Nvidia RTX

For other uses, see RTX.
RTX
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 from MSI, released in 2018. The GPUs of the GeForce 20 series are the first of Nvidia's RTX line of hardware.
Release dateSeptember 20, 2018; 6 years ago (2018-09-20)
History
PredecessorQuadro

Nvidia RTX (also known as Nvidia GeForce RTX under the GeForce brand) is a professional visual computing platform created by Nvidia, primarily used in workstations for designing complex large-scale models in architecture and product design, scientific visualization, energy exploration, and film and video production, as well as being used in mainstream PCs for gaming.

Nvidia RTX features hardware-enabled real-time ray tracing. Historically, ray tracing had been reserved to non-real time applications (like CGI in visual effects for movies and in photorealistic renderings), with video games having to rely on direct lighting and precalculated indirect contribution for their rendering. RTX facilitates a new development in computer graphics of generating interactive images that react to lighting, shadows and reflections.[1] RTX runs on Nvidia Volta-, Turing-, Ampere- and Ada Lovelace-based GPUs, specifically utilizing the Tensor cores (and new RT cores on Turing and successors) on the architectures for ray-tracing acceleration.[2][3][4]

In March 2019, Nvidia announced that selected GTX 10 series (Pascal) and GTX 16 series (Turing) cards would receive support for subsets of RTX technology in upcoming drivers, although functions and performance will be affected by their lack of dedicated hardware cores for ray tracing.[5]

In October 2020, Nvidia announced Nvidia RTX A6000 as the first Ampere-architecture-based graphics card for use in professional workstations in the Nvidia RTX product line, replacing the former Quadro product line of professional graphics cards.[6]

Nvidia worked with Microsoft to integrate RTX support with Microsoft's DirectX Raytracing API (DXR). RTX is currently available through Nvidia OptiX and for DirectX. For the Turing and Ampere architectures, it is also available for Vulkan.[7]

  1. ^ Alwani, Rishi (21 March 2018). "Microsoft and Nvidia Tech to Bring Photorealistic Games With Ray Tracing". Gadgets 360. Retrieved March 21, 2018.
  2. ^ Atlavilla, Dave. "Nvidia And Microsoft Lay Foundation For Photorealistic Gaming With Real-Time Ray Tracing". Forbes. Retrieved March 19, 2018.
  3. ^ "Nvidia announces RTX 2000 GPU series with '6 times more performance' and ray-tracing". The Verge. Retrieved 2018-08-20.
  4. ^ "Nvidia reveals $800 GeForce RTX 2080 at Gamescom 2018". CNET.
  5. ^ Sarkar, Samit (2019-03-18). "Nvidia bringing new movie-quality graphics tech to GTX cards". Polygon. Retrieved 2019-03-19.
  6. ^ Smith, Ryan. "Quadro No More? NVIDIA Announces Ampere-based RTX A6000 & A40 Video Cards For Pro Visualization". www.anandtech.com. Retrieved 2021-03-10.
  7. ^ "Turing Extensions for Vulkan and OpenGL". NVIDIA Developer. 11 September 2018.