At this year's Nvidia conference, the company lifted the lid on its new line of graphics cards, called the RTX 20XX. The company promised these cards would revolutionize the way graphics work in games over the next decade or more, and the secret to that evolution is in the shift from the 'GTX' moniker to 'RTX'. The 'r' in RTX now stands for 'ray tracing', a technology that has been part of the visual effects industry for years, but has finally made the leap to gaming, thanks to intelligent artificial intelligence systems in behind the scenes.
But what exactly is ray tracing and why is it so important to the future of gaming?
This is where ray tracing comes in. As we mentioned in the previous section, visual effects studios have used ray tracing for years on major Hollywood movies, but that's only because unlike real-time graphics, Hollywood has the luxury to be able to send their effects to what is called a "render farm" and spend hours, days and sometimes even weeks rendering the lighting for a single scene.
Interactive gaming must be able to produce these same lighting effects in a changing and dynamic environment, which is why until now the technology has been reserved exclusively for films due to the high demand for processing power. With the release of the RTX cards, however, Nvidia says that thanks to clever AI integration, the era of real-time ray tracing has finally arrived, and it looks better than any of them. between us might have expected.
Ray tracing simulates all aspects of the light source and its refractive properties as they occur in 3D. This makes for a much more natural and realistic scene and brings the graphics in games closer to the photorealism we've come to expect from our favorite movies. That said, the only cards that will be able to run ray trace-enabled games (like Battlefield V) are Nvidia's RTX line of cards and AMD's upcoming Vega line.
Ray tracing has the potential to forever change the way we view gaming, and full-scale implementation of the technology that powers it is just months away.
