Raytracing in games, 6 years in: was it really all that?

What nVidia promised, what we got for years, what is missing and how things are looking long-term

Kostas Farkonas
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According to Sony, one of the three competitive advantages of the PlayStation5 Pro compared to the original PS5 relates to raytracing performance. Is it something gamers should really take into account when making a purchasing decision in 2024? (Image: Sony)

Thursday, September 20th, 2018: it’s a date that may not hold much significance for most, but it does for nVidia, as one of the most important products in the company’s history was released in the United States. The GeForce RTX 2080 was the first consumer-level graphics card to feature real-time raytracing hardware support, meaning that it sported custom RT cores — alongside the dedicated tensor cores used for AI — specifically designed to accelerate complex calculations focused on this particular lighting technique.

Real-time raytracing — the simulation of how light interacts with every single thing present in a virtual scene, as it happens — has been something of a unicorn in the 3D animation industry for decades. No wonder, then, that the release of the GeForce RTX 2080 was hailed by nVidia as nothing less than a new chapter in the evolution of computer graphics. In some respects, it actually was. In others — when it comes to PC games and video games, for instance — it’s fair to say that one would have expected it to offer more, certainly to mean more, than what it currently does. Especially after more than half a decade of consumer availability.

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