What is ray tracing ?

Abarbarian

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What is ray tracing, and how will it change games?

The dedicated RT cores in RTX 20-series GPUs were a big selling point, but they didn’t quite deliver the performance Nvidia suggested. Even last-gen’s 2080 Ti struggled in supported ray tracing titles upon launch. The new RTX 3080 and 3090 feature newer RT cores, however, and the performance improvement is clear. Not only are these cards faster than their last-gen counterparts, but the new RT cores are faster, too. In many ways, the RTX 30-series cards feel like the GPUs Nvidia was promising with RTX in the first place.

You’ll need a recent — and expensive — graphics card to see ray tracing at home. Hardware-accelerated ray tracing is only available on Nvidia RTX 20-series and 30-series GPUs, and on AMD’s RX 6000-series GPUs (GTX 10-series and 16-series cards support ray tracing but lack RT cores). The RX 6000 cards aren’t out yet, RTX 30-series cards are likely to stay out of stock until 2021.

Neat article on this upcoming improvement to gaming. As usual though you will need tons of loot and there are not many games around at the moment that implement it. :rolleyes:
 
I've got an RTX card, but very few of the games I run make the most of it. Some games like Fortnite can use it, but it isn't really a great example.

I'm looking forward to trying a next-gen game that does use it a little more heavily!
 
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