“Buying a graphics card without hardware for ray tracing is completely crazy”

Almost a year ago, Nvidia unveiled the new graphics card series Geforce RTX 2000 with the architecture Turing under the hood. The parade number is spelled graphics circuits with new hardware in the form of RT and Tensor cores, where the former are designed to accelerate hardware ray tracing in real time.

In computer graphics her ray tracing has long been something of the Holy Grail, but the features have previously been too heavy to implement in games and run in real time. The Geforce RTX 2000 series makes this possible, but at present there are only a few games that benefit from the dedicated hardware, and at the same time the extra eye candy has a significant performance impact.

At this point, it’s a foregone conclusion that if you’re going to buy a new graphics card, it’s going to last you two, three, four years, and to not have ray tracing is just crazy.

Despite the limited areas of use, however, Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, believes that it is completely crazy to buy a graphics card today without support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing. The statement was made in connection with Question Time, which was held in connection with the unveiling of the company’s second quarter report for 2019.

In addition, it is said that graphics cards purchased today are expected to run for two to four years. In combination with this, Jensen Huang’s conclusion is in line with an earlier statement signed by Nvidia. During the graphics conference Siggraph 2019, the company’s Morgan McGuire presented a prediction that the first major games that require ray tracinghardware will be released in 2023.

This is thus four years away, but as mentioned, the range of games is currently scarce. Game developers have unveiled some titles to be equipped with ray tracingsupport, where for example Control and Cyberpunk 2077 are two upcoming games. It is worth mentioning, however, that the next generation of gaming consoles from Sony and Microsoft will receive support for the technology, which will be launched sometime towards the end of 2020.

It is worth keeping in mind, however, that Nvidia is the only company to provide graphics cards that offer hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and this will be the case for some time to come. AMD’s current graphics card with the Navi architecture is delivered without this and the same will reportedly also apply to Intel’s first load of dedicated graphics cards, which will be launched in 2020 and become part of the Xe family.

In conclusion, it should be pointed out that Nvidia also offers graphics cards outside the RTX family, where the more wallet-friendly Geforce GTX 1600 series only has a few months on its neck. This is probably a proposal aimed at AMD’s recent Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT, which in terms of performance goes up against Nvidia’s Geforce RTX models, but which lacks support for ray tracing in real time. Whether ray tracinghardware actually becomes necessary within the next few years remains to be seen.

Source: Nvidia via Overclock3d

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