The 'RTX' in NVIDIA's new GeForce GPUs doesn't refer to just ray tracing alone
NVIDIA showed off the ray tracing powers of its latest graphics cards at Gamescom 2018 and left everyone impressed. However, real world performance is feared to take a hit due to the extensive computations involved in tracing a ray from a point source of light to its destination. Developers, therefore, will have to specifically enable ray tracing abilities in their games, which means not all games will be supporting it right away. Also, just because a game is RTX-enabled, doesn't mean you will get to see light bouncing off walls and objects in real time.
RTX is more of a fancy term to collectively indicate ray tracing and AI functionality. According to NVIDIA, if a game supports RTX technologies, it enables either of these two functionalities — real time ray tracing or AI-driven Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS). Real time ray tracing uses Microsoft DirectX Raytracing (DXR) APIs aided by dedicated RT cores on the Turing GPUs. DLSS, on the other hand, uses Turing's Tensor Cores to apply AI to rendering that results in better image quality. As of date, about 11 upcoming games support ray tracing including —
- Assetto Corsa Competizione
- Atomic Heart
- Battlefield V
- Control
- Enlisted
- Justice
- JX3
- MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries
- Metro: Exodus
- ProjectDH
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider
A slightly larger number of games feature support for DLSS. These include —
- Ark: Survival Evolved
- Atomic Heart
- Dauntless
- Final Fantasy XV
- Fractured Lands
- Hitman 2
- Islands of Nyne
- Justice
- JX3
- Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries
- Player Unknown's Battlegrounds
- Remnant: From the Ashes
- Serious Sam 4: PLanet Badass
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider
- The Forge Arena
- We Happy Few
Some of the games such as Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Mechwarior 5: Mercenaries, Justice, JX3, and Atomic Heart feature both ray tracing and DLSS support, which makes performance evaluation in these games very interesting.
NVIDIA's GeForce RTX definitely aims to bring a level of immersiveness never seen before in video games. Ray tracing is not new but the implementation of the technique in video games is, so there will be performance variations depending on how developers implement RTX in their games. It also not clear at this stage if partial implementation of RTX is possible to achieve a fair trade-off between visual fidelity and performance. We will be knowing actual benchmarks only post September 20 so we'd suggest holding off pre-orders till then.
Source(s)
Overclock3D via NVIDIA
