NVIDIA GeForce RTX™ Sheds All New Light on Gaming

NVIDIA GeForce RTX™ Sheds All New Light on Gaming

New Platform Elevates Photorealism to New Heights

With the recent launch of NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™, gamers the world over are taking notice.

The RTX 2080, 2080Ti and 2070 are the latest series of top-end graphics cards from NVIDIA. Powered by the new NVIDIA Turing™ GPU architecture and the RTX platform, RTX graphics cards fuse together real-time ray tracing, artificial intelligence, and programmable shading.

These are the first graphics cards built to deliver AI-enhanced gaming and real-time ray-tracing effects. With the benefit of ray tracing, light reflects off objects more realistically. In earlier iterations, ray tracing was only evident as part of prerendered cutscenes. The difference with the RTX family is that now the full ray tracing effect will be rendered in real-time; light will traverse across a room before your eyes; and you will be able to witness shadows form as they do in any real-word setting. Moreover, RTX provides up to 6X faster ray-tracing performance than previous-generation Pascal-architecture cards.

Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, aptly characterized the significance of the RTX launch.

“GeForce RTX and NVIDIA’s Turing architecture provide an astonishingly powerful new foundation for game development by combining ray tracing acceleration, artificial intelligence hardware, and programmable shading in one GPU for the first time ever,” said Sweeney.

As to the specific visualization upgrade generated by RTX, Donggun Kim, of ProjectDH, NEXON Korea devCAT Studioadded, the “. . . ray-traced shadows, reflections, refractions and ambient occlusion are stunning.”

Among the most interesting coding breakthroughs of RTX is that NVIDA integrated Tensor Cores into the new RTX boards. Although the Tensor Cores were initially produced for deep learning purposes (i.e., neural network workloads), NVIDIA ingeniously repurposed them for RTX; resulting in a measurably accelerated rendering process.

Another facet to RTX that heightens visual acuity is a new feature called Deep Learning Super-Sampling (DLSS), a technology that applies deep learning and AI to rendering techniques, resulting in “crisp, smooth edges” on rendered objects in games. At the risk of digressing, traditional anti-aliasing can be highly consumptive of GPU processing resources, memory bandwidth, and frame buffer memory because of the successive rounds of rendering needed to reach the desired smoothness of edges and crispness of lines in games. In contrast, DLSS uses inferencing which is far more efficient and far less performance draining.

Perhaps the best news for gamers is the broad adoption by many of the biggest and best game publishers and developers. This ringing endorsement is not only an acknowledgement of the power and efficacy of RTX, but also the widespread penchant for near-absolute authenticity of every sensory element in the gaming experience, no matter how seemingly subtle.

The following titles will feature real-time ray tracing:

• Assetto Corsa Competizione; Kunos Simulazioni/505 Games
• Atomic Heart; Mundfish
• Battlefield V; EA/DICE
• Control; Remedy Entertainment/505 Games
• Enlisted; Gaijin Entertainment/Darkflow Software
• Justice; NetEase
• JX3; Kingsoft
• MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries; Piranha Games
• Metro Exodus; 4A Games
• ProjectDH; Nexon’s devCAT Studio
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider; Square Enix/Eidos-Montréal/Crystal Dynamics/Nixxes

The titles below will employ the aforementioned DLSS technology:

• Ark: Survival Evolved; Studio Wildcard
• Atomic Heart; Mundfish
• Dauntless; Phoenix Labs
• Final Fantasy XV; Square Enix
• Fractured Lands; Unbroken Studios
• Hitman 2; IO Interactive/Warner Bros.
• Islands of Nyne; Define Human Studios
• Justice; NetEase
• JX3; Kingsoft
• Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries; Piranha Games
• PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, PUBG Corp.
• Remnant: From the Ashes; Arc Games
• Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass; Croteam/Devolver Digital
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider; Square Enix/Eidos-Montréal/Crystal Dynamics/Nixxes
• The Forge Arena; Freezing Raccoon Studios
• We Happy Few; Compulsion Games / Gearbox

As for the initial performance metrics, the benchmarks are impressive. The first rounds of data (BELOW CHART) show GeForce RTX 2080 outperforming GeForce GTX 1080 by anywhere from 35 percent to 125 percent at 3840×2160, contingent on workload.

The data is early and the sample set is admittedly limited, but a litany of gaming business and creative leaders are already taking note of the immediate impact made by RTX; for example:

“The NVIDIA RTX platform . . . allows us to achieve the most realistic lighting simulations seen in real-time graphics.”
Oleksandr Shyshkovtsov
CTO, 4A Games

“Thanks to NVIDIA RTX technology, we are pleased to announce that Shadow of the Tomb Raider will, quite fittingly, feature real-time shadows.”
Rich Briggs,
Senior Brand Director, Crystal Dynamics

“GeForce RTX from NVIDIA is really exciting. We can see a future where games are more realistic and more immersive . . .”
Klemens Kundratitz
CEO, Deep Silver

“Our investment in RTX is allowing us to take a huge graphical leap forward . . .”
Christian Holmquist
Technical Director, DICE

“NVIDIA has shattered the photorealism barrier . . .”
Kim Libreri
CTO, Epic Games

“DLSS delivers a stunning picture . . . applying artificial intelligence to anti-aliasing results in a much-improved gaming experience.”
Kris Guo
CEO, Seasun

“It was remarkably easy to integrate ray tracing into Atomic Heart using the NVIDIA RTX platform. NVIDIA provided a great tool set . . .”
Robert Bagratuni
CEO, Mundfish

“GeForce RTX has made real-time ray tracing a reality . . . and the results are jaw dropping.”
ZhiPeng Hu
General Manager, NetEase LeiHuo Studio

“Real-time ray tracing was always something that was out of reach for gaming, but NVIDIA GeForce RTX changes that . . . they are literally game changers.”
Donggun Kim
Executive Producer, ProjectDH, NEXON Korea devCAT Studio

“Nixxes Software has a long history of collaboration with NVIDIA. We are excited to continue that tradition with the integration of real-time ray-traced shadows . . .”
Jurjen Katsman
CEO, Nixxes Software BV.

As you explore the RTX platform and they wide variety of ways that you and your team may put it to work, please contact us. Our solutions architects and engineers are eager to field your questions and collaborate with you at every step of deployment.

In the meantime, be sure to check out this video of a live demonstration of RTX in the popular game title, Battlefield V.