NVIDIA seemed to have struck gold with the announcement of their brand new graphics cards for gamers. These cards are set to bring the gaming world into unparalleled heights thanks to the technologies behind them. The company calls them the RTX series, and the biggest feature within these graphics cards is real-time, ray tracing technology.

But, what is ray tracing technology? What is it about this technology that had NVIDIA wanting to produce a new line of cards to house it? Will it really change the gaming experience as a whole?

Ray tracing in a nutshell

Ray tracing is a rendering technique that uses rays of light to project images or objects onto your screen. These rays of light determine the colors, reflections, refractions, and shadows that the objects possess. These also show more accurate, more realistic images as the rays trace back to any source of light in the surrounding. To put it simply, ray tracing is what happens when you could take a picture of anything around you with your eyes.

The technology isn’t that new; in fact, it has been used since the 1960s for movies and television. Ray tracing is the main proponent behind CGI, where most special effects are often rendered to recreate realistic backgrounds with accurate coloring. In 2008, Intel showed a demonstration of the game Enemy Territory: Quake Wars that used ray tracing powered by a Xeon Tigerton processor. Currently, there are applications that allow you to edit videos using ray tracing such as Adobe’s After Effects.

Shifting from rasterization to ray tracing

For the longest time, NVIDIA has worked with multiple companies to produce game-grade graphics cards for consumers. The main technology behind these graphics cards is rasterization. In a nutshell, rasterization creates shapes to outline certain elements during gameplay. These shapes are given various colors to mimic reflections and shadows produced by such objects. The technology does not use up too much processing power to produce high-quality images for games. Rasterization enables gamers to play at smoother frame rates while getting the best and most realistic image quality.

However, NVIDIA wanted to take things up a notch when producing the next generation of graphics cards for the modern-day gamer. The company wanted to improve the gaming experience by any means, thus bringing in ray tracing in their graphics cards. With ray tracing, colors are more accurate allowing for a more immersive gaming experience — at least that’s how the company explains it. This is clearly seen with their exclusive gameplay of Shadow of the Tomb Raider:

This technology became the backbone for their new RTX graphics cards, putting much emphasis on real-time interactions within games. The RTX graphics cards possess greater memory capacity and processing speeds to keep up with the demands of the technology inside it. With NVIDIA’s Turing architecture, these new cards make the ray tracing processes much faster while using less computations.

Risks of going for ray tracing

Of course, with new technologies comes risks to consider before buying into them. First, ray tracing heavily relies on multiple calculations to generate accurate images on your screen. Back then, computers and graphics cards were not powerful enough to produce quality images immediately using ray tracing. Production of such images can take days to possibly weeks or months, as seen with most movies that heavily rely on CGI.

When applying ray tracing technology to modern games, graphics cards tend to suffer more. The computational requirement for ray tracing is much more than the graphics card’s virtual memory (VRAM) could handle. Of course, it depends on how much RAM is included in your graphics card — even then, it would consume more energy than it’s optimized for. These are the risks that NVIDIA is constantly trying to address with their new RTX cards.

There is still a lot of work needed to prove that ray tracing is the future for gaming. While the technology wants to bring to you the most immersive gaming experience ever, it also comes with a heavy cost — not just on your wallet. Let’s hope that the RTX series is worth the wait.