Nvidia RTX (also known as Nvidia GeForce RTX under the GeForce brand) is a professional visual computing platform created by

Nvidia Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...

, used in mainstream PCs for gaming as well as being used in

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or computational science, scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating syste ...

s for designing complex large-scale models in architecture and product design, scientific visualization, energy exploration, and film and video production (especially under the RTX PRO and formerly Quadro RTX brands). 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. RTX runs on Nvidia Volta-, Turing-,

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 1 c ...

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

- and Blackwell-based GPUs, 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) 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, replacing the former Quadro product line of professional graphics cards. Nvidia worked with

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

to integrate RTX support with Microsoft's DirectX Raytracing API (DXR). RTX is currently available through Nvidia OptiX 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 cross-platform API and open standard for 3D graphics and computing. It was intended to address the shortcomings of OpenGL, and allow developers more control over the GPU. It is designed to support a wide variety of GPUs, CPUs and o ...

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 OptiX, Microsoft DXR and

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

PhysX PhysX is an Open-source software, open-source Real-time computer graphics, realtime physics engine middleware Software development kit, SDK developed by Nvidia as part of the Nvidia GameWorks software suite. Initially, video games supporting Ph ...

Features and software

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 graphics, raster image, or the smallest addressable element in a dot matrix display device. In most digital display devices, p ...

s of an image plane 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 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.

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 and art with the aid of computers. Computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, digital art, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. ...

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, ultravio ...

and acoustical design,

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

and

electromagnetic In physics, electromagnetism is an interaction that occurs between particles with electric charge via electromagnetic fields. The electromagnetic force is one of the four fundamental forces of nature. It is the dominant force in the interacti ...

research,

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of 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 for ...

analysis.

Chat with RTX

Chat with RTX is an AI-based assistant that runs locally on the user's

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

PC. It uses a

large language model A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained with self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks, especially language generation. The largest and most capable LLMs are g ...

and requires an RTX 30 or 40 series GPU with at least 8GB of

VRAM Video random-access memory (VRAM) is dedicated computer memory used to store the pixels and other graphics data as a framebuffer to be rendered on a computer monitor. It often uses a different technology than other computer memory, in order to ...

. It can be downloaded from Nvidia's website.

RTX Remix

RTX Remix is a game modding platform designed by Nvidia to remaster older titles by implementing modern technologies such as ray tracing, DLSS, and enhanced assets.

List of Nvidia RTX cards

Nvidia has released many cards that support RTX, including the 20, 30 and 40 series: * Nvidia GeForce RTX 20 series **Nvidia GeForce RTX 2050 **Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 **Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super **Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 **Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super **Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 **Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super **Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti **Nvidia Titan RTX * Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 series **Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 **Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti **Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 **Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti **Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 **Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti **Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 **Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti **Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 **Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Ti * Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 series ** Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 **Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 **Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti **Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 **Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super **Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti **Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super **Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 **Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super **Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 **Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090D * Nvidia GeForce RTX 50 series **Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 **Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti **Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 **Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti **Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 **Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 * Nvidia A series workstation cards ** Nvidia RTX A400 4 GB ** Nvidia RTX A2000 6 GB/12 GB ** Nvidia RTX A4000 16 GB ** Nvidia RTX A4500 20 GB ** Nvidia RTX A5000 24 GB ** Nvidia RTX A5500 24 GB ** Nvidia RTX A6000 48 GB ** Nvidia RTX 5000 Ada Lovelace 32 GB ** Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Lovelace 48 GB ** Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell 96 GB * Nvidia A series server cards **Nvidia A10 **Nvidia A50

References

External links

Nvidia developer page on RTXOfficial website of Chat with RTX
{{Nvidia 3D graphics software Image processing software 3D computer graphics Computer-aided design software Computer-aided engineering software