When NVIDIA announced the new RTX graphics cards at gamescom 2018, the reactions were somewhat mixed. Expectations of a sharp jump in graphics card performance were disappointed, but RTX and DLSS offered the potential for a significant jump in the pure quality of the game display. A step in the right direction or just a premature technology gimmick that doesn't really want to be used? A look back and an inventory.
Ray tracing in itself is not a new technique. Raytracing has been used for years, especially in animated films, but until recently the hardware hunger of technology could hardly be managed in real time and then only with powerful computer farms, such as are available to animation studios. Accordingly, players have had to do without it so far.
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That changed in August 2018, however, when NVIDIA announced the new series of RTX graphics cards at gamescom and caused a sensation with visually impressive demos. But not without a lot of skepticism. On the one hand, there was a whole series of disappointed players who had hoped for a clear leap in performance with the new graphics card generation. On the other hand, hardly any of the demos ran really smoothly and in higher resolutions than Full HD. The number of games that support the new features was also more than manageable.
The start in the games themselves was also rather bumpy. Battlefield V was the first title to enable RTX in the form of ray tracing reflections. At the beginning, however, this had the problem that scenes with a high particle density had a strong impact on the performance. It took some optimization patches to get this under control. In the meantime, the studios have learned with the strong help of NVIDIA. Shadow of the Tomb Raider, for example, uses RTX shadows and DLSS, which does not produce any noteworthy differences in frame rates compared to deactivated effects and rather improves the graphics discreetly and unobtrusively. Metro Exodus, on the other hand, delivered a posh implementation of global illumination with ray tracing without major performance losses.
The technology has a lot to offer in order to significantly improve the quality of the graphics and to make them more realistic and credible. While previous techniques used to only calculate light, shadow and reflections based on visible objects and light sources, ray tracing offers the possibility to include the entire game environment along with surface properties. With the advantage that ray tracing algorithms are even easier to implement, especially since DXR has an interface available in DirectX 12.
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Ray tracing enables physically correct reflections and light / shadow effects (Battlefield V)
NVIDIA uses two technologies for the GeForce RTX series, namely ray tracing on the one hand and DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) on the other. This is made possible by outsourcing the processing processes from the actual GPU to special computing cores on the graphics cards, the RT cores for ray tracing and the tensor cores for DLSS, in conjunction with a new cluster architecture. The calculation is still very complex, but at least possible with this solution.
Basically, ray tracing does nothing other than completely track the rays of the light sources of an entire game environment, not just what is in the visible area. If the light beam hits a surface, it is modified or reflected by the objects it hits, for example by color or by the material (glass reflected, wood rather less).
