In this blog we have already talked about Nvidia Raytraicing in this post, but here you have a small introduction.
Raytracing is a technique commonly used in digital photography or movies that works imitating the natural process of vision. The camera trace rays through the scenario that collides with all the elements of it generating reflections, refractions and shadows until the ray hit an opaque object or reach a specific amount of collisions.
This technique is well known for the photorealism in the images generated and also for the amount of resources it consumes.
Last week during the Gamescom 2018 Nvidia announced a new serie of graphic cards, GeForce RTX 2000. This cards uses the new Turing architecture, Raytracing technique and an IA that will improve even further the efficiency of the cards. The cards has a base memory of 8GB of GDDR 6.
The serie has three different models, RTX 2070, 2080 and 2080 Ti, which prices go from 639€ to 1300€.
Why is Nvidia Raytracing so important?
If the industry manage to create graphic cards and a software capable of running games and virtual reality scenarios, using Raytracing the jump on the graphics will be huge. Instead of using a lot of textures and reduce the amount of polygons in the objects as we’ve been seeing until now, we will be able to create objects and scenarios with a higher realism.
It all sounds great, right? But the real question is, is it worth it?
During the talk Nvidia did on Gamescom the said this new serie has 6 times more power than the generation before. A few days ago Nvidia updated an image to show the differences between a 2080 and a 1080 in some games.
As we can see in the graphic, the difference between Pascal and Turing architectures is an average of 50% on Turing over the old Pascal and in light green we can see that the games with Deep Learning Super Sampling activated is around twice the power of 1080.
DLSS is an IA that improve the performance of the games, comparing it with the antialiasing system(TAA) that games usually have and only improve the fps in 5 or 10 frames, we can see that the difference is huge.
With this last picture Nvidia says that an RTX 2080 can run all these games in 4K over 60fps.
As these pictures looks more like a marketing technique than real tests or data, we’ll have to wait until the cards arrive to the hands of professional testers and see their reviews.
Although this company doesn’t work with games, we believe this is a step necessary in the industry that will help us improve our products and let more people reach to virtual reality devices in the near future.