On August 20, 2018,
NVIDIA launched a new line of graphics cards based on their new
Turing architecture. Branded as GeForce RTX, these new cards boast several significant new features, including:
- Fixed-function ASIC ray-tracing units, enabling real-time ray-tracing for the ultimate in realism (more on that below)
- Tensor cores for AI. There are myriad applications for this, one of which is faster and smarter anti-aliasing.
- Datacenter-grade NVLink connectivity for SLI, providing as much as 50 times the bandwidth of conventional SLI connections.
- Redesigned shader cores with new features like Variable Rate Shading for higher performance.
- More CUDA cores and higher efficiency enabled through the TSMC 12FFN process designed specifically for NVIDIA.
Undoubtedly, the most important new feature is the real-time ray-tracing capability.
Ray-tracing enables the most realistic lighting effects possible by actually computing the paths that light rays travel. This process is extremely computationally expensive, which means it's long been been limited to movies and other media which do not require real-time graphical rendering. Instead, video games use simpler
rasterization techniques which provide approximations of lighting effects. NVIDIA's new RTX graphics cards contain specialized hardware designed specifically to accelerate ray-tracing, enabling cinematic lighting effects that would otherwise be impossible to implement in video games and other real-time applications. NVIDIA has also developed RTX middleware, built on the DirectX Raytracing API, to enable game developers to take advantage of this functionality more easily.
However, there is a more sinister side to these new graphics cards.
