May 2021
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