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Nvidia GeForce RTX (Ray Tracing Texel eXtreme) is a professional visual computing platform created by

Nvidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

, primarily used for designing complex large-scale models in architecture and product design, scientific visualization, energy exploration, games, and film and video production. Nvidia RTX enables real-time ray tracing. Historically, ray tracing had been reserved to non-

real time Real-time or real time describes various operations in computing or other processes that must guarantee response times within a specified time (deadline), usually a relatively short time. A real-time process is generally one that happens in defined ...

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. RTX runs on Nvidia Volta-,

Turing Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalysis, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and mathematical and theoretical biology, theoretical biologist. Turing was high ...

Ampere The ampere (, ; symbol: A), often shortened to amp,SI supports only the use of symbols and deprecates the use of abbreviations for units. is the unit of electric current in the International System of Units (SI). One ampere is equal to elect ...

- and

Ada Lovelace Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (''née'' Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the A ...

-based

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobil ...

s, specifically utilizing the Tensor cores (and new RT cores on Turing and successors) on the architectures for ray-tracing acceleration. In March 2019, Nvidia announced that selected GTX 10 series (

Pascal Pascal, Pascal's or PASCAL may refer to: People and fictional characters * Pascal (given name), including a list of people with the name * Pascal (surname), including a list of people and fictional characters with the name ** Blaise Pascal, Fren ...

) 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. 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. Nvidia worked with

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

to integrate RTX support with Microsoft's

DirectX Raytracing DirectX Raytracing (DXR) is a feature introduced in Microsoft's DirectX 12 that implements ray tracing, for video graphic rendering. DXR was released with the Windows 10 October update (version 1809) on October 10, 2018. It requires an AMD Radeo ...

API (DXR). RTX is currently available through Nvidia

OptiX Nvidia OptiX (OptiX Application Acceleration Engine) is a ray tracing API that was first developed around 2009. The computations are offloaded to the GPUs through either the low-level or the high-level API introduced with CUDA. CUDA is only avai ...

and for

DirectX Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", ...

. For the Turing and Ampere architectures, it is also available for

Vulkan Vulkan is a low- overhead, cross-platform API, open standard for 3D graphics and computing. Vulkan targets high-performance real-time 3D graphics applications, such as video games and interactive media. Vulkan is intended to offer higher perform ...

Components

In addition to ray tracing, RTX includes artificial intelligence integration, common asset formats, rasterization (CUDA) support, and simulation APIs. The components of RTX are: * AI-accelerated features (NGX) * Asset formats (USD and MDL) * Rasterization including advanced shaders * Raytracing via

, Microsoft DXR and

* Simulation tools: ** CUDA 10 ** Flex **

PhysX PhysX is an open-source realtime physics engine middleware SDK developed by Nvidia as a part of Nvidia GameWorks software suite. Initially, video games supporting PhysX were meant to be accelerated by PhysX PPU (expansion cards designed by Ag ...

Ray tracing

In computer graphics, ray tracing generates an image by tracing rays cast through

pixel In digital imaging, a pixel (abbreviated px), pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a raster image, or the smallest point in an all points addressable display device. In most digital display devices, pixels are the smal ...

s of an

image plane In 3D computer graphics, the image plane is that plane in the world which is identified with the plane of the display monitor used to view the image that is being rendered. It is also referred to as screen space. If one makes the analogy of taking ...

and simulating the effects of its encounters with virtual objects. This enables advanced effects that better reflect real-world optical properties, such as softer and more realistic shadows and reflections; as compared to traditional rasterization techniques which prioritize performance over accuracy. NVIDIA RTX achieves this through a combination of hardware and software acceleration. On a hardware level, RTX cards feature fixed-function "RT cores" that are designed to accelerate mathematical operations needed to simulate rays, such as

bounding volume hierarchy A bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) is a tree structure on a set of geometric objects. All geometric objects, that form the leaf nodes of the tree, are wrapped in bounding volumes. These nodes are then grouped as small sets and enclosed within la ...

traversal. The software implementation is open to individual application developers. As ray-tracing is still computationally intensive, many developers choose to take a hybrid rendering approach where certain graphical effects, such as shadows and reflections, are performed using ray-tracing; while the remaining scene is rendered using the more performant

rasterization In computer graphics, rasterisation (British English) or rasterization (American English) is the task of taking an image described in a vector graphics format (shapes) and converting it into a raster image (a series of pixels, dots or lines, whic ...

Development

APIs using RTX

Nvidia OptiX

Nvidia OptiX is part of Nvidia DesignWorks. OptiX is a high-level, or "to-the-algorithm" API, meaning that it is designed to encapsulate the entire algorithm of which ray tracing is a part, not just the ray tracing itself. This is meant to allow the OptiX engine to execute the larger algorithm without application-side changes. Aside from

computer graphics Computer graphics deals with generating images with the aid of computers. Today, computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great de ...

rendering, OptiX also helps in

optical Optics is the branch of physics that studies the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. Optics usually describes the behaviour of visible, ultraviole ...

and

acoustical Acoustics is a branch of physics that deals with the study of mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including topics such as vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician ...

design,

radiation In physics, radiation is the emission or transmission of energy in the form of waves or particles through space or through a material medium. This includes: * ''electromagnetic radiation'', such as radio waves, microwaves, infrared, visi ...

and

electromagnetic In physics, electromagnetism is an interaction that occurs between particles with electric charge. It is the second-strongest of the four fundamental interactions, after the strong force, and it is the dominant force in the interactions of a ...

research,

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

queries and

collision In physics, a collision is any event in which two or more bodies exert forces on each other in a relatively short time. Although the most common use of the word ''collision'' refers to incidents in which two or more objects collide with great fo ...

analysis.

List of Nvidia RTX cards including the 20, 30, and 40 series cards

Nvidia has released many cards that support RTX including the 20, and 30 series. * 20 series ** GeForce RTX 2060 ** GeForce RTX 2060 Super ** GeForce RTX 2070 ** GeForce RTX 2070 Super ** GeForce RTX 2080 ** GeForce RTX 2080 Super ** GeForce RTX 2080 Ti * 30 series ** GeForce RTX 3050 ** GeForce RTX 3050 Ti ** GeForce RTX 3060 ** GeForce RTX 3060 Ti ** GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GA103 ** GeForce RTX 3070 ** GeForce RTX 3070 Ti ** GeForce RTX 3080 ** GeForce RTX 3080 Ti ** GeForce RTX 3090 ** GeForce RTX 3090 Ti *

40 series The is a diesel multiple unit (DMU) train type introduced by Japanese National Railways (JNR) in 1977 and operated by all Japan Railways Group companies on suburban and rural services in Japan. Since 2017, the train type has seen use by other ...

** ~~GeForce RTX 4080 12GB (AD104)~~ Unlaunched ** GeForce RTX 4080 16GB (AD103) ** GeForce RTX 4090 * Titan Cards ** Nvidia Titan RTX * Quadro Cards ** Nvidia Quadro RTX A4000 ** Nvidia Quadro RTX A5000 ** Nvidia Quadro RTX A6000

Reference

External links

Nvidia developer page on RTX
{{Nvidia 3D graphics software Image processing software 3D computer graphics Computer-aided design software Computer-aided engineering software