Nvidia announces RTX for real-time ray tracing

Nvidia announced RTX at the Game Developers Conference, which enables real-time ray tracing on Volta GPUs. The technology works in combination with DXR, an extension to DirectX 12 developed by Microsoft.

Nvidia’s RTX technology only works on Volta and future GPUs and enables real-time ray tracing using Microsoft’s DirectX Ray tracing API. The Volta GPU can also use its tensor cores, which can be trained for denoising, for example, so that a comparable result can be achieved with fewer rays. Nvidia is expanding its Gameworks developer toolkit to include ray-traced area shadows, ray-traced glossy reflections, and ray-traced ambient occlusion.

Nvidia has not yet announced anything about the performance of RTX on the Volta GPU. It is clear that the Unreal, Unity and Frostbite engines will receive support for RTX.