Nvidia RTX

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The GeForce 20 series were the first of the lines of Nvidia's RTX line of hardware. RTX 2080FE.png
The GeForce 20 series were the first of the lines of Nvidia's RTX line of hardware.

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.

Contents

Nvidia RTX enables 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]

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: [8]

Ray tracing

In computer graphics, ray tracing generates an image by tracing rays cast through pixels 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. [9]

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. [10]

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 rendering, OptiX also helps in optical and acoustical design, radiation and electromagnetic research, artificial intelligence queries and collision analysis.

List of Nvidia RTX cards

Nvidia has released many cards that support RTX including the 20, 30 and 40 series. [11]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nvidia</span> American technology company

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">GeForce</span> Range of GPUs by Nvidia

GeForce is a brand of graphics processing units (GPUs) designed by Nvidia Corporation and marketed for the performance market. As of the GeForce 40 series, there have been eighteen iterations of the design. The first GeForce products were discrete GPUs designed for add-on graphics boards, intended for the high-margin PC gaming market, and later diversification of the product line covered all tiers of the PC graphics market, ranging from cost-sensitive GPUs integrated on motherboards, to mainstream add-in retail boards. Most recently, GeForce technology has been introduced into Nvidia's line of embedded application processors, designed for electronic handhelds and mobile handsets.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quadro</span> Brand of Nvidia graphics cards used in workstations

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">GeForce 10 series</span> Series of GPUs by Nvidia

The GeForce 10 series is a series of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, initially based on the Pascal microarchitecture announced in March 2014. This design series succeeded the GeForce 900 series, and is succeeded by the GeForce 16 series and GeForce 20 series using the Turing microarchitecture.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pascal (microarchitecture)</span> GPU microarchitecture by Nvidia

Pascal is the codename for a GPU microarchitecture developed by Nvidia, as the successor to the Maxwell architecture. The architecture was first introduced in April 2016 with the release of the Tesla P100 (GP100) on April 5, 2016, and is primarily used in the GeForce 10 series, starting with the GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, which were released on May 17, 2016, and June 10, 2016, respectively. Pascal was manufactured using TSMC's 16 nm FinFET process, and later Samsung's 14 nm FinFET process.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">GeForce 20 series</span> Series of GPUs by Nvidia

The GeForce 20 series is a family of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia. Serving as the successor to the GeForce 10 series, the line started shipping on September 20, 2018, and after several editions, on July 2, 2019, the GeForce RTX Super line of cards was announced.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Turing (microarchitecture)</span> GPU microarchitecture by Nvidia

Turing is the codename for a graphics processing unit (GPU) microarchitecture developed by Nvidia. It is named after the prominent mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing. The architecture was first introduced in August 2018 at SIGGRAPH 2018 in the workstation-oriented Quadro RTX cards, and one week later at Gamescom in consumer GeForce RTX 20 series graphics cards. Building on the preliminary work of its HPC-exclusive predecessor, the Turing architecture introduces the first consumer products capable of real-time ray tracing, a longstanding goal of the computer graphics industry. Key elements include dedicated artificial intelligence processors and dedicated ray tracing processors. Turing leverages DXR, OptiX, and Vulkan for access to ray-tracing. In February 2019, Nvidia released the GeForce 16 series of GPUs, which utilizes the new Turing design but lacks the RT and Tensor cores.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GeForce 16 series</span> Series of GPUs by Nvidia

The GeForce 16 series is a series of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, based on the Turing microarchitecture, announced in February 2019. The 16 series, commercialized within the same timeframe as the 20 series, aims to cover the entry-level to mid-range market, not addressed by the latter. As a result, the media have mainly compared it to AMD's Radeon RX 500 series of GPUs.

Ampere is the codename for a graphics processing unit (GPU) microarchitecture developed by Nvidia as the successor to both the Volta and Turing architectures. It was officially announced on May 14, 2020 and is named after French mathematician and physicist André-Marie Ampère.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GeForce 30 series</span> GPU series by Nvidia

The GeForce 30 series is a suite of graphics processing units (GPUs) designed and marketed by Nvidia, succeeding the GeForce 20 series. The GeForce 30 series is based on the Ampere architecture, which features Nvidia's second-generation ray tracing (RT) cores and third-generation Tensor Cores. Through Nvidia RTX, hardware-enabled ray tracing is possible on GeForce 30 series cards.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GeForce 40 series</span> Family of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia

The GeForce 40 series is a family of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, succeeding the GeForce 30 series. The series was announced on September 20, 2022, at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2022 event; the RTX 4090 was released on October 12, 2022, the 16GB RTX 4080 was released on November 16, 2022. An RTX 4080 12GB was announced in September 2022, but following some controversy in the media, was "unlaunched" by Nvidia. On January 5, 2023, that model would be released as the RTX 4070 Ti. The RTX 4070 was then released on April 13, 2023. The RTX 4060 Ti was released on May 24th 2023, and the RTX 4060 on June 29th 2023. An RTX 4060 Ti 16GB followed on July 18, 2023. Further models of this generation of desktop and mobile GPUs are to release later in 2023. On January, 8, 2024 NVIDIA released RTX 4070 SUPER, RTX 4070 Ti SUPER and RTX 4080 SUPER video cards at higher specs and lower prices than their original counterparts. In the same vein the production of the RTX 4080 and RTX 4070 Ti have stopped due to the SUPER Series, but the 4070 will remain.

Ada Lovelace, also referred to simply as Lovelace, is a graphics processing unit (GPU) microarchitecture developed by Nvidia as the successor to the Ampere architecture, officially announced on September 20, 2022. It is named after the English mathematician Ada Lovelace, one of the first computer programmers. Nvidia announced the architecture along with the new GeForce 40 series consumer GPUs and the RTX 6000 Ada Generation pro workstation graphics card. The Lovelace chipset uses TSMC's new 5 nm "4N" process which offers increased efficiency over the previous Samsung 8 nm and TSMC N7 processes used by Nvidia for its previous-generation Ampere architecture.

References

  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.
  8. ↑ "NVIDIA RTX™ platform". Nvidia. 20 July 2018.
  9. ↑ Jefferies, Charles. "What Is Ray Tracing? (And What It Means for PC Gaming)". PCMag. Retrieved 23 February 2022.
  10. ↑ Oh, Nate (14 September 2018). "The NVIDIA Turing GPU Architecture Deep Dive: Prelude to GeForce RTX". AnandTech. Retrieved 23 February 2022.
  11. ↑ "Nvidia Graphics Cards List In Order Of Performance". CG Director. 2018-09-26. Retrieved 2022-03-15.
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